"Now what?"
"A native law unit has moved in behind us."
"That is no problem. It will be Bannion. We have an arrangement."
Von Bulow decided that she would keep Sharkboy with her until Slide was brought down. After that she world rid herself of him. He was clearly impossible, but to replace a combined killer and techhand and recruit anew in the middle of a mission was too much trouble, no matter how much he vexed her. Tolerating Sharkboy would be worth the trouble if, at the culmination of this excursion, she saw Slide suffer. As far as Nuygen von Bulow was concerned, Slide had to suffer. Suffering was going to be his manifest destiny, if she had any hand in it. And after she'd had her fill of watching him suffer, she would hand him over to the highest bidder, either the Pentecostal Fire Boys, who were still hot about losing him in the cooch, or one of the other crews of bounty hunters who sought him all over the Fullness. That way, pleasure would be combined with a reasonably excessive profit. She still blamed the unpleasantness with the High-Soviet Knights on Slide, and that was only the most recent negative incident in a series of unresolved conflicts between her and the idimmu demon that extended back along the millennia and across the dimensional divides.
"Slide appears about to enter a building."
This time, von Bulow did not reprimand Sharkboy for speaking before he was spoken to. She peered through the closest window. Slide had halted in front of a doorway above which a dirty lightbox sign read; ART'S SNOOKER - SECOND FLOOR.
Slide halted. The two goons who flanked the door were looking at him with disparaging expressions. "How many times do we have to warn you, Yuma?"
Slide had, of course, never seen either of them before in all of his near-infinite lifespan, but that they knew and apparently disliked Johnny Yuma was another reason for Slide to strongly suspect that he had chosen the
wrong body when he'd made reality-fall after his untidy escape from the cooch joint. He smiled politely, and spoke with a mild tone. "I think we're all under something of a misapprehension here. I might look like the person you know as Johnny Yuma, but I can an assure you that I'm not."
The goon on the left, a shaved head muscle-builder with a stud in his lip, and a teardrop tattoo at the corner of his left eye, held up an authoritarian hand, level with Slide's chest, but not touching him. "What the fuck are you trying to pull now, punk?"
It had been a long time since Yancey Slide had been addressed by anyone as "punk", and even though the mistake was understandable, he could feel a demon ire rising inside him. The teardrop tattoo didn't worry him, but he still held his wrath in check. He did not wish to create an occurrence right there on the street, and thus resisted the impulse to fill these two minders-of-the-door with the double-whammy horrors right there and then. "I'm here to see Doc Zen."
"Why should Doc Zen want to see a always-broke, scrounging-asswipe speedfreak like you?"
Still Slide refrained from imposing the full horrors, but also realized that to argue with the goons guarding the door of Art's Snooker was pointless. The simplest solution was to simply erase himself from their perception. If either of the goons had retained a memory of what had happened, they would have told everyone they knew how "fucking Johnny Yuma" had apparently turned into a heavy vapor, sunk to the sidewalk, and flowed past their feet into the entrance and on up the stairs. Of course, they would never do that. At the same time as erasing himself, he also wiped the memory from their minds. As far as the goons were concerned nothing had happened. Johnny Yuma had never been there or spoken to them. That was one of the advantages of being an idimmu. You could always fuck with the minds of humans if it made your life a little easier.
He resumed his human form halfway up the stairs to the second floor, and was Johnny Yuma again when he pushed through the double doors into the pool hall itself, reflecting on how he seemed to be rapidly reinforcing the first impression that stealing the body Johnny Yuma had been a very poor choice. The pool hall was nominally closed. Indeed, it had been nominally closed since Doc Zen had taken it over as his headquarters. The large room, with its twelve full size tables was dark save for a single light of one table in the far corner. Four men and two artificials were clustered around it, but their attention was entirely on a gilded California blonde, practiced and willowy, leaning over the pool table to make her shot. She was a bright blaze of irradiated gold in the Rembrandt whiskey haze of the pool hall's interior, a fluid symmetry between the electric blue halo above the pool table and verdant green of its surface. The solid colors of the balls clicked at the command of her stick. She tossed her mane at each fresh position, short shorts, long legs, and when she turned to dust her hands with talc and then chalked her cue before dispatching the frame, Slide could feel the Yuma-body stir with desire. The woman must have sensed something because she looked up, saw him, and gestured to Doc Zen who was her opponent in the game of eight ball.
Doc Zen had the powerfully sculpted features of a Roman Emperor, except he was a Roman Emperor with long grey hair pulled back into a ponytail and dressed in white linen suit from the days of river boat gamblers, a silver brocade vest, and matching sleeve garters on the arms of his black silk shirt. If that moment, his suit coat was hung carelessly over the back of a chair, and he leaned on a custom-made cue waiting for the blonde to finish her break. At the sight of what he also though was Johnny Yuma, he frowned angrily. "What are you doing here Yuma? I thought I banned you."
Slide was really growing bored with all this mistaken identity. "Damn it, Doc. It's me, Slide."
Doc Zen's eyes narrowed. "Well so it is. What the fuck made you possess the body of a worthless fuckwit like wretched Johnny?"
"I was in something of a hurry."
"So it would seem."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Why don't you adapt the damn body to look more like yourself? You don't need to be carrying Yuma's penny-ante baggage around with you."
"Shape-taking takes time, and I only just got here."
"Time seems to be a major problem with you right now."
"Like I just said, what's that supposed to mean?"
"In a nutshell, my boy, someone's been walking on butterflies. And they're trying to put the blame for it squarely on you."
"Butterflies?"
The blonde had straightened up from the table, and Doc Zen put down his cue effectively suspending the game. "You know the old story. Guy rides a time machine a couple of million years into the past, and he steps in a butterfly on kills it. In the present, New York vanishes."
"Shit, Doc, I know the fucking story. What does it have to do with me?"
"A couple of entire dimensions have completely vanished?"
Slide was shocked. The news was monumental enough to move even his jaded sensibilities.
"Vanished?"
"To say they were even history would be an exaggeration. No more DZM displacement, not so much as a vestigial Q-bias."
"Fuck."
"That's one way of putting it."
"And they're blaming it on me?"
"Couldn't happen to a nicer person."
"Fuck."
"That's the second time you said that."
"All I did was take a powder from the Battle of the Fifteen Armies."
"That would seem to have been the cause of all the trouble. You were supposed to rally your men, turn the tide of the fight and save the day. When you didn't, much changed. Some things quite inexplicably. Even in this exactitude, the city of Baltimore blinked and found it had been taken by the Mole People."
"That's bullshit. You know I'm not the rallying kind, and I never save the day if I can in any way help it. I'm Yancey Slide goddamn it."