Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
An Exchange in the Wasteland
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
The camel-car sway-legged across an industrial wreckscape. A rider occupied the middle of its three cockpit domes. The other two were packed to the glass with spinmenders, implosive engines, and tangle-nets of aerophonic wire.
Beside a leaning but not yet fallen smokestack, it locked both upper and lower knees in all six legs. A rope ladder let the rider down from the car’s belly.
A man in a ragged pigeon-feather poncho came up out of the rubble to watch.
“Morning,” he said.
She looked at him over the top of her rebreather, then shot a grappling line to the top of the smokestack.
“Careful now,” said the man. “Might bring it all down.”
She pushed her voice through the mask, “It should hold.” She didn’t mention the stressline analysis she–or rather the car–had done.
The man settled with a ruffling of feathers. “Certain about that?”
She began to climb or, rather, the rope began to pull her up.
“I’ve got water,” said the ragged man.
“Oh,” said the rider, halfway up. He must have seen the condensation scoop spirals on the sides of the car.
He wasn’t offering because he thought she needed it.
She busied herself prying open the corroded lump that had once been a cleaning door in the stack’s side.
He might not be offering at all.
“Care for some?”
The car had taught her to recognize the question as a test: to refuse would insult by implying her water was better. To accept insulted by the implied comparison–he offered what was large portion of his reserves, but only a small fraction of her own. The car hadn’t taught her how to answer.
“You’re generous to offer,” she said.
“I’m sure no more generous than you,” said the man.
This did not track at all to what the car had coached her to expect. She was sure it must mean something.
“You’re prospecting carbon,” said the man. “You’ll find more and better over there,” he pointed to a hill of tumbled brick. “That was a warehouse, full of wooden things that burned before the walls fell in.”
“You are generous,” she said. She put the retrieval beacon back in her pocket.
“I am not the only one,” said the man, pursing parched lips.
She nodded.
She’d plant the beacon on the brick-mound as soon as she’d given him all the water he wanted.
The Cube and the Cantilever
Monday, July 5th, 2010
The cube, immense and radiant, just appeared in the middle of the Bonneville salt flat and hovered about half a mile from the rest stop on I-80, which was as close as FEMA and army would let any of us get.
The rest stop was an atomic modern sweep of shade-bearing cantilevered wings, its now-retro futurism rendered quaint by the appearance of the cube in its utter simplicity and future-changingness.
The military brought Iraq-tested tents; the television crews, air-conditioned RVs. Us net journalists sweltered and unfurled our bedrolls in the back seats of our dust-covered cars. By some unspoken covenant, the rest stop was left empty, neutral territory where we exchanged wary small talk between briefings.
Which was fine by me. I’d arrived the day before the cube to photograph the rest stop for a mid-century design blog. I was supposed to get shots every fifteen minutes–more often at dawn or dusk. Kind of a Monet haystack thing.
So I was the first one posting shots of the cube, and that got us an unreal number of hits. I filed reports every hour on the hour, and all the pics I could snap. By the end of the first week, they were paying me more per day than I’d made in the last month.
It all went along in a sort of routine for six weeks–I couldn’t leave, because the powers that be weren’t issuing any new press passes, and we wouldn’t have had a shot at them if they were. Every few days, the scientists tried some new ploy. After the first couple ineffectual beams, shorted-out robot drones, and spontaneously combusting probe gizmos, it got a little repetitive, but we still got decent hits.
Then someone–no one later ever wanted to admit exactly who–decided to level the rest stop to make way for a hypersonic echo-imaging array.
So I chained myself to the nearest column and waited to face down the bulldozer.
Which never came, because the aliens chose that moment to reveal themselves, levitating down in silver-foil spacesuits with ridiculous 50’s sci-fi movie antennae.
Mid-century modern, it turned out, bore an uncanny resemblance to the design of their holiest shrines, and the I-80 rest stop had become a place of pilgrimage via the teletransport temple inside the cube.
Which was how I became ambassador to another world, and never again lacked for blog content.