I was so thin, in fact, that I could maneuver in the solar wind coming from Big Pink and Little Pink. I was able to fly or sail or whatever you want to call it, and as I tacked I surveyed no fewer than sixteen planets that wove and danced among the three stars of the Pink System. I could write a book about the things that I saw, the marvels and the monsters of those worlds and their moons and their inhabitants. Hey, come to think of it, maybe I will. Write a book, that is. Why the heck not, it should sell plenty of copies and it'll be a lot more fun than editing software manuals and getting paid by the hour.
The seventeenth world that I visited was a water world, at least when I was there. I realized that those planets must experience amazing changes in their climates as the three stars of the system engaged in their eternal gavotte, and as the planets pirouetted around their primaries. A planet might be frozen solid at one point in its orbit and turn to a boiling hell at another.
This world was cold but not frozen. A global ocean covered it. It was pink, all right, but I hope I haven't given you the impression that the dominant color of the Pink System was that sweet pink that doting parents swathe their darling baby girls in. No, it was an angry pink, a raging magenta that tore at the eyes. Or at least that was the way it made my eyes feel.
And this world was populated by every manner of marine life, animal and vegetable, from microscopic algae to crustaceans and predators that would scare the daylights (okay, you got me) out of Clive Barker on a bad night. There were even flying creatures, the this-world equivalent of amphibians. They could swim to the surface of the world-ocean, use their version of a blowfish's inflatable membrane until they were, are you ready for this, living blimps, then propel themselves into the air and go merrily seeking their dinners.
There I was, just about ready to start packing it in and head for home if I could just figure out how to get back to dear old Earth, when I spotted the first sign of intelligent life I'd encountered on seventeen worlds.
The first thing I saw was, well, I guess you could call it an aircraft. Nothing like a Boeing 777 or a MiG-29 or a Bell helicopter. It had wings, maybe it resembled one of those B-2 stealth bombers just a little bit. But that would be like saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger resembled Eddie Gaedel.
Yeah, Eddie Gaedel. You could look it up, but I'll save you the trouble. He was the only officially recognized "little person" ever to play major league baseball. He was a pinch-hitter for the 1951 St. Louis Browns, wore number 7/8 on the back of his jersey, used a toy bat, and drew a walk in his one and only appearance in an American League game.
He was later murdered and the case was never solved.
I am digressing, am I not?
This thing that looked like a cross between a mechanical sting ray and an artificial chiropteran was droning through the sky. I don't know where it came from and I didn't wait around to find out where it was headed. I abandoned my shape as a giant solar sail and tried something vaguely sharkish. I plunged into that global ocean. I tried to sense any kind of artificial activity and almost at once, there it was.
Beneath my fins was the largest city I had ever seen or even imagined. If it had been on Earth you could have dumped Tokyo, Beijing, New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Rio de Janeiro into one corner of it and hardly made a splash.
The ocean must have been two hundred miles deep, surrounding an icy core. The buildings of this city were easily twenty miles tall. Their shapes were jagged, projecting into the waters above them like angry, voracious mouths. The pressure must have been immense, but as Stephen Jay Gould had said, where life can exist . . .
I swam above the city. To the creatures who inhabited it, I imagine the heavy, cold water was as air is to the inhabitants of any city on Earth.
The denizens of the metropolis were clearly the product of the same evolution that had inspired their flying craft. They had bat-like wings and they swam with them, or in a sense flew through the water as aquatic rays seem to fly through the shallow seas of Earth.
Now I came to something that I can only compare to an outdoor amphitheater on Earth. It was immense, on a scale with everything else in this strange civilization. It must have held—I tried to calculate—no fewer than twenty million of the bat-winged rays. In the center of the arena thousands, no, tens of thousands of similar beings were—were—I can hardly bring myself to say it. They were staked to the ground.
I tried to get a closer look at them, suddenly realizing my peril. If these hideous monsters discovered me, captured me, there was no telling what my fate would be, but I knew it would be terrible. I used my shape-shifting ability to make myself into a tiny creature, so small and inconspicuous that I could observe the proceedings unnoticed.
The rays that were staked to the ground were clearly close biological relatives of the ones looking on, but there were small, subtle differences. Their cranial development was not identical. One species had a small triangular protuberance in the center of what I can almost bring myself to call a forehead. The other species had slightly longer claws on its bat-wings. The one species were a slightly paler shade of angry magenta, and mottled with irregular blotches; the other, a slightly darker shade, and solid in coloration.
Which were the more hideous? Which were the more terrible?
How could such monstrous conduct take place among such an obviously intelligent, obviously advanced race as these bat-rays? At first I was baffled but then I remembered the legendary sport of Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian ruler who gave rise to the legend of Dracula. I thought of the death camps of the Nazis and the killing fields of Pol Pot and a hundred other monstrous, cruel slaughters that my own species had carried out against its own.
No, there was nothing surprising here. These monsters were no worse than humans.
And gradually I realized that they were beautiful. They were lovely creatures, and the staking of their victims to the floor of the arena was an act of artistry. The occupants of the front row of the audience swept from their places and swooped down upon their struggling, staked victims and began to have sport with them. They tore at their bodies with their claws and their teeth, they ripped bits of flesh and tossed them back and forth like playthings before devouring them. They danced, they sang. They mated, mated on the writhing bodies of dying victims.
It was glorious.
I used my power to assume a shape like theirs. I plunged into the melee. I gorged. I cavorted. I—
Miranda Nguyen was standing over me, and Robert Armstrong was standing beside her. Armstrong had his hand on my wrist, clearly feeling for a pulse. Nguyen was fussing with the controls of her mixed-ware gadget.
For a moment I thought I was still a bat-ray, that I was surrounded by the magenta waters of the planet of those horrible beings. No, not horrible. Beautiful. They had found the full joy of life. Murder. And I was one of them.
The gurney was rolling out of Nguyen's machine. There were medical personnel there. I struggled to get free. I wanted to sink my teeth into their flesh, into their throats, to gorge myself on their blood.
Then Martha was there. How had they known of our involvement? How had they located her?
She was standing with Ed Guenther. There were tears on her face. She was trying to get to me but Guenther was holding her back. She called my name and I replied not with words but with a savage roar. That was the way to communicate. With roars and screams and death.
And death.
And death.
HEAVEN.GOD
Trying to figure out how many times I'd lived with someone. Anyone. My parents, of course, and my brothers and sisters. If you've ever lived in a big, chaotic household you know what I mean, and if you haven't, well, maybe you can imagine and maybe you can't.
Summer camp when I was a kid. A dozen of us to a bunkhouse, iron cots lined up along the walls, the counselor's so-called room separated by a beaverboard partition. College, of course, first in a cramped cell called a dorm room and then in a frat house where the noise and booze and dope never l
et up.
My parents still had Louisa May Alcott, the family mutt we had adopted from the local animal shelter as a bedraggled pup. She had attached herself to me and we fell madly in love the way only a lonely little kid and a needy little dog can fall in love. Lonely with all those brothers and sisters milling around? I guess there were just so many of us, I needed somebody who was just mine, and that was Louisa.
When I finished college I got my first apartment and Louisa moved in with me. She was already pretty long in the tooth, and when she died of some kind of doggie Alzheimer's a couple of years later I cried for days. The only time I've cried from grief since I became a man. The only other time I cried was tears of joy when my daughter was born.
I married young and Beloved Spouse came to live with me in an apartment about the size of a packing crate. Happy? We'd go off to work in the morning, both of us, taking the train up to San Francisco and separating to our jobs in dueling skyscrapers. We'd meet again at quitting time and head for home. We took turns with household chores.
The first meal that Beloved Spouse made for me—oh, how I remember that meal! Burned liver and green string beans and yellow wax beans. I made a face and Beloved Spouse—I didn't use the term sarcastically, at least not then—burst into tears and I comforted her as best I could and we wound up doing what newlyweds do.
Before very long I became a father, bought a house in the 'burbs in Silicon Valley, and lived the good life until my marriage fell apart and Beloved Spouse moved to for God's sake Glendale and divorced me by mail.
Our darling offspring, Daddy's best girl and chief pride and joy, reached the Atrocious Age, decided she hated my guts, and went to live with Mommy. She took our family pet, a shelter foundling named Anna Sewell, with her. I still love the little hellcat and hope she decides someday that I'm not the world's cruelest parent.
I sold the house in Sunnyvale, bought a postmodern condo on Drumm Street in San Francisco and watched 'em build the new Bay Bridge from my living room window. Oh, listen, I don't know what postmodern means either. Just thought I'd throw that in.
Then I met Martha Washington, her actual name, a big, loving, sensitive, sexy, sometimes vulgar woman of a certain age. Couple of years younger than I am, by the way. Martha owns a Queen Anne Victorian near the Panhandle. If you don't know San Francisco don't worry about that. It's a great house in a neighborhood that bottomed out a couple of decades ago and has been on the rebound ever since.
We kept both places so I suppose we're not officially "living together," although we seldom spend a night or a weekend apart.
Right now, though, things got a little bit off-kilter. Martha had to fly up to Seattle on business. There had been a series of burglaries in her neighborhood and she was worried about leaving her house untenanted for a week. My condo, on the other hand, was pretty secure. The building has a twenty-four-hour doorperson (he said with a slight smirk) and spy gadgets up the wazoo. Hasn't been a crime in the building since it opened, if you don't count the blow parties some of my younger, hipper, more affluent neighbors like to toss.
You see where this is going, don't you? Well, you're right.
Martha and I have keys to each other's digs, so I saw her off to the land of Boeing and Microsoft, drove back to her joint, locked my little Tesla (all right, I've worked hard and made a few bucks and I treated myself) in Martha's garage, deposited a couple of bags of groceries from Cala Foods in the kitchen, and settled in for a week of batching it.
I'd brought a stack of books with me. I have a limited repertoire as a chef but I'm pretty good at homemade tarte aux champignons and the meal tasted even better after a couple of fingers worth of Laphroaig that was laid down before I was born.
Martha had surprised me, though. On a low table next to my favorite chair she had left a little package and a note:
Webster—
I know you're not a big TV fan but the new 3D set your friend Ed Guenther gave us for our "anniversary" is really spectacular. Ed sent over this disk and says it's truly amazing. I hope you'll watch it and give me a briefing when I get home.
And thanks, sweetie, for watching my place for me. I can't wait to get back and tell you all about everything.
Martha
She was right about my not being a television addict. I don't knock people who have to have their nightly dose of sitcoms or cop shows or whatever, but I'd rather turn on some worthwhile music—Haydn, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius—and open a good book, a biography or history, and lose myself in the words in the book and the sounds inside my head.
Still, when in Rome do as the Romans do, and in Martha's house, at her suggestion, I took a postprandial brandy, specifically a lovely Cypriot Zivania, into the TV den and loaded Ed Guenther's gift disk into the tray. I put on the fancy 3D glasses that came with the set. I hate those things, but never mind that. I hit the play button on the remote and leaned back in an easy chair.
At first the screen remained black and I thought that I'd done something wrong, but then a point of light appeared at the bottom edge of the screen. It moved toward me, or seemed to. I'd never tried this gadget before and I was impressed with the technology.
The light halted half a foot from my face. That is, it seemed to. I actually reached out but when I tried to touch it there was nothing there.
As I sat there studying the point of light, waiting for something else to happen, I got the very strange feeling that the point of light was intelligent and aware, and that even as I was studying it, it was studying me.
"You're going to die," said the point of light.
"Everybody dies," I answered.
"Doesn't matter," the point of light said. "You are going to die. What do you care if some llama-herder in the Andes dies, or a noodle-vendor in Osaka. That's their problem. Your problem is, you are going to die."
I felt pretty silly, arguing with a point of light that wasn't even there. When the point said something, it wasn't as if it had grown vocal cords and was actually talking. I didn't hear the voice of God or of James Earl Jones. I've always thought they were the same, anyhow.
But I didn't really hear anything. It wasn't even the way those science fiction writers describe telepathic communication, somehow hearing a voice inside your head. This was more like, oh, try this out: Did you ever have a feeling about reality? Did you ever just know something without having any idea in the world how you knew it?
Some people call that intuition, but that isn't an explanation, it's just a label.
I've had the experience a few times in my life. Example: When my Beloved Spouse was pregnant with our sole offspring, I knew the child was going to be a girl. I told Beloved Spouse and she asked how I knew. She hadn't had a sonogram or an amniocentesis. Didn't do the old coin-on-a-string test. Didn't try the old boys-carry-high-girls-carry-low thing.
"I just know," I told her.
Well, the child was born and of course she was a girl and I said to Beloved Spouse, "See, what did I tell you?"
To which Beloved Spouse replied, "Jeez, Webster, so you happened to guess right for once. It was a fifty-fifty shot to start with."
If we'd gone on to produce a large brood and I'd kept predicting their genders and getting them right we would have had a better sample, but we never did get more than that one little bundle of joy. But I really did know. I did. It was not a lucky guess. Nosiree!
But I digress.
"You're going to die," the point of light had said, and we'd had our little colloquy about the inevitability of universal extinction and then the point said, "Let's put it this way, Webster Sloat old man, you're a fifty-ish middle class American male in pretty decent health. You don't smoke. You don't mess around with any of those really nasty drugs. You drink a little but not to excess. That Cypriot Zivania brandy, by the way, was a superb choice on your part."
I said, "Thank you."
"Barring a meteor-strike, terrorist attack, botulism in your kohlrabi, or a mugging that goes wrong and turns into a murder case, yo
u should live at least another thirty years. Maybe forty."
I said, "Okay." I figured the point of light was going somewhere with this. I wasn't working these days. Ed Guenther had me on call at Silicon Research Labs but SRL seemed to be having a quiet spell. I had some savings and a couple of cute little investments so I wasn't worried about money. So, I figured, I'd play along with Little Pointy, as I was starting to think of that talkative bit of glitter, and see what he, she, or it had to say.
"This wacky thing you call the universe is something like thirteen-and-a-half billion years old. Give or take a few hundred million. And it's about halfway through its life cycle. What went on before the starting gun went off and what will happen after the universe crosses the finish line, well, that's another matter. But even considering the twenty-seven billion year lifespan of the universe, the life cycle of a critter like you, Web, it less than the blink of an eye. In fact, you so-called living things come and go so fast, you hardly even exist at all."
Little Pointy's reference to everything that ever has or ever will draw a breath on this planet, from the biggest dinosaur to the tiniest bacterium as "so-called living things" was mildly nettlesome. But what the hell, I had bigger fish to fry in this conversation, so I hit him with the ultimate weapon of a onetime member of a high school debate team.
"So what?"
Can a point of light laugh scornfully? I think Pointy did. I realized I'd swung wild and missed by a yard, but at least Pointy didn't rub it in. Instead, he just went on with his spiel. And while he did so, I found myself wondering if this was some kind of gag that Ed Guenther had dreamed up, or maybe that Martha had put him up to. Anyway:
"So what do you think is going to happen to you, Web, when you finally hit the wall? Splat! Right? Splat! No more single malt scotch for you. No more pomace brandy. No more Beethoven. No more Schopenhauer. No more key lime pie. No more Martha Washington."
A pause. Then:
"No more Webster Sloat."
Dreams Page 26
