Turns out the blood of the workers is a pretty lousy oil substitute.
“I told you we should have used their fat!” fumes Dagny.
“They don’t have any fat,” snaps Olga, “they’re all on Atkins, remember? Fourth Estate! More blood!”
Fourth Estate cranks the hose-pump enthusiastically, but Dagny knocks the nozzle out of her hand. “You’re only going to gum it up more!” she says.
“You–you Rawlsian!” Olga tackles her, and they collapse wrestling into an ankle-deep blood pool.
“This is hot,” pants Dagny, struggling, “I bet we could sell tickets.”
“Fourth Estate! Get the camera!” shrieks Olga.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Eventually, thanks to stubborn tradition and globalization, everybody’s family name is either Li or Smith. There are some people in San Francisco named Smith-Li but nobody likes them.
Smith men only want to marry Li women and so goes the reverse, which means that while percentages fluctuate, they stay at about fifty-fifty for the next twelve thousand years.
Then one day, Smith Nakhit pings the downtown courthouse construct and demands to change her name–not to Li, not even to the apocryphal Smith-Li, but to Jones.
And it totally catches on! Everybody’s named Jones now! So that’s good.
Madigan basically expected, throughout her career in tech theatre, to end up in the CIA.
There is this about a safe house: it must feel safe. It needs dressing like any set; even the new ones need to have their corners knocked and book spines broken. It’s not just to blend away from enemy eyes. It’s to give agents and those in protective custody the feeling that people have been here; people have lived here; people have lived.
Madigan stayed in one in Madrid, quietly and against regulations, for a vacation week. The art on the walls was all children’s collage.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Eventually this guy from the original team gets Death to let him bring Deep Blue to a chess match. He wins. People rage about the technocracy and preferential treatment, etcetera, but it turns out you can beat him with a MacBook running Rybka.
In fact, most of the the time all you need is one of those hand-cranked laptops, and soon deathless child armies rule the third world. They march the old warlords off to candy factories; the diamond business collapses. It’s a strange kind of paradise.
Death buys his own laptop but he can’t get the touchpad to work.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Revere’s musket worked well enough against the natives and their witching pelts, when first they came to Massachusetts; but after their tea party two years back the King’s men have been massing in Boston, and silversmith’s bullets won’t avail them much.
So they’ve been watching, the Masons of Liberty, and now they’re riding. The lanterns are bright in the church tower–a last-ditch signal they can’t take down. One if by land. Two if by wing.
Revere can’t let himself look back. “The Redthroats are coming!” he yelps into the swallowing night, while behind him race dark and slitted eyes.
Friday, November 23, 2007
“But all you do anymore is commercial crap,” protests Andrei. “What happened to your old work, in black and white?” He yanks a book off the shelf, fans it. “This! The stuff that came from–”
“The heart?” says Verity, and chokes a giggle. “Oh, please finish that sentence. And my ‘commercial work’ is at least as valid as overexposed pictures of a butter churn by a fencepost.”
“It’s selling out!”
“It’s my talent, used as I like, with money on top,” says Verity. “How long is this going to be an issue?”
“Until you kick me off your couch,” sniffs Andrei.
Monday, November 26, 2007
“Bonfire” comes from “bone-fire,” which is to say a fire that can turn calcium to ash: so a very hot fire indeed. You hold two bonfires in autumn and two in spring, and you drive cattle between them, lowing and foaming. It funnels their life into the planting or the harvest.
“Professional arsonists,” the police told the news. More like vocational, thinks Donnchadh, as he and the other priests watch the West Pier burn. Their fingers tingle. They’re thundering with it, the crashing strength of its iron skeleton, the gape-mouthed worship of those who shuffled its hot bright length.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007