Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Cumulus
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Night bled to day. The glare off all the chrome of the buildings and the cars shifted from reflected and redoubled neon to a blazing ultraviolet-edged glare. Still a day and a night to go.
She tinted her lenses down darker than the night had been. The road so flat, so straight, she was glad the car could do its own driving. It sang to her as it went, airfoils and antennae on its metal skin vibrating with the wind, an app in its wiring turning all the swooping downdrafts from the mile-high arcology towers and all the little traffic-spawned crosscurrent eddies into a choir of susurrant near-voices, howling and humming, a unique irreproducible unplannable chaos tune.
She had a vintage neoDAT running, told herself this would be the soundtrack for her summer. She resisted the urge to number the tapes as they filled, just tossed them in a paper bag. She put a title on the bag, “The Road to Stellavista.”
The app distracted the climate control; she could tell it was getting hotter. Mouth dry, she stretched on the passenger couch and didn’t think about what she was leaving, or how many of the lives in those towers were reflections of her own–how many were there in the metacity her age, her gender, with the same schooling, same tastes in work, furniture, clothes, music, friends, lovers… She had the time on the trip, she could have run the stats, worked out how unique she wasn’t.
She rolled over, restless. How many had wanted to get out? She knew the number of applicants for the colony to the nearest million. The others were finding other exits even now–immersion in family, community, intoxicants, viddies, all the distractions, destructions, constructions of life. She would have applied herself to her organitechture work, breeding new buildings. She didn’t know what she’d do in the desert where nothing would grow.
When she arrived at last, she saw a single cloud beyond the low reach of the apartments, beyond the sandflats, a curl of white dissolving in the heatshimmer a long way away, and she looked at it hard, a long time, thinking it might be the last one she saw for a few months, trying to think what it looked like, but metaphors failed her, and then was gone to blue. A sign, she decided, although she couldn’t say of what.
A Few Notes Concerning Griffins
Friday, July 23rd, 2010
The thing about griffins, and nobody really takes this into account, is that it isn’t just the beak–the whole digestive system is avian. That means gizzard stones, and that, in the case of griffins, with their fondness for hoarded riches, should mean swallowed rubies, opals, and chunks of jade as big as your fist. Which would be pretty much inaccessible except the feline side brings with it a grooming instinct. And that means hairballs.
The sound is a fearful thing, particularly when echoing among the dunes on a night when the new moon is a low huge matte-gray absence overhead. A sound like a freight train hauling an angelic choir roaring by, then slamming into a glottal stop the size of Rhode Island. Not a sound you forget, or one that I could resist investigating.
So, after hours wandering the dunes, I found the griffin around dawn, stretched out in a garage at the burnt-out end of a cul de sac where the lawns were all sand and switch grass, gnawing on a truck tire.
“What do you want?” said the griffin.
Ever since the apocalypse, lying hasn’t seemed worth the effort, so I answered with utter honesty: “Treasure.”
“Help yourself,” said the griffin. “Plenty for us both.” It waved a claw in the direction of the lawns, and I saw, by the plum-colored sun that had just crested the split-level ranch opposite, that the sand was strewn with the stuff you give away two hours after your your yard sale should have ended–a broken blender, a stack of Steven Seagal DVDs, a bedraggled Cabbage Patch Kid…
The good stuff was heaped in the back of the garage, and it wasn’t all that good. A cherub-encrusted chandelier. A plastic faux-jukebox hutch. One of those sad clown paintings. The griffin’s taste was abominable.
I had just realized the whole priceless hairball thing was pretty iffy when it made that disgusting, angelic, and, at this distance, skull-splitting sound again.
“If I help you with that,” I said, “what’ll I get?” I was thinking, Androcles and the Lion; I was thinking, hairball remedy and vasoline in the cupboards of the abandoned subdivision; I was thinking, something in that hoard-heap might be worth a decent meal in one of the shanty-burbs.
“You’ll get,” said the griffin, “not eaten.”
I was thinking how its eagle side and its lion side had carnivorousness in common.
“Deal,” I said.