Shopping malls had, of course, developed well after Semple’s and Aimee’s death, but she had made an ample study of them during her investigation of Californian Valley girl culture. This example in Necropolis appeared to be a mall in decline. The overall look was one of dirt and neglect. The air was rank and polluted, and Semple’s eyes were soon watering. Depressing gray light filtered through the filthy panes of the once-magnificent roof, more directly where they were actually missing. The precise lines of palms were either dead or dying; some had gone altogether, their planters standing empty like the sockets of decayed teeth. Drifts of ignored and uncollected garbage were heaped up in nooks and corners. Unhealthy, malformed pigeons flapped, fluttered, and scuttled between the feet of pedestrians, and Semple thought she saw rats moving among the piles of garbage.
As if in harmony with the dirt and decay, the people of Necropolis looked worried and stressed, as though the burdens of Afterlife lay heavy on them. Semple wondered how many of them had come there of their own accord, and how many were, like Aimee’s angels, created by Anubis for his own amusement and gratification. They showed a distinct uniformity. They all wore the same clothes and similar makeup. They were all dark-haired and dark-skinned, and approximately the same height. No children were in evidence. All this led Semple to believe that the majority were created creatures of Anubis rather than formerly mortal souls. One sign of uniformity gravely disturbed Semple. As far as she could see, each and every one of the population had a computer barcode, black, rectilinear, and slightly larger than a postage stamp, printed squarely in the middle of his or her forehead, about three-quarters of an inch above the bridge of the nose, like a high-tech version of a Hindu caste mark.
Semple’s immediate conclusion was that coming to Necropolis had been nothing less than a terrible mistake. No way was she going to find the poet of Aimee’s schemes and dreams in this place. Poets couldn’t flourish among a people so locked down that they let themselves be computer coded. The manner of her arrival had also left a lot to be desired, and looked to have all the makings of embarrassment, or worse. Her brief but furious struggle to achieve a suitable bodily form had been observed by a large number of passersby, many of whom had stopped to stare as the body of the street boy had dissolved into a vague column of shapeless ectoplasm and then reconfigured itself, first as the grotesque hermaphrodite and then as a tall, good-looking woman. Obviously this was no regular occurrence, and gawkers continued to gawk for some time after the fact, making it hard for her to blend with the surroundings.
As Aimee had predicted, Necropolis looked to be an iron-grip police state. From where she stood, Semple could see no less than three pairs of heavily armed and armored men, with the unmistakable arrogant amble of law enforcement on patrol. In Necropolis, the faces of the cops were grimly anonymous, fully hidden behind the full-face visors of sinister egg-shaped helmets, wholly smooth apart from a decorative pair of stylized vestigial wings where the ears should have been. The officers’ bulky, dark blue body armor gave them a weight of bully-boy power that caused the rest of the populace to allow them the widest possible berth. The armor was constructed from flat flexible bricks of Kevlar, arranged in the manner of an insect carapace, perhaps as some kind of scarab homage. The complex large-bore weapon that each officer carried in the crook of his arm was the ultimate demonstration of potential force. Semple had never seen guns like these before, but she could guess at their destructive power.
Semple’s first impression, that coming to Necropolis had been a fundamental error, was now being confirmed by every fresh detail. She decided that her only chance was to get away from this too-public area. She needed to hole up in some secluded place and think through her next move. Without a team circle like Aimee’s nuns to provide her with the necessary telekinetic energy boost, she couldn’t simply vibe out the way she’d come, wind walking to the great wide open. She would have to blow town under her own power, but without the slightest knowledge of the geography or relative dimensions of the place, she knew this might require a modicum of planning.
Even in finding temporary refuge, Semple was beset by obstacles. The first rank of merchants and vendors along the edge of the plaza were just casual traders with small removable stalls. Behind them was a line of permanent structures that Semple had to assume were the Necropolis equivalent of stores and cafes. The problem was that all the signs were written in the hieroglyphics of the nineteenth dynasty and Semple was totally unable to read them. She could, of course, follow her nose. She had been around the block enough times to be confident that she could locate a bar or even a coffee shop by sense of smell. What worried her more was that she knew nothing of the manners and protocols of the city. What, for instance, was the status of women? Could a woman just walk into a bar and order a drink, or was that some kind of social taboo? And how would she pay for it? Did they have currency in this place? She remembered from her time on Earth that in certain bars ladies drank for free. If such a place existed here, how would she know? Damned hieroglyphics.
Semple was starting to realize how much she had forgotten about her and her sister’s tent-show hustling days. The first two rules of going into a strange town were a girl had to know how to read the signs, and had to have a cash stake to get rolling. The Afterlife, with its easy fantasy fulfillments, had made her careless. If she didn’t get back on the ball with some alacrity, she could well be paying for her isolation the hard way.
Head down, avoiding all eye contact and keeping as far as possible from the patrolling pairs of law officers, she quickly put some distance between herself and her arrival point, and the handful of witnesses who had seen what had gone down with the boy and the transitory hermaphrodite. Despite all her efforts to melt into the crowds, however, people kept on looking at her. No matter what evasive tactics she might employ, she continued to receive batteries of constant and curious stares. Even the stallholders at the edge of the square, who couldn’t possibly have seen her strange arrival, glanced at her with expressions that might be reserved for some outlandish mutant.
Semple started to feel spooked and desperate. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
As far as she could tell, nothing was particularly unusual about the way she looked. She should have been at one with the crowd. It couldn’t be her clothes. Both men and women wore some variation on the wraparound skirt. The colors and patterns might be a matter of individual choice, but no one deviated too far from the basic design. Everyone wore eye shadow and lipstick. Both genders were basically bare to the waist, although some of the men sported sleeveless jackets with jutting, science-fiction shoulders. Most wore decorative collars similar to the one that was around her own neck, and these only really differed in size and in the lavishness of their decoration, possibly serving as an indication of the wearer’s status or wealth. Semple’s collar was large and heavily inlaid with lapis; if the status theory held good, the goddamned proles ought to be treating her with a measure of respect, not eyeballing her like she had two heads.