Jesus looked at her with one of his hand-rubbingly wolfish smiles. “Impatient for some payback?”
“Damn right I’m impatient.”
He looked down at the remote. “Then let’s see what we can do.”
***
Jim tilted the pipe to the right, about thirty degrees from the vertical, and the impossibly beautiful Asian woman applied the blue and yellow flame of the small lamp to the ball of purest tar-black Shanghai opium that nestled inside. Jim was beginning to get used to the near-seamless shifts of reality. He had quickly realized that his only safe course was to go where the Mystere took him, accept each new situation on its face value, and not struggle or kick or ask too many damn fool questions. Certainly the current environment was very easy to accept. Hanging chimes sang soft and lazy harmonics in the slight, sweet-scented breeze created by gliding fans. Candles flickered in sevens, tens, and dozens, positioned before dark mirrors and behind the diffusion of parchment screens or the refraction of the cracked leaded glass of hexagonal Tiffany shades that split light into unimagined spectra and cast soft auras of protection over all those safely gathered within.
Jim drew long and steadily on the ivory pipe and, although the tiny carved dragons didn’t actually move, the eighteen-inch tube all but had a life of its own as the living smoke insinuated the receptors of his brain, formally bowing with mandarin manners and welcoming itself as an old and valued friend before it moved on to enfold him in its perfect velvet detachment and gently lead him beyond the reach of hurt or destiny. When they had first arrived at the Palace of Mirrors, Dr. Hypodermic had told him, “Don’t get too accustomed to this place. It’s only an interlude, a rest stop before the tour continues.” He now saw the reason for the warning.
The other dragons, however-the ones on the slit silk skirt of the impossibly beautiful Asian woman’s vibrantly tight cheongsam-did move. They came animatedly alive as she replaced the long pipe in its ornate holder and got respectfully to her feet from the opium den version of the Hefner bunny dip that she had assumed while ministering to his needs. “Are you content for now?”
Jim smiled blissfully, sinking back into the fully reclined seat. Hypodermic had told him not to get too accustomed to the place, but Jim was already wishing for the interlude never to end. “I don’t think it would be possible to be any more content.”
Like the cabin attendant of some divine airline, the woman moved on to the next passenger-or client? customer? trick? Jim watched the sway of her hips and the exquisite sheen of her perfect legs. He appreciated the small reflections from the garment and the way it stretched taut as she leaned forward to address the intoxicant needs of the racked and inert figure in the recliner across the aisle. He appreciated the contours of her ass in a way that was almost completely lacking in active desire. Such was the relationship between the drug and the sex drive. Even the spurs of the flesh to that which was ultimately pleasurable were blunted to a glorious objectivity. As she held the lamp to the new pipe, the flame triggered a rainbow of hallucinations, equal in their perfection to the wafting curves of the woman’s hypnotic body. The true glory was that Jim didn’t have to do a damn thing about it. All he needed was simply to relax down into the magical wonder of it all, where the dreams were waiting to claim him. With time at least temporarily negated under the opium spell, he didn’t need to worry that Hypodermic would wake him and insist that they continue the tour of the Mystere. He didn’t even have to worry about the fact that the figure in the next recliner looked a great deal like Doc Holliday.
***
An inset window came up in the top right corner of the forward screen. Jesus smiled. To Semple’s mind, he was becoming altogether too pleased with himself as the trashing of Necropolis progressed. “I think you’ll like this.”
Gojiro was now wading knee deep in the city’s business district, wrecking imposing corporate structures left and right. A hapless Zeppelin swung into the King of the Monsters’ field of vision and was instantly incinerated by a burst of blue breath. Its hydrogen exploded like a giant phallic firecracker. Boom! Gojiro trundled on. All around him, pillars of red fire and oily black smoke marked where entire city blocks were burning, ignited by electrical sparks and the gas tanks of recklessly hurled vehicles. Gushers of steam erupted as progressive sections of the computer network blew its boilers. Jesus looked round at Semple and Mr. Thomas “Don’t you just love to see a city on fire, trapped in its own death throes?”
The great creature’s newest objective appeared to be a squat and singularly ugly double-triangle pyramid festooned with tall steel broadcast antennae and satellite uplink dishes. Semple peered at the screen. “The TV center?”
Jesus nodded. “Watch the inset.”
At that moment all the window showed was random, cathode-stream snow, but then the snow cleared and Semple found that, of all the TV shows on all the TV channels in the Afterlife, she was watching Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club. Semple blinked. “How the hell did that get there?”
“Watch and learn.”
In black and white so crude and grainy that it was almost an insult to the viewer, and with all the production quality of a snuff movie, the painted and powdered naked women Fat Ari treated as the merchandise paraded down the catwalk, smiling into the camera with painfully phony, frightened allure, and leaning forward so the potential customers on the other end of the process could clearly read the barcodes on their foreheads.
Mr. Thomas chewed a chunk of plastic packing material and snuffled through his nose. “There but for the grace of someone . . . ”
Semple looked at the goat in surprise.
“You know about me and Fat Ari?”
“Even a goat has his sources.”
Jesus glanced up from running the remote. “If you’d made it to the catwalk, I certainly would have put in a bid for you.”
“Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?”
Jesus shrugged. “I would have thought so.”
Mr. Thomas looked around for something else to eat. “Of course, you didn’t have a barcode . . . ”
“How the hell do you guys know all this?”
Jesus looked down at the remote as though he suddenly had something very important to do, and Mr. Thomas simply avoided her eyes. Semple, oblivious for the moment to what Gojiro might be doing outside, planted her superhero gauntlets on her hips and looked disgustedly at Jesus and the goat. “Are you telling me that you two used to sit up here and watch Necropolis TV for fun?”
Mr. Thomas nodded, looking a little shamefaced. “It can be one of the more entertaining channels for the warped of taste.”
“And did you buy any slaves?”
Mr. Thomas nodded at Jesus. “He tried it a couple of times.”
“And where are they now?”
“Unfortunately there was a bit of a screwup with the animation process when they entered the Big Green’s brain.”
Semple shook her head. “I can hardly believe you even watched this crap, let alone actually tried to buy people.”
Jesus finally contributed to the discussion by gesturing to the screen. “I somehow don’t think we’ll be doing it anymore.”
In the inset window, one of the slaves had looked up at the roof of the studio and started screaming in tight close-up. On the larger screen, Gojiro was ripping loose one of the triangular sides of the TV center. Suddenly, his forward vision was peering down into the studio where Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club was going out live. As slaves and technicians alike scattered for their lives, a huge green hand entered the black and white picture and ripped up the catwalk. A lone cameraman was sticking it out to the end, more concerned with preserving potentially historic images than his own continued continuity. Apart from the cameraman, the only individual who had stood his ground was Fat Ari himself. In fact, he actually advanced on the King of the Monsters as though completely unaware that the thing he faced was many thousands of times his own size. He stomped down the stairs from the control room, his irate tented bulk quivering with the same fury that Semple had faced when he discovered her lack of barcode.