"For real adventure
you can't just mess around with kid stuff:
wormholes
subspace
star-shot time travel
cryogenics
swapping genes"
he said,
then spun this tale of
climbing out of one bubble universe,
somehow dancing across the continuum
in which they're all embedded,
and slipping down a hole into another,
like in The Magician's Nephew.
(Holes in this part of Creation
(if you go in for Creation,
or the panMythicConcordance,
if that
or else
Holes in this part of
Just What it IS)
do a choke-neck spiral down
to a pointparticleimpossibility
or a piece of String...)
I thought he was going to say something
about how he came from
another universe
much cooler than this one
and I was going to
wonder out loud (but only just) why he ever left it
and be all DEFENSIVE
about my paltry three dimensions
but
he interrupted my interruption
like he had some kind of
temporal fugue going
or maybe he was just firing
on a better class of brane cylinder
"...feet up to yer ankles
in quantum foam and your head
stuck in one dimension of a Calabi-Yau quandary
while you wrap your ass around
the Far Horizons
of the first 3 dimensions
and wait for your table in the 4th
which is ALWAYS late
when you don't tip the maitre d' enough, well,
or anything..."
blah blah blah.
(there are only 11 ways to die,
and only one of these has anything to do
with Einstein at a distance -
the rest are Darwinian somehow -
but here's the thing about a multiverse
spawning infinite sub-verses at any/every
point o' choice -
it was invented by dweebs who comfort themselves
with the thought
that even though they don't get the girl
in this life, they can still kick sand
back somewhere else.)
but of course this is not what he meant:
"There's something about a Brane transplant
and I've got a case of
surebellums so alien it's not funny
in my transport and well you see
I've got to move them
before the Expiration Date
(two months from last
Wednesday by your reckoning
but almost 3 years ago by mine)
and this Irish fellow
runs the bar out by the spaceport
he tells me
you might be interested
or know someone who is."
I am about ready
to show him the bum's rush
because I've heard this story
plenty of times
on planets a lot more
sophisticated than this,
when he pulls out a sample
and I have to admit
it's like nothing I've ever seen:
ticking
wild paint job
and what looks like
a V8 or better
under the hood
so I've got a portable
with me and we
jack the thing into it...
...now, there are some places,
some planets,
that just scare you the second
you see 'em.
there are sounds
that take you back to bad times
and smells...
you see where I am going with this.
this was every place like that
and every sound and every smell
and oh! I did gag most emphatically
and he laughs,
"There now, and didn't I tell you?
That's a Hell in a handbasket, isn't it!?
Get over it, man, and LOOK.
Would you look at the thing?"
and this is something I did try to do,
to look
"There in the wet places, there
in the dark. Do you see? At the shore,
do you see? At the edges,
where the tiny gods go to die
where the primary mumbles 'dawn'
from time to time. There, do you see..."
...and I suppose I did see,
or I did begin to see,
while every twitching part of me
cried to be blind or drunk or both.
both, best, actually, and all this
after 37 seconds,
so I yank the jack and grab the Jack
and pour a shot and hand it back
and empty the bottle and stare.
and stare...
...until I don't care where he came from
and I'm about to tell him
just what he can do with his
toxic alien brain furniture
and I'm making a note
copying it to my symbiote
to stay away from this particular
waystation the next time
I have to kill time
on this sorry orb
that's way too close
to the edge of everything
and way too far from anything that
spells Home:
nucleic-acid based life
instant food
mass-produced entertainment
robot-made garments with familiar logos
conspecific sexual partners