NECROM

He came to a kiosk that sold newspapers, magazines, and tobacco, and he decided that it would be a good idea to stock up on cigarettes. The outside of the kiosk was protected from the weather by a layer of enameled tin signs, the kind that Gibson had seen in stores as a kid, and that they now sold in trendy antique boutiques to the kind of people who lived in apartments with exposed brick walls and Victorian furniture. It was the standard Luxor style of tits-and-ass advertising, and he probably wouldn't have given any of it a second glance, except that one of the well-developed and scantily clad blue babes was holding up a pack of Camels. Of course, the name was in the Luxor alphabet, but it was definitely a pack of Camels. The same tan, yellow, and brown pack, the same camel, and the same pair of pyramids and clump of palm trees in the background of the drawing. Gibson slowly shook his head: a different system of writing but an identical brand of smokes.

"I guess there's no telling with parallel worlds."

A fat man was taking his time over buying cigars, and Gibson had to wait. He glanced at the covers of the local tabloids. Luxor still had a lot of newspapers-as far as he could see, five in all. The headlines screamed unintelligibly, but Gibson could see from the pictures that, of the five papers on the rack, four had given their front pages over to a gruesome multiple murder. Huge color blowups of the bloody crime scene were positioned alongside smaller shots of a frightened pinhead being manhandled by police. A freak slaying appeared to be hot copy, and Gibson wondered why he hadn't seen the same story on TV. Was the press in Luxor so fast with its editions that the murder story had broken after he'd watched the news?

The fat man was through and it was Gibson's turn. "Three packs of Camel filters, please."

The man in the kiosk gave him a strange look. "Where you from, mister? Camel don't make a filter."

"So give me anything with a filter on it. I don't care."

The man treated him to a look like he was just one more crazy in a long day and tossed three packs of totally unfamiliar cigarettes onto the counter.

"Three kudos."

So a pack of cigarettes cost a kudo. That made life tidy.

Farther down the block, Gibson thought that he'd spotted his bar. The neon sign was elaborate, a foaming stein with suds ru

"You can't come in here."

Gibson still wasn't accustomed to being on the receiving end of a color bar.

"I just wanted a drink."

"So go down the street to the Radium Room. They serve your kind in there."

The Radium Room wasn't the most luxurious saloon that Gibson had ever been in, but for the moment it would suit his purpose. Nobody in the place seemed the kind to get inquisitive about a stranger who minded his own business. If he hadn't been told in front, he would have known immediately that the management had no reservations about serving mutations and also hiring them. The place was busy but not jammed, and at least a third of the clientele showed evidence of some kind of glitch in their genes. The bartender who asked him what he wanted had six fingers on each of her hands, and webs between the fingers.

It was then that Gibson made his second cultural error of the evening. "Scotch?"

"Huh?"

Clearly the term wasn't used in Luxor. He tried again. "Whiskey?"

"Why didn't you say so."

"I'm sorry. I'm from out of town. Could I get a beer back with that?"

"No problem."

Gibson pulled out the look-alike's wallet to pay for the drinks, and before he put it away, he took anodier look at the picture on the ID. A thought struck him. Could it be that the double was actually a parallel him? He didn't like the thought one bit and swallowed the shot of whiskey in one gulp.

"Jesus Christ!"

The bartender, who was still counting out his change, looked up sharply. "What's the trouble?"

"Nothing." He gestured to his now empty shot glass. "Why don't you do me again while you're still here?"

"You can put it away."

"It's been a rough day."

Gibson was wondering what, if indeed the double was his parallel in this dimension, would happen if the two of them met? Would they merely exchange pleasantries or would there be some hideous interface in which one or both of them were destroyed like matter and antimatter? Of course, the double wasn't an albino; maybe that would make a difference. A kind of sidebar idea jumped into his mind. If the streamheat's plan was really to swing some kind of substitution, the fact that he had come out of the transition as an albino may have seriously screwed things up. He sipped his second shot, hardly tasting it, and set the glass down on the bar. He took the whole parcel of thoughts that had been triggered by the picture in the wallet and, handling them with the mental equivalent of long tongs, consigned them to one of the deepest recesses of his mind. He should be concentrating on practical survival and concealing himself as far as he could in this red-light subworld of Luxor.

He took a deep breath to calm himself and clear his mind and then looked around the bar. He would probably be spending a lot of time in places like this over the next few days. The Radium Room appeared to be something of a pickup parlor. Gibson didn't know enough about the mores of Luxor to be able to tell if it was a swinging singles joint or a hooker bar, but he suspected the latter. He noticed that a woman a little way down the bar was looking in his direction. Taking the dim smoky light of the barroom into account, she actually didn't look too bad. Her close-cropped helmet of yellow-blond hair contrasted prettily with the blue of her skin, and her mouth, a slash of purple lipstick, pouted seductively. Gibson no longer had any doubts about how he'd handle getting close to a blue woman. To paraphrase Stephen Stills, love the color you're with.

The woman was coming through the crowd toward him. In her pencil skirt and low-cut blouse, she looked like a B-girl from some fifties gangster movies, and when she slid into the space at the bar beside him, he discovered that she had the matching, husky Lizbeth Scott voice.

"You wa

Gibson smiled and signaled to the bartender. "Sure, anytime."

The woman's pout increased in provocation. "Are you alone?"

Gibson laughed. "You wouldn't believe how alone I am."

"My name's Zazsu."

Zazsu appeared to be a regular at the Radium Room. The bartender didn't bother to ask her what she was drinking, she simply set a green concoction in a conical glass in front of her and picked up some of Gibson's money. Zazsu sipped the green stuff through a clear plastic straw in a ma

"Are you go

"It's Joe."

Zazsu frowned. "Joe? That's a weird name. Are you from out of town?"

Gibson nodded. "Oh, yeah, I'm from out of town."

Zazsu came straight to the point.

"So I guess you don't know any girls in Luxor."

"Not a one."

"You looking for a good time?"

"I might be."

"I've got a place right near here. I could show you a real good time for a fifty."

"Is that a fact?"

Zazsu raised an eyebrow that seemed to indicate that time was money and he should make up his mind. "So, you wa

Gibson hesitated. The offer was tempting, and even a little commercial creature comfort was preferable to the absolute isolation that he'd been feeling ever since Klein had left him alone in the apartment. As far as revealing his alien status, he was fairly confident he was on safe ground; the natives of Luxor seemed to believe that out-of-towners were capable of any gaucheness or stupidity. He was about to agree to Zazsu's offer when he happened to glance up. The smile froze on his face and the words stuck in his throat. Nephredana had just walked into the Radium Room and was heading directly for where he was standing. It was a somewhat different Nephredana from the first time he had seen her, with Yancey Slide outside Windemere's house in Ladbroke Grove, but there was no mistaking it was her. If nothing else, on high spike heels she was a head taller than most of the drinkers in the place. Back in London, she had been pure metal, the wet dream of any Megadeth fan; now she looked like a gun moll from some lost Robert Mitchum movie. As before, she was all in black, a sequined jacket like the skin of a vampire reptile over a sheath dress so tight that it gave no quarter, a wide-brimmed hat with a veil tilted at a piratical angle, and a pocket book over her shoulder big enough to hold a small arsenal of weapons. A hush fell and heads turned as she made her way determinedly through the crowd, and one dwarf actually dropped his drink.