NECROM

They seemed to be heading out of the city. After passing through the intersection with the gold statue, they took a broad avenue lined with soot-caked, leafless trees and equally dirty official-looking buildings. From the avenue, they came out onto a steel road and rail bridge across the river. This was the first that Gibson knew about Luxor having a river.

Nephredana turned on the radio and got something that sounded a lot like John Coltrane playing " My Favorite Things."

Gibson smiled. "There's a lot of jazz in this town."

Nephredana nodded. "Luxor's a good town if you like saxophones." She pointed into the rear of the car. "Your tux is back there, in the box on the seat; why don't you climb into it."

"Right now, while we're driving?"

"Don't tell me you've never changed your clothes in a moving car."

"Sure, but…"

"So get to it. You don't want to arrive with your party clothes under your arm."

Gibson clambered into the back of the car and spent the next few minutes struggling into his evening suit and remembering how the back of a moving car is always a less than ideal dressing room. Now and then he glanced up to see if Nephredana was watching him in the rearview mirror. She didn't appear to be, and he could only imagine that after eighteen thousand years she had seen enough male nudity to be no longer interested. He managed to dress himself completely with the single exception of the tie. Gibson had never learned how to tie a formal bow. Nephredana glanced back. "How are you doing?" He scrambled back into the front passenger seat."Okay, apart from the tie. I never was able to get the hang of these suckers." Nephredana looked at him as though he were an idiot. "I'll do it for you when we get there. You'd better stash that gun of yours in the glove compartment. They may have metal detectors at the entrance to this bash and it'd be embarrassing if you were caught with a piece."

Gibson's hand went unconsciously to the pistol in the waistband of his tuxedo. He had transferred it from the pocket of the look-alike's suit while he'd been changing. "How did you know I had a gun?"

"You telegraphed the fact when that pimp came at us in the bar, and I assumed that you'd keep it with you."

"No magic?"

"No magic."

"I'd be happier if I had it with me after all that's happened."

Nephredana treated him to a look that brooked no further argument. "Stash it."

Gibson caught the look and did as he was told. They were now in the suburbs of Luxor, which proved to be quite a contrast to the i

"Looks like any well-heeled suburb. Same shit that I ran away from when I was a kid wanting to be Elvis Presley."

"It's much the same as what you have back in your dimension. They're just hanging on to appearances while they slowly sink into the mire. All the real money's being spent on the cold war with the Hind-Mancu with less and less left over for education or social programs. Even their consumer society is only sustained by impossibly massive deficit financing. Behind these facades, they're up to their necks in debt and stone terrified."

"Who are the Hind-Mancu?"

Nephredana raised an eyebrow," How much did your stream-heat friends fill you in about Luxor, UKR, and this dimension in general?"

"Next to nothing, like with most everything else."

Nephredana sighed. "Seems like it might be a good idea if I ran down a little background to you before we get to this party. We can't have you looking and sounding like a complete idiot."

"I appreciate that."

Nephredana smiled. "Okay, so the first basic you have to grasp is that this dimension missed out on having World War II."

Gibson nodded. "That much they told me. Seems like it made quite a difference."

"Quite a difference is a hell of an understatement. Something like that can radically change the whole face of a twentieth-century parallel."

"It doesn't look so different to me."

"That's because the shit still has a long way to trickle; these divergences take time. You won't recognize this place in a hundred years, if indeed it survives that long. As late as 1900, your world and this one were ru

Nephredana shifted gear and set the Hudson roaring past a slower-moving family car hogging the middle of the road. She drove with an assured contempt for other drivers that Gibson assumed was a result of having superior demon reflexes and also what had to be a superior car. When she'd completed the maneuver, she resumed her history lecture.

"With Europe effectively gone, the main centers of power became polarized between the League of Hind-Mancu, which you can think of as a combination of China and India, and the UKR, which is virtually the USA, Canada, and Mexico rolled into one. Neither of them had played more than a token role in the war and it was pretty much inevitable that these two superpowers should become natural adversaries."

"Inevitable?"

"You always find that, when a world is divided between two megastates, they have to start snarling at each other sooner or later. In this instance, the snarling went on for quite a while before they really got to it. Separated, as they were, by an ocean in one direction and the devastation of Europe in the other, overt hostilities didn't start immediately. Instead, they sank ponderously into a cold war of unbelievable rigidity and ignorance, like a pair of bull mammoths being swallowed by the muskeg, tusks locked and too stupid to disengage and scramble out. Every so often there would be an incident or proxy brush war, but the two superpowers were so cumbersome and inefficient that they tended, despite the crippling sums of money that both sides spent on weaponry, to keep it down to threats and posturing, and to avoid direct confrontation for three full decades. Then came June 5th, 1957."

"What happened on June 5th, 1957?"

"The Kamerians touched off their first A-bomb. Since then, there have been no less than five nuclear flurries. The last one was four years ago."

"How come there's any of this dimension left standing if they're so free with the nukes?"

Nephredana's expression indicated that she never ceased to marvel at the stupidity of human beings.

"Because they only invented small nuclear bombs. Just a dozen or so kilotons. They delivered them by primitive chemical-fuel rockets or turbo-prop bombers,"