Swallows dive-bomb the park, picking insects as they rise out of cooling grass. Jake dodges when they strafe by his knees.
Consider the eye of the predator bird: an instrument hundreds of millions of years in development, perfected while you were still a tree shrew looking out both sides of your head. Forget what it’s like to be a bat. Birdsight, like the Hubble, strains photons bouncing gnatwise from the deep field of dusk.
Jake’s headphones have stopped working. He pulls them off and runs on, puffing, a red-faced struggle to stay out of the ranks of the old and sick.
“I remember when this fighting made sense,” mutters Waxman (D-CA). “Two sides, party lines, primary colors. I had allies over there.” His suit is mudstained, one sleeve torn for a bandage.
“It couldn’t last,” says Martinez (R-FL) wryly. “War is never that simple.”
“I liked it better when we paid people to do this for us,” grumbles McConnell (R-KY).
“Prepare yourselves!” bellows Mikulski (D-MD), her claymore high. “You hold this line! You hold!”
Four hundred thirty-five cavalry mount the hill and charge, sabers gleaming. Waxman licks his lips, grasps the haft of his pike, and waits.
Evony’s mother is a basket case and her father is an iceberg. This makes parent-teacher conferences difficult.
“WE THOUGHT SHE WAS IMPROVING IN SOCIAL STUDIES,” booms her father (or, technically, his top ten percent).
“She is,” winces Miss Lagant. “But eighth-grade curriculum emphasizes current events, and she’s not up to speed. Do you get the paper or watch the evening news?”
“Oh no!” says her mother. “It’s always so depressing.”
Miss Lagant stares at her beautifully lacquered cherry lid. “I’m sorry, I have to ask. If there’s a basket inside you, what’s inside the basket?”
“Eggs,” says Evony’s mother.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The gates of Luoyang crash open, and allied troops surge inward. The daring young generals follow, Sun Jian foremost among them.
“Usurper! Tyrant! Fiend and false emperor!” he thunders, saber high. “Im in ur base!”
“Do not want,” Dong Zhuo chortles in reply, as fire roars across the thatched roofs of the city. “lol! gtg.” He wheels his horse and pounds for the western gate.
“Never gonna give you up,” snaps Cao Cao, lashing his steed, urging his detachment through the flames. “You have no chance to survive make your time!”
“O,” grins Lu Bu, waiting just around the corner. “RLY?”
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
“This could all be put to rest,” says Hawthorne, “with a valid death certificate.”
“Here!” says Senji, propping up his netbook. “Factcheck.org. Scans of the document. Pictures of the seal.”
“Oh, you can’t trust Photoshops,” says Hawthorne.
“Here’s video of people handling it.”
“Occam’s Razor. We must not needlessly multiply death certificates!” says Hawthorne. “Only physical evidence–”
“You’re beginning an argument that leads into a distrust of all information from your senses,” says Senji.
“Do you know what that means?”
“Descartes already explored–”
“We’re still inside the game!” gasps Hawthorne, thrashing, fumbling for the goggles and the IV drip.
You can hide out for a long time in Kijong-dong, if you want to. There aren’t many amenities, true, and the farms on the outskirts don’t grow real food; but there’s heat, and light, and shelter, and they don’t even play the music these days.
Laugh at Kijong-dong if you want: it’s a silly place, as a king once said, absurd in its insistent claims to progress and glory. But what kind of mind has shored it up so well against the world’s derision? Could your will have kept it going all these years, empty and tall and bright?
Fawcett does find Z, five days after leaving the Kalopalo, right at Kuhikugu where they expected. It’s a mandala on the floor of the all-consuming forest.
The Xinguanos liked their buildings sturdy, back when they had buildings, and many have resisted collapse. Everything’s covered in green. The only clean stone is the light well in the central temple, which turns out to lead to the center of the earth.
“Is that where they all disappeared to?” asks his son.
But Fawcett is already scrambling over the edge, hands shaking, headfirst into this perfect manifestation of the fear of the unknown.
Kitezh, like the strange flora of undersea vents, learns to do without the sun. Deep in the dark and icy lake, they learn reliance on a new power source: faith.
Faith brings illumination in the shape of strange, glowing fish, and food in a similar fashion. It is through faith that they deny the need for warmth and air. Faith even provides wine casks, half-buried in the silt.
Like everyone, Anatoly pauses to bow his head at the hourly tolling bells (from time-eaten towers that tremble not). His prayer is simple and frightening: that their faith is not misplaced.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Iram is one of the first places he finds himself, seventy years into it, while he still considers the whole thing a lark. Such is his confidence in his own cynicism that he smirks knowingly to find that the “City of a Thousand Pillars” has, like, fifty-eight.
Everything smells like frankincense and camel dung. Some of the merchants try to pass off one as the other.
He rushes to help when the first of the sinkholes suddenly gulps down a teahouse. Lugging a sobbing matron out of the sand, Longinus doesn’t even ponder his own wrongness about the cynicism thing.