It took a couple of weeks for everybody to brief me on what to expect and how to react. Then everybody from the cafeteria manager to the corporate comptroller had to sign off. Then they had a little party in my honor, complete with SRL baseball caps and Wyshes.com tee shirts.
And then there was no more putting it off. I sent a text message to Martha Washington's Blackberry, handed the keys to my rented hybrid and my condo to Ed Guenther, transmitted an internet greeting card to my daughter in care of her mother saying that I loved her, and told my courtiers, "I'm ready."
One of the guards slit the bottoms of my trousers, the chaplain read a few verses from the Bible, and we went a-strolling to the little green Wyshes.com room.
Just kidding.
But it was a creepy feeling. Maybe more like old Boris lying on Dr. Frankenstein's operating table and getting hoisted into the storm than Bogey getting fried in a Warner Brothers gangster epic. Once I was settled comfortably on the gurney, they had to blindfold me and block my ears. An all-out sensory deprivation tank might have served better, but Miranda Nguyen's super-donut wouldn't have worked under water. And lying on soft padding pretty well damped out tactile sensations.
So there I was locked inside my skull with nobody for company but myself and nothing to play with but my own thoughts. I tried to imagine the lights flashing and the micro motors whirring, electrons flashing and data gates opening and shutting in Miranda's mixed-ware. I tried to see that picture that Alberto Salazar had showed me of those three stars, Big Pink and Little Pink and Newt, and the planets that wove among them and the dust motes that floated from one to another.
Except I knew they weren't dust motes.
And then I was out of my head. I don't mean crazy, although upon further review maybe I was at that. I didn't feel myself leaving my body and there was none of the light show folderol that Carter Thurston Hull's Dreemz.biz provided. It was more like falling asleep, where you're not aware of the transition between waking and dream states. Just that, there you are lying in your bed gazing up at the ceiling or maybe at the inside of your eyelids, and then you're walking on the beach in Maui with a lovely naked maiden, the surf is crashing, the breeze is wafting the odor of jasmine to you and—and how the hell did you get from Smallville, Kansas, to Maui?
No idea, right? No sense of transition, certainly no sensation of travel. Just—you were in one place and then you're in another.
I knew where I was, too. I was out there at Big Pink and Little Pink and Newt. I knew where I was but there's no way I can tell you, exactly. I mean, I wasn't at Betelgeuse or Alpha Centauri or Beta Reticuli or NGC 9999 or any other star that we've cataloged and named.
Oh, no.
If you went all the way to the center of our galaxy, tipped your hat to the black hole that's been sitting there gobbling up matter for the past several billion years, continued to the far side of the galaxy and then jumped off, you would just be starting to go where I was. You'd have to hopscotch over a couple of galactic clusters, hang a couple of sharp curves through the third, fourth, and polka-dot dimensions, reach down your own throat until you came to the inside of your great toe, grab hold and pull with all your might.
You would hear a loud pop! and you would have a slight idea of where I was.
Or you could just click your ruby slippers together and say, "I wish, I wish, I wish I was in Kansas!"
Hey, worked for Dorothy Gale, didn't it?
How long did it take me to get there, wherever there was? I don't know whether I know and can't tell you, or I don't know myself. You know how time passes in a dream? It was a little bit like that. I could have been floating in that sensory-deprived limbo, wondering what the hell I'd let myself in for, for a few seconds or for ten thousand years. Ten million years. It just doesn't make sense. And it wasn't like a Dreemz.biz dream, oh no, this was one of Miranda Nguyen's wyshes. Very different. Very.
There they were, Big Pink, Little Pink, and Newt.
Alberto Salazar had given me a crash course in star types. As far as I could make it out, Big Pink was a Type M red giant. A huge thing, nearing the end of its stellar lifetime, with a relatively low surface temperature of a few thousand degrees Celsius. Little Pink was a red dwarf. They were both variables, Big Red with a long period and Little Red with a much shorter one.
Newt was indeed a neutron star, its diameter not much more than five miles. If you stood on its surface and if you could move you could walk around the mother in a day. But of course its substance was so dense and its gravity so strong, you'd be squashed into a kind of Flatland creature in a fraction of a second, and even if that didn't happen you'd be held down so you couldn't lift a foot no less walk around the star.
I tried to figure out who or what I was. In Carter Thurston Hull's dreemz I'd been able to flit from mind to mind and from person to person. I'd been Stu Sutcliffe at Candlestick Park, Robert Oppenheimer at Alamogordo, and Howard Lovecraft sitting at his desk in Providence, Rhode Island. Did I have to be somebody to function in Miranda Nguyen's wysh?
I tried looking at myself, you know, the way you hold your hand in front of your face in a dream to make sure you're alive, but there was nothing there. At least, there was nothing there for a moment, and then there was. Yes, there was the good old familiar Webster Sloat mano that had lifted a thousand brewskies and fondled a hundred derrieres.
Then I blinked.
My hand was changing. The knuckles became smaller, the fingers more tapered, the skin smoother. I looked down and there was the generous cleavage of my squeeze Martha Washington. I picked up a mirror and . . .
Okay, where the hell did I get a mirror?
If I knew the answer to that one I would be totally willing to tell you.
I picked up a mirror, no, I sat down in front of a mirror, no, I stood in front of a mirror and I was Martha Washington. I was starkers except for that tiny diamond and pearl pendant and I won't deny that I was fuckin' gorgeous, baby.
Nice rounded shoulders, but even as I stood there looking at myself I felt myself changing again. I held out my arms and they got longer and longer until I could hardly see my hands. I was getting taller, too, and my head—Martha's good-looking head—was morphing into something a little bit like a god damned pteranodon.
A pteranodon? Fuck me, what the hell was that about? I barely knew what a pteranodon was, some kind of amazing aerial reptile that lived in the age of dinosaurs and disappeared from the Earth fifty or a hundred million years ago.
What?
I turned my head and looked at my arm, now something like a bat-wing with claw-like fingers and thin, hollow bones holding up an impossibly thin membrane. The membrane was pinkish in color, or maybe it was colorless and picked up the glare of pink light from around me.
Okay, calm down, Sloat. You're here, wherever the hell here is. You are a pink pteranodon.
Yiiiiiiiikes!
Did I just say what I thought I said? Talking to myself, okay, that's not as crazy as it might be, "thinking out loud" (ding!) isn't that far from talking to yourself, is it? Okay, Sloat, You are a pink pteranodon.
This was a lot crazier than anything that happened to me in one of Carter Thurston Hull's dreemz. God bless Miranda Nguyen!
Calm down, calm down,
All right, maybe this is another kind of dream, or dreem, or wysh. If I'm a—don't say it again, just let it go, Sloat—okay, if I am a whatever-the-heck, if that is what I am, then where am I? Okay, okay, I came out here courtesy of Guenther, Nguyen, Salazar, and Armstrong. Sounds like a high-price downtown law firm but in fact it was my committee of pals at Silicon Research Labs. I'm someplace near Big Pink, Little Pink, and Newt, somewhere in some galaxy someplace in this great big friggin' universe of ours.
Look around, Sloat. Look down. Look at your feet.
Gaak! Big scaly things with claws like the pigeons in Golden Gate Park. Okay, never mind that, what are you standing on, buddy?
A pink surface, pink or maybe white or a sort of colorless t
ranslucence picking up the light from Big Pink or Little Pink, whichever one that star up there is. Hey, I can see both of those old red stars up above, and I can even see Newt the neutron star in the distant sky.
Newt the Neutron Star, a picture book for ages three and up, by Webster Sloat. Might be salable. I'll have to look at that when I get back to California.
When I get back to California. Lots of luck.
I can see down into the earth—well, of course it isn't "Earth, earth" but what the heck, close enough for federal work—I can see down into the earth a ways but then things get jumbled and confused looking. I can reach down with my claws, the ones that used to be hands, I think, and feel the surface I'm standing on.
Is it sand? Feels kind of like sand. I pick up a claw full and let it sift through my, er, claws. There's a wind here and the sand, if that's what it is, drifts away. Except it's awfully cold. I pick up some more and hold it close to my eyes. My eyes seem to work very, very well today. This is one pteranodon who doesn't need specs. The stuff is grainy like sand, all right, but I have a feeling it's something else, maybe ice.
The wind is getting stronger and sure enough the sand or ice is getting swept up off the ground (?) and swirled through the air (?) and it stings as it collides with my skin (?) or membrane.
Just for the heck of it I try running into the wind, spreading my wings, my membranes, and then I jump and I can glide pretty well. I don't land quite so well. In fact I tumble head over ashcan (ding!) and bounce and roll over the icy terrain. But I am undaunted and I give it another try and do better, and then after a while I try flapping my wings once I'm airborne and I discover that, by golly gee, I can actually fly.
Soon I'm soaring over an eerie pink landscape of swirling ice-sand dunes. I can do an Immelmann. I can do an inside loop. I am one hell of a fine pteranodon, I'll tell you that. But am I really a pteranodon? Is this something that I conjured up out of my fevered imagination (hey, "fevered imagination," ding that!) at the behest of Miranda Nguyen, or is it really a native life form here on Pink, whichever Pink, actually on a planet that wandered between the Pinks and Newt, that I somehow morphed into when I arrived courtesy of Wyshes.com?
Pumping for altitude soon gets me high enough to see a hell of a lot of landscape, if that's the right term for miles and miles and miles of ice. Rocky ice, tumbled ice, ice dunes, ice plains.
Oh, boy!
Here comes something else.
One, two, three, many specks in the sky. They're moving in formation. My first thought is that this is a sign of intelligence. Then I think of the Canada geese who love to nest in Lake Merritt over in Oakland, to the delight of local ornithologists and the dismay of joggers and picnickers whose ideas of sanitation do not quite harmonize with those of the geese.
Intelligent? Well, maybe, but certainly not in any sense that implies you could sit down and discuss cosmic philosophy with them. Or even exchange clichés like Pleased ta meetcha and Have a nice day.
At the same time that I spot the specks the specks spot me. I'm playing at being a kite in the chilly breezes. The specks are already arranged in a chevron and their leader has obviously decided to take a closer gander at me. He-she-or-it does a sharp nose-over, pumps his-her-or-its wings, and comes zooming down at yours truly at a frightening rate. The rest of the formation follows.
There's no way I can fly away from these critters and I don't want to stay there and parlay with them because they seem to be equipped with nasty beaks and claws. I also know that I'm not experienced at this pteranodon business. This situation looks very damned scary, and I don't know whether Ed Guenther, Miranda Nguyen and Company would be more upset to get me back in bloody chunks or not to get me back at all.
And I think Martha Washington would be dismayed. And despite her teenaged rebelliousness, I do believe that my daughter likes the idea of having a father and would not take kindly to being told that I'd been, ah, Wyshed off to an alien world in a galaxy far, far away, only to be torn to shreds by a flock of flying pink dinosaurs.
No, this is not good.
At this point some circuit buried deep in my brain takes over. I'm not being modest. I was, to coin a phrase, scared witless. I did not know what to do. Those scary critters were rocketing at me and there couldn't be more than a few seconds before they sampled their first Sloat-kebob dinner.
And then they disappeared. What the hell? I swiveled my reptilian neck looking for them, and there they were, looking comically confused, a couple of thousand feet below me. What had happened? Had I jumped to a higher altitude just as they approached my lower one? Or, more intriguingly, had I time-jumped a few seconds into the future? I think that's what happened. I think I disappeared from my spot in the Pink firmament just as the nasties were about to reach me. They continued downward and I popped back into being, right where I'd been before, but they had zipped right through momentarily empty space.
You may get a giggle out of this. I automatically moved my arm—except that it was now a wing!—so I could get a look at my wristwatch. It's a genuine counterfeit $10,000 Rolex Oyster, by the way, that I bought over the internet for less than thirty bucks, and beat that if you can!
The predators tried another couple of passes at me, but pretty soon they gave it up as a bad job and went squawking and quarreling away through the sky. I have a feeling that there was going to be a leadership shakeup in that gang before very long.
If there were predators on this world there had to be prey, and if there was prey there had to be something for the prey to live on, too. I'm no expert on ecosystems, but it's just common sense that everything has to eat something. I dropped to a lower altitude. Keeping a watchful eye for more dive-bombers, I started a survey of the region.
After a while the ice dunes gave way to something truly remarkable. There were fields of something vaguely grassy or grain-like. This had to be damned hardy stuff, to thrive under these conditions. I doubted that its metabolism or biochemistry was much like life on Earth, but I also remembered something that an evolutionary biologist named Stephen Jay Gould had once said at a Silicon Valley tech session. Somebody in the audience had asked him to talk about extraterrestrial life forms, and Gould had modestly pointed out that he was not an exobiologist. But then he'd added, "It seems to be a law of nature that, wherever life can exist, it will exist."
He also added that the range of environments in which life had been found, even on Earth, was truly astonishing. I wondered what he would think of life on the Pink planets!
The fields of grain—apparently wild grain—gave way to forests, and in the forests I detected an astonishing variety of wildlife. There was a slithering, snakelike creature that must have been a couple of miles long and at least a hundred yards across, but not much more than a quarter of an inch thick. It had a face at one end, or something that I guess was a face. It moved through the forest, apparently scooping up small vegetation and any slow-moving creatures that got in its way.
It left behind perfectly round, flat objects that inflated to globular shapes and then sprouted trunks and limbs and leaves. What the heck kind of thing was that? A snake that gave birth to Frisbees that turned into volleyballs that turned into trees? And I suppose there would be little birdies building their nests in those trees. Yeah, sure.
Except there were, only they weren't birds, they were little flying dinosaurs, miniature versions of the current "me."
Oh, Ed Guenther sent the wrong guy out here. He should have recruited an exobiologist. This expedition alone would have brought home enough data to keep a dozen research institutes busy for the next twenty years.
I came to a river that flowed pinkly through the woods. Ahead there was a highland area, obviously the source of the river. I followed the river until it fed into a body of water that had to be a sea if not an ocean.
Pink, too.
There was plenty of marine life doing its stuff in that body of water. I flew out over the surface looking for ships or islands or any sign of civiliz
ation. I didn't find any but I was so focused on my search that I didn't notice a storm coming up. No, I didn't notice until I was buffeted by violent, swirling wind and smashed into a roaring wall of pink. I'd hit a waterspout.
I had a feeling that I could die in this world, in this Wysh, and if I did I would really be dead. Die in a dream and you'll really die, right? That's an old wives' tale (ding!) and I didn't take it seriously, but die in a Wysh? I didn't want to find out.
I tried to beat my wings and fly above the waterspout but I didn't have the strength. Things were looking desperate and then that old smart part of my brain took over again. Before you could say Jack Robinson (ding! ding!) I found myself swimming away from the storm. I couldn't see myself very well but I could feel my body, my organs, my beak.
Hot damn, I was a giant squid. An Architeuthis. Hey, don't ask me how I knew what those big guys are called. Must have learned it before dozing off in front of the National Geographic Channel one night. I was one big son of a gun! (Okay, ding!)
But as much fun and adventure as I was having on this world, I wanted at least a quick peek at a couple of other worlds in this cockamamie system.
Back at Silicon Research Labs I'd seen the pictures that Alberto Salazar had brought to our little clambake. They weren't exactly photographs, not exactly CGI's, certainly not drawings. But they were something, and they'd shown specks moving between the planets of the Pink System.
What were those specks?
Okay, subconscious brain, take over. I'm just a-squiddin' along here, happy as a—thought you'd get me, hey?—so let's see what you can do for good old Webster Sloat.
And—wham!—ask and it shall be given to thee! I was way, way above the planet, so high that the sky was black, the world was round, and there was hardly any atmosphere at all. I was back in my pteranodon persona. I guess that's a good shape. But this time I was far bigger than I'd ever been before. I was easily a thousand miles across, and I was so thin that a kid's toy balloon would have looked like a fat blob of pancake batter compared to me.
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