A Dirge for the Temporal by Darren Speegle Read Free Book Online Page B

to fall as she watched the tulip-purple boa wrap around Lane’s neck, seizing him tightly and drawing him upwards, against his bulging eyes and his rotten tongue. He swung out there in the nothingness filled with sun, and the tears on her face began to melt. She rose up out of the silence, spreading out over the miasma, and she felt, in every molecule of her, the call of New Geneva. She looked down into the swirl, laughing for the pleasure of it, and as she surrendered herself she felt the hands of the âme rise up out of the storm of nothingness to catch her and bring her down gently to the urban beds that had been calling for her in shouts and screams of silence.
~

      As Lane stepped out of the Prism into the park, he caught the flash of the old man’s eyes. He stepped over to where the man slumped against the wall, gazing into mirrors that had not been there before. The thought— the old man has betrayed his city and now he can only reflect it —was replaced by the reflection itself. The image of his own eyes. Miasmal, spectral, exhibiting the rainbows through which he had just descended. The shock dissipated into the question, But what ….?
      He searched his clothes, his pockets. What had he given in return? What did he own that had such intrinsic value to him? Certainly no mate rial thing, nor even a symbolic thing.
      The question was answered as he emerged from the park to find a solitary âme approaching him, the outlines of her body and face as familiar to him as his own. Her name from his lips sounded every bit as ghostly as her appearance. She seemed to recognize him, seemed to be acting in humor when she crossed her forefingers and placed them over each of her eyes, but the silence surrounding her had crystallized, and there was no breaking it. Not now. Never.
      As he walked back in the direction of the only place that seemed connected in any way to anything, he could almost hear the trumpet calling to him, its voiceless notes reaching across the strange urban surfaces to temper the harrowing stillness.

The Whole Circus

    T he nearer you were to Chaos, the more numerous and glaring its symptoms. It was hard to believe that only a decade ago it was still known as Orlando, entertainment capital of the world. Always State of the Art, the city had been the first to go fully automated. Too late New Orleans, Miami and Las Vegas saw Orlando’s error. They were now suffering the same fate. They would likely never achieve the state of electronic and social bedlam their forerunner had, but they were nonetheless places you would not want to take your children.
      To Shelley, who knew all too well about symptoms, Chaos was home. Even now, as his captor led him along the tubular passage, he experienced that strange sense of connection, that feeling of needing only a terminal to bring it all into glorious focus. He saw it mirrored in the eyes of the people he passed. The lust for life had been replaced by a shimmering brought on by the phantasmagorial splendor of electrons and currents and information bombardment.
      Surrounding the flow of foot traffic in the tunnel, screens displayed nonsensical, indecipherable, illogical messages. In the ceiling, light panels dimmed and intensified, dimmed and intensified, contributing to the rou tine surreal quality of the scene. The lower half of a hominoid robot strode by, drawing scarcely a glance as it journeyed to someplace remembered by its legs. Pieces and parts of things, not always inorganic, cluttered the base of the walls. Homing spheres, seeking to deliver certified messages that had long since lost their relevance to anything, hummed by, occasionally colliding with a public access monitor, someone’s head or shoulder, another sphere. A random scream, or peal of laughter, echoed and shuddered along the passage. And all this in an auxiliary tubeway outside city limits.
  As Shelley felt the mysteries deepen around him, reminding him that they were approaching the