The quasi-woman who undulated professionally in front of him was arrayed in a second skin of white latex, complete with a form fitting hood that totally encased her head, save for a ponytail switch of hair, teased from a vent in the back of hood, a little above the nape of her neck.

It perversely reminded Slide of the single scalp lock of the traditional tribal Cossack, or the tail of a blood-line true palomino mare. The hood completely hide her features and she was only identifiable by the form of her body, her trademark long legs, prominent hip bones, and maybe something in the way she moved. She wore white rubber cocktail gauntlets with fingers ending in fake nails that, as far as Slide could tell, were constructed from white titanium, pointed as icepicks and as sharp as razors, protracted feline claws at full extension, and with a wicked scimitar curve. The facepiece of the hood was akin to a gas mask, but mysterious as a domino. Dark, unreadable eyes looked out from behind the built-in, circular goggles of tinted glass, while a white ribbed hose projected from the center of the mask like a pachyderm nose, curving round to the left side of her waist to vanish somewhere Slide could not see but only imagine.

"Do me a favor? Please? Just get the fuck away from me. This fucking body's nine parts shot."

Yancey Slide was on the run again.

The Howdy Hole had deposited him in a place of spheres, down in the Gantenbrink matter of the sub-atomic foam. He was confronted with identical orbs, floating in random patterns of tachyon flux, with full substance, but neither sound nor color, and stretching as far as his demon perception could perceive, each one's perfection only marred by the letterbox shadow slit of a Borkhist wormhole tag-patch. Slide's body was shredding fast. His physical form was actually falling apart, and it was probably getting the best of the deal. Fortunately for his entirety, sub-atomic foam could be persuaded to be at least temporarily accommodating, and allow itself to gathered and molded it into a rough approximation of body tissue. Even after these makeshift repairs, to say Slide was messed up was like calling the Atlantic Ocean "damp". Mercifully his silver flask was still full of old, bad, Red Army vodka, distilled from MIG 15 antifreeze, and well spiked with tetradetoxin, the puffer fish derivative used in the traditional zombie process. It messed up humans real good, but, for a demon, it could help slow a rapid bout of borrowed-body degenerative decay. The free floating cooch joint, however, was what had really saved his ass.

The interdimension fun-mill's grab-a-rube gravity just sucked him in towards the orbiting lights and virtuals, which proved blinding up close, and came in over seven thousand cultural equivalents, of which Slide could perceive at least half, and which gave him a headache on top of everything else.

At first the Skylars had been reluctant to admit him when he had lurched up to the portal with hardly a body, and riddled with bullet and blast holes patched up with sub-foam. They knew he could only have come directly from the carnage on the Darogad, and they didn't need any on-the-lam demon-merc deserters in their pseudo-saloon. Then an old Skylar 5 flash-signed to the others that this was the original Yancey Slide and not to fuck with him if they knew what was good for them. Once inside and in the cloaking chamber, the Skylar 5 had tossed him a spray can. "Use the damned ectoplasm before you melt all over the floor."

"You got a mirror and something to wear?"

"Complimentary kimono or hood-habit?"

"Hood-habit. I ain't got enough body for a kimono. And what about a piece of complimentary hardware?"

"You know I can't loan you a piece."

"Not even a belly gun, like for insurance. Particle beam or Derringer. I ain't fussy."

"No chance."

"Give me a break. Right now I'm posted as a deserter in at least three of the wars."

"Weapon-free establishment, ain't we?"

Slide knew better than to ask the Skylar 5 a third time, and, hidden by his new hood-habit, he moved on inside the cooch, where he had been almost immediately hustled by the quasi in white latex, who refused to take "get the fuck away from me" as an answer. Her crotch was on his eye level as he sagged in the amorphous, womb-soft shaper-couch, and she tried one last shot. "I thought you demons couldn't be killed."

"Not in the strictest sense, but we can be royally and painfully fucked up."

"So why don't we play out what's left on the old body, baby?. I thought demons could do anything."

Neurons fluttered angrily in his exhausted brain. Telling him, should he be so much as tempted, to not even think about it. Slide sighed. "It's too late for anything like that."

"So why the fuck did you come in here at all?"

"For a drink, and to get out of the war."

"The wars are a long way from here."

"Not far enough, kid."

The girl in latex moved on, clearly shrink-game trained or plex-programmed not to push the hustle beyond predetermined bounds. Finally left to himself to lay limp in the softness of the shaper-couch, Slide gave the interior of the cooch the gunfighter once-over. Inside the soft-light sugar walls, the wars actually did take on an unreal distance. Billows of pink and turquoise sweet-vented up like pillars from the floor, maintaining their integrity to a high chaos-point, and then precipitating into miniature storms of gelatinous colored rain that was gathered in ornamental gutters. The joint was busy, but that was the way of the cooch in high times of crisis with little but conflict above, below, and beyond. And it took all kinds to make a crowd; human girls and boys, lads and lassies, all for hire, squid-lid pukes and familiars, a single pair of twin-matched paracletes, plus a scattering of reptiles and invertebrates. Dwarves in military dress blues, bearing medals and strange insignia, looked on with over-sized Beefeater Martinis in their stubby fists, while lizard men from the frightened cities of the hollow earth, doing passable - if scaly - impersonations of Joan Crawford, tangoed with young men in transparent body shirts, sun glasses and impossibly tight black jeans, who must have planned their look to resemble the young Lou Reed. Italian baby wiseguys, in black fascisti shirts, white suits with wide lapels, and flared pants looked on in nervous and Saturday-night-fevered contemplation at things that could only be blobs of pure and formless evil, thinking that maybe they should never have left the Galaxy 2000 in the first place.

Visiting mouth breeders sported in a tank between the bubble streams and the pendant rainbow crystals of aquarium chandeliers, creating hundreds of replicas of themselves as they rock & rolled, babies that Slide knew, without a doubt, would find themselves on the next day's menu in the restaurant, probably in heavy cream sauce and with a chopped garnish. A Krishna pimp paraded with a swaying, finger-cymbal string of five of his stable of slit-sari Hindu whores with yabyum dots on their foreheads. A gilded boy in spandex, and the kind of tan that could only end in melanoma, performed queer tribal dances with roots in the Hitchhike and the Batman with another quasi women in the standard form-fitting latex and goggles and ribbed nose hose, in her case, color-coded acid yellow. The couple were watched with admiration by things not of this earth in metallic capes, with exposed exterior brain cases and name tags that read "Hi, I'm Cwwymbvw." Was it possible that Mars still needed women after all these millennia?