Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (9 page)

“Good?”

“Well, you’re hung like—But then again, it doesn’t last long. Fifteen seconds and you’re done. Of course, they can alter that, at Amazingland. They can do anything. All you gotta do is ask.”

“You’ve tried it? I mean, the horse thing?”

“Let’s not get personal. All I’m saying is, you can do or be anything. Anything! And we’re not talking virtual reality, okay? You got that, right? They really alter you.”

The cat laughed.

“Look at me! This look like virtual reality? I can cough up a hairball if you need proof.”

“What I need is time to think,” Gallinski said. It was a lot to drop on a guy right after breakfast, while his eggs and toast were still digesting.

“Take your time,” the cat said. “You got questions, ask me.”

It turned and walked off toward the living room then, only pausing to say, “Oh, and could you look into one of the grain-free cat foods? Those Friskies give me cramps.”

***

The next few days brought a mixture of fear and excitement. Had Gallinski hallucinated it? He supposed it could’ve been an acid flashback, if he’d ever taken acid. Or had the stress of modern living overtaken him? Bill Roman, from pre-owned, had been twitching uncontrollably since April. But it had seemed so real. And if he ever found himself convinced he’d imagined all of it, all he had to do was ask the cat.

“Did I hallucinate it?”

“No.”

“And how about this?”

“Look, can you leave me alone two minutes? I’ve got to finish licking myself by three. I’ve got a heavy nap to catch.”

And supposing it was real?

“How much does it cost?” he asked, the next night after supper.

The cat rubbed its front paws together.

“Okay, now you’re talking.”

It explained, between long pauses to scratch its ears (“I think I got mites,” it complained. “You got any mineral oil?”) that one week at Amazingland cost just shy of twenty million dollars.

“But that includes the time travel, food, and lodging. Plus shows and other entertainment. Alcohol’s extra.”

“Yeah?” Gallinski gripped the countertop again.

“Well after all, Einstein said this wasn’t even possible. And he was right, according to the laws of physics he was using. See, he knew space and time weren’t constant, but he didn’t know the laws themselves were changeable. I don’t pretend to understand it all, as I got most of it from the sales brochure. On top of that, your brain needs to be altered.”

Gallinski’s hopes had crashed when he heard the price tag. Now, they caught on fire.

“You mean wipe my memory,” he said. It made sense. They couldn’t have people running around blabbing about trips to the future, after all, could they? That would change things. Step on the wrong butterfly and wind up with three heads and a lifetime subscription to
HeyGirl
magazine, or something. And what good’s a vacation if you can’t remember any of it?

But the cat was shaking its head.

“No, we leave the memories intact,” it said. “In fact, for a little extra, you can come back thinking it was even more amazing than it actually was.”

“Then what—”

“We stop you telling anyone. Every time you feel the urge, a motivational relay kicks in and you talk politics instead. Saying really embarrassing things you can’t back up. We’ve done it to you already, on a smaller scale.”

Gallinski nodded. Just that afternoon, he’d tried to tell Jim Pedersen about his talking cat and had argued in favor of affirmative action programs for disadvantaged white people instead.

“But I can’t afford twenty million,” he said. “If you’re from Saugus yourself, you must know that.”

The cat nodded.

“Right. But look: we’re talking year 3000 dollars. You win on the exchange rate. To you it costs a hundred forty-three fifty.”

Gallinski’s eyebrows rose. He laughed. The only thing he didn’t understand now was why Amazingland didn’t just set up some legitimate business in the past, like a chain of dry cleaners, and make a fortune in the future.

“Well, they do,” the cat said, when Gallinski asked about it. “But the tariffs are bad enough you can’t hardly earn a penny out of it. So. What do you say?”

“Will you take a check?”

“There’s the spirit. Let me get you a receipt.”

***

Time travel wasn’t what Gallinski had expected. No sooner had he signed his name to the extensive release and waiver-of-reliability forms (they were seventeen million pages long and the cat had to put him in a stasis field for 50 years just so he could read them—he didn’t age during this time, but he did develop an irritating habit of saying, “Well look at you,” which took several years of therapy afterward to correct) than his living room disassembled itself from around him and was replaced by somewhere different. This was in the open air of a warm and bugless night in June. (“It’s always June here,” said the cat.) It was a cross between a jungle and a garden and a city: wild plants and vines hung from and sprung up between the moss-swathed trunks of trees. The near-full moon shone through a broken canopy of ancient green and blue, while lush plants and ferns cascaded down the crumbling sides of ziggurats and temples in the silver light. Perfumes of flowers wafted from this jungle scene, as far removed from man-made fragrances as fresh guava is from candied fruit. And in/among this chaotic wilderness, tended gardens sprang, with lamps on poles, and walkways between hedge-lined ponds. On top of all of this, some genius of a discipline unknown to Gallinski’s time (a master of both landscape artistry and architecture) had called forth gleaming, curving buildings—monoliths and monorails, carved seemingly from ancient stone themselves but shot with arabesques of glowing lapis light, structures that fit the jungles and the gardens as though the gods themselves had expected nothing more than that the human race attain such harmony between the created and the natural.

“Nice, eh?” said the cat.

Along the walkways, people mingled, dressed in clothes from different times through history. They chatted with toy poodles, mastiffs, cats, and other pets (and in one instance a passerby was deep in conversation with what appeared to be a kitchen chair). A group of pilgrims stood and talked among some topiary animals, sporting broad-brimmed hats and buckled shoes. Around the nearest pond, men and women wearing togas and Victorian attire conversed, and splayed out on the well-mowed grass were groups of people clothed in gold lamé or sackcloth.

“Ugh,” said a passing cave dweller, picking something from his beard that looked like it might’ve come from a genetic research facility.

“This is amazing,” said Gallinski. “Fascinating. I’ve never seen anything like it. Smelled anything like it,” he added, with a glance back at the caveman.

“Yeah it’s a trip, all right,” said the cat, “but don’t hyperventilate.”

“And all these people—they won’t be able to talk about it after?”

“Not a one.”

“But that means…”

Gallinski thought about it. It meant that lots of people—friends of his, even—might’ve been to Amazingland.

“Your cousin Flavia’s been here six times,” the cat confirmed. “She’s on the preferred customer agreement. And your mom.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m serious as hookworms, man. She spends most of her time as Guy Lombardo. Says she likes the hydroplane races.”

“But she never—”

“She couldn’t. Like I said, nothing about the trip can influence your own time zone in any way. Otherwise people from the past would be getting ideas, and we’ve got copyrights to protect.”

It was a lot to think about, but Gallinski didn’t seem to have the time. The cat led him past a gift shop, and beneath the bus-sized lintel of a temple craquelured with vines. Once inside, he had to wait in a long line that moved forward at intervals, mazed with velvet ropes, while infomercials about Amazingland played on overhead hallucinations.

“This is amazing,” he told the cat. “What will I be? Who? And how will I decide?”

The cat shrugged.

“Don’t get too worked up. Start small. You don’t like it, change your mind. Have you considered my hummingbird suggestion?”

“I think I’d like to be an ostrich. Or a leopard. No. You know what? A killer whale. Or a giant squid. Can I be a giant squid? I’d like to be a giant squid and attack a pirate ship.”

“We’ve got some pirate ships,” the cat said. “But be warned: you might not win. Those pirates have cannons.”

“I won’t really die, will I?”

“Of course not.”

“Then that’s it. I’ll be a giant squid, attacking a pirate ship.”

“You’re the boss.”

So, Gallinski was a giant squid. And it was amazing. They knocked him out while they processed him (in a machine that looked like a CAT scan made by the McDonald’s corporation) but when he woke, he drifted languidly beneath the sea, in darkened waters like some heavy sky. Snows of plankton silted down with ghostly lassitude, and Gallinski cruised, magnificent in size and natural complexity. And it was true! He wasn’t simply at the controls. He was the giant squid. Oh, Gallinski was still there, at the core of things, but he was different. He had squid memories, for one thing: copulation, battle, gliding under pack ice, and one time, nearly getting brain damage from swallowing too big a chunk of sea lion. Further, he possessed a working knowledge of the operation of his many suckered tentacles.

Then he remembered—the cat had promised him a pirate ship. And there was only one place a pirate ship could be.

He made himself light—felt organs working in him that increased his buoyancy. He glided up through mansions of the deep, their ethereal walls delineated by wisps and luminescent curtains made of aggregated and minute marine life. He felt the ever-increasing lightness of his ascent press outward from his cephalus.

It made him crazy, this ascension, as the omnipresent, ever-present pressure left and let his squid-thoughts scatter outward in a skittering like maddened tentacles. His perceptions skewed, their interconnections growing fainter as the water lightened, and above he saw the brilliant curved meniscus, silver ceiling of the world, where even now a hulking shape cut through the thinness—something black and ponderous.

Gallinski knew this was a ship. But that understanding was cut off from the enveloping squid-mind—a large, wet presence, a subverbal and mysterious perception with which Gallinski could not communicate, except in raw emotion. And to that part, the ship he shot toward like a missile was not a ship at all, but a wounded spermaceti whale, that waited for attack, defeat, and finally, delicious consumption.

This part let out a thrill that drew Gallinski in completely. The fight now held such visceral attraction for him that to turn away from it was an option he could no longer comprehend.

“Let’s eat,” he thought, and he surged upward on a column of excreted water.

He hit the ship like a disaster. Felt it shudder in a way not blubber-like. His squid-mind registered confusion as it encountered data new to it. Why did the whale not fight? Why did it feel so frangible?

He wrapped his many tentacles around it, pulling himself up under it. He snapped his steam-shovel beak, crunching not whale but something dry that jabbed his mouth. Enraged, he lashed his tentacles, feeling them hit edges, angles, things like bones and sinew strung up high into the air. This whale was very sick. Or worse. Fear flooded Norm, the giant squid.

Gripped by apprehension, he hauled the whale partway down and himself the same way up, rolling the carcass and himself toward one another, so both met there at the juncture of the world and the giant bubble up above it. And there he saw a thing that raised the level of his shock to frenzied panic.

There were creatures on the whale-thing. Terrible, misshapen things like mutilated, giant crabs. They scuttled in between the bones and carcass of the horribly disfigured whale, mewling, shrieking, alien. Gallinski knew these were humans—pirates—but again, the squid around him didn’t, and the shock of its reaction rocked him like an earthquake.

He struck at them in terror, seeing them the way a man might see a large and long-legged spider suddenly encountered in the shower. He swatted at them, never having noticed before how terrifying men could be. He batted with his tentacles, splattering them against the whalebones/mastheads and the carcass/ship. He wrapped one with a tentacle and squeezed until it popped. He tug-of-warred another, pulling it apart, and flinging both halves to the waves.

The things fought back. They stung and bit him with their long, sharp, shiny teeth or stingers. They swarmed his head, going for his eyes! Norm slapped them aside and crushed them; flung them skywards, swept them underwater, smashing them against the ship/whale with a roar like something H.P. Lovecraft would appreciate.

Then some of them got near a long, black thing and turned it so its empty mouth gaped at Gallinski’s head. The squid-mind didn’t understand, but it picked up on Norm’s panic as he recognized the cannon. Norm snapped a tentacle, whip-like, at the little group of men, and sent them flying, but the cannon fired, and everything went black.

***

“How was it?”