Dann (Borgo Press/Wildside) has just been published.
* * * * *
iROBOT
by Guy Haley
Illustrations for iRobot by Jim Burns
iROBOT
There is nothing but the desert, a landscape of dust and ceaseless wind. Dunes of dust creep across the land, dust sheets from their scimitar peaks. Ribbons of dust undulate swiftly up and down their sides. The dust makes the sky brown, the rising sun pale and dirty. Shrouds of dust chase each other through the air, tangling daylight in their umber strands. The sun retaliates, flaring a little brighter, calling shadows from the desert; hard and straight, traces of something beneath the sand.
There was a city here once.
Wind blows harder. Brick and worn concrete rise from the desert, grains of dust carried from them in torrents. The walls have lost their edges, worn smooth by the scouring sands. They are as cracked as ancient teeth, and yet in procession, taken from afar, unwavering. The lines and cells the walls describe are echoes of lost angles and cast geometry, straight where the dust is rippled and curled. In their simple precision the walls defy the fractal whorls of the dust, although they cannot win the battle, and have lost it many times before.
These are secret marks, conjured rarely when the light is just so, legible only to archaeology. Their testimony goes unread. There are no archaeologists any more.
Nor are there doctors, nor policemen. No bums, no vendors, no consumers, no mothers or fathers or children, no dogs or cats or bees or ants or trees. There is no one and nothing at all; nothing but brown dust and the ruins they suffocate, uncover, and suffocate again.
Something terrible happened here. When or what, nobody knows, because there is nobody left to know. Only the wind has a voice, but it says little; it does not care or remember.
In the lee of a broken wall two figures are revealed. One, huddled within the remains of long coat that flaps in the freezing wind, was once a man. Desiccated black flesh, hard as plastic, clings to yellow bones. Hair is still attached to his shrivelled scalp. His eyes are raisins in his sockets. His mouth is as wide as only the mouths of the dead can be, his tongue hard and sharp inside his jaw. He lies on one arm. The other is flung out. The bones of his fingers are outstretched toward the second figure, as if in supplication, or in revelation; the hand of an apostle reaching out to say “See! Here is the son of God”.
There are no gods now.
The second figure is not human. It is blocky and broken and its torso is pitted by the actions of the elements. Of its four limbs, one arm remains. Two of the fingers on the hand of this arm have broken away. It remains cloaked to its waist in the sand, coyly hiding the stumps of its legs. The wind pushes grains of sand from globules of melted plastic and metal scattered around the machine like dropped pearls. The ground they rest on is fused to glass.
For much of the year the machine is hidden. Summer storms periodically uncover the city, and then it and its companion. Shifting ramparts build themselves up to the shattered chestplate and fall away to the whim of the wind. The sports of dust are relentless, and have no winner.
The robot still has a head, a cartoonish facsimile of a human being. Its eyes are broken. Those parts of its solar array that are whole are scrubbed opaque, as is the screen upon its chest.
The machine has been dying a long time, but it is not yet dead.
As the veiled sun strikes the machine, something sparks inside. Images, as indistinct through the robot’s ruined screen as the sun is indistinct in the ruined sky, flicker and dance.
“Good morning,” the robot’s voice speaks. It does not matter in which language, it knows them all in any case, and the speakers of languages are all dead and gone from the Earth. “Good morning. I have four thousand and five reminders!” Without preamble, it begins. Music, the choice of a person whose dust is at one with all the
* * * * *
iROBOT
by Guy Haley
Illustrations for iRobot by Jim Burns
iROBOT
There is nothing but the desert, a landscape of dust and ceaseless wind. Dunes of dust creep across the land, dust sheets from their scimitar peaks. Ribbons of dust undulate swiftly up and down their sides. The dust makes the sky brown, the rising sun pale and dirty. Shrouds of dust chase each other through the air, tangling daylight in their umber strands. The sun retaliates, flaring a little brighter, calling shadows from the desert; hard and straight, traces of something beneath the sand.
There was a city here once.
Wind blows harder. Brick and worn concrete rise from the desert, grains of dust carried from them in torrents. The walls have lost their edges, worn smooth by the scouring sands. They are as cracked as ancient teeth, and yet in procession, taken from afar, unwavering. The lines and cells the walls describe are echoes of lost angles and cast geometry, straight where the dust is rippled and curled. In their simple precision the walls defy the fractal whorls of the dust, although they cannot win the battle, and have lost it many times before.
These are secret marks, conjured rarely when the light is just so, legible only to archaeology. Their testimony goes unread. There are no archaeologists any more.
Nor are there doctors, nor policemen. No bums, no vendors, no consumers, no mothers or fathers or children, no dogs or cats or bees or ants or trees. There is no one and nothing at all; nothing but brown dust and the ruins they suffocate, uncover, and suffocate again.
Something terrible happened here. When or what, nobody knows, because there is nobody left to know. Only the wind has a voice, but it says little; it does not care or remember.
In the lee of a broken wall two figures are revealed. One, huddled within the remains of long coat that flaps in the freezing wind, was once a man. Desiccated black flesh, hard as plastic, clings to yellow bones. Hair is still attached to his shrivelled scalp. His eyes are raisins in his sockets. His mouth is as wide as only the mouths of the dead can be, his tongue hard and sharp inside his jaw. He lies on one arm. The other is flung out. The bones of his fingers are outstretched toward the second figure, as if in supplication, or in revelation; the hand of an apostle reaching out to say “See! Here is the son of God”.
There are no gods now.
The second figure is not human. It is blocky and broken and its torso is pitted by the actions of the elements. Of its four limbs, one arm remains. Two of the fingers on the hand of this arm have broken away. It remains cloaked to its waist in the sand, coyly hiding the stumps of its legs. The wind pushes grains of sand from globules of melted plastic and metal scattered around the machine like dropped pearls. The ground they rest on is fused to glass.
For much of the year the machine is hidden. Summer storms periodically uncover the city, and then it and its companion. Shifting ramparts build themselves up to the shattered chestplate and fall away to the whim of the wind. The sports of dust are relentless, and have no winner.
The robot still has a head, a cartoonish facsimile of a human being. Its eyes are broken. Those parts of its solar array that are whole are scrubbed opaque, as is the screen upon its chest.
The machine has been dying a long time, but it is not yet dead.
As the veiled sun strikes the machine, something sparks inside. Images, as indistinct through the robot’s ruined screen as the sun is indistinct in the ruined sky, flicker and dance.
“Good morning,” the robot’s voice speaks. It does not matter in which language, it knows them all in any case, and the speakers of languages are all dead and gone from the Earth. “Good morning. I have four thousand and five reminders!” Without preamble, it begins. Music, the choice of a person whose dust is at one with all the
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