Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Kinetic Energy of Bees
Friday, October 9th, 2009
A cloud of bees surrounded the white-painted dresser in the back of the backyard. Earl flipped a switch. A line of LEDs blinked readiness along the dresser’s top edge.
“The hive’s primed,” he said.
“The transreality gate, you mean,” said Monica.
“Right,” said Earl. “That.”
Monica hopped from one side of the patio to the other, twiddling dials and tweaking sliders.
“This gonna work?” said Earl. “I mean, the mantis engine and the wasp bridge, those sounded like good ideas too.” He was rubbing the place on his forehead where the welts had been.
She slapped a lever down, said, “I checked the math twice.”
“And what if it does work?” said Earl. “What then?”
“I’m ready for that,” said Monica. “Dial it to three, dear.”
Earl clicked the dial around and the wooden box made the sound of summer weekend afternoons.
“Five,” said Monica. “I’ve been watching documentaries and reading the web.”
“Didn’t know Wikipedia had much on the insect dimensions,” said Earl. “And when do you have time to watch TV? It’s dance lessons every night, you’re hardly ever home.”
“Eight,” said Monica. “I didn’t realize you left the garage and your card-playing buddies long enough to notice what I was or wasn’t doing.”
The hive vibrated with contained momentum.
“Whoa,” said Earl, “this is serious.”
“Eleven!” said Monica.
The hum of the buzz became a pipe organ roar and the air shimmered over the hive.
A hexagonal window opened above the hive, and a bee-woman dropped through in a cloud of pollen.
“The insect dimensions!” said Earl, “I thought you were cra– I mean, I didn’t think they were real.”
The bee-woman twitched her antennae, and looked back and forth between Earl and Monica. He couldn’t read the expression in her faceted eyes.
Monica stepped forward, and did a kind of shimmy-waggle dance. Earl thought it looked like belly dancing, but something was wrong–it was like Monica had a stiff back, but she hadn’t mentioned anything and there wasn’t any rain in the forecast.
The bee-woman shimmied and waggled back. The motions of her three-segmented body made Monica’s movements make sense.
The two of them danced several minutes conversation before the bee-woman climbed up the hive, into the hexagon, and away to who knows where.
“Don’t wait up, dear,” said Monica, and followed.
Inheritance
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
The phase ships drifted overhead, immense and slow as clouds — rusty clouds, Last Empire surplus that had spent a few decades rotting in a parking orbit around one of the further ring-moons — and flocks of drones flew around, among, and between them.
Coming down from the viewing platform, I missed the last stair. One or more of the ships must have needed its gravity tuned. My feet pedaled around a couple times before I found the ground. The auction wasn’t going well.
“That’s minor,” said my Aunt Artemisia. Her voice echoed over the salt flat in waves as the translators for each group of bidders caught up. “They cleared a thorough inspection by registered engineers. Nothing’s wrong that’ll cost much to fix.”
I could tell that from the way that the Zhrrkians had sheathed their foreclaws they weren’t planning to scratch any bids on their translator pads, and the ecto-projections from the 11th dimension were barely bubbling in their jars, so they didn’t look ready to jump into the bidding fray either.
The phase ships were essentially big hovering rocks, triumphs of solid-state engineering and utter failures of livability. Aunt A. had to drop the starting bid twice, and the price moved sluggishly from there.
“Do I hear nine billion?” Her enthusiasm was “Eight?”
But the auction kept rolling; every time it seemed like someone had won by a few credits, another bid came in. More often than not, the keep-alive bids seemed to come in on the screens hooked to the transdimensional relays. But they seemed to come in just a little too quickly; there should have been more of a lag.
“Fifteen?” said Aunt Artemisia. “Fourteen-five?”
I monitored the input, waited for another lull, another last minute save. It happened twice more before I could trace it, another time before I believed the results: it was the drones. The drones we’d rented along with the auction platform, the salt flats and the airspace above.
I looked up. They weren’t just randomly flocking around the ships, transmitting images. They were looking for something, following some kind of ridges or cracks that hadn’t been in the inspector’s report.
I wondered for a moment why they’d been stalling — surely the weren’t trying to run up the price. Then the first of the phase ships hatched, and the drones helped the vast glowing thing within to emerge into the universe. From then on, we all had far more interesting things to wonder about.