Dreams (30 page)

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 let 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, you 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."

"No more crazy dialogues with pretentious fugitives from a Fourth of July fireworks show, either," I shot back.

"Now, now," scolded Pointy, "let's not be hostile about this. You can always hit the remote and turn me off and go back to—hey, whatever you'd go back to."

"The autobiography of Howard Fast, if you really want to know, and a Locatelli violin concerto. Not that it's any of your business."

Tsk,
the point of light said.
Tsk, tsk.
"You won't do it, though, will you, Web? I know you're annoyed but you're curious. Where the hell is this going, you want to know. Is this some kind of interactive 3D video game, or are you just hallucinating? You're a curious old gink, I know that, so I'm sure you won't hit the off button, whatever you do."

I heaved a sigh. One of the classic stunts of software developers, back in the 1960s, was an interactive program designed to create psychological profiles of volunteers. They used college students for the experiment. The whole exercise was set up in the form of questions and answers. The volunteers never knew whether they were really engaged in a keyboard-based conversation with a psychologist or with a piece of software.

Maybe this disk from Ed Guenther was an updated version of that experiment. If so, it was damned good. Even back in the Sixties most of the kids couldn't tell whether they were talking to a real shrink or a computer program. And as for Little Pointy—yeah, Ed Guenther had me going, all right.

"You've been quiet for a long time, Webster. You still with me?"

"Okay, I'll play a little longer. What's next?"

"A lot of people think that there
is
something on the other side of the wall. You know? Maybe you do go
splat
but maybe that isn't the end of everything. What do you think?"

Oh, Jesus, I thought, this whole thing is a put-up job courtesy of Jehovah's Whozises or the Church of Jesus Cripes of Latter Day Ain'ts or the ghost of the Reverend Gene Scott.

"No, it isn't," Pointy's non-voice said in my head.

"Oh, it isn't, isn't it?" I actually picked up the remote and brandished it at the TV set. Then I put it back down. "Okay, pal, you tell me: What the hell
is
it?"

"Think of it as a free sample," Pointy said. "Or a bouquet of free samples. As if you were at the ice cream parlor and they weren't too busy and the teenaged kid in the funny hat handed you one of those tiny little spoons and invited you to try out every flavor that appealed to you."

"Okay," I moaned. "I give up. Whatever you have to show me, let's give it a shot."

The point of light danced away from me. Its color shifted from the plain brilliant white that had started out and shifted through the spectrum. I saw every color I knew about and a bunch that I had never seen before. I didn't even know the names of some of them.

Little Pointy retreated toward the screen and I followed him, like Peter Pan following Tinker Bell, or maybe like that little kid getting sucked into the TV set in
Poltergeist
. Little Pointy was gone and there were no more messages inside my head, at least for the moment. Instead there was music, nothing but music. Man, was it ever familiar!