Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Happy New Year, Said the Rooster
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
The rooster took it philosophically. “I’ve always thought I had a spiritual calling,” he joked to the ducks.
The mallard drake, a half-wild resident of the dome wall wetland, didn’t think this was funny. “Why do you choose death when there is swimming and flying? Run away!”
The rooster cleared his throat with a delicate “ur-uhrt!” and the mallard was embarrassed to recollect that the rooster could neither swim nor fly. “Anyway,” said the duck, “they won’t kill you when they realize you’re a Speaking Animal.”
The rooster jerked his head back in that way chickens have when they want to be contrary. “If chopping off the head of a dumb rooster will bring luck to the farm, then chopping off the head of a Speaking Rooster should be much more luck. So I won’t tell them.”
The farm had been running a little short of luck. It was a serene and verdant little farm, five square kilometers under a bubble on an asteroid that drifted through the Jupiter Rim Mining Territories. Lately the miners had been doing badly, and the farm had been doing worse. No one had been able to afford eggs in almost four months. The bubble had grown a crack that crept further every week, and if they didn’t get the funds to fly in engineers soon, it might break open entirely, leaving Farmer Hwang-Bernstein and his family to cower in their survival shelter and hope for an evacuation mission while the livestock drifted away into space, bug-eyed and frozen.
So the rooster said nothing when 8-year-old Verita Hwang-Bernstein strode out and grabbed him by his taloned feet.
“You’re making a mistake!” the mallard quacked as she walked away, but Verita never talked to ducks, and the rooster didn’t know whether the mallard meant him or the girl.
Dangling upside down, the stars wheeling above him, the rooster began to feel unsure, and his marble-sized heart beat double time. When Verita laid him out on the old stump and the rooster glimpsed the farmer striding out with the axe, he began crowing and screeching and jerking around for all he was worth.
There was a kind of thwack. All his fears, suddenly, left him.
When his feet touched the ground he ran, heedless, unthinking, unburdened. He couldn’t see, nor hear, and he wasn’t even sure the ground was beneath his feet. “Ah,” the rooster thought. “So this is freedom.”
He might, he thought, be running in circles on the stars themselves.
Lunch in Mongolia
Monday, December 17th, 2007
I didn’t think about it until weeks later, when Meg was doing the bills. Even then I didn’t think about it until she walked in the living room, where I was flipping through an automatic car brochure with the dog sleeping on my feet. She trailed a little hologram of a credit card bill behind her as she came, and she’d put a red orbiter around the offending item. Trouble.
“Honey,” Meg said. Our real endearments were “baby” and “whiskey” (long story). “Honey” was a pretend endearment, like a mother using a kid’s middle name. “Honey” meant “you are screwed.”
So … “Honey,” she said. “Did you go to Mongolia?”
“Oh,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you about that, whiskey?” Weak, but what else did I have? “It was just for lunch.”
She frowned such a tight frown that her lips went pale. She looked madder than I’d ever seen her. Madder than when I got drunk on our first anniversary.
“You asshole!” she finally shrieked.
“Oh come on, baby,” I said. “Everybody teleports these days. I’m sick of being stuck in a backwater while everybody else goes wherever they want, whenever they want.”
“What do you think teleportation is? What do you think it is?” she said. Her voice was so loud it hurt my ears. “It’s not you at the other end. It’s a copy of you. The real you gets destroyed. The real man I married is dead! Who the hell are you?”
“You don’t have to make a big deal out of it, whiskey–”
“Don’t call me that!”
At that moment the front door opened, and we both froze. The door was on auto-lock, and it only opened for me and Meg and her parents and maybe the police or something. A figure emerged from it, a figure with recent burn scars and most of his hair singed off, wearing a hospital giveaway suit. A figure that looked like … me.
“Baby!” she cried out, in a strangled voice. “What happened?” And she ran to him and threw her arms around him.
He shook his head, wincing at the pressure of her hug on his injuries. “Malfunction,” he said in a raspy voice. “It didn’t clear the original.”
“I hate you!” she screamed, and she began hitting him on the chest, but she was crying, and he gathered her into his arms, and she stopped. All of a sudden I felt like a third chopstick.
The dog woke up and started barking at me.