It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .9番

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 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 gamboling its way to the sea.

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 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 committee meetings.

The wisps of dark, forest green clouds had been highlighted by the sinking suns to emerald along their edges, and the way they drifted lazily by certainly didn’t help the fathers’ mood or efforts either, and it had become difficult for a platinum feathered dreamdove to find a bush to roost in that had not been occupied by couples or groups, depending on species, who had already stared 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 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 a fairly intelligent race 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, which is very painful for most species, and just stood there for a few seconds struggling mightily with seven years of college and an honors degree in language 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’s 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 out, 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 reason their snakey counterparts on many planets have been the symbol of seduction.

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.