Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Interview
Monday, February 28th, 2011
The time traveler pulled up a chair, placed her holorecorder on the table and pressed a button just in time for her ghost to appear.
Across the table, her ghost was apparently sitting on air.
“We need to talk,” said the ghost, “about some things you need to do. And not do.”
The time traveler nodded. “Go ahead,” she said.
The ghost laid out times, dates, places, people to watch out for, objects to be sure not to misplace or to avoid if they were falling from a great height.
The time traveler nodded, checking that the recorder’s green LED still glowed. She could have sworn that, under the otherworldly blur, the ghost was looking older already. That had to be a good thing.
The ghost must have talked ten minutes before she paused. “Actually,” she said, “I made it all up. I’m not your ghost exactly.”
“What?” said the time traveler. “Then who are you?”
“I’m the ghost of your clone.”
“I have a clone?”
“You will,” said the ghost, “The Rosenkrantz institute has a secret cloning project. That’s what all the samples were for. They had nothing to do with your fitness for time travel.”
The traveler held her head. The organization that had invented the time machine and recruited her to use it apparently had a deeper, perhaps more sinister agenda. “What should I do?”
“I have no idea,” said the ghost. “To be completely honest, the clone wasn’t exactly your clone, but a clone of your twin sister.”
“I don’t have a twin sister.”
“Not in this universe, you don’t…”
“Wait a minute!” The time traveler jumped up, bumping the table.
The ghost shuddered in the air; perhaps that’s what ghosts did when they were surprised.
“You’re the ghost of the clone of my twin sister from another dimension?”
“Exactly!” said the ghost. “Well, no. I made that up too.”
“Then who are you?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You have a multiple personality disorder, and recorded this whole mad spiel as a joke on my most boring self.”
“That can’t be,” said the time traveler. “I got the recorder right before I left, in factory packaging.”
The ghost pointed to the depressed button on the recorder’s top–“PLAY” not “RECORD.”
“But how? I haven’t had time. And how would you… I… know what I was going to say?”
The ghost/hologram grinned, “Isn’t time travel great?”
The Minotaur’s Gaze
Monday, February 7th, 2011
I grew up in a tenement that looked out on the back of the minotaur’s head. The minotaur statue is older than the city and taller than any building in it. Our tenement is nearly as tall, not nearly as old, and in far worse repair.
The statue gazes out across the plain of salt, which the scholars say was a sea that dried up years ago, and my siblings and I gaze with it into the hazy horizon.
The scholars don’t know who built the statue, or why, but everyone else says it’s a marker to guide travelers over the salt plain. However, everyone, including the scholars, agrees the plain is impossible to cross–too vast, too empty of landmarks. With all the wind-stirred dust, you can’t navigate by stars; by day, you can barely guess where the sun is.
My brothers and sisters and I do go out onto the plain at daybreak and dusk, when the twilight seeps into everything, and we might be walking on a flat of sky. It’s the one advantage we’ve got in the salt quarter. The old city has history; the river districts have trade and communication with distant lands; and the elite quarter has the evening cool of the mountains. A half hour at either end of the day to explore an empty blue world doesn’t seem like much in comparison.
We find our way back by the broken silhouettes of the mountains, and the prongs of the minotaur’s horns above them. One night, we found a man collapsed at the base of the minotaur statue, covered in salt dust. Under the white coating, we saw his boots and glasses were the blue of twilight on the plain.
We went for a healer and returned to find the man gone. The scholars and city guard told us he was a lunatic who’d wandered out onto the plain. We didn’t believe them; we knew the impossible when we saw it.
They built his pyre on our rooftop–our building was closest, and they didn’t want to move him far, which made us even more suspicious. We knew secret ways to the roof, so we crept up and stole his glasses and boots.
We argued all night and drew lots. In the predawn twilight, the glasses show me trails on the plain. I set my foot on one to see where the boots will take me…