The secrets of the Witches of Athay include a method for storing all the blood in your body in a jar in the cooling cellar. Isabella does so, with a knife and a pipette, then gives Patrick the umbrella and leads him out into the storm of glass. The music of the shards is beautiful; the cuts don’t hurt. She seals them up with superglue.
In the cooling cellar again, she pours her blood back in through her ear.
“I think you should have waited,” says Patrick.
“What?” says Isabella, as, in a pattern of tiny fountains, she begins to leak.
“It was at this point,” says Sherrinford, “that he shook my hand–”
“Aha!” says Sacker. “From which gesture you surely gathered a panoply of interesting details.”
“It was neither limp and cold, like a dead fisherman’s, nor crushingly tight like that of some great Russian sadist,” says Sherrinford. “His fingers were slightly moist from the exertion of climbing the stairs. The shake was appropriately firm, and ended after a clasp and a slight vertical movement.”
“And what did you deduce?” asks Sacker, mustaches twitching.
“Almost completely nothing,” says Sherrinford, “the only people who don’t shake hands like that are in books.”
They watch him in the side mirror of the car, sipping Thai iced teas. He’s brooding, flipping pizza in a sullen chain restaurant kitchen, not looking up.
“I believed my own hype,” mutters Liz. “Stupid. I thought if I loved him, that if I tried, I could fuck the crazy out of his brain.”
Delarivier shakes her head. “Your failure lies in where you placed his crazy.”
“You don’t have to put our whole relationship in terms of my failure,” says Liz.
“I didn’t. You did.”
“Then where was it really, smartass?”
“Men,” says Delarivier, “are crazy down to the bones.”
That the remainder of the research group be persuaded, by means of entirely positive entreaties, to continue working at the company and attending interview sessions.
That the control group be compensated for their time, released, and replaced with one better representative of area demographics.
That all particle transmission containment procedures be reviewed end-to-end, rethought, reinforced and reinstituted on an enterprise scale.
That, considering press coverage attitude and buzzword penetration, further investigation in this vein be rebranded and possibly shifted to another subsidiary (see attached).
That, given stockholder preference and the anticipated cost/benefit ratio, investigation in this vein continue.
It’s all coming in small and dry at the sinking end of summer; Stark looks glumly over the shriveled crop and wonders whether they’ll provide any juice at all.
“Are they supposed to look like that?” asks Antonia.
“They didn’t used to,” Stark admits. They follow the reaper along the elevated walkway into the big barn.
“You tried fertilizer?”
Stark shakes his head. “Costs money.”
“Pesticides?”
“They can swat their own flies.”
“Crop rotation? Irrigation? Er, compost? Anything?”
“Look,” snaps Stark, “if I wanted to tend to something I’d grow corn,” as the brain harvest squishes out onto the threshing floor.
Yesenia beats the gigolo until he falls down and money comes out. Her avatar runs around scooping it up.
“I don’t like some of the symbolism here,” says Yusuf.
“What, because it’s overt instead of covert?” Yesenia smirks. On the screen, her avatar jogs back toward town, phallus bouncing enormously before him. “You’d prefer I mask it as a sword or a big, fat, thick gun?”
“I was referring to the way all your interactions in the game involve penetration. Somehow it’s worse than, er, running them over.”
“It’s called Aggravated Sodomy 4. What did you expect?”
Yusuf frowns. “A satire.”
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
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.