Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Evening in the Chess-Cafe Star
Monday, July 16th, 2007
That Tuesday evening, like every Tuesday for the last couple of months, Maxim Abromovich Klebanov went to the chess café on Zaparin street. Javad Azaizeh waited at the usual table by the window. Like a third of the tables in the café, instead of chess pieces, the table was set with a shallow bowl of glass beads beside the board on each side. A new fad, the game with glass beads was as rigorous as chess but more abstract.
They made the usual small talk as they played — ostensibly, the older man was helping Max with his French, but they both enjoyed the challenges of the games, chess at first, this new game for the last few weeks. They placed the beads at the corners of squares or, when the rules allow, in the center. Javad jotted the score and corrected Max’s accent; Max was distracted —
3: Akbal: climbing the steps to the sky: even with the green of the trees beyond the city
Max’s peripheral mind read patterns in the bead arrangements as Mayan calendar glyphs and jaunted off on cross-reference tangents —
8: Lamat: topography in relief: overlays for infrastructure, political divisions, groundcover vs. cleared vs. paved : looped animations showing ebb and flow of cultivation over decades.
Max shook his head. His contract was very specific: the peri-brain implant was for work only. The company paid for the surgery and the monthly subscription. The connection should have ended when he left the building. He shook his head again. One idea opened into the next.
14: Ix: import export ratios for corn, beans, millet, rice: by district, by country, by continent: by month, by year, by rolling five-year interval: flurry of numbers: mob of colored charts
The clatter and conversation in the street, loud yet removed. Against the focused silence of chess club, the noise was like a pressure in the air.
Max had fallen silent, but Javad must have assumed his friend was concentrating on the game. The taste of dust from another continent, another century, was thick on Max’s tongue. Amidst the random firings of the peri-brain, he glimpsed a story, a life. He moved his lips, couldn’t find words.
20: Ahau: numbers flock and disperse: commodities markets, futures: a wind in the treetops: so many steps
The game was over. Javad stood, wrapped his scarf around his neck, said something. Reached out to shake Max’s hand.
Behind Max’s eyes, the cycle of days began again.
1: Imix: climbing still higher: above the trees now and nearer to the sun’s heat
The Grand Spire
Friday, July 6th, 2007
(From A Comprehensive Guide to the Labyrinth City, by P.W. Garletts. 1087: Mewlen and Oll, Publishers; Osper Square. Pages 57-58.)
The Grand Spire is the tallest building in the Labyrinth City and, allegedly, the only one from whose upper floors the whole design of the city can be seen.
Built in the Linear Year 136 by architect siblings Oscar, Omar and Olive Specto, the tower was built of stone quarried from the mountain that formerly stood in what is now the Three Hills neighborhood.
The Grand Spire’s existence was one of the underlying causes of the Second Mapmaker’s revolt in L.Y. 260. When Queen Sheparsa IV brokered an end to hostilities, the fate of the spire was one of the most contentious issues. The only issue that united the squabbling Mapper’s Guilds was their common desire to see the Spire razed. Eleven-finger Owlsely, a steward of the Sevenbridge guild, even produced a map of a proposed park that would encompass the dunes that would result from the Spire’s being ground to sand.
The nearby neighborhoods, however, had seen the worst of the fighting during the revolt’s five years. With its massive stone blocks barely chipped, the spire was the least damaged building for nearly a mile in any direction, and a great source of local pride. More practically, the inhabitants of Spireshadow, Spireview, Baker’s Fallow, Wormtree, and Lower Seething saw the Spire’s use as a landmark as their only hope to rebuild without falling prey to the unscrupulous map sellers who were quickly amassing fortunes in other war-torn quarters of the city.
So it is that the tower wardens not only cover their faces with eyeless masks but also blind themselves each day at noon by plunging lit torches into troughs of ink-dust, filling the interior of the tower with impenetrable darkness. Behind the welded-shut windows, the wardens go about their duties by touch. No matter how they may be tempted, they are unable to abuse their position and glimpse the plan of the city.
From the time of the truce, maps in the Labyrinth City have been approximate, transitory, and provisional, but the peace, however strained, whatever injustices it leaves unchallenged, is — like the Grand Spire — enduring.