It was happening again and Gibson wasn't having any. He wasn't prepared to be treated as a specimen any longer, and he quickly took a step forward. "Good evening, Mr. Slide."
Slide smiled and his dark glasses flashed with reflections of the party lights. He seemed to sense what Gibson was feeling. "Good evening, Mr. Gibson. It was nice of you to come at such short notice."
"It was nice of you to send the lady to fetch me."
Slide laughed. "Oh, the lady was very keen on the idea herself."
Gibson's eyebrows climbed. "She didn't mention that to me."
Nephredana shook her head. "Ignore him, Joe. He's just pushing your buttons."
Slide removed the cigar from his mouth. "I expect you could use a drink after your trip out here."
Gibson nodded cautiously. He trusted this affable new playboy version of Slide even less than the sinister longrider in Lad-broke Grove. "You're right, I could definitely use a drink."
Slide indicated a nearby floodlit marquee.
"Shall we walk?"
They started up the slope, away from the lakeside. Now it was Slide's turn to make a sweeping gesture. It took in all of the surrounding estate.
"So what do you think of Castle Raus, Joe?"
"I'm impressed, but I'm also wondering what I'm doing here."
Slide seemed to be working overtime at the demonic charm. "Doing here? You're my guest, Joe, I thought, after all that you'd been through, you deserved a little R and R."
"You won't take offense if, after all that I've been through, I don't absolutely buy that."
Slide shot him a sly look. "You don't believe that I could only want you to have a good time?"
"Why don't you just come right out and tell me what you really want with me."
"I hate to disappoint you, Gibson, but, right now, I don't want anything."
"You deny that there's something about me that interests you?"
"Well, sure you interest me. You got a whammy count on you higher than I ever seen on a human."
Gibson sighed. "An aura like a black cloud?"
Slide smiled and nodded. "Your mojo's rising so fast, boy, it should be making your head spin."
His whole accent had changed, switching from tuxedo velvet to the grate and rasp of all the way down and funky. Gibson was aware that he was being jived by a demon, but jive talk was better than no talk at all, and Gibson even had a strange feeling that Slide might be telling him the truth, albeit in a weirdly oblique manner.
"It's certainly making my head spin." He had to agree with that. "Trouble is, it seemed to me that any mojo I had was on a strictly down grade."
Slide looked at him knowingly. "That's because you're back-pedaling with it as fast as you can, hoping it'll go away, but it ain't gonna, so you'd best accept that you're on the rise and start taking bets on how high you'll go before the fall."
Gibson didn't like the sound of the word "fall." "You want to put any of that into plain English?"
Slide let out an impatient hiss. "That's as plain as it gets, boy. You want it any more plain, and I'll just have to assume you've been hanging with the streamheat for too long and you're beyond redemption. Why don't you just get drunk and enjoy the party? It'll all come to you in time."
They were almost at the entrance to the marquee and moving into the thick of Raus's guests. Despite the fact that everyone with the apparent exception of him, Nephredana, and Slide were rich shades of aqua and turquoise, and the styles of clothing, particularly among the women, were odd to the point of alien, the party was of a kind that Gibson instantly recognized. The guests had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to convince themselves that they were the cream of Luxor society. Back home, they'd confidently expect their pictures to appear in the next issues of Vanity Fair, Interview, or New York magazine. He found it strangely comforting to know that pretension hardly varied from dimension to dimension, and he discovered he didn't need a scorecard to help him spot the stereotypes. Society painters escorted politicians' wives; dress designers, hairdressers to the stars, TV actresses, and real-estate speculators ran in whooping packs; celebrity newscasters squired prominent lesbians; racecar drivers and teenage starlets carried out intimate investigations of each other in dark corners, as did fashion models and merchant bankers, while women who wrote sex novels avoided their lawyer husbands, and men and women with no claim to fame apart from an accident of birth making them heirs to legendary fortunes kept up a stream of inane chatter. Oh, yes, Gibson knew this bunch. The smart set had invaded too many of his dressing rooms and taken over too many parties thrown for him back in the old days. Even though he'd been a peripheral part of it for a while, Gibson had never understood and certainly never liked high society. He had never appreciated their absolute certainty that they had a right to be there, their condescension, their bland belief in themselves and their value systems. Above all, he loathed their arrogant stupidity. What was the old MC5 war cry from the sixties? "I see a lot of honkies sitting on a lot of money telling me they're the high society…" Among the lesser faux pas along the downward spiral of his career had been the times when, at the top of his not inconsiderable voice, he'd informed whole rooms full of the social crowd how he held them in total contempt and wished that they'd fuck off, stop drinking his booze, and leave him the fuck alone.
A woman walked by him in a dress that seemed to be a spiral of stiffened lace that followed a strategic track up her body. In one hand she held the leash of a small, white, poodlelike dog, On her other arm there was a short man in a purple-and-white striped suit, a dyed-pink Beatle haircut, and oversize, white-rimmed sunglasses. It seemed that, in this dimension, the parallel Andy Warhol was alive and well.
Inside the marquee, Slide made straight for the bar and Gibson followed close behind. White-coated waiters were pushing a sparkling white wine that was probably the local equivalent of champagne, but Slide steered Gibson past them. "Just leave it to me, that stuff's not fit to drink."
He caught a bartender's attention. "I'd like two doubles from Mr. Raus's private reserve."
The bartender gave Slide a look as though he had just spoken the most obscene blasphemy and implacably shook his head. "I'm not authorized to pour from Mr. Raus's private stock."
Slide slowly leaned across the bar. "Do you know who I am, kid?"
The bartender shook his head a second time. "No, sir, I don't know who you are, but I assure you it wouldn't make any difference. I have strict instructions not to serve anyone from Mr. Raus's private stock unless he personally orders it."
Slide lowered his sunglasses a fraction and treated the bartender to the briefest glimpse of what was behind them. "I think Mr. Raus would want us to drink his finest booze if he was here, don't you?"
The bartender turned pale, his eyes glazed over, and he answered with the dull monotone of a zombie. "I understand and I quite agree with you, sir."
Moving as though in a trance, he went to the back of the bar and returned with a bottle with a gold label that carried three initials, presumably the Raus monogram in the local script. He slowly and carefully poured Slide a double shot and then did the same for Gibson and Nephredana. Gibson took a first experimental sip, and his face broke into a blissful smile.
"Damn but that's good."
Slide also looked pleased. "Isn't it just?"
Nephredana, on the other hand, put herself above all this rapture. She turned disdainfully to the bartender. "Put a shot of yerlo in it, will you?"
Gibson watched in horror as the zoned-out bartender topped of Nephredana's glass with a clear spirit that turned cloudy as it hit the whiskey. He winced at the defiling of the whiskey. "Are you crazy?"