Tyrannosaur Faire

Contents

One Long Summer Night Over at the Tyrannosaur Faire

Up ahead Barnum City creeps out along the road, neon jewels wooing the darkness, tendrils of light designed to scoop you in and fool you into thinking you’ve arrived when you have another thousand heartbeats to go. Teesha’s vehicle whips past shops and sundries, bright and gaudy as the city itself. Never leave, she thinks, this town is you, one false step and you’re back being a supplicant in El, depending again on the kindness of pilgrims. Grim, indeed.

Reflections in an Empty Pool

Cullen awoke amidst the tumult of the other thousand refugees as the sun’s rays lighted their tent. Before he could draw a peaceful breath, memories of Lila’s death hit him, her absence a space that filled his world. In silence he showered, dressed, made the bed, breakfasted. He left his possessions neatly stowed under the bed; the Conquistadors saw to it that nobody stole. Another quiet day in occupied Washington.

A Kiss Is Just a Kiss

On its slowest day, Hong Kong International Airport fed tens of thousands of bodies into the plush or plain holds of the jets bearing the insignia of sixty different airlines. Today, tens of thousands jostled one another each minute in lines that never ended, lines that boiled and roiled and dissolved and reformed as loved ones gave each other parting kisses. Then kissed friends, children, strangers, staff, crew, baggage handlers, passing taxi and bus drivers, and the police who kept threatening them with their clubs. The Flu had arrived and they were the first wave out of the infected area.

Wrestling with the Demon

In 1782, John Goodricke of York, England, started a series of observations which would lead him to the discovery of the first known eclipsing binary star, a milestone in the understanding of star behaviors. He was 18 years old. A disease in infancy had rendered him a deaf-mute.

This night I looked at Beta Persei and was much amazed to find its brightness altered, two magnitudes dimmer than ever seen before. Beta Persei is the star known as Algol, familiar, as the name implies, to the astronomers of Islam who referred to it as R’as al Ghul, the Demon’s Head. Al Ghul and thus, Algol. Demon. Well named. It is the very opposite of a nova, this sudden lessening, this diminishing of one’s very being, or essence, and evidence indubitable that unanticipated disaster may strike even the heavenly spheres. For all the good and noble souls here on Earth, who is it that may minister to a star?

The Taste of Worms

Robert finally made it to the door of the witch’s cottage. She was waiting for him as he entered.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Sorenson,” she said. Her voice was as deep as any woman’s he’d ever heard and totally self-assured.

“A moment to put together what’s left of my shattered poise,” Robert said. He wished for a drink. Any liquid would do. “Were the spiders and chains and hanging bridge really necessary? I had paid the price you wanted. I thought that meant I was through, not just beginning.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. “It’s been a long time since I used to accept dares to eat worms when I was a cub scout. That was one skill I never thought I’d ever use again.”

Pity the Poor Dybbuk

The handcart creaked though Shanghai’s streets, under a blazing July sun. Sweat beaded under Hans’ felt hat as he pushed and pushed and pushed, rolled down to sting his eyes, cascaded further to join the swamp saturating his formal wool suit. A nice long soak in the chilly water of his house’s communal tub beckoned like the almost forgotten taste of ice cream. The city’s perpetual lack of hot water meant that he had no choice but a cold bath, but today that was a blessing. Hans laughed. Converting troubles into blessings was something Jews had done for 5,000 years, so why should 1945 be any different?

Goggle a Frog, Kiss a Prince

Mirror panels on the METAVEC Corporation’s lowrise glass-iceberg suburban/Edge City headquarters reflect a blood red sky under a setting sun. Poisonous contrails from a screaming blastplane spew a particulate shower on every one in the unprotected outdoors. Which means only Sclera, stuck in the open, running the well-lit buzz-cut corporate lawn. Sclera: non-driver from the metro’s Innercore, deposited on a far crossroads corner by the hourly public transit electrobus. One short cut later she’s crossing the acres of browning grass and almost onto the long, long curving entranceway. Temporarily covetous, she watches singlecars pull cozily up the semicircular driveway to disgorge their solitary occupants directly into METAVEC’s vast covered vestibule. She needs a distraction, finds one in the improbable numbers of petunias like so many waving stacks of dollars landscaping the otherwise desolate land. How do they keep them alive? Probably fertilized with the bodies of those who fail to penetrate the security scans, she thinks, and finally has a laugh to bring her back to herself.

Grafts on the Memory Tree

Austin slides off the expressway at the last exit, just before the huge barriers that block the cars from running over the work crews extending the concrete another infinity of miles. Up the ramp to the surface street, crowded — choked — with cars; the computer almost hesitates before inserting him into the traffic flow. He has never been to this part of the city. Part? Hell, this whole end of the valley was scrubland and waste two years ago. Even so, the map that appears when he directs his gaze to the icon on the windshield shows him that he has eleven miles to go before he gets to his destination. The traffic icon gives him an eighteen minute ETA. Relax.

Holly: New Paree Prime: Spring Two

I flew in for the fashions, the spring-two show on New Paree Prime. Me and she and two hundred hundred of the more and most converging from points east and west and up and down. The hotels along the Champs E. + One flung their doors wide like maws to welcome us with open arms and pockets, servants real and robot. In the gapingly exposed lobby, balconies filled with lookers and lurkers, I grabbed a slipper sloppy with Chateau Unpronounceable. Bubbles blasted through my nose snorting a greeting to the twenty twenty others doing the same.

Forever, with Diamond

While her main consciousness was busy with a delicate cellular-level check of liver enzyme efficiency in 2877, Lila’s gossipmonger gave off an excited *ping*. While sifting through the chaff of a billion trillion multinews transmissions, it had finally found a bulletin containing every keyword and image load. Lila bunched brain cells and memory tissue, and decrypted the news on the screen of her second brain. One living person, if an experimental-class humanoid nearmale could be defined as such, had been successfully reduced to a photonic matrix. Better, after an interval leisurely ticked off by the sottoquark fabric pulsating in the pair of synchronized atomic clocks, the being, or a fully recognizable facsimile, reappeared at the receiver at the far end of the laboratory after a journey whose speed was calculated at exactly c, or the local velocity thereof. Lila watched and studied the report from angles that made her cerebellum itch. She didn’t care. The long sought instantaneous teleportation it might never be, but she thought it would make Greater Los Angeles nearly livable again, at least the Oregon half.

The Changeling Variations

The newly-falling snow tasted of the city, gritty and lacerating. Lona Clemente forced herself from the cold shelter of the parking garage, wind tearing away her breath, freezing her lips. Gloved fingers fumbled to draw the hood already snugged into her close-cropped hair tighter around her face. Italian leather boots turned aside the snow slashing her ankles, squeezed her legs warmly, gently under the flapping hem of her coat. She couldn’t have too many covering layers.

Mother of All Neuroses

My mother was a robot,” Dave said.

“So what?” Robbie snapped. “At least she was around. My mother’ll be in cryogenic storage until they figure out how to treat bone termites.”

“I’m my own mother,” whispered clone Clara C-21.

Harlequins

I smoothed the wrinkles of my skirt from under my aching legs and thought once more of the many things that could go wrong. Engines falling off. Cabin doors exploding. Five hundred bodies traveled with me on Pan Am flight 119, from JFK to CDG, Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. In my lifetime to be part of a crowd had always meant disaster. And, in this year of the terrorist’s bomb, this plane was a special target. Flight 119 made direct connections to Tel Aviv.

Farstream Books - An Imprint of PLANET LACTOSE Publishing - P.O. Box 10126 Rochester, New York © 2008 Steve Carper