Slide On The Run

Episode Eight Transylvanian Mind Meld

An attenuated wisp of heavy, silver-white vapor, dusted with a slight shiver of hoar frost like crystalized stars, flowed from between the Queen's pale and slightly lips, over her chin, out across her throat, and down to her breasts. She sighed contentedly and small hesitant ripples disturbed the vapor. Then, moments later, something occurred that was extremely strange, even in Slide's mightily extensive experience. Her body appeared to dissolve, progressively consumed by the bright breath, ivory skin and emaciated flesh passively succumbing to the flow until she was no more that a tenuous mist herself, only approximately holding a temporary, moment to moment, human form. Slide could only speculate that Queen Mina was taking considerably more than just tetradetoxin if she could shimmer in and out of physical reality with such consummate ease, but while he still entertained that thought, the monarch's metamorphing took a turn for the even more strange. A new body started to form, made from what primarily resembled flawed organic Lucite, transparent but sinuous, with internal ripples of tension clearly visible, undulating with a languid chemical hedonism, that not only seduced a response from Slide's physical body, but even coaxed a certain wistful frisson from the inner entity. The body of the Queen had lain normal but motionless when Slide had first been ushered into the inner sanctum, formal as a prone corpse on a white ovoid at the focal point of one of the most elaborate beds Slide had ever seen. The ovoid was covered with the luxurious albino pelt of the rare horned apt that roamed the planet's northern polar cap, and contained between the slightly out-turned wings of a huge sculpted and transparent swan, the real dysfunctional magnificent. Like a stabilized ice sculpture, the rearing neck and head arched well above Slide's not inconsiderable stature, and, as the Queen had commenced her vapor-change, she and the bed had started to look as if they were both composed of the same material, although, in the case of the swan, the internal structure was frozen and still, while the Queen's was in constant motion.

Slide observed all from a dark shadow-throne, beyond the bed's immediate internal light. The handmaiden's final instruction, before showing him in from where he had waiting in the anteroom on the Queen's pleasure, had been. "You will seat yourself in the low-throne, and do not speak until Her Majesty speaks to you."

"Check." Slide was well aware that monarchies were held together by nets of fine-mesh protocol. "How will I know if I've got the right throne?"

"It's the only one. It is exactly positioned for you to gaze adoringly on Her Majesty."

Slide nodded. "No problem."

"Above all, don't look directly at her until you are seated."

"Whatever she wants."

He sat in a shadow-throne, all but invisible, but he drank cognac straight from the bottle, like a cheap-saloon cowboy, and took alternate pulls on a Martian lotus pipe. The bottle and pipe that had been waiting for him were the only sign that Slide's presence was anticipated. The inner chamber was lacquered black, and Japanese scarlet, with a deep gloss, mirror finish, and rigid geometry, sabotaged by claustrophobic falls of purple chiffon like enfolding fabric shadows. Slide sensed a bunker mentality, or maybe a vault 'n' coffin hangover from the time that the Queen had melded with Vlad Dracula, in that Victorian peak of the famous Count's four-hundred-year Transylvanian period. The Queen's body had commenced to move shortly after Slide had seated himself and taken his first drink. Slowly but with an inherent incitement, one long slim leg eased against the other, and her pelvis rotating slightly in the process. Slide was happy to remain passive and watch the slowly escalating royal auto-voluptuousness, until he was suddenly and dazzlingly distracted. Illuminated characters of light appeared in thin air, hotly pink in the red and the black dark of the chamber.

SD21

SD21

SD21

SD21

It pulsed like a silent alarm.

SD21

SD21

SD21

Flicker, flicker, flicker, flash.

SD21

Pow!

SD21

SD21

Slide wondered if it really was an alarm, and if he was expected to do something, but, right as he contemplated moving, he found himself restrained. The throne was, as far as Slide could tell, some dark Martian hardwood, carved into a relief of milling, intertwining dragons, but this did not stop the tails of the two largest dragons suddenly becoming alive and prehensile. He didn't resist as they coiled around his wrists, effectively binding then to the two arms of the throne. In part he didn't resist because he wanted to see what would happen next, but also because he was holding the bottle of cognac in one hand, and the pipe in the other, and really didn't know what to do with either of them. This problem was swiftly solved by the appearance of the handmaiden who had instructed him in the first place. Slide had not known she was even in the room until she appeared out of the shadows, took the objects from him, and withdrew, back into the concealing gloom. With the impediments removed, two more dragons' tails looped about his chest, and more secured his ankles. He was now quite helpless, and he wondered if it might have been a better idea to resist, although he doubted it would have made any difference. Now he was unable to move, the SD21 stopped flashing.

"You demons…"

The Queen spoke, and Slide decided it was incumbent on him to reply. "We demons?"

Now the Queen actually rose, and descended from the Swan bed. Her body was fluid in its transparency, and she moved with an unsteady but still-comely grace, that belied her transformation. She looked sadly at Slide. The change had in no way idealized her. Her body was still painfully thin, and her face still narrow and tending to judgmental, although the lips remained candid and suggestible. Finally she shook her head.

"You demons…"

"Can't live with us, but can't live without us?"

Her face hardened. "There are times when I believe all of that you are nothing but grown out gel-spots left behind from the First Squirt of the liquid para-mater." Slide noticed that she had dropped the royal "we" in her transparent form. "It's hard to believe you are made from the stuff of the Ancient Ones."

Had he been able, Slide would have spread his hands. "Perhaps imperfectly."

The Queen seemed envious. "You are effectively immortal."

"That remains to be totally put to the test."

She ignored him. "But you have no idea what to do with it."

"And you resent that?"

"You wear out one human body after another in the quest for suitable oblivion." The Queen stood in front of Slide with an expression of wistful amusement. "I arranged for you to be helpless."

"So I observe."

She raised her right hand so it was not quite touching his chest. Beads of vapor drifted from her fingertips and attached themselves to his coat. "I thought safer to have you restrained."

Slide was noncommital. "A neat device this throne."

With a move that was as sudden as it was unexpectedly violent, Queen Mina jerked open the front of Slide's shirt. A hand that was chill but plastic explored his chest. The body desired her, but the entity was curious and more than a little watchful. The two separating parts of him conspired to sigh. "You'll find me a little different to your Count. We are both demons, but of a highly different ilk."

The Queen's eyes hardened, but a slight smile played at the corners of her mouth. "My Count, as you call him, is maintained, but halted at a safe distance."

Chill knuckles were on his nipple, squeezing and twisting, but now Slide did the ignoring, despite the copious surge of desire that jolted through the ex-body of Johnny Yuma. "And what of you, lady?"

Nails of ice raked down his chest. "And what of me Yancey Slide? You need have no concern about me. I am integrated. I have purpose."

Slide kept his face impassive, although the body would have liked to have strained yearningly against its bonds. "Where is it written that all should have purpose?" "You would rather run the dimensions in random flight?"

"We're both here on prehistoric Mars aren't we? Flight or purpose, we have arrived in the same place."

She removed her hands from him, took a step back, and frowned, "You're not one of those who believe that we are all chessmen in some game of the Ancients, are you, Slide?"

Slide shrugged, to the extent that he could while so restrained. "We play our own games with the lesser mortals, don't we? We amuse ourselves, right? Why should we suppose that the Big Boys don't do the same?"

She sighed and touched him again. Her face was close to his, and her breath felt glacial. She placed her hands on his shoulders. "Predestined chessmen or not, I have need of you, Slide."

Where her hands touched, his clothes froze, cracked and fell away. The body was beside itself in unpleasant ecstacy, as the clothing dropped in glass-like shards to the floor, but the entity that was the real Slide knew he was only being worked by chimeric distraction. The dragons' tails tightened their grip on his wrists, chest, and ankles. The Queen plainly wanted him helpless: for amusement, or did the requirement come from a deeper place? "I think I need a drink before we go any further."

Queen Mina pressed her cold plastic flesh against his, climbing the throne to straddle him. "You're afraid of me?"

Slide shook his head. It was the only part of him that he could still move. "No, but I would like to proceed with a combination of alcohol and caution."

Without removing herself from the chilly but intimate contact, the Queen raised a transparent arm and gestured to the handmaiden in the shadows. The Martian moved quickly to beside Slide, and placed the bottle to his lips. The delivery method was hardly ideal, but it would have to do. Slide again felt Mina's frigid breath as she asked him. "You also want the pipe?

"No. I don't feel any need to dwell in the dream canyons just now."

"Your body would like it."

"But the rest of me wouldn't."

"Why do you resist me?"

"Because you say you need me, but you don't tell me for what. Like I said, alcohol and caution."

Mina was now writhing against Slide, and his body was responding eagerly, straining against the bonds with breath coming in short, sharp, anguished gasps and heart racing. Now Slide knew for sure she was trying to unbalance him. "I need you. Isn't that enough?"

Fortunately Slide the Idimmu was infinitely schizophrenic, and could detach completely from the body, and its simplistic human lust. "All you have to do, your Majesty, is to explain."

The Queen's frozen breathing was also quickening. "I need your demon power."

"You'll have to be a little more precise."

"I need your demon power to change all this."

Slide's bound and heaving body, and the translucent form of the so sensually-busy Queen Mina were starting to merge at a number of points on their extremities. Where the foreplay had been distracting, this new intensity of melding was threatened to engulf the totality that was Slide, despite all his attempts at Idimmu detachment. He could have all too easily toggled down his logic and awareness, and wallowed along with the body-that-had-once-been-Yuma all those millions of years in the future, but Slide knew that to do that would be a serious error. He made an even greater effort to fully divorce himself the tactile storm and rise, discorporate, to a point in the middle of the air close to where SD21 had been flashing. He immediately found himself facing the equally disembodied essence of the Queen, ready for the move and positioned to head him off.

"Your core-being is immune to my wiles?"

"My body is having a wonderful time. It doesn't need me."

Slide tried to peer past her to see if any other beings might be nearby in this private discorporation, but she deftly blocked him. "If you're looking for the Count, he's a long way from here."

"But you don't want me to see for myself."

"I am quite alone."

"I only have your word on that."

The Queen was icy in either condition. "I am supposed to rule here. I have to maintain some authority."

"But you claim to need me."

The two metaphysically copulating bodies were now completely merged, losing their physical integrity in a firework display of tantric energy, while the core-beings faced each other coolly. "You think it's easy for me to admit I need anything?"

Slide moved to the heart of the matter. "But you say you want to change all this?"

The Mina entity sighed. "I have come to the reluctant, but all too obvious conclusion, that coming to Mars was a good idea at the time, but, in the long run, a very bad mistake."

"For a replicated slice of the British Empire on Ancient Mars, it seems pretty damned coherent."

The Queen took on a negative and depressed coloration. "This place is nothing but a fragment of fantasy, and the people here are just a pack dentists seeking to make an extraction."

"Are you sure that's not just the tetradetoxin talking?"

"What do you know about tetradetoxin?"

"Plenty. In fact, a fuck of a lot. We Idimmu pretty much live on tetradetoxin."

"Then that's something we have in common."

Slide's body was moaning loudly while that of the Queen's was emitting prolonged cat howls. On the swan-bed the long, silky-white fur of the apt-pelt was standing on end as though reanimated by the so-total coupling. Slide made a discorporate gesture towards the torridly writhing energy mass. "Will I have a body left when we all that unnatural passion has run it's course?"

"You like that one so much?"

"No."

"So take another. I know you can."

Slide was sly and teasingly sideways. "I might take yours."

The Queen briefly sparkled with laughter. "It would seem that you already have."

"I'm serious. This is neither the time nor place to be breaking in a new one."

"Don't worry, we have drug that will restore us to whatever levels of normality we enjoyed previously."

Slide's interest was instantly piqued. "A drug?"

"It called fluxamelotide, and…"

"Fluxamelotide?".

"Flux for short."

"What does it do?"

"Among other uses, it's the prefect normality reconditioner."

"What's it made from?"

"You might not want to know."

"Believe me, girl. I have ingested some pretty out-there intoxicants in my time."

Queen Mina's entity took on a devilish hue. "Fluxamelotide is a distillation of the slime of the Slimy Things."

"Shit."

"Shocked?"

Slide metaphorically shook his head. "No, but you have to admit it's kind of extreme."

The Queen's color suddenly became business-like. "So are you going to help me?"

"You seriously want me to make this place like it never existed?"

The merged and flaming bodies had moved to the bed. Now it was Queen's turn to coquettishly reference their shuddering multiple orgasms. "It's surely the least you could do after the good time I've been showing your human receptacle."

"It may not be as easy as you think."

"But you'll try? Tell me you'll try."

Slide could see that the Queen was close to pleading. She wanted an answer, and he suspected that it would not go well for him it he didn't give her the one she hoped to hear. He went for one final delay. "Why go to all the trouble? This place can't last. Sooner or later it'll fall, either to the Martians or the Slimy Things."

"I don't want to wait that long."

"It might not take that long. Look how fast the American Empire fell apart on most C21 timelines."

A purple impatience suffused the Queen. "Even if it happened tomorrow, I am in no condition right now to deal with the crippling sense of defeat that would naturally follow."

Slide knew he had no choice but to go along with Queen. He would agree to what she wanted, and continue to play out the game one moment at a time. "I'll do what you want. You have my word."

The Queen flared happily. It was the first time that Slide had seen her so positive and satisfied. "Be assured, Yancey Slide, you will not find me ungrateful."

Then, at that very moment, the entire discorporation fell apart.

As far as Slide could tell, the forcible transition that suddenly engulfed them had nothing to do with the Queen's gratitude, but was the product of a wholly external intervention. After a nanosecond of infinite falling, he and Queen Mina were rudely dumped down in the physical, and, as if that wasn't enough, they discovered that Lupo, with a frightened handmaiden behind him, was standing beside the swan-bed watching them, as they untangled from each other's intertwined limbs, and torsos slick with shared fluids. As soon as he was able The Queen sat bolt upright, nude and furious.

"WHO FLUXED US UP?"

Lupo, the Renaissance vampire bowed gravely. "It was me, your Majesty. I had to do it."

"You?"

Lupo's face was like a carved Michelangelo. He was plainly well versed in the unpredictability of royals. "Me, ma'am."

"You're nothing but a visiting vampire."

"That's why the task fell to me. The others were scared of what you might do to them."

"They were right."

"Sir Richard suggested I should bring you the bad news, ma'am."

"And you weren't scared?"

"I am nosferatu. What could you do to me? I don't even fear the sun on this planet."

"And what news could have been so horribly important to warrant this intrusion?"

"Your city would seem to be in clear, present, and highly immediate danger."

"Danger? The city is always in danger according to Barton."

"An uprising has broken out among the Martian workers at Morlock's foundry."

The Queen's anger mounted. "A STRIKE? You interrupted me for a bloody INDUSTRIAL ACTION?"

"It's more than a strike, your Majesty. It is an armed insurrection. The Red Martian workers are well organized, and marching down the railway that connects the foundry and the city."

"I'll hang Bolivar Morlock. This is all his fault."

But Lupo hadn't finished. "Meanwhile…"

"There's a meanwhile?"

"There's a meanwhile, your Majesty. The Slimy Things seem to have taken the uprising as some kind of signal, or at least an opportunity. Their fighting machines are advancing rapidly on the Grand Canal with what would seem to be hostile and aggressive intent."

The Queen turned to Slide. "Now do you see why I want you to do what I want you to do?" Before he could respond, she was snarling at the handmaiden. "Don't just stand there you wretched girl. Hurry, damn it. Summon the rest. I have to dress. I have to select a uniform. Didn't you hear the vampire? The city is under attack."

Slide and Lupo found themselves ignored by the irate flurry that was the Queen and her attendants, and Lupo spoke in a low voice. "If you find a way out of this place, I would considered it a favor if you took me with you. These humans are more insane than most."

Slide grinned at the venerable Vampire. "What did you expect, pal? They're living on fucking Mars, aren't they?"

Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, running from a fragmenting backstory, finds himself in a Martian revolution. The workers are rising up angry against Queen Mina and the neo-Imperial Victorians who have established a faux-British Raj on the Red Planet.