Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Finer Cheeses of the Late Cretaceous
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
Dear Moms and Dads,
I am not about to admit that you were even slightly right, but the second half of the summer is not turning out to be quite as terrible as the first half. The difference? Red Freya, who used to lead the tours, forgot to charge her ionic shield before one of her jumps back to the milking era and got bit by some kind of proto-mosquito, so now she’s got a lump the size of a grapefruit on her leg and I get to herd the tourists around while she sits on my stool in the gift shop and looks out at the gray snow in the dino skeleton garden.
It’s a long day, because the Motaris are cheap, and only pay us by shop-relative time and have all the tours come back right after they leave, even though it takes at least forty minutes to hop from the kollikodon barn to the remote milking traps — some days we don’t actually find one with a repenomamus in the harness until the third or fourth try. And if one of those feathered dinos runs by, forget it — we won’t be back in under an hour. Like every zoo back up in home time doesn’t have dome where you can trip over the things. We’re not supposed to log more than half our time in eras with carnivorous megafauna or the insurance company will raise the rates, but the Mrs. Motari who assigns the tours doesn’t seem worried.
Me, I like being more in a time where everything’s alive and growing than a time where everything’s dead except us in the creamery and the shop, even if it’s alive and dangerous, even if I know it won’t last, at least not in this worldline. I still want to visit one of the no-K/T-extinction lines on my way home, just to see how it all comes out. (And no, Mom2, it’s not because of S’ksth’sks — I mean, he’s sweet, with his big eyes and the way his crest is always ruffled in the morning, but he can be sarcastic, too, and if I go to his line, I’ll have to spend some time with his hatch-mates, and there’s twenty-five of them, so I’ll be totally outnumbered, and I don’t think any of them have travelled off-line or have any mammal friends.)
But we can talk about that later. I’ve got to go now — the 3:00 group is getting bored with the way the kollikos bump around in their pens — or maybe they’ve notice that special giant platypus reek.
XOXOXO
Cicely9B
Seen by Half-light
Friday, December 28th, 2007
Miranda Edison went out into the indigo of the suspended evening to walk. The city was just familiar enough that she kept looking, kept searching for the alley and the interior courtyard that she remembered.
The memory was one of her oldest; she couldn’t have been more than four or five. Just images and emotion: twilight saturating everything, buildings on four sides lit from within like paper lanterns, lulling buzz of distant traffic over the more distant whisper-vesper of the sea. She’d dropped a glove, bent to pick it up. In a window, she saw a face mostly shadow, laughing. He saw her. Answering laughter welled up in her and she clamped her throat against it, ran away down the alley.
A creepy memory, really. The laughing man still scared her. But the vividness – the texture of the stone, the realness of the trampled snow and the worn-fingered gloves, the illuminated drapes, the glimpsed piano in one window, the shelf of candy-bright books in another, the woman in the white mutton-sleeved blouse laying out silverware on a table in a third – had drawn her back to this city on the edge of the arctic twenty years later.
It might have been a thickening of the clouds or one of the sun’s occasional feints further below the horizon, but the sky tinged deeper and Miranda found herself noticing how far apart the streetlights were and how dark it got between them. She was lost; she turned at a corner that seemed familiar from the way out. It wasn’t the corner she thought it was, but this was the memory-place, an alley-end behind tall buildings like the bottom of a square-sided well. The windows were dark; an open one creaked and slammed in the wind.
If the laughing man was there, she couldn’t see him. She almost bolted, then remembered her coat, the scarf nearly up to her eyes and the hat down over her brows – all black. He couldn’t see her either. She laughed, silently, and the panic slipped from her.
She started back for the guesthouse. On the near wall, in chalk that glowed like ultraviolet fire under the evening purple, a line of slanted curly-tipped numbers. She had no idea what they meant, perhaps just the city offering a safer mystery to replace the one she’d just traded away when she found the lost place and broke its mystery.