Archive for September, 2010
The Tree of What Could Be
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
He read the directions. Five times. The machine had to run, a persistent low whine, for ten days to calibrate itself to his reality, to his “multiversal node-ality.”
After ten days, the button on the front glowed green like page 12 said it would. He pushed it, as described, gently, firmly. The whine became a hum.
In the early hours of day 72, it was lack of hum as much as the machine’s shrill chime that woke him. He dragged a kitchen chair over, sat there in his bathrobe and slippers, the machine’s chilly visor on his eyes, its navigation gloves too tight on his hands.
The interface was anything but intuitive; after an hour, he asked the house for coffee, stronger and more of it than usual. That helped.
The display branched and rebranched, a vast tree, a neuron’s dendrites, a river delta, dividing ever finer. He figured out the twist of hands that allowed him to sync with a particular branch. To drop into the consciousness of his parallel self in that alternate reality.
In the first, he noticed his bathrobe plaid was redder. In the second, his mug brimmed with herbal tea. He went further, twisted gloves, and spent ten minutes searching before he realized that the movies on the arthouse calendar on the fridge were in a different order. But the titles, stars, synopses, were the same, and the same scattering of magnets held it in place.
He’d hoped for something more dramatic–a world ruled by Nazis, or communists, or dinosaurs. A home built of mudbrick, glass, or pure light. A body that was taller, in better shape or half robot. But no matter how far out across the tree of alternatives, all he saw was too-close versions of his too-familiar kitchen.
He began to twiddle the machine in ways the manual discouraged, in ways it warned against, and finally in ways dared not mention. He was sure his other selves were doing the same, all looking for somewhere other.
He twisted in to see, just as another reality turned to nothing but light. An explosion–he saw it in one universe after another, and was too busy watching to do fiddle any further with his own machine.
When his was the only branch left, the machine made a sound like a lightbulb burning out.
He stood and rubbed his eyes, feeling very, very alone.
The Cartographer Dreams
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
The cartographer dreams.
Asleep at his drafting table. Wet ink on the maps he is drawing for the Dutch East India Company.
Indigo lines blur in his unconscious mind, dissolving into the black night sky.
He traces lines across the heavens. Glowing white paths arcing from star to star.
“These routes are not for merchant schooners,” a voice tells him.
“But what kind of fleet could traverse the heavens,” he asks.
His dream shifts and he is standing in a vast desert. Strange, towering, rock formations surround him.
Dingos howl. A camel snorts and looks skyward. A pair of wallabies hop away.
The giant hull fills the sky. The vessel is so massive all the cartographer can see is its silver underside, eclipsing the moon and sky.
He wonders how can it be that it is airborne, then he awakes.
#
The cartographer daydreams of the routes between the stars and the great silver ship, but his contracts and deadlines with the Dutch East India Company await.
He draws the Indian Ocean. And the Horn of Africa. Coastlines and ports and dotted lines ocean faring ships must travel with their cargos of spice and precious things.
He works until late in the night and falls asleep at his drafting table again.
#
In his dream the great sky vessel is hovering above the desert sky. The ship is a giant sphere above the primordial landscape. An artificial thing, bathing the stone and sand and parched earth in white light.
“Draw the maps,” the voice tells the cartographer. “Come here, bury them in a chest of lead in the mountains called Kata Tjuta.”
“Why?” the cartographer demands.
The light flares. In the white brilliance he sees a story of moving pictures played out in the sky before him. The great sky vessel is coming. They are fleeing persecution like the colonists fleeing Britain. Their enemies are far stronger. So they must flee very far away. They are from so far it will take them hundreds of years to arrive. If they are caught they must have no trace of their plans of their final destination with them.
“This is why we need you,” the voice says.
The cartographer awakens.
#
The cartographer returns to inking the trade routes. He draws for several minutes, wondering where he can procure a chest of lead. Then he stops and unrolls a blank piece of parchment. In his mind’s eye he sees the stars and begins to draw.
– END-