Summerhill (5 page)

Four

Sky

Summerhill slept, and he dreamt.

There was a sky. A real sky, a sky with weather, with colors—
real
colors. Magnificent bright blue faded as it got near the horizon and deepened as it extended up into space, so unlike the sky Summerhill had always known. There were clouds that floated by, pure gleaming white, puffy and delicate. A yellow sun shone with the brilliant light of late afternoon.

Oh, Summerhill had had dreams before, but they had been abstract and indistinct. Never had his sleeping mind imagined colors as rich and beautiful as these.

Below, so far below as to be at the very edge of vision, was the ground. The ground didn’t concern Summerhill, though. He paid it only enough attention to determine that it was not covered with the endless stretch of empty, lifeless buildings from back home, a prospect which brought with it a fleeting terror amidst the exultant jubilation he felt.

No, the ground did not concern Summerhill. What he cared about was the sky.

The blue of the sky paired well with the yellow sun. Blue struck Summerhill as the kind of color a world’s sky
should
be, though he had no idea why, nor even what world it was he was seeing. He knew for sure that it wasn’t the sky of the planet Rydale, which was a world that he’d never been to or even heard of before, but he knew that this was not that sky.

A quick pat to his shirt pocket let Summerhill know that he had his watch safely tucked away. Good. Come what may, he was prepared.

There was a sound, a cross between buzzing and whining. It was like the sound of an insect hovering too close to a bug zapper right before the fatal electric spark went off. Abruptly, the noise crescendoed, rising in pitch and volume until it ended with a fantastic crash.

A hole tore open in the very sky itself. The rip expanded into a rift, through which Summerhill could see another sky, a separate sky, a night sky filled with stars and nebulae and galaxies that spun and swirled.

Through that hole came a sphere enveloped in fire, rocketing across the beautiful blue sky. It screeched as it tore through the empty air, the sound like the piercing wail of a banshee. In its wake, it left behind a trail of leaves, which swirled madly in the superheated updraft, creating a spiral of splendid hues of autumnal foliage. A moment later, the rift in the sky sealed itself up silently.

Far below, the ground, free of gray-green lifeless buildings, began to blossom forth with flowers of every conceivable color.

Five

Runaways

Bleary-eyed Summerhill was greeted not by the wide cerulean expanse of an open sky, but by the pulsing green of a buzzing, crackling energy field. The euphoria of his magnificent dream faded, and in its place rose the dismal reminder that he was in the
Nusquam
’s brig.

His hand was resting on his chest, right over his shirt pocket. He groped around out of reflex, but the pocket was empty, and he couldn’t think of what he might have been looking for. Shrugging off the last vestiges of sleep, he stretched his arms out and sat up.

For a ship as nice as the
Nusquam
, the brig didn’t disappoint. Summerhill was still in a prison cell, but he had enough space to pace around, and the wall-mounted bed at least had a pillow and a mattress. Of course, the actual guest cabins had to be far more spacious, with much more comfortable bedding, and without pike-wielding robot sentinels standing guard outside.

The robots felt like overkill to Summerhill. Surely a force field was enough to keep a single dog from coming and going. It wasn’t as if he needed an additional deterrent to keep him from wandering off willy-nilly. Besides, since they didn’t have obvious faces, it was impossible to tell whether they were or weren’t looking at him, which made him feel awkward and uncomfortable, and the Chief had promised he’d be comfortable.

Summerhill sighed as he flopped back down onto the prison bed. Dogs were creatures of instincts, and after the debacle with Katherine and the disappointing meeting with the Chief, Summerhill was starting to think that he might be better off not trusting his.

Well, the
Nusquam
was going to reach its next destination eventually, wherever that was. Hopefully, the Chief would make good on the promise to figure out something to do with him. If nothing else, Summerhill had escaped from the World of the Pale Gray Sky, from an existence that didn’t make any sense.

In the meantime, though, he didn’t have anything to do but wait. The security robots made for poor company, and he couldn’t simply will himself back to sleep in order to have more dreams (and he’d likely just disappoint himself further when he woke up again). Couldn’t the Chief have at least left him a deck of cards or a newspaper or something?

Instead, Summerhill just lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, examining the little patterns in it and making sure he didn’t accidentally make actual flowers or vines sprout forth from the whirling loops and spirals he saw. Security probably wouldn’t take too kindly to that, even if there wasn’t really a feasible way for him to escape using flowers.

With no clock or watch to check, he tried to deliberately lose track of time; unfortunately, there was no way to tell whether or not it was working. He tried losing himself in thought, using his experiences in the
Nusquam
’s ballroom as fodder for the imagination. If he’d learned anything there, it was that the spectrum of realities was so vast and imposing that he’d never run out of things to imagine that might be possible somewhere.

That line of thought naturally lead right back to Summerhill himself. Supposing that he
didn’t
come from the World of the Pale Gray Sky originally, where else could he have come from? Someplace that had dogs, apparently. That didn’t really narrow it down, though, as quite a few of the other guests he’d spoken to knew what dogs were, which implied that dogs were pretty common across a variety of universes.

Actually, that in itself was pretty telling with regards to the nature of different realities and their commonalities and how they worked, but it left open the question as to how or why they should be like that. Being an interdimensional traveler was evidently quite headache-inducing.

Summerhill’s imagination had nothing to rein it in, so he tried to focus on what shreds of information he did have in order to keep his mind from wandering too far. There were the dreams he’d been having, ones where he’d seen worlds and cities and people. Had he just invented them in his sleep? Or were there shades of memory still lurking somewhere in his mind? Try as he might, he was unable to conjure up anything from before the World of the Pale Gray Sky. 

Perhaps he was going about this all wrong. Maybe it
had
all started there, and the things in his head had always just—

“Mr. Summerhill. I’ve brought your food.”

Summerhill sat up with a jolt. Standing outside the buzzing force field, carrying a covered platter of silver and gold, was Katherine. She was still dressed in her hostess’ outfit, looking as proper as ever.

“Do they usually send hostesses to bring prisoners their food?” Summerhill asked as he leaned forward and swung his legs off the edge of the bed.

Katherine huffed, the curls of hair over her forehead jostling from that puff of air. She pressed her finger against the device in her ear, and the energy field in front of the cell deactivated. “I volunteered, if you must know,” she said as she stepped inside. “My shift is ending anyway, and I thought I’d see how you were doing.”

“Well, I’m still in a cell,” Summerhill replied. “You know, where you helped put me.”

Taking a few more steps forward, Katherine set the fancy platter on Summerhill’s bed. “And what would you have had me do?” she asked. “Let you wander around the ship despite the fact that you don’t belong here and I have no idea who or what you are?”

“I told you all that.” The dog tried to suppress the growling in his throat. “My name is Summerhill, and I was told I needed your help. Though I’m beginning to think that was all a ploy to make sure I landed in here.”

Katherine paced over to the wall and leaned against it. “You seem really earnest, Mr. Summerhill, and if your story is true, then I sympathize with you, I really do.” She sighed. “But I can’t just take what you say at face value. Surely you must understand that.”

“So why are you here, then?” Summerhill was ignoring the food that he’d been brought, perhaps a bit too pointedly. “Did you come to actually hear me out this time? Or just to gloat about getting me stuck in here?”

Katherine growled with frustration under her breath. For several seconds she eyed Summerhill in silence, then she crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You said that you were on the run. What did you mean by that?”

“What did I mean?” Summerhill thought again about his escape from the World of the Pale Gray Sky—it had been escape, hadn’t it? “I don’t know. I mean, like I said, I left the place I came from and I was told to find you. And yes, I know you said that’s impossible.”

The hostess shook her head. “But you specifically said that you’re
on the run
. That’s not the same thing as leaving home,” she pointed out. “So, who and what are you on the run from?”

It was a fair question. Summerhill leaned back a little and looked down at his feet still dangling off the bed. “I’m not sure,” he said. Then he took a deep breath. “I get the distinct impression that I was trapped there—like it was a prison I wasn’t ever supposed to get out of.”

“You don’t really strike me as a prisoner,” Katherine replied. Summerhill shot her a sharp look, and then she looked around the brig and chuckled wryly. “Sorry. That was a pretty stupid thing to say.”

“It’s okay.” Summerhill folded his hands together in his lap. “I guess it’s like you said: I can’t blame you for not trusting me.”

Katherine came closer again. “Look, if there’s something you think you’re in danger from, let me know. I can talk to the Chief, and maybe we can see about getting you out of here and keeping you safe.”