“We gotta million of them.”
“So what happens next?”
“Well it’s been nice meeting you, Jimbo, but we gotta get you on to the medical examination.”
Jim’s glow crashed and burned like a vampire in the sun. “Medical examination?”
“The medical examination. Everyone gets the medical examination. I mean, we’re aliens, ain’t we? That’s part of what we do.”
Jim dug in like a recalcitrant mule. He’d heard too many anecdotal reports regarding the role of body cavities in alien medical work. “No way.”
The alien raised a hand. “Hey, pal, don’t be telling me ‘no way.’ I just do the meeting and greeting. If you got a problem, take it up with the croakers. Don’t be busting my balls, okay?”
“So where are these croakers? The sooner I put them straight, the better.”
“You want to talk to a sawbones about this?”
Jim nodded. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I want.”
No sooner had he spoken than a second alien appeared beside the first one. In every respect, the two of them were identical, and Jim looked curiously from one to the other. Finally he focused on the new arrival. “Your friend here tells me that you’re the one I need to talk to about the medical exam. If it’s all the same with you, I really think I prefer to pass, particularly as I’m already dead.”
The huge black alien eyes looked straight into Jim’s; the voice was that of a robot with just the faintest trace of an Austrian accent. “The medical examination is nonnegotiable.”
***
Semple found herself in the calm center of frenzied chaos, the eye of a uniquely disorganized show-business hurricane. Even though she had died well before television had locked its grip on planet Earth, she knew enough from her irregular observation of the lifeside to recognize that she was inside a TV studio. In addition, her intricate familiarity with human nature at its worst told her that it was controlled by a megalomaniac, some kind of panic-prone neurotic who believed that any problem could be solved by inflicting screaming, hysterical abuse on his underlings. The name Fat Ari hardly did the man justice. He was huge in every direction. He stood well over six feet tall and was twice that around. The full horror of his stacked tires of flesh was fortunately swathed in a flowing, lavishly embroidered red-and-gold caftan that could have been the bell tent of God. He even seemed exempt from the ancient Egypt look. Perhaps, as the King of the TV Slave Salesmen, he actually had the juice to override the fixations of Anubis and dress as he pleased.
Semple and the other women from the jail stood in a roped-off area to one side of the set waiting for their call. Aside from a couple of walk-through rehearsals, and then actually being paraded for sale on the show itself, their part was, by this time, all but done. Until Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club went on the air, their primary tasks were not to get in the way and not smudge their makeup. The latter was not, in fact, as easy as it sounded. Even standing was made difficult by the spindly five-inch clear-plastic heels on which they were forced to balance. Here was another small factor where Fat Ari seemed to feel free to buck the mandated Egyptology. Fat Ari’s merchandise all seemed to conform to a more twentieth century, Times Square hooker authenticity, screw the trappings of the nineteenth dynasty. Unfortunately, Semple was about the only one in the batch who actually knew how to walk on high heels; the rest tended to reel and teeter unless they kept perfectly still.
Since they were to appear on the show naked but for shoes, the exteriors of Semple and her companions had been layered with cosmetics from head to toe, from glitter nail varnish to a special color-blended rouge that had been liberally applied to their nipples. They could neither sit nor lean. Although crowded together, they could not touch each other, and if they so much as sweated under the studio lights, a bad-tempered makeup boy would rush to powder them down.
The boy was something of an ordeal all on his own. He had the knack of maintaining himself in a state of perpetual snit. While he powdered, he mercilessly berated the woman on whom he was working, and even those around her, in a low querulous voice. He was also armed with a flashlight-sized version of the prison guards’ Lucite shock prods, and if Semple or one of her companions especially aggravated him, he would administer a waspish, stinging jolt to a part of her anatomy where the resulting red mark would not be visible on camera. The entire production of Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club seemed to be run on the dynamic of intimidation and spite.
That Semple and the others were merchandise had been made abundantly clear from the moment their prison escort had accepted a receipt for them from a harried associate producer and they had become the property of Fat Ari. After being stripped of even their prison kilts, run through a fast shower and blow-dry, they lined up for a perfunctory camera test. Three times, they were made to walk past a static camera, nude and unadorned. After that, Fat Ari and his director went into a two-minute huddle over the results, looking from the screen to the real woman and back again. Finally Fat Ari made an angry, disparaging gesture and stalked toward the women as if, whatever the current problem might be, it was definitely their fault.
“For my sins, you are all going to appear on tonight’s show. Personally, I would rather have hot needles jabbed into my eyes than let a substandard collection like yourselves loose on an unsuspecting public, but since the incompetence of my staff leaves me no other alternative, there are some things you need to hear before the worst happens.”
Fat Ari turned and, with a dramatic flourish, pointed in the direction of the long catwalk that was the centerpiece of the show’s set. “Behold the runway, the place that makes or breaks you. The place where you will be sold or remain unsold. That is where the great viewing audience will decide if you are prime merchandise or merely damaged goods.”
He gave a theatrical shudder as if to say he himself would be horrified by the spectacle. “During our short time together, there’s really just one thing I expect you women to grasp. I don’t know where you came from and I don’t know by what accident of circumstance you got here. You can also rest assured that I absolutely don’t give a fuck. As far I’m concerned, you have no history, no background, and no sad stories. You are my product. That’s all you have to know.”
Fat Ari looked at the women to make sure they were paying complete attention. Not one of them, Semple included, would have had the courage to do otherwise. When satisfied, he continued, “You are merchandise. The ‘For Sale’ sign is upon you. You are stickered and listed, and my job is to sell you. It is also your job to sell yourself. You sell yourself by doing exactly what you are told, and by making the maximum possible effort when your turn on camera comes. Your goal is to persuade the great unwashed to lust after you, to persuade them that they can’t live another day without you. You have to convince them to bid their hard-earned credits like there’s no tomorrow, just to get their greasy hands on your illusionary flesh. We have no artistic standards here. Be sensual, be erotic, be downright lewd and dirty. Just be sold. There’s no second chance for unsold merchandise on Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club.”
If anything, Fat Ari was more Mediterranean than Egyptian. He wore his hair and beard so long and unkempt that it was hard to tell where one set of greasy ringlets stopped and the other began. It was all too possible to imagine him cheating crusaders out of their gold, somewhere in Constantinople in the twelfth century, or selling whores and hashish to GIs in the twentieth. Fat Ari was the universal merchant/pimp/hustler. As his dark, infinitely calculating eyes moved from one woman to the next, Semple decided that he’d probably been exactly the same in every life he’d ever known.