Doc raised an amused eyebrow. “Curious?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Maybe.”
“You know her?”
“Maybe.”
“But you’re not going to tell me?”
“I think it’s something you need to find out for yourself.”
“It’s seems I’m predestined to meet her, though.”
“Who the fuck knows? I’d be the last one to claim that it’s all written and unchangeable. Your timeline seems so fucked up I wouldn’t bet bookmaker odds on anything.”
Jim frowned. He was about to start worrying like a terrier at the paradoxical bone of the distortions of time and fate; but then a pleasure boat, a veritable palace in white and gold, hove into view, way ahead upriver, but coming toward them. Jim adjusted the wheel to give the larger boat a wider birth. Doc nodded his approval at the maneuver. “Stay out of her wake, boy. I don’t want to get so rocked I spill my drink.”
He coughed three or four times. Jim couldn’t figure why Doc clung to his rotting lungs. “Are you ever going to do something about that TB?”
Doc shook his head. “I doubt it. It’s like a trademark.”
As the pleasure boat came closer, Jim marveled at its strange and luxuriously complex design, somewhere between a sculpted iceberg and a floating wedding cake, and far larger than he had first imagined when he’d seen it in the distance. It loomed over the launch like a small ocean liner, but like no ocean liner Jim had ever seen. Parts of it had the appearance of being constructed from custom-fabricated, translucent gemstone crystals, purposely and chemically grown but seemingly too huge to be plausible, especially with their heavy overlay of gold filigree and their surreal engineering. From out of nowhere, the phrase “crystal ship” jumped into Jim’s mind, and reverberated in the wreckage of his memory. Where the hell had he heard that before? He glanced around to Doc. “That thing scarcely seems possible. Like it shouldn’t exist, even here.”
Doc nodded gravely. “I’ll allow you don’t see too many of those. In fact, I wasn’t even aware he did boats. He usually sticks to dry land projects.”
“Who does?”
“Phibes.”
Doc nodded to the bigger craft, now almost level with them. His expression was one of weary disdain. “Yonder monster of overelaboration is a product of the excessively celebrated Runcible Phibes.”
Jim frowned. “Should I know about Phibes?”
Doc pushed back his hat. It was the teacher/pupil routine again.
“Runcible Phibes is the leading light of the post-logical school. Some say post-logicalism is the first truly indigenous art movement of the hereafter, but I fear I am not one of them.”
“Does it really float? Or run on wheels on the river bottom like those Pirates of the Caribbean boats at Disneyland?”
Doc snorted. “I’ve never yet laid eyes on Disneyland, boy. I was seventy years dead when that damned place opened.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. I suspect I didn’t miss much. A good friend told me once, and I totally trust his judgment, that Disneyland put him in mind of what Hitler would have wanted the world to be after he’d killed everyone he didn’t like.”
Jim nodded. “That’s definitely one way of looking at it.”
***
The mushroom cloud grew in Semple’s perception until it overwhelmed all else in the landscape. It seemed to be drawing her to it. Somehow its elemental force had managed to infiltrate her consciousness, as though it wanted to force her to join it, or at least to abase herself before it. It seemed to be talking to her, telling her it was the only symbol that remained for her, the Pillar of Cloud in the wildness, the Great Tree of Evil Fruit. She had almost called it the Tree of Life, but there was no way that the word “life” could ever be appropriate for this towering blossom of fundamental destruction, or the accursed place and equally accursed mind that had brought it into being. The only mercy was that, in running to it, she had left the Nubians way behind. Where most of the pursued had milled around and attempted to double back, to circle toward the city, Semple had carried on as straight and as fast as she could, directly into the desert. The ones who had tried to return to Necropolis had been sent bloodily to another place. The curve of the Nubian formation had surrounded them, the horns of the bull had closed, the golden spears went to work, and the victims took their leave of Anubis’s desert, to the pods with a final scream. As far as Semple could observe, she and the rearing atomic cloud were all that remained.
She looked back a number of times, just to make sure all pursuit had ceased, before she felt safe enough to stop running and attempt to catch her breath. It was only when she finally stopped that she realized just how winded she was. She leaned forward, hands on knees, eyes closed, bent double, gasping, with the circulation pounding in her head. Her legs were shaking and threatening to give out on her. For one fearful moment, she wondered if this heralded the onset of another bout of the melting horror, but her body managed to struggle back to normality and she slowly straightened up. For a brief time, this fear of the melting had pushed the influence of the atomic cloud out of her mind. As she reopened her eyes, she half hoped that it might have gone, borne away on some desert wind, but the mushroom of poison vapor was still in front of her, showing no sign of dissipating or even losing its shape. Indeed, the mighty fungoid head, atop its roughly cylindrical trunk, appeared to be expanding still, growing between her and the sun, so that a dark shadow advanced across the blast-blown desert directly toward her. A new impulse suddenly entered her mind. She no longer had to go to the cloud. All she had to do was to wait for the shadow to come to her.
As far as she could tell, the outer edge of the cloud-cast shadow was maybe seventy yards from her, but it was moving quickly closer. It seemed to cover the desert at something well in excess of walking pace, and the seventy yards quickly dwindled to fifty, thirty, twenty-five, and the nearer it came, the more her strength ebbed, leaving her without the will to resist or flee. As it moved inexorably closer to the immediate ground on which she stood, she began to feel almost transparent, as though her very being were ebbing. What was this? Some bizarre new unknown ending? With the shadow just a few feet from her, she felt as though she could no longer breathe; her motor functions spun out of control, she was hot and then cold, her thoughts became randomized, without thread or pattern. She was scattering. She hardly knew who she was, even had doubts as to what she was. And then the shadow touched her and she became a part of the blackness that hid the sun. As a conscious being, Semple ceased.
***
Doc shaded his eyes and looked more closely at the passing pleasure boat. “I see they have their own shipboard entertainment.”
A dancer was performing for a small audience on the quarterdeck of the great white and gold river palace. All but naked, she turned, undulated, and pranced, legs lifted high in mock classic symbolic poses that looked to Jim privately like bullshit, having engaged in some similar bullshit himself back in the days of yore. The dancer’s arms dipped and waved, trailing a long chiffon scarf. Jim grinned at Doc. “Isadora Duncan disciple?”
“It could be the divine Isadora herself.”
“You think so?”
Doc squinted from beneath his hat, looking more closely at the dancer. “It’s too far to tell for sure, but it looks like her. If I just had binoculars powerful enough that I could see her mole, I’d know . . . ”
“You know her?”
“Isadora took a fancy to me once, way back down the road. I recall we spent a memorable three nights in a hot-sheet, yab-yum motel out on one of the caravan routes.”
“You’re kidding me.”