Dreams (29 page)

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 civilization. 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.

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.