“Fall, Socialist Satans!” Randigrad shrieks through cavernous megaphones, unleashing another cannonade. Marxopolis rocks on its treads and spits back an electrostatic volley.
“Your epithets are inconsistent with rationality,” it trumpets. “Clearly your logic is as flawed as your elitist philosophy!”
“Eat alloy!” snaps Randigrad, and labors to bring its broadside to bear.
Deep in the sweating bowels of Marxopolis, Karl and Leoben heave at one of the thousand yokes that keep the gears turning, then brace for the shock of impact.
“Heard anything about what the infidel Objectivists use for power?” says Leoben wistfully.
“Pretty much the same thing,” says Karl.
“It’s a known area of vulnerability,” says Harris. “Aquatic attack! Enemy frogmen, firing spearguns from the reeds before the bodyguard can shake off his shock!”
“Or her shock,” says Burlington.
“A female bodyguard wouldn’t be shocked,” says Harris firmly.
Burlington lets this pass and waves vaguely. “Okay,” he says, “your solution?”
Harris yanks the curtain from the big plastic tank. Its occupant heaves itself onto the edge, whiskers brandished in a rampant pose of fierce vigilance.
“Let’s see them,” grins Harris, “get past a guard manatee!”
The manatee proves to be completely useless so they eat it and get a dog.
You can’t use a brush for this: they’re already perfectly good at depicting the truth. You need a fountain pen.
Cardiff pumps the lever and drenches the halogen bulb in ink, which mostly steams or drips right off: the smell is oily and redolent of mushrooms. He empties cartridge after cartridge, and some the residue begins to build up. It dims.
When it’s thick enough, he can take off his dark goggles and look directly at it. The dry shell has already started cracking; Cardiff waves his fingers slowly over them and watches their outlines flicker like lightning on the wall.
“It’s time we stopped pretending, Dagan,” murmurs Tamara throatily. Dagan becomes suddenly aware of her nearness, the warmth and bulk of her tall body.
“I d-don’t know what you mean,” he replies nervously.
Then she’s gripping his wrists, pinning his naked back against the window, ravishing his mouth with brutal, hungry kisses. The evening’s champagne makes Dagan giddy; blood rushes to his head–and heat, to lower places.
“Stop–no–” he gasps. “It’s wrong, I’m your secretary–”
“The only thing that could be wrong, now,” she growls, “would be stopping,” and scoops him up to carry him into the bedroom.
In the middle of the pond there’s a tree and you can climb, barefoot and careful, some fifty old two-by-fours up to its stubby limbs. Everybody jumps off the lowest branch. Boys showing off for the girls jump from the second one. Boys showing off for boys jump from the top.
Laura drives herself and Tom back, seat belts over wet bathing suits. She plays good songs on the stereo; he’s funny. She twists her ring and asks, “sweetie, why didn’t I ever date you?”
“That’s a pretty confident question,” he says, falling, flailing, metaphor rushing up at him.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Between the Very Large Telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope and the HMFTJC, somebody forgets about the absorptive properties of certain thicknesses of nickel-iron alloy; when they split the planet in half to build the WET, the architecture of the dish turns part of the spectrum to cosmic mush. Earth never realizes it’s missing the transmission of songs and speeches and TV Westerns from Wolf 359.
The Wolf 359ians, of course, have made the same mistake. They listen hard, so hard, but never get a whiff of AM or VHF–just the bloops of the kraken, mournful in the lonely deep.
When they meet, Laurie learns that his name is Barathrum. After that she just talks, lured on by his sympathetic brown eyes: she tells him about her job, her last breakup, the time she led a protest march in the Dean’s office. By now the party’s over and they’re alone in her car, his gray eyes searching as she confesses to high school shoplifting and a kiss with her cousin. She finally realizes she knows nothing about him but his name.
“You’re such a good listener–” she falters. His black eyes are hungry and bottomless.
“Really?” he says. “Tell me more.”
Most anybody with a knack for somnomancy would set wards against jet lag on this trip, but Elihu prefers to feel the edges of time zones batter his mind: Wellington, Fiji, Nuku’alofa, then the great crash of the IDL.
“It’s a buffer,” Elihu explains later, red-eyed, to a fellow traveler at a guarana bar. “It’s a kindness, to blunt the edge of travel.”
“That’s a weird attitude,” she grumbles. “I’d wave my hands and just be adjusted, if I could.”
“Jet lag makes the place you’ve left a little more magical,” says Elihu. “The spells just use the magic up.”
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
“Her thesis is that it’s dependent on technology?” Tay snorts. “Even if she’s talking about instruments rather than computers, that’s hardly a new take–”
“It’s more sophisticated,” Sharon admits. “She’s saying that increasingly, each drives innovation in the other, and–hey, speaking of.”
They’re passing a coffee shop. Tay and Sharon pull out their pods and wave them at the window; customers inside wave back without looking up. Noises like a modem awkwardly mounting a shortwave radio, and they scroll down through their harvest from the filecloud.
“So music and technology are indistinguishable,” murmurs Tay.
“Well, sufficiently advanced music,” says Sharon.