"But, either way, why am I all done up as if I was expecting the Pirates of The Lower Quadrant? And if I am, where the fuck are they?"

Neither space pirates nor any other thing else was visible anywhere in the proximity of Slide's immediate present. He free-floated in what appeared to be intergalactic space, which was about as dislocated as a body could get. Fear parabolics were cutting through his armor and, all round him, possibly sentient particles searched for partners in the dance of annihilation. Why all the palaver with the hardware if the Gridley wave had dumped him here in the middle of nothing? And where were Lupo and Queen Mina who had supposedly left Mars at the same time he had? Slide had no real idea how exactly a Gridley wave functioned, but he didn't believe that it would simply reassemble him in the back of the black stuff. Surely the double-damned piece of junk required some kind of destination in order to function. Even a free form time/dimension jump had to have a start and end. The starts and ends might be totally repugnant and unsuitable, but at least they came with a bit of workable reality attached. He had to believe that some substantial tangibility was somewhere nearby.

"But why the fuck can't I see it?"

And then, no sooner had he uttered the fate testing, synchronous words, he saw it. Huge and intricate and, at the same time, possessing a vast and fragile delicacy. "Goddamn it, to hell. When is destiny going to cut me a break?"

An Eloi bio-craft had floated oh-so silently into his perception. By Slide's reckoning, the petals of the sail stretched nine hundred Earth miles, and yet were insubstantial as gossamer, spread and trimmed, with constant adjustment, by a system endless and impossibly complicated rigging, to trap the starlight and be carried by its momentum, until after a hundred years of acceleration, the vessel all but matched the speed of light itself, slowing only enough to maintain conclusive mass and three relative spacial dimensions.

"From ancient Mars to the full flowers of evil. My fucking karma must have rotted and died." He looked around. "And what the fuck happened to Lupo and the Queen? Why aren't they here to deal with the goddamned Eloi?"

Slide didn't for a moment entertain any doubt that the Eloi bio-craft was his ultimate destination, or bother to wonder why he had come to it by such a roundabout route. He was not in the least surprised when a long and continually extending tendril, like a transparent, ghost-leaf tentacle, detached itself from a part of the complex main-mass closest to him, and started moving tentatively in his direction. Someone or something aboard the ship had sensed his presence in empty space and was bringing him in. He could only assume that Lupo the vampire and Queen Mina Harker were still riding to Gridley Wave to who knew where, or had dropped off it even before he had.

"I guess that's the last I'll see of them."

As the tendril came toward him, he unsnapped the Raymond's holster, but didn't draw the weapon. He had heard all the stories about bio-craft that consumed all other organic life as fuel, but, since Slide tried to avoid outer space, he had never seen such one of the fabled things for himself, and ignorance was a very good reason to be the one to initiate an overtly hostile act. It paid to be circumspect around the wholly alien, and although the Eloi were approximately human, the strange sentient ships that carried them were far from it.

The tendril was close, halted some three meters from him. Small sub-fibers

grew from the end, and made the final approach. Slide's left hand eased stealthily to the Capulet vibrafoil. If anything went wrong, he could at least attempt to slash himself free. The tendril either saw the move or sensed his intention, and hesitated. He raised his hand from the blade. The fibers came on. They touched the chest plate of his space armor, and instant feelings of well-being and euphoria swept over him. He knew he was being deliberately fed the goodvibes, but he gave the tendril the benefit of the doubt, and assumed the calming influence was well intentioned.

As with the fibers acting as an anchoring attachment, the tendril looped around him. When Slide was firmly in its grip, it began to retract, drawing him towards the body of the bio-craft. Too late to fight now. As the old-time Borg were so fond of putting it, resistance was futile.

In a matter of seconds, he was out of the void and in among a filmy, leaf-like outer-growth that covered the entire exterior of the ship, and, Slide assumed, was an organic means of trapping radiant energy from space. He was suddenly in a place of dappled light and limited visibility as he was pulled deeper into the canopy. He also noted the leaf things moved out of his way, as though informed as to the tendril's intention.

t only released him once he was inside what he though of as the orifice, a mouth-like slit in what he assumed was the hull of the craft, with fleshy, vegetable labia. When the orifice closed behind him, Slide was momentarily in darkness again, and this time he made no pretense at reaching for the blaster when the disembodied voice came out of some soft and sightless nowhere.

"Remove your helmet, Yancey Slide."

"Forget about it."

"You will find the air quite breathable."

"I'd rather confirm that for myself."

"As you wish."

Some inner portion of the orifice opened, and Slide found himself in a high cathedral place of grey mists, and blue and green light. A sudden return to gravity caused him to stumble slightly as he found himself on a floor that was covered in a thick carpet of lush moss. He walked carefully ahead until he reached what looked to be a path that wound between the moss-banks, and revealed that the moss flourished on a floor of yellow brickwork. He halted and looked around. Distances were hard to judge, but the lack of an horizon, and the way the floor curved up, until it was lost in some high distance, led him to believe that he was on the inner surface of some vast and hollow spheroid.

"Follow the yellow brick road? I don't think so."

The disembodied voice was back. "You could do worse, Yancey Slide."

"Would you care to explain?"

"The swiftest way to the Orchids."

"What?"

"The yellow brick road is the swiftest way to the Orchids."

"The Orchids?"

"The Orchids are."

Slide suspected that whatever intelligence controlled the voice was not much smarter than a talking clock. A simpleminded verbal transfer.

"The Orchids are all round us."

"Where?"

"The Orchids are all round us."

Slide looked up. What he'd though of a jungle style tree canopy was in fact a complexity of huge petals that rose, dipped, and shivered, inflated and deflated with what Slide read as a languid vegetable ecstacy. Insects and humming birds danced constant attention and, at regular, perhaps even timed intervals, puffs of heavy vapor gasped into the upper air and then drifted down as a localized drizzle.

"Remove your helmet, Yancey Slide." The voice sounded as though it had come back to where it had started. "You will find the air quite breathable."

Slide hesitated. He knew to remove the helmet made sense. The air in this part of the bio-craft looked maybe high in carbon dioxide, but by no means harmful, and if he continued to be stubborn he would only deplete his own reserves.

"I won't argue."

His hands went to the ring fastening, and as he was twisting the helmet lock he heard another voice. "You can take off the helmet, but I'd keep the suit on." "What?"

The new voice came from a distance, but was certainly not disembodied. Something was moving in the mist beyond the moss. At first Slide couldn't distinguish it as anything but a hunched form. Only when the thing was a matter of fifteen or twenty yards away did it cease to be a thing, and was revealed as a man in the most complicated mechanical wheelchair that Slide, as far as he could remember, had ever seen.