Slide stared at it a slightly bemused expression even for a demon who had seen most things. "That is definitely a Carter Machine."
"I just have to find the power source."
Doc Zen rummaged and eventually located a light absorbing cube that appeared uncomfortable in the relative space it occupied. Slide took a step back. "Is that what I think it is?"
"A simple little matter/anti-matter unit."
"You're messing round with matter/anti-matter in the middle of a highly populated city?
Doc Zen didn't seem at all concerned. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a cosmic joke. And anyway, I'm careful."
Slide seated himself in the chair of the Carter Machine, trying it for size, but, at the same time, he couldn't help remembering that, as far as his information went, the Carter Machine didn't have an exactly unblemished safety record. He had heard tales of how people had checked out under the spinning canopy but then never checked in again. "I'm still not sure I can do this without tetradetoxin, Doc."
Doc Zen's voice took on a tone of provoked impatience. "Fuck, Yancey, don't you ever stop creating problems? You seriously think Doc Zen is without tetradetoxin?
After Slide had been suitably drugged and otherwise prepared for his departure through space and time, and deprived of his weapon because the Gridley Wave would never support even that mass of metal, Doc Zen leaned in and made sure his seat belt was securely fastened, and then stepped back to a safe distance. "The coordinates are all set. You need only to press forward on the main control lever."
Still Slide hesitated. "I don't know, Doc. I don't know about any of this."
"Fuck you, Yancey, get going, or I'll turn you in to the IIA myself."
With his brain now awash in tetradetoxin, Slide could only do as he was told and go. He pressed forward on the main control lever, and then looked up as the
canopy commenced to turn, allowing himself to be hypnotized by its accelerating rotation. Initially the hallucinations were routine, flapping wings leaving rainbow contrails, and stars streaming down the curvature of space-time like a sparkling mercury fountain, then, fleetingly, as the intergalactic dust clouds rushed past, he crossed the space lanes of the Great Ships of the Ancients, the star-hammers and death-asteroids in which the Shining Ones waged their majestic war on The Great Chalcedon, the Destroyer of Worlds, and he was hurried witness to the carnage and conflagration that resulted when the absolute masters of planetary systems, and the lords of vast gas nebulae clashed in a conflict that he knew would drag on for countless millennia. As he sped across a hundred or more million miles and eighty thousand human centuries, riding the impossible Gridley Wave like the course of the Starchild, he also briefly traversed the black vacuum ranges where the squid-like hydrogen feeders, conceived in the fiery afterbirth of the Big Bang, grazed on the void as they probably would all the way to an approximation of infinity, but then, in an instant he had entered quadrants of light and sound that were impossible to describe even for an idimmu, and where ethereal voices whispered galactic conspiracy in a language he had never encountered before in all his long days, but whose tone was precise enough for Slide to recognize an overpowering evil intent.
When it came, his arrival at his destination was in abrupt and in untoward contrast to the strange and awesome magnificence of the transit. Without warning, he was slammed sideways into hard hot red sand with the force of a dead fall of maybe ten or fifteen feet. For an few moments, Yancey Slide lay stunned and winded, unable to accurately recognize so much as up, light headed in the thin atmosphere, and cautious to make his first move in the reduced gravity. He also realized very quickly that the Carter Machine had not landed with him, and neither had the clothes he had been wearing. He was as bare ass naked as a new born human, without so much as a shirt to cover himself, or any of the small and useful items he had secreted in his pockets before his departure from Doc Zen's. It was more that sufficient to cause him to curse out loud.
"Fuck this for unacceptable shit."
"You must have been extremely drunk."
"What?" The perfect incongruity of the shrill squeaky and over-sibilant voice, with it's slightly affected and decidedly campy English lisp, fitted with the rest of Slide's current predicament so exactly that he moved his head enough to observe that the speaker, was small, barely eighteen inches tall, and resembled a Maine lobster on spindly tripod legs.
"This far down the canal and bareass naked."
"What?"
"I said you must have been extremely drunk to get all this way out of town and lose your clothes into the bargain. You sure must have tied one on."
"Did you see how I got here?"
"No memory?"
Slide was getting tried of this crustacean assuming he was a mislaid drunk. "Just answer the question."
The lobster boy made a negatory gesture with a antennae. "No. I didn't see how you got here. You were fully here when I came sashaying by, out cold in your birthday suit."
"I came a long way to be here. All the fucking way from Earth."
"Are you telling me you're John Carter? Because, if you are, I'm flatly not going to believe you."
"I'm not John Carter, and neither am I Ulysses Paxton, but I arrived here by a similar means of transport."
"So welcome to Malecandra, or Barsoom, or Mars if you prefer it."
"Mars will do."
"My name is Mahdjfb.
"I'm pleased to meet you Mahdjfb. My named is Yancey Slide."
The tripod didn't seem to attache any significance to the name. "I'm afraid your only hope is to make it to the city.
"The city?
"The moons will be up soon and the banths and corphals will be out."
"What?"
"We could both end up as chow."
"What city are you talking about?"
"Extrosylvania."
"What?"
"City of Queen Mina."
"What?"
"Made herself Queen didn't she? After the assassination of Dejah Thoris by the Gorthans in Aaanthor Plaza. Made the place the capital of the Victorian Raj, and Claims she's last bastion of the vertebrates against The Slimy Things."
"But you're exoskeletal."
"That counts."
"It does?"
"The Victorians need all the help they can get, right now. If you've got a bone of any kind, they'll take you, even with those humorless fucking Treens growing a new Mekon in the their tanks."
Now Slide was really surprised. "You've got Treens here?"
"'Tis but a short hop from Venus. I mean, Mars and Venus really started talking after the attack of the Volan Hives from the Red Moon, and the fall of the 17th. Mekon."
"I'm starting to feel a little dizzy."
"There's no air plants this far out, dearie. You need to get back to the city."
"How do I do that?"
"You follow the Grand Canal for about ten clicks and you're there."
"What?"
"The Grand Canal. It's right beside you, for pity's sake. You really should take a look around at your immediate surroundings. What are you going to do when people ask you for your first impressions? Tell them you don't have any because you lay your back and stared straight up because like Snoopy on his doghouse because you didn't like the situation in which you found yourself?"
Mahdjfb seemed an excellent judge of the situation so Slide made the effort, struggled into a sitting position and looked to his right. And there was the Grand Canal. The Martian Grand Canal, for fuck sake. The legendary construction required a moment of pause, in which all thoughts of Slide's own ongoing predicament were temporarily driven from his mind as he stared in unashamed awe. "Holy shit."