Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Sunlight on Broken Columns
Monday, November 29th, 2010
This is the final piece in the Hollow Men series. Three others have appeared (now revised): part I, part II and part III.
The way to the land leviathan, half-submerged in sand, was dry and empty. At dawn I dug a shallow trench and draped a cloth over the top to bury myself under. At dusk I cut succulents for their amassed water, gathered my gear, and marched on. Ahead the glowing eyes of the leviathan winked sleepily beneath the lamplight of the moon.
My heart felt a pang as the memory of a breeze rustled distant poppies and the glorious waxing-moon colloquies on the probability of existence, the purpose of purpose, and the electability of those electing to use nonexistent words. Yet I could no longer lay with my hands pillowing my head and chew the stems of bittersweet clover, much as I longed to sense the heat of a companion’s elbow seeping into mine. The world swelled with too much.
As the hours waned into morning, details of the leviathan’s general features spread apart: no longer a lounging leviathan but a ramble of crumbling buildings left to ruin. When light pooled at the horizon, what had been eyebrows raised into an archway of tiny wedding bells weakly, brokenly tinkling their march. The leviathan’s eyes became nothing more than mundane dimension portals. The images that the portals cast drew me closer.
The scenes were vaguely familiar, changing each time as the eyelid of one screen slid over another: me as a child I’d dreamed of was laughing and log-rolling all the way down to the bottom of the screw, the giant man my imagined self had assembled crossed deserts and mountains in a few strides, and me again as a man attaching pipes to construct a bridge spanning the screws. One corner of my mouth drew up. I touched the portal screen to visit these alternate realities, but a tough if thin, milky film separated me from penetrating this eye. It further hardened and clouded over under my palm while I pondered the dwarf’s warning, the silliness of dreams, and the water leaking from my eyes.
They closed, and I dreamed of piecing together a giant to help me build bridges. The screen softened, my hand slid through, and I toppled.
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.