VIII

At the window stood a young girl. Well, actually, she wasn’t exactly a young girl as we know them, but we’ll get to that in a moment. She had her back to the room and the lights were out because it is much easier to sulk petulantly that way. The day had been simply awful.

First, the sky had been that wonderfully bright shade of crimson that announces, perhaps almost too forcefully, that Spring is well and truly sprung; and the delicate perfumes of the spring flowers with their blossoms of almost painfully pure shades of orange and yellow had been unbearably sweet and delicious. On the far side of the meadow our young nearly girl was glowering at was a stream clear and cold with the bright green snow melt from the Crystal Mountains as it gamboled its way to the sea.

There are those—particularly young, virginal males who spend an unusual amount of time worrying about these kinds of things and attending gatherings called ‘something-con,’—who will, at this point, start yammering about how if the sky was crimson it must have a high concentration of carbon dioxide, and therefore the planet must be suffering from the greenhouse effect and be too hot for life. The mature, if not scientific, response to this—indeed, the only response—is, of course, “Go away.”

Followed quickly by, “And stop touching yourself there when watching those Puffy Ami Yumi videos.”

In the first place, the predominant color for plant life on this planet is orange, so a greenhouse effect would be unheard of. Secondly, the sky could very well be crimson because the things living there see it that way.

As the evening advanced the sky had darkened gradually through shades of wine to a black with dark red highlights that stirred the soul of anything more animate than a granite paper weight to thoughts that kept the fathers of this particular young sort of girl at levels of alert just short of, but not excluding, a preemptive nuclear strike. They knew exactly what those roving, unaligned paternal teams wanted. They had been a young, unmarried squad once themselves, and they were damned if their little girl was going to get caught in one of those kinds of committee meeting.

The wisps of dark, forest green clouds had been highlighted with emerald along their edges by the sinking suns, and the way the clouds drifted lazily by certainly didn’t help the fathers’ mood, or efforts, either. In fact it had become difficult for a platinum feathered dreamdove to find a bush to roost in that had not already been occupied by couples or groups, depending on species, who had gazed too long at the sky and breathed too deeply of the spring flowers.

Now there was just enough light from a distant moon to allow you to see those clouds against the black and deep red sky as they drifted over the Crystal Mountains. The Crystal Mountains were, of course, lighted from within by the fires raging deep within the planet, and the spires and columns glowed with a shade of blue that . . . .

There is no word for it. Suffice it to say that in one or two dimensions only a hallucination or so removed from this one, that shade of blue is worshiped as a god by some fairly intelligent races with prismatic eyes. In our universe it has only been approached once or twice by the light show for some of the pricier rock concerts, and even then the likeness was that of a guppy to a whale. Or more properly, a Jerry Falwell or Osama bin Laden to a kind and benevolent God. A hint of the glimmerings of the concept was there, but they truly and utterly failed to get a grip of any kind on the reality.

Still, if you had been to, say, a Genesis concert when their version of the blue came up you would have dropped your arms, and possibly your lower jaw, depending on your species anatomy and concepts of acceptable behavior, and just stood there for a few seconds struggling mightily with seven years of college and an honors degree in writing trying to come up with the only possible description of the intensity of the color and your primal response to it, and finally succeed in describing it to you companion with, “that is really, really blue”. Then the lights melt into a black with dark red that gives you a mere smattering of a hint of what those poor fathers so far away were up against.

Between the impossibly blue Crystal Mountains and the wall with the window our petulantly sulking young lady is looking through, were the scattered sapphire and not-quite-ultraviolet flashes of the night blooming glow flowers as they expelled puffs of the perfumes that would soon bring the skysnakes. The skysnakes, which nested in the dark orange groves at the base of the Crystal Mountains, would do their sinuous aerial dances as they made their way from flower to flower. These dances are difficult to describe, but suffice it to say that they are the major reason a preemptive nuclear strike was still an option for our sulking, young lady’s fathers.

Kimberly—the cause is as unknown as the phenomenon, but on all the planets in all the galaxies in all the universes in all the dimensions that have petulant, sulking young girls or their equivalent, a fair number of them are named Kimberly—let out the three thousand four hundred fifty-third exasperated sigh for the day and declared, “This has got to be the ugliest, most boring place ever!” and dreamed of a world where everything was beige.

But, again I digress. Try to take comfort in the belief that it will all make sense later. That’s what I’m doing.