The harem boarded the royal carriage by means of a mobile flight of steps. Semple observed that, as the women climbed aboard, the craft swayed slightly; and that it seemed to be floating six to eight feet above the ground, supported, as far as Semple could guess, by some Nikola Tesla system or perhaps an antigravity fantasy reminiscent of the vimanas of Gilgamesh. The more Semple saw of Necropolis, the more she became aware that the entire place was a galactic collage of fanciful minutiae. Semple had little time, though, to ponder the inner mechanics of Anubis’s ceremonial craft. Zipporah quickly clapped her hands, indicating that the harem should assume its position. The armed guards on the prow, until now busy shooting covert glances at the diaphanously clad concubines, radiating random lust from behind the visors of their helmets, stiffened to attention. Anubis himself was coming.
The arrival of the dog-god constituted a mini-parade all by itself. Preceded by a formation of his Nubians carrying long gold-tipped lances, and followed by a gaggle of handmaidens, he rode to the craft in a litter borne by four strapping blond slaves. The Dream Warden walked beside the litter, and Semple groaned inwardly. She had half hoped their day out would be unencumbered by that potentially dangerous weirdo, but it was inevitable that the sinister robed figure should show up for the detonation of the Holy Bomb. As the dog-god climbed the steps, the women all adopted expressions of adoration. When he looked in Semple’s direction she smiled radiantly but muttered under her breath, “At least you can make the stairs unaided, you psychotic son of a bitch.”
When Anubis was finally seated on his elevated throne and his court was satisfactorily arrayed around him, the craft started forward with a slight lurch that had some of the women reaching for handholds. It nosed its way out of the hangar and into the hazy polluted sunshine of a Necropolis morning. As it traveled, the keel rose to a height of twelve feet above the surface of the raised highway the procession would follow all way to the test site. Anubis may have wanted his people to see and worship him, but he obviously didn’t feel any need to let the common horde get too close.
The procession itself was perhaps a quarter of a mile long. First up was a squad of the city’s rocketeer police mounted on big, smoke-belching Harley-Davidsons and World War II–Indians. The bike cops were followed by a massive sculpted bust of Anubis himself fashioned from reflective silvery material, borne on a float that moved under its own power. A human garnish of young women in Mylar bikinis and body paint was draped around the neck and shoulders of the bust, and crowded the plinth that supported it, beaming like beauty queens and strewing rose petals, coins, strings of good-luck beads, and other small trinkets over the heads of the organized multitude thronging the highway. The bust was followed by the first of four marching bands, short on tune but strong on cacophony. Comprised mainly of hammering copper-shell drums and big brass wind instruments, sousaphones and tubas, the bands produced a relentless metallic braying that seemed to set the tone for the entire holiday.
Semple had hardly expected that Anubis would forgo the chance to put on a display of military power. Whenever a hole presented itself in the order of the parade, Anubis had filled it with dress phalanxes from the various regiments of his army. The clatter of the hooves of his plumed and cloaked cavalry vied with the grinding roar of ornately gilded battle tanks. Neither the God-King himself nor anyone in the massed crowds seemed embarrassed that the style and weaponry of the Army of Necropolis should span some three thousand years, and Semple wondered if she was the only one to whom the parade looked like nothing more than a small boy showing off his toys. Even the air above the parade hadn’t been neglected. Formations of biplanes and dirigibles moved lowly across the sky, while small solo aircraft left trails of hieroglyphics in colored smoke. Flags fluttered, banners waved, and huge tethered balloons, in the shape of eagles, vultures, dragons, and one bulbous inflatable ankh, floated overhead, an old-fashioned communist May Day procession in chaotic collision with Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.
The drawback of actually being in a parade was that, once the procession was on the move, anyone actually taking part in it had only a limited view of the proceedings. After a while, Semple, between smiling and looking as radiant as was expected of the God-King’s current favorite, stopped craning her neck to see what was going on up ahead or back behind the ceremonial craft and started looking farther afield, at parts of the city that she had never seen before. At first it was very much what she had expected-large, bombastically imposing, Egyptian-style buildings, once magnificent, now run-down and in need of paint and maintenance-but as they moved farther out, the architecture started to change. The towering temples, commercial towers, and apartment blocks gave way to a seemingly endless sprawl of crudely constructed single-and two-story hovels, huddled together in what looked, from the elevation of the highway, to be insanitary and overcrowded neglect amid garbage, chaos, graffiti, and stands of wilted and apologetic palm trees.
This endless acreage of slums only deepened the puzzle for Semple. Why would anyone live here? What misery-prone spirit would leave the Great Double Helix to be ghettoized in such a depressing and degrading hereafter? The only conclusion was that Anubis had deliberately created the millions of souls it so obviously took to fill all this sorry real estate. Was he really so driven by the need for glory that he surrounded the place of his dreams with miles of wretchedness and underclass squalor? Semple wasn’t attempting any moral judgment. She accepted that her own personal history left no room for condemnation of another’s fantasy. What she totally failed to understand was what percentage Anubis gleaned from all the pointless work and organization.
***
“What the hell is going on?”
A huge dinosaur flashed past, sprinting backward at alarming speed. Only Jim and the Mammal with No Name seemed to remain in one spot. The rest of the world was in sudden and violent reverse motion. The sun whipped across the sky in entirely the wrong direction, so fast that the alternation of night and day was turned into the rapid beating of a huge black wing. The mammal, its eyes made eerie by the strobing sunlight, stared at Jim with metaphysical resignation. “I think we have a time fuckup.”
“A time fuckup?”
“Right.”
The mammal seemed to accept the situation as if it were eminently natural. Jim, on the other hand, had never experienced anything like it and didn’t like it at all. “This happen often around here?”
“Not often, but it happens.”
The sun was now traveling so fast that it was nothing more than a gray blur blending perfectly with an increasingly blurred landscape. The spectacle struck Jim as the visual equivalent of a deep and overwhelming depression. “Do these time fuckups always run backwards?”
“Only half the time.”
“So what happens? We stand here like idiots until we’re swallowed up by the Big Bang?”
The Mammal with No Name frowned. “I guess it would be more of an Ultimate Implosion than a Big Bang, seeing as how we’re going backwards. Usually it doesn’t get that far, though.”
“It doesn’t?”
The mammal shook his head. “Not usually. No.”
“So what does happen . . . usually?”
“Usually someone puts a stop to it.”
“Like who?”
Again the mammal shook his head, embarrassed at his lack of knowledge. “I don’t know.”
“You know how whoever it is stops it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“So what do you do when one of these happens?”
“I just keep my head down and wait.”