The guard turned back to the computer, clearly blaming Semple for the screwup. “Wait.”
And Semple, having positively no other choice in the matter, waited, as did the eleven other women in her transfer batch. The huge guard pecked slowly at the keyboard with two uncertain index fingers. With a computer that ran on hieroglyphics, the keyboard was massive, with a hundred or more keys, like some strange, multi-tiered Johann Sebastian Bach organ.
While the guard tried to come up with a workable solution, Semple looked up and down the long corridor in which she now seemed to be trapped. The corridor was dead straight and appeared to go on forever. It was somewhat wider at the floor than at the ceiling, and its walls were constructed from huge blocks of precision-hewn sandstone. The overall impression was one of being deep in the heart of a great stone pyramid. Every fifty feet or so, the corridor was sectioned off by steel-barred gates, presumably to present an obstacle to a fermenting riot or an attempt at mass breakout. The gates, like all the other metal surfaces in the jail, were painted a dull sandy beige, the color of Rommel’s tanks in the World War II desert. The gates were also automatic, controlled by guards in glassed-in booths positioned at every third set of gates, identical to the one at which Semple was currently receiving bureaucratic grief. On either side of the corridor were lines of sliding grids, the entrances to the tanks, the big gloomy rooms, each with its two dozen triple-tiered bunk beds, that housed all of the overcapacity inmate population, except for the incorrigible in solitary, the demented in the padded rooms, and the ultraprivileged who, having fallen foul of the Code of Anubis, were rumored to be held in luxurious private detention suites somewhere on the upper levels.
The guards who had come to fetch Semple and the others from their tank had blanked all questions regarding their destination or the purpose of the excursion. They had simply summoned them to the sliding door and ordered them out. Initially, Semple had been terrified. The fear that she’d experienced in the immediate aftermath of her arrest had returned with a vengeance. The possibility of summary execution without trial and a dozen other kindred horrors and atrocities shrieked through her imagination. Then, in the moment of confusion as the women were being filtered from the tank, a whisper had gone around that they were being sent to Fat Ari.
Semple had no idea who or what Fat Ari might be, but since none of the other women had showed any marked dismay at the prospect, Semple had joined the line with only a measured trepidation. Also, every one of the women selected was both young and attractive, and that gave Semple some kind of idea about the nature of Fat Ari and why they were being brought to him. If the fate of this batch of twelve was to be some kind of sexual exploitation, perhaps it would offer the window of opportunity for which she was so patiently waiting. Semple knew well how sexual desire, even among those in authority, could derail both sense and sensibility.
After leaving the holding tank, the twelve women had moved in single file along the punctuated corridor, with one guard leading them and a second bringing up the rear. Both were considerably thinner and more limber than the fat guard in the glass booth, and both carried a short cylinder of transparent Lucite that delivered a painful, nonlethal shock much in the manner of a cattle prod. These were the guards’ only weapon, and if the twelve women had attempted a sudden rush on their escorts, they would have had little trouble overpowering them.
No such thing happened, though, and Semple could only wonder at the docility of her fellow inmates. Without exception they passively accepted their penitent status and submitted to everything they were told without rebellion and rancor and, most surprising of all, with a minimum of complaint. Semple was starting to wonder if the prison population in Necropolis were not real criminals at all, nothing more than animated set dressing like Aimee’s cherubs and angels.
Her developing theory was that the majority of the city’s inhabitants were fabricated beings with little or no will of their own, created for the amusement of Anubis or one of his underlings. It was possible that the whole prison system, and perhaps even the oppressive police force, had been established, not in response to any real problem of crime and punishment, but simply because someone on the planning level thought a city wasn’t complete without such things, and installed them much in the same way that a small boy with an obsessive hobby might add a new section to his model train layout.
Had Semple been more diligent in keeping up with the trends in popular mortal, she would have known that the environment she now occupied was little more than a local modification to the genre of low-budget women’s prison movies with titles like Caged Rage and Chained Heat. The ever-present Egyptian motif and the heavy overlay of unworkable totalitarian baroque might have thrown her off track, but all the required details were in place, right down to the glandular guard and the coteries of butch and burly lesbians who ogled her body with a masculine candor.
Even though she’d missed the cultural origins of her situation, Semple was beginning to realize that, although Anubis may have been responsible for the overall concept of Necropolis, a lot of the details must have been delegated to subsidiary minds, allowing them to indulge their own fantasies and fixations. He had, in fact, done what Aimee was hoping to do: recruited the newly deceased to help construct his hereafter. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that Necropolis was a conspiracy of the deformed. Anubis might have been its guiding force, but this all must have been the produce of a legion of warped minds.
The line of twelve women and two guards had moved smoothly down the corridor until Semple had attempted to check through the gate at the first glass booth, when the fat guard had brought it to a shuffling halt. The prisoners looked on with boredom as Semple paralyzed the process with her lack of a barcode. The guard bringing up the rear was less patient. “So what’s the goddamned holdup?”
The fat guard didn’t answer, but she did seem ready to enlist some outside help. She resentfully tapped out a sequence on the oversized keyboard, and a pinched irritated face appeared on the tiny computer screen. Semple assumed it was the obese guard’s immediate superior, some harried, middle-echelon administrator. A tinny voice crackled from a speaker. “Can we make this fast? I really don’t have the time to be dealing with complications at every damned section gate.”
“I have a female unit here with no barcode.”
The man’s mouth became a small, sour line. “You bothered me with that?”
The guard didn’t seem too impressed by the man’s exasperation. “The box wouldn’t pass the paperwork. What was I supposed to do?”
“You couldn’t run up the help manual?”
“I haven’t been able to access help since before Lotus Day.”
“You called maintenance?”
“Sure I called pigging maintenance. I’m still waiting.”
The administrator frowned. “Isn’t this batch for Fat Ari?”
The guard was becoming decidedly peevish. “Of course this batch is for Fat Ari. That’s why I’ve got to have the pigging paperwork straight.”
“It could bollix up the entire term-end profit-share bonus.”
The fat guard’s peevishness sharpened. “You think I don’t know that?”
“So run it on a Gazelle/Leopard ten seventy.”
“Why didn’t you say that in first place?”
A weary scowl twisted the man’s face. “I still cling to the archaic notion that people should know how to do their own pigging jobs.”