“Fucking unbelievable.”
All through his life on Earth he had harbored three great irrational regrets. He’d never seen the young Elvis Presley performing live, he was unable to fly like Superman, and he’d never looked into the deep vastness of space. One down and two impossibilities to go. If he hadn’t already been dead, he would probably have been able to die happy. Jim was so transfixed by the infinite beyond the port that he totally failed to hear the ovoid door slide open.
“Hello, Jim.” The first voice was blond, breathless, and afraid of its own power.
“Good evening, Jim.” The second voice was cool, lazily aloof, with a hint of contempt.
Jim quickly turned and was confronted by a spectacle in its own way as wondrous as the view beyond the ovoid picture window.
“I am Epiphany.”
“And I am Devora.”
“Were you admiring the stars, Jim?”
“Now it’s time for you to admire us.”
Jim knew this couldn’t be anything but an elaborate illusion, but in that first moment, he really didn’t care. The 50s sci-fi tableau was now complete. The two women were Wally Wood creations straight from the cover of an EC space comic. Each was at least as tall as he was, perhaps taller, statuesque, each a warrior showgirl in a formfitting fantasy space suit and transparent bubble helmet with articulated hose running to a tiny finned air tank on her back. Epiphany was as blond as she sounded, and her suit was silver accented by a pale shade of the same blue as the room. Devora was a brunette with honey high-yellow skin, her suit was midnight metalflake with crimson pinstriping. Jim was almost as impressed with the suits as he was with the women. They were fetish feats of bizarre body-shop engineering. The women’s torsos were clad in what looked to be highly polished plastic or fiberglass, with the kind of multicoat, hand-rubbed finish usually saved for top-of-the-line hot rods. Rigidly molded and contoured to the bodies beneath, the detailing went right down to loving re-creations of navels and nipples. Epiphany’s and Devora’s Las Vegas legs were encased in long thigh-length boots with absurdly high heels, their arms sheathed in long evening gloves that came to well above their elbows. Both gloves and boots matched the color of the body units. Their thighs and upper arms, on the other hand, were quite bare, something that, in any real exposure to the vacuum of space, would immediately cause explosive decompression.
Jim knew, however, that these outfits would never be exposed to anything beyond him and this egg-shaped blue room. They had been crafted for his seduction and his seduction alone. He also knew that Epiphany and Devora, these equal and opposite Queens of the Galaxy, nasty and nice, good and evil, were the gift wrapping on some chill alien agenda that, if it had to be so seriously camouflaged, probably would have repulsed him if he’d been forced to witness its unvarnished reality. On the other hand, if the aliens had the decency to run an erotic con on him, he might as well go along with the gag, as long as the gift wrapping held up. He certainly had very little to lose. And so, when Epiphany moved toward him with a demure yet lascivious smile, Devora just one step behind her, Jim returned the smile. When their smiles broadened and their hands went to the throat fastenings of their bubble helmets, he stood his ground. It was only then that he noticed how, although Epiphany was unarmed, Devora wore an unusually phallic art deco ray gun in a low-slung, tied-down, speed-draw gunfighter holster.
***
“Do the handmaidens have to stay?”
Anubis turned. He’d been absorbed in picking at a tray of crackers and tiny chips of dried fish. It seemed that Anubis did eat constantly. Maybe it was the dog in him, or perhaps the parents of the mortal child had done something really terrible to him like repeatedly locking him in closets without supper, lunch, or breakfast. As in the Throne Room, a pair of near-naked handmaidens carried the trays of goodies, following the God-King as he moved from one part of the bedroom to another, while two more stood flanking the silk acreage of the dog-god’s bed, waiting on his pleasure.
Anubis regarded Semple disdainfully. “Of course they have to stay; we don’t know when we might require them.”
“And the guards, too?”
“The guards always stay. For all we know, you might be planning an attempt on our life.”
Semple observed that, even in the semi-privacy of his bedroom, Anubis continued to use the royal “We.” The son of a bitch must have been a seriously abused child. Why else would he require such constant reinforcement of his self-esteem? Semple knew that she and Aimee had their problems, but not even the sum of their collective hang-ups could approach Anubis and his monstrous dysfunction.
“As this is our first time together, I might respond better to you if we had a little more privacy?”
The fingers that held the latest cracker halted halfway to the dog-god’s mouth. “Our intention is to fuck you, you stupid woman, not consummate some passionate romance. You will respond just as we want you to respond or you’ll find this interlude will have a very unpleasant aftermath. Besides, we might decide to have one of the handmaidens join us at some point in the proceedings if we’re so inclined.”
Semple caught the two handmaidens beside the bed exchanging weary glances behind Anubis’s back. It was good to see some spark of resistance surviving in this absurd autocracy. She wished she could slip them some sign of sisterly solidarity, but Anubis was looking straight at her. Anubis’s decision of what to do with Semple couldn’t have been more predictable if he’d been wholly dog instead of just dog from the neck up. After an unpleasantly rambling debate with himself regarding Semple’s ultimate fate, complete with a couple of lengthy and loathsomely perverse digressions, Anubis had suddenly declared that he was bored and wished to leave the Throne Room and retire to his private suite. He had risen petulantly and the Nubian guards had fallen in, swiftly and silently, on either side of him. With a curt gesture that Semple should follow, he had walked quickly to a concealed door behind the right leg of the giant statue. The Dream Warden had attempted to tag along, but Anubis had turned in the doorway and shaken his head. “We won’t be needing you right now. We suggest you busy yourself with that matter we discussed earlier.”
The Dream Warden seemed about to protest, but at a sign from Anubis, the Nubians closed the door on him. Anubis had glanced at Semple and smiled nastily. “The Dream Warden is not happy. We had halfway promised you to him, but then we changed our mind and decided, for the moment, to keep you for ourself. You should feel honored. Our whims are not always so charitable.”
“I am honored, my lord.”
Anubis’s eyes flashed with amusement. “Learning submission, are you, Semple McPherson?”
No, dogbreath, I’m just a poor girl doing her level best to survive in an untenable situation.
“I’m attempting to please, my lord.”
“You wouldn’t have preferred the Dream Warden?”
She smiled nicely. “How could anything be preferable to being noticed by you, my lord?”
Anubis had then switched position like a spoiled child. “Are you saying that you have something against our Dream Warden? That you’re maybe too good for him?”
Semple sighed inwardly. Don’t you ever give it a rest, Benji? “How can I say, my lord? All I’ve seen is a figure in a robe.”
“And you don’t want to see what’s beneath that robe, believe us. It’s disgusting.”
Semple couldn’t let this pass. She decided the highest level of reproach that she could risk would be to pout prettily. “And you were going to give me to him, my lord?”