Dreams (27 page)

"Good for you," I muttered under my breath.

"We were unable to achieve our goals," she told her tee shirt—anybody else who wanted to listen in, could—"but the Law of Unintended Consequences kicked in and we picked up signals. At first we thought they were random radiation, just as early researchers thought that cosmic rays were messages and our friends at SETI did when they first turned on their giant arrays and got instant results. So we were very cautious about what we were getting, but after a while we were able to translate them into visuals."

"Don't tell me they were old
I Love Lucy
episodes." I know I was being nasty but by this time I couldn't help it.

"No, Mr. Sloat." She didn't bat an eye. Go figure. "They were not old
I Love Lucy
episodes. Not even early
South Parks
. I'll show you what we got."

She tinkered with her PowerPoint gadget and the screen lit up with something that looked vaguely like two bright pink pool balls and something that I couldn't really describe except that it looked a little like an ebony marble, all in a row. Whatever the something was, my eyes, to honest, just couldn't deal with it. Or maybe my brain was incapable of processing the signal that came zooming up the optic nerve.

"What do you think of that, Mr. Sloat?"

"Deponent knoweth not what he see-eth," I told her.

"It's a complex star system," Salazar put in. "Three stars locked in a gravitational gavotte."

"I see two pink object that I suppose could be stars," I conceded, "but what's that—that other thing?"

"We're not quite sure. Most likely it's a neutron star. We've consulted with some of the best brains in the world, even got to Coleman at Harvard. Lots of suggestions. No certainties. If it's a neutron star, it must have gone nova at some point in time. And if that's the case, it should have destroyed its two partners. Obviously it didn't."

"And you got this image—how?" I asked.

Miranda Nguyen actually flashed me a grin. "I picked it up and decoded it. And we have plenty of others, Mr. Sloat. Treat yourself to a gander at this one."

Treat myself to a gander. Right.

She flashed through a rapid series of images, finally settled on one that showed the two pink stars much more faintly than I'd seen them before. "This took a lot of tweaking," she said, "but we were finally able to get this far."

The image on the screen showed the two pink stars and the I-had-no-way-to-describe-it thingamabob, and several tiny disks apparently caught in mid-flight between them.

I asked, "Are those planets?"

Alberto Salazar said, "Probably."

Miranda Nguyen played with her tinker toy a little more. The two pink stars and the thingamabob grew still fainter, the things that Salazar said were probably planets grew larger, and some specks no larger than single pixels appeared, dancing like dust motes in a sunbeam.

"Jesus."

"You got it, Web." Ed Guenther switched on the overhead lights. "End of slide show. Our Trip to Yosemite, preserved for the ages." He paused and looked around. I hadn't made so much as a doodle in my nice leatherette SRL folder.

I said, "I'll bet I can guess what Wyshes.com does."

Ed Guenther said, "I'll bet you can."

One thing about SRL, they don't skimp. It was time for a lunch break and our hosts treated us to limp sandwiches on balloon bread and bottled water, followed by coffee or something that I guess was supposed to be coffee. Was it stale or just weak?

As the great Nero Wolfe used to say,
Pfui!

The afternoon session was at least shorter than the morning had been. The star performer was Robert Armstrong from NIMH. Since everybody else in the room knew each other before I arrived, I wasn't surprised when Armstrong reached across the table to shake my hand and repeat his name.

"Any relation to Carl Denham?" Golly, I thought I was being clever. Either he'd never heard that line before or he was an expert at keeping a poker face. I guessed it was the first and pretended I hadn't heard myself, muttered, "Pleased ta meetcha," and sat back down.

"I've studied Mr. Sloat's file and I want to remind everyone present that Mr. Sloat's privacy rights are very important to the United States government and must be respected by us all."

What the heck?

"Mr. Sloat is unique among the 14,293 known cases of persons victimized by the
Dreemz.biz
disorder, in that he apparently achieved a level of complete psychotic dissociation and has fully recovered from said break. Of the other cases, well over 13,000 went into psychic shock as a result of their experience, and emerged with little or no damage but also with little or no memory of their experiences."

Fourteen
thousand?
I wasn't so egotistical as to think I was the only sucker to fall for Charles Thurston Hull's nasty game, but I had no idea there were that many fools.

"Approximately 1,000 individuals," Armstrong went on, "to be precise, 857, suffered serious damage. Of these, 294 committed suicide, 18 became violent and were killed in accidents or by law enforcement officers, and the remaining 549 remain hospitalized. Their prognosis is not encouraging."

He looked around the table, smiling brilliantly. You'd have thought he had just won the lottery. "Mr. Sloat here, you see, is uniquely qualified to become the subject, should I say the operator, of our newest investigative tool."

"Which," Ed Guenther put in, "we call Wyshes.com."

Guenther had risen to his feet. I don't know why but suddenly he appeared to be at least six inches taller and eighty pounds heavier than anyone else in the room.

After the session I headed back toward San Francisco. Before I pulled onto the freeway I used my cell phone to check calls on my home answering machine. There was one from Martha Washington so I called her back.

She asked if I was busy tonight.

I told her I was not.

She said, "How about dinner out?"

I said I was feeling jangled and had a lot on my mind and could I have a rain check.

She said she thought as much from the sound of my voice and invited me to her place instead. "I'll whip something up, we can drink a glass of wine and listen to some music. I bet you'll feel better."

How could I refuse?

She lives in a restored Victorian in Noe Valley. Built right after the 1906 quake-and-fire, amazing gingerbread trim, bright yellow paint with white trim, high ceilings, cut glass, carved and polished wood. Amazing. Makes my condo look like a Motel 6. Or maybe the Bates Motel, with Tony Perkins ready to jerk back the shower curtain at any moment.

Did I mention that Martha has amazing powers of empathy? She could read my mood like a book. (There, how's that for a cliché?) I showed up on her doorstep after surviving the freeway back from Silicon Valley without even stopping at my condo for a clean-up and fresh clothes. I knew if I tried that I would have flopped on my bed between shower and dressing and that would have been it for good old Webster Sloat.

Another thing I love about Martha is her amazing talent for irony. She met me in the vestibule of her Queen Anne. Of course, nobody has built a house with a vestibule for seventy-five years at least. She was wearing a satiny copper-colored hostess gown that set off her rich, auburn hair and that showed plenty of cleavage with a tiny diamond-and-pearl pendant just above her sternum. She held a glass of pinot noir from a winery we'd visited together up north in Ukiah. The house was illuminated by candles and there was music playing.

Music.

We'd been exploring some difficult composers for the past couple of months, downloading their works and listening to them—
really
listening to them—at her place or at mine, then trying to find live performances to attend. Not easy when you're into Ives, Schoenberg, Edgar Varese or late John Coltrane from his "sheets of sound" period.

But tonight she had put on a Mozart clarinet concerto. Cool, melodic, just involving enough, not too challenging.

You see what I mean? Hostess gown, candles, wine, Mozart. It was just perfect and it made me feel something in my chest that I didn't think I'd ever feel again, after my divorce. But did Martha have her tongue in her cheek, just a little bit?

I didn't worry about that. I took her in my arms, gave her a warm (not hot) kiss, and accepted the glass of wine. We strolled into her Victorian parlor arm-in-arm and made ourselves comfortable. She must have sensed that I wasn't ready to talk about the day's events so she went first. She works in the Mayor's office and she dotes on City Hall gossip the way a soap fan relishes the latest convolutions of a favorite daytime serial.

The Sewers and Streetlamps Commissioner had her nose out of joint because her most recent boyfriend had left her to take up with her former boyfriend, whom she had lusted after so dearly that she had abandoned her own former girlfriend to be with him. Her former girlfriend had even offered to undergo a sex change if it would just keep her steady squeeze in her bed, but the course of true love was clear, leaving a playing field strewn with angry exes and one couple—was it the Commish herself and her new sweetums? I couldn't quite keep up with the comings and goings—reportedly indulging in a nightly sexual circus that would make the Mitchell Brothers blush.

The whole sequence of events had left the San Francisco political community in a state of sexual confusion.

Martha laid out some
hors d'oeuvres
and we snacked on them, finished the bottle of pinot noir, and kissed and cuddled for a while. The Mozart ended and was replaced by Tchaikovsky's Sixth, a transfer of the old 1959 Carl Maria Giulini version. Somewhere along the way Martha disappeared into the kitchen and returned carrying a cold ahi tuna salad and two forks. How we got from there to her bed I cannot tell you; I think that Tchaikovsky may have wafted us through the air.

We made love, and rested, and made love again, and I was finally ready to talk about my visit to Silicon Research Labs and Wyshes.com.

And Martha was ready to listen. By the time I'd reviewed the events of the day, Ed Guenther's butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth performance and the pitches of the various bigdomes, Martha was interjecting little hmm's and mm's and mm?'s every time I paused for breath. She seemed particularly intrigued by Robert Armstrong's actions. Why would the National Institutes of Mental Health care about Wyshes.com?

I reminded her that Dreemz.biz had walloped almost 15,000 people's sanity, with a variety of outcomes ranging from apparently complete recovery—me—to those poor souls who just couldn't deal with Carter Thurston Hull's nasty gift and took their own lives. Nearly 300 of them.

Martha was sitting against the headboard of her bed by now. She was still naked after our love-making and the flickering candlelight in the room cast a deep shadow between her breasts. I leaned over the planted a kiss right there and she laughed and wrapped her arms around me. She is not a fragile flower.

"Web, I don't want to sound stupid but after everything you've told me I still don't know exactly what this Miranda Nguyen's—what did she call it?—"

"Mixed-ware."

"—what it's supposed to do. And what was that Salazar genius from NASA all about? What do they want you to do? I guess that's the main question, what the hell do they want you to do, Webster?"

"They want me to be the first of a new breed of astronauts. They want me to go play footsie with the aliens. Or potsy. Or poker. Something."

"Not in a spaceship, though." She shook her head. Her medium-long hair swung around her shoulders and made a screen between me and the rest of the world. I wanted to stay inside that screen for good, but I knew that wasn't in the cards.

That wasn't in the cards. Charge one more to my cliché account.

"That's where the Hull events come in." I pushed myself up and stretched. "I'll be right back, Martha." I climbed out of bed and padded to the kitchen. I brought us each a cold mineral water with a slice of lime.

I climbed back into bed with Martha. Jesus, I had a hard time keeping my mind off sex when I was a randy teenager but now that I'm a middle-aged ex-husband with graying hair and the beginning of a pot belly I'm worse than ever. What the hell is the matter with me?

"Okay." I ordered myself to concentrate. "You know, I'm not supposed to talk about this. We could both wind up in the slammer."

"Bullshit, Webster. Come on, spill." Martha is not a blushing rose, either.

"Armstrong says that NASA has been trying to develop an ultra-high-speed communication system. They're serious about sending people to Mars and they don't want the long delay in radio transmissions. Even talking to moon bases involves a little delay, but they can live with that. But once you get much farther away from Earth, it's a serious problem."

I paused to gather my thoughts.

Martha waited.

"They've been trying all sorts of things to get around the speed-of-light problem. Looking for wormholes, trying to produce fourth-dimensional paper-folds, searching for tachyons."

"Science fiction." Martha grinned.

"No," I said. "They're serious about it, and when they set up an experimental transmitter and receiver they started getting messages. I mean, messages that they hadn't sent. Scared the bejesus out of 'em."

Scared the bejesus out of 'em. Rack up another one.

Martha said, "What kind of signals?"

"Visuals." I told her about the three-sun system. I was starting to think of 'em as Big Pink, Little Pink, and Gingrich the Neutron Star. I told her about the planets that didn't so much circle any of those stars as weave among them in a wildly complex dance. And I told her about the dust-motes, if that's what they were, that appeared to weave among the planets. And of course they weren't dust motes. Oh, no. They were certainly not dust motes.