Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Onierographer
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
She’d only just arrived. Translucent like illuminated smoke, the curves of buildings loomed over her, but she felt more comforted than claustrophobic and, realizing something wasn’t right about that response, she fell awake.
The laminated prompt card still lay on her blanket.
One of the researchers was right there, making a show of reading something off a display in the corner. As if he couldn’t have done that from control room.
She pre-empted what she knew he was going to say.
“I’ll pack first thing in the morning,” she said, and tugged at an electrode on her scalp.
“It happens this way with some people. A lot early, then nothing.” He sounded sympathetic, but she knew he got paid by the page his subjects produced, and must be secretly relieved to get someone new into this room, someone who might dream more productively.
“I was there. On a street. Somewhere in the ammonite city.”
He didn’t even look up from his clipboard. “Did you see any inhabitants? Get a sense of what any of the buildings were? Were you in the inner or outer whorl?”
“I didn’t…” she said. “I’m sorry.” Her eye lingered on the spiral as she handed him the prompt card.
“We’ll mail your last check.” He pulled something from the pocket of his lab coat. “Here,” he said, “for a free copy, when the book comes out.”
The coupon showed the cover: More Dream Realms Revealed: A LucidTravel Guide.
She shivered awake.
The director, Dr. Current-Waves-Tendril flushed disappointment pinks and purples from the tips of his upper limbs. “How much did you give them?”
Red-Sand-Hiding stretched on the sleeping shelf, brushed life-support barnacles from her mantle.
“Not enough,” she said, “We’re still a prime destination.” She could feel frustration brightening her face. “Publication date’s pushed back a little, that’s all.”
Within a year, they’d be overrun; mobs of dream tourists, gawking without inhibition, would wander the inner and outer whorl, the upper and lower spirals.
“The others haven’t done much better,” said the director, and Red-Sand-Hiding saw two-thirds of the shelves were empty. “They can sustain the dream, but not the dream within it. We’ll have to try the next plan soon.”
She loosened her limbs in agreement. Somewhere, she knew, behind walls that swirled like ink, were pens of sharks, hungry, restless, ready to turn the streets of ammonite city to nightmare for a season.
Women Watching from the Shore
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
The waves coming in on the gravel shore were sewn through with dragons, pencil-sized, silver, each spinning a froth droplet in its fore-claws.
Two women sat side by side on one of the memorial benches and watched the prison moon rise over the breakers. One in a corduroy coat, the other curled into herself, only a thin shawl against the wind.
A samovar cart jingled and sloshed from the direction of the pier.
“Do you have a least-brass?” said the woman in the heavy coat. The other woman placed a coin on the ones already in her palm.
Two paper cups of tea; three small cookies, an afterthought, dropped in the hand of the woman in the shawl.
Thirty years before, these women were not friends. The woman in the shawl used to run a shop on the ground floor of the building where the other woman lived. She extended credit to her neighbors. She overcharged on a random basis, knowing they’d never complain.
The moon lifts; the sky darkens; colony lights flicker into view. Coldgate. Artemis II. Shandren. They’ll wait, like they do whenever they happen to walk out at the right time on a cloudless, full moon night. It happens more often than chance would allow.
The tea is harsh. Some of the dragons needle out from the water to snatch wind-blown crumbs from the cookies and tumble them in place of their froth-orbs.
Seventeen years ago, the woman in the coat was taken away and charged with crimes against the ruling pattern. She protested, but there was evidence from an anonymous witness, and she went up for nine years, and came back to find the woman in the shawl had taken over her shop in her absence. A gift from the patterners, although she never explained, and the other never asked. (The patterners pay; they do not give.)
The paper-edges of the cups soak a little further through with every sip.
There it was: Hsieu’s Bridge. They rose together from the bench. The woman in the shawl held her breath a moment, as if expecting the other woman to make some statement, but the other woman remained silent. Whatever truce lay between them in the place where forgiveness would never be, it would last another month, at least.
The women continued their walk up the beach. The woman in the shawl leaned into her companion’s corduroy arm.