Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Sunrise
Friday, November 26th, 2010
The peacocks seemed to spend their nights down by the river. Possibly in the apple trees. I never went down to check. They probably would have heard me coming; it would have been inconclusive.
Anyway, I meant to tell you about the robot. What was I saying? Oh yeah, the metal. It had this sheen, iridescent–guess that’s what got me started on peacocks.
So the robot was made with tiny speakers all over it, and supposedly emitted all these subsonic sounds, like wind, leaves, and sounds insects make and only other insects can hear. So it could wander around the enclosures without spooking anything.
Guess it worked, because it used to walk around in this really, slow, calm way, and none of the animals minded. There’d be a deer grazing, a mother deer, with fawns, and she’d just look up, and just when I thought she’d spring away, she didn’t. Might not have spooked the animals, but it kind of spooked me.
I got used to it, the way you get used to things working a lot with an android. And then it started picking up other odd sounds on its speakers, sounds I could hear. Static, hums, high screechy whistles, and, once, when we were working together to re-contour some of the erosion breaks along the lake road, what I could have sworn was the “don’t expect to see the sunrise,” spoken with this accent like the scientists in the programs have, like someone who’s spoken Math all their life.
I dropped my shovel. The robot kept digging, at least until it noticed I’d stopped. Then it did that head-tilt triangulation thing, checking me out in infrared and echolocation and whatever else it’s got, which always looks to me like confusion, so I said, “What was that?”
It acted like it didn’t have a human language chipset, although I was sure those come standard. I started wondering if it wasn’t a stray signal, if it was a threat. If the robot harbored some glitch that approximated hate. The rest of the afternoon crawled.
Finally, it turned to me. “I have analyzed my utterance.” Its consonants, crickety; its vowels, river splash and burble.
It held its shovel like an ax. I expected it would bury me, or the pieces that had been me, in one of the retaining banks.
“95% chance of complete cloud cover, all day,” it said.
Strange Navigations
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
We rolled the wicker cage out of the water and onto the beach. Within, water poured from the convolutions of the brain shell.
From a gaff-pole’s length away, we rolled, waited, rolled; the shell tumbled, dripped. We repeated until the rolling didn’t spot the dry sand, and we figured it was as safe as it’d get. Dry, they’re sluggish.
“Careful!” said the captain. He stood twenty paces off.
Bellamy, a share-and-a-half man who’s been with the crew twenty years, buckled on the shield and glove. The shield was giant tortoise’s shell. Set in the middle, the glove was shark hide and stank from all the lard greasing it into flexibility. It hasn’t been used–or needed–for a dozen voyages.
We’ve been lost in mapless seas for two months, and becalmed for weeks. Some blame the captain’s timidity in keeping us far from stronger winds in hope of avoiding cyclones. Others say it’s simple bad luck.
But we all agree: if we ever want to get home–or anywhere–we need brain shell stew and the uncanny sense of wind and current it gives.
That’s why I volunteered to be a spotter, leaning down to watch and shout instructions to Bellamy, who couldn’t feel or see where he was reaching.
“Three hand-breadths to me,” I said.
“Down about half that,” says Higgs.
“A little away from me,” I say. “Right. That’s it.” Behind me, I hear the others setting up a cookfire for the pot of water that’s already boiling down nearer the ship.
“Good men!” said the captain. I didn’t look, but he sounded to be another half dozen paces away.
Bellamy’s fingers closed over the shell.
I looked up to see Higgs grab his throat, the welt flaring already up the side of his face.
“Gods, no!” said Bellamy, dropping the shell and its now-poisonous meat.
While Higgs writhed and cursed, the quartermaster and I ran and hurled it back into the water. We returned to find the captain and Higgs wrestling over a pistol.
“It’ll be… a… mercy,” says the captain.
The welts are stripes now, and Higgs’ skin echoes the brain shell’s pattern.
The pistol boomed; the captain fell. The thing that wasn’t Higgs struggled to speak.
We gathered to hear our new captain’s first orders, knowing we’d see home shores now for certain, if we survived to see any shores at all…