Purple Rain
(Holiday on Phreetum Prime used by permission, copyright Richard H. Fay 2008)
Last time the Earth was destroyed, Val wound up on a dark planet, circling a purple sun. This time, he wasn’t so sure that he’d be that lucky.
Last night at about 8 o’clock, he was messing with the alien device on his workbench. His dad had warned him about it, but he didn’t listen. His mom had spanked him last time he pulled one of those monsters through the n-dimensional vortex and it ate thousands of Egyptians. When the FBI came a knockin’, he knew that he was in big trouble. Too bad his dad was on the space station that week, so the lickin’ from his mom was worse, ’cause she was frustrated. “Ahh, mom! I didn’t do it on purpose!”, but she spanked him extra-hard that time.
Then, when he was messing with it the time before, it wasn’t exactly his fault that the City of New York crumbled and sank into the Atlantic, was it?
The time on the planet with the purple sun wasn’t so bad, after all. The android who accompanied him was very pleasant. “COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE” was his way of introducing himself. “NOW GO HOME. YOUR PLANET WAS REASSEMBLED CORRECTLY” was his way of saying goodbye. It wasn’t a big deal, not really. Of course, the reassembled Earth didn’t really have the same geography, or the same species of life forms, or anything. But, hey, the fact that they could reassemble it at all was pretty cool.
When Val bought the alien device, he was just 13, but he used his own money. Now he was 14 1/2 and feeling quite mature. The zillions of knobs and lights needed exploring. The strange runes invited translation. The glowing protuberances begged to be used. The clock-like display on the front was easy to figure out, but it kept changing speed. The lights were always changing patterns – phasing in and out of some calculation of what, he couldn’t possibly know. The knobs were the coolest. They could be twisted left- and right, plus in- and out. And when he wrecked Earth, it was because of the special direction that he found that he could twist the purple knob on the top, left-side of the device. “Next time, I won’t try that”, he promised himself. But the 14-year-old living inside of him couldn’t quite resist the urge. Next time, a twist in another way, but on the same knob, and absolutely nothing happened! Val was surprised, but the next day he knew that New York was his fault. CNN showed a giant vortex where the great city used to be. It was just flat gone, all that stuff. Val was so scared that he cried out loud. His mom and dad were both upset, but they really didn’t believe that it was his fault – he was a curious teenager, after all. That’s what his dad said. His mom was more skeptical, and made sure he got spanked for it.
The blue knob, when twisted just so, brought Val back into the age of the dinosaur. He spent many pleasant days, wandering in the Permian basin that would later become Huntsville, Alabama. That was after the Nashville Dome arose from the earth, which was after he pushed an orange button, right next to the yellow dial. He wouldn’t do that again! He never really thought that making a mountain was something that made a lot of noise, but now he knew! Once, he left his Boy Scout handkerchief near a group of Dimetrodons. They sniffed at it, but then went on munching. When he got back, he asked his science teacher about Dimetrodons. Mr. Jack was glad that Val was finally taking an interest in science, so he explained that the Dimetrodons were early dinosaurs, and he showed Val a picture. Val laughed when he saw the artist’s conception. “That’s not what they looked like! They were red.”
“Val, we don’t know what color they were, these creatures preceded dinosaurs by 40 million years and had characteristics of both mammal and reptile.” Val just shut up. He decided that it would be better to feign ignorance than to get a poor grade in science. He made a mental note that this was worth taking a picture of, next time he visited the past.
When he bought the alien device, it was in a box of greasy, smelly junk at the local flea market. His dad loved to pick up spare tubes and transistors there. For a $20 bill, you could shop all morning, and still have enough left to get a corn dog. His dad was an astronaut, so Val was always infested with science and space. When he bought a small engine to make a go-cart, his dad didn’t have a clue how build it. But when he got a box of old electronic parts from some ancient IBM computer, he and his dad spent hours building a panel from the computer that sent man to the moon, or at least that’s what dad said. “But what can we do with it now?” Val asked. “It’s just fun to build”, was his dad’s answer. Val was an Amateur radio operator, just like his dad, and he liked building circuits. But the IBM mainframe display was boring. It didn’t do anything but stare back at him. What did IBM 360/95 mean to anyone, anyway?
Val knew that it was hard to track the Earth through space and time. He found out the hard way. The earth circles the sun; the sun circles the Milky Way; the Milky Way circles Sagittarius; Sagittarius circles something else, and so forth. Val once bumped a small silver button and found himself jiggied about 5 feet East, slammed up against his bedroom wall, and knocked silly. Later that week, he asked his math teacher about how to calculate the Earth’s orbit – he had a suspicion about what happened. The math teacher said “Val, you need calculus for that, and you’ll learn that in College.” He was sure that she spoke about calculus like it was a religion, and the name of the God was Calculus. Then he went to the Barnes and Noble store and bought “Calculus for Dummies”, and gasped in horror, but he would not be put off. So next, he had to get “Trigonometry for Dummies”, and then he had to get “Algebra for Dummies.” Finally, he had it all down cold. Something about quadratic equations stuck in his mind, then the idea about sines and cosines fit, then it took a while, but integration took hold, somewhere up there. When it was all done, it was summer break. He wrote a small program in Basic to calculate how far the Earth moves every second, versus the sun, Sagittarius, etc., and then he knew why he got slammed against the bedroom wall – he had skipped ahead about 1 second. “Pretty cool!” was all he could say about time-travel.
The symbols on the alien device were fascinating. He used a magnifying glass and saw that each symbol was actually a finely-etched series of smaller symbols. He looked up “runes” on Google and decided that that’s what these things were. When school started in the fall, he asked the librarian about runes, and got a book from the State Library that talked all about runes. Val was almost sure that the markings on his device were the same as some ancient Teutonic medieval writings. “How cool is that?” He didn’t know that Teutonic meant German, but the librarian got him a book on German history. Mostly it was very boring, and just a bunch of wars and overly-long words, but he looked carefully at the ancient writings and decided that that would be a cool “time” to visit – during the Teutonic age; he could join the Teutonic Order and become a chivalric character! Too bad he didn’t know which button to press. But that year, he signed up for German, to the astonishment of his parents. Then he quizzed-out of the stupid math course, and demanded the tests for trig and calc. He got AP college credits, and started visiting the University of Alabama at night, where he kept learning more about advanced math, especially stuff about multi-dimensions, which he thought was going to be useful to him, some day.
Right after that the android appeared and off he went. He was looking at the runes around the silver slider-switch and meant to brush it off, but bumped it instead. In a second, he was pencil-thin and rising to the ceiling. Then he could feel himself stretch a mile up and get thinner, then 10-miles up and even thinner. In a couple of minutes he looked back at the International Space Station and waved at his dad, who obviously was not looking, but who would have waved back if he knew what Val was up to. The stretching went on and on and on. Finally Val was on a strange planet in a different section of the Milky Way, or at least he assumed that he was still in the Milky Way. Then he felt his other end, the one he left behind, starting to “catch up”, as he started getting fatter, minute by minute. He realized that it would take a few minutes to get the rest of himself there, wherever there was, and when he saw the odd planet that was his new home, he recalled a poem called “Holiday on Phreetum Prime“, by Richard H. Fay
“Twin red suns rise over a crimson sea
As wudols twitter a raucous chorus
Amongst the majestic etafal trees.
Saunter beneath the weeping purple fronds
And sip a cup of sytunn flower tea
While wine-stained waters kiss a chartreuse shore.”
Before he could remember the rest, he caught up with himself and looked up at the purple rain coming down and he realized that something wasn’t quite right. “For example: how am I able to breathe here?” he asked nobody in particular. “And why is the sky raining purple? And, gee, where am I?”
Well, it took him some time, but he found that by twisting the slider-switch just a bit back towards its original setting, he thinned out and went back home. Or at least essentially home, since Earth had moved around the Sun, etc., etc., etc.
Then and there, he decided to be a bit more careful with the alien device. He remembered how thin he felt when he was going to Phreetum Prime, as he now identified the strange world. “Professor Sandoval, can you tell me how time and space are related?”
“Well, Val, that would take a long time. Google ‘string theory’ and when you have got that down, come back and we’ll talk”, replied the University Physics professor. Of course he was just hoping that Val would not come back at all, but he didn’t know Val very well.
When Val studied it, he realized that he had become a string, and traveled around time and space to get to Phreetum Prime – that was the only way that it could have happened, he decided. “Schnur” he stated. “Aufreihen, Schnur.” His German teacher simply stared at him. Was Val actually thinking in German? “The rune says Schnur!” Val blurted out. “Gesundheit!” said Professor Geiselbrect.
Now Val was on a roll – his original guess that the runes were Teutonic was correct! Every day he sat with a magnifying glass and decrypted the runes. He had several volumes of runes from various libraries, and he had lots of patience. The slide-switch said “STRING”; the blue button said “BACK-TIME”; the clear-red button said “EMERGENCY POWER”. It was all making sense. He also saw a row of indicators that were obviously trigonometric functions, and finally he realized that the box was an advanced navigation computer from a spaceship of some type, and some time. It must have been ejected from a crash? Val pondered that, and then realized that if the spaceship crashed a thousand years ago, in ancient German lands, it would make quite a bit of sense: the aliens taught their alphabet to the ancient German people in an attempt to get them to help rebuild the spaceship? Could that be it? Maybe the Germans got mad at the aliens and bonked them over the head and took the box? Maybe the spaceship was still in Germany!
“Val! Val! You’re daydreaming again. Please conjugate “to go” in German”, said Professor Geislebrect. “Val, have you been daydreaming? Val! Ha! High-school boys! Always daydreaming! What do young boys think of, anyway?”
Val looked around the classroom and everyone was looking at him. Dan was laughing and pointing at him. “He’s been asleep the whole class! What a jerk!”
The blood raced out of Val’s head and he looked around again. Then he looked down at his notebook and saw the runes that he had doodled there. “May I go to the bathroom, please?” he asked quietly, but everyone saw the tears flow down his hot cheeks.
“Yes, Val, and pick up a note from the Principal on your way back here. Please explain to him how you can manage to daydream through the entire first semester of German and only produce a bunch of scribbles on your notebook. Where’s your mind, Val? You are smarter than that. You just need to apply yourself.”
Val slunk out of the room and heard the laughter of the entire class behind him. “Yeah”, he thought, “Someday I’ll find a box like that and destroy this lousy planet! I’m going to Phreetum Prime when I grow up!” As he went downstairs to the Principal’s office, he quoted the rest of the poem called “Holiday on Phreetum Prime“, by Richard H. Fay, to nobody in particular, and it simply made him feel good, and he finally stopped crying. Then he knocked on Principal Poquett’s door and waited for him to bellow.
“ENTER!”
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Genres: Science Fiction. Authors: Doug Hilton, Richard H. Fay. Form: Short Story. Length: 2500 words. Editor who accepted this story: Previous Editors.
Author Bio
Abandoned Towers Content: A Brief History of the Internut American Microbes Behind the Barn Cul de sac Deflationary Universe – Scenario 1 Error 404 , Sock Not Found Hero Holy Cow One Man’s Trash Pleonasm Purple Rain Smileys Song of the Quasar The Billboard The Last Ride The Maginot Line Tinnitus Trip to Earth: Final Report of Ambassador Kla’atu War Story
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Author Bio
Richard H. Fay is a published artist, illustrator, poet, and writer of non-fiction, as well as an amateur medievalist, folklore nut, fan of classic speculative literature, and avid reader of true tales of the supernatural and the unexplained.
Abandoned Towers Content: Cosmic Journey Demons of the Dark Nebula Galactic Road Trip Gothic Window Holiday on Phreetum Prime Infiltration Mother Earth’s Children Nanomite 323 Purple Rain Selected Scifaiku Sorcerous Evolution Speculative Poetry: Past, Present, and Future Temporal Crack The Banshee’s Cry The Birth of Sentience on Aggraboth V The Era of Faeries and Dragons The Faces The Haunted Isle The Maginot Line They’ve Come for me Again Things in the Swamp West Dingleton’s Loss of Humanity When Wizards Dream at Night Worrying
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