Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
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-
How It Is
Monday, September 20th, 2010
The chicken settled into the in basket on my desk for lack of a better seat. He was clearly uncomfortable.
“I gather you’re here about your kind being killed for us to eat?” I said.
“Oh,” said the chicken. “So that part’s true. But–”
“Let me explain. When we kill a chicken–and by ‘we’ I mean some anonymous worker way off in a processing plant somewhere–we make most of the parts of that chicken into food. For instance, we might roast the whole chicken together–”
“After a decent funeral, I hope? No, I’m kidding. Sorry: nervous habit.”
I cleared my throat. The conversation was uncomfortable, but the chicken was more diplomatic than I’d been led to expect. “So we might roast the whole chicken, or we might use the breast meat in strips in one place and the wings in another … are you sure you’re all right?”
The chicken was scratching at the papers beneath him now, his feathers looking a little ruffled. “Honestly?” he said. “You aren’t quite the barbaric kind of creature I was expecting, but in a way this is worse. Your talk is pretty cold-blooded, for a mammal.”
“Well, unless we’re going to live on apples and tree nuts, we have to kill something, right?”
“But here we are, having a conversation … are you saying you’d just as soon eat me as talk with me? How do you justify that?”
“Listen, I’d love to see better treatment of your people while you’re alive, but it’s not as though you contemplate your impending doom the way a human would. And chickens don’t actually talk.”
“But … I can talk! Clearly your idea that chickens can’t talk is erroneous in some way.”
“You’re fictional. I don’t eat fictional chickens.”
“Uh … oh,” said the chicken. He spontaneously let out a kind of “buGAW!” noise, then looked embarrassed. “So that’s how it is?”
“That’s how it is.”
“This didn’t come out the way I was hoping.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll just let myself out, then.”
“Sounds good.” I smiled perfunctorily, and he flapped down to the floor. “Oh, and would you send in the Amazon rain forest on your way out? Thanks.”