Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Merlin, Mid-Ocean
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
Merlin walked across the ocean on a line of sea turtles stretched like garden stepping stones all the way from Atlantis to Mu. Under the shadeless sun, he cut a somewhat twee figure — beard to his knees, purple robes, pointy shoes, bell-fringed bowler, and in either hand, a parasol.
The water was clear enough he could see all the way down to the bones of sunken cities even he didn’t remember the names of. The clarity was a sign of trouble, and a reminder of why he was out here: the leviathans. They’d scoured the seas of anything they could fit down their maelstrom-wide gullets, from plankton to the 30-foot megasharks.
Merlin hopped from shell to shell, sweated in his robes, and tried not to scratch the sunburn peeling from his nose. He didn’t have to wait long before he noticed turtles swimming by, fleeing. He turned, and the leviathans rose to meet him.
Taller than mountains, they became the sky. Spray and spill-water came down in torrents. One of the vast beasts bent to devour the wizard. Its breath stank of tide pools stranded too long under the sun, of whole schools of beached fish.
Merlin held a parasol out like a sword.
“I have my affectations,” he said, “but they’re useful affectations.”
Just as the monster’s jaws encircled him, its lips and teeth becoming the wizard’s horizon, he thumbed a button and the parasol popped open. It stretched as wide as the leviathan’s mouth, its tines rooting in the distant gum-line. The creature reared back and shook its immense head, but the parasol held fast.
“You can eat whatever you can suck through that,” said Merlin.
The second leviathan narrowed its mouth and charged.
Merlin gathered his robes and sprinted along the line of bobbing turtles. He threw the remaining umbrella at the vast flesh wall of the leviathan’s head.
The parasol unfurled, its supports melting to tentacles that scored the leviathan’s hide with tooth-ringed suckers and gripped it fast.
“You’ll never know rest again,” said Merlin.
The leviathan howled through a dozen octaves and dove, still embraced by the parasol squid.
Merlin sat down on turtle-back.
He rapped on the shell. “Change of course,” he said. “Babylon, please, but take your time. We have a few centuries.”
The Next Flight of the Icarus
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
You had to know where it was — and when, because it was just solid rock if you missed the moment. But, with a good map and a watch set right, you’d find it: the door in the side of the rocky hill. And inside, the wreckage of the slipship.
That’s what we called it, because we figured it must have been made to pass through solid objects, maybe phase between universes or something. We used to argue about whether it was made by aliens or time-travelers from the future. I argued time-travelers. Everything was human-sized — the chairs at the right height, the buttons not too big or too small, and the screens mostly at eye-level.
“Could be alien time-travelers,” said Dhalya.
“Could be,” I said, even though I didn’t think so.
We named everything — so we could find our way around; so it seemed more cool than eerie. There was the glass altar, the dentist chairs, master control, and the room full of sinks. The whole ship, for obvious reasons, we called the Icarus.
We’d never noticed the lump in the middle of one of the desk-shelves. It must not have had glowing symbols on it before.
“It’s a clock,” said Dhalya. She pressed buttons, held her own wrist up near it.
Shapes flowed and flickered over the lump. They blinked once, again.
“I think it’s on,” I said. The numbers weren’t quite in time to the second hand on Dhalya’s watch, but they were shifting with a regular pulse.
And then I looked up. Some kind of multicolored melting nebula special effect was happening out of the window that we’d always thought was just another wall.
We weren’t alone. Creatures were everywhere on the multi-level deck, hurrying from one station to another on their too-many-jointed legs. It was hard to know if they were always this frantic, or if they realized they’d just been uncollided with a large rock.
“Hah,” said Dahlya, barely squeaking out the words. “Not human.”
One of them stopped to look at us with spinning, faceted eyes.
“No,” it said. “Not for a long time.”