Dreams (28 page)

"I ask again, Webster, although I have a feeling I already know the answer, I'll ask you again anyway, What do they want you to do?"

"They want me to go there."

"By super-high-speed wormhole tachyon express?"

"Nope. By Miranda Nguyen's mixed-ware gadget. By Wyshes.com."

Martha swung her legs off the bed and stood between me and a candle. All I could see of her was her silhouette. She said, "You're going."

I said, "You're way ahead of me."

"I'm not trying to influence you."

"I know it. It scares the piss out of me, but I'm going."

Scares the piss out of me. Ding!

"And this will be something like your Dreemz.biz experiences?"

"Not very much."

***

First, Carl Denham's—I mean, Robert Armstrong's—people at NIMH had to run me through every mental health and stability, does this guy have a firm grip on reality, etc., test in the book, plus a couple that I think they made up just for my personal benefit. I won't say that I came through with flying colors but Armstrong did finally sign off.

Every test in the book. Flying colors. Two for the price of one. Whoops! Two for the price of one. Call that a bonus point.

I saw Rorschach blobs variously as grasshoppers, butterflies, Satanic faces, and vaginas. Once I got to vaginas I think Armstrong let a small smile escape. I associated
mother
with
love, rain
with
wet, pencil
with
paper
and
alien
with
Roberto Salazar.
I think that last one upset Armstrong until he decided I was pulling his leg. I balanced on one foot, admitted that I'd experimented with weed and acid and coke in my wild youth and denied that I'd used anything illegal in the past couple of decades. I told him that I'd masturbated as a teenager, had sex with approximately thirty women in my life and with one man. Didn't like the latter and never repeated the experiment. I told him that I thought maybe there was a God and maybe not, I really didn't know.

Oh, was it ever fun.

Armstrong decided I was sane, or at least sane enough to put at risk once I signed the release form that Ed Guenther kindly provided.

I had to pass a pretty rigorous physical, but nothing excessively demanding. After all, I didn't have to sit on top of a giant firecracker and get launched into outer space. I was going to travel by—what? Might as well be honest and go all the way back to Madame Blavatsky and her gang of wild and crazy partiers and call it astral projection.

Miranda Nguyen personally showed me her wonderful gadget, the Wyshes.com device.

Have you ever had a CT Scan? Computerized Tomography? I did, a few years ago. One of my internal organs blew up and the docs at the Cal Pacific Med Center decided they needed a good look at my innards. First I had to drink a cocktail with some kind of gunk in it to make my insides show up. It came in banana and chocolate flavors. I asked the refugee from Romper Room who ran the dispensing station which one she recommended and she said, "Doesn't matter, Mister. Whichever one I suggest you'll drink it and get mad at me because no matter how bad the other one is, this one has to be worse."

Actually I had to do the do a couple of times, once before a surgeon went in and fixed my plumbing and once after he was finished. I tried the banana once and the chocolate once and they were both worse.

Anyhow, Miranda Nguyen's Wyshes.com device looked something like a CT Scanner. There's a big donut-shaped thingamy with enough flashing lights on it to make George Lucas wet his pants. You lie down on a powerized gurney and an operator plays Phantom of the Opera at a futuristic looking control panel. The gurney rolls into the giant donut and if you're strapped to it, as I was, even for a dry run, you feel as if somebody made a mistake and sent you to the Fisher and Sons Mortuary for cremation.

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 translucence 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?