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Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Are you there, Mab? It’s me Margaret.
I just read a totally awesome book about magical fairy dragon robots. Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
"It’s the Deep Grammar lecture, silly. I told you all about it at lunchtime, don’t you remember?"
"Jane shook her head. Unheeding, Sirin said, "They only give this lecture once every ten years. The rest of the time they keep the speaker stored in the catacombs, sealed in a jar of olive oil."
"Oh, they do not."
"Seriously. I know a teaching assistant who helped decant him."
A goat-headed administrator took the lectern. He cleared his throat. "There are too few heroes in Natural Philosophy. Yet tonight I present you not merely a hero but a warrior, indeed an academic berserker, one who has made a direct assault on the Goddess’s most privy secrets. When he and his companions set out to assail her fastness and force her to surrender knowledge to them, they knew that this attempt might destroy not only themselves but the upper and lower worlds as well. But this did not deter them for an instant. For they had the courage of their convictions. They had intellectual honesty.
"Only one of that glorious company returned. He stands before us now. Is there anyone who less needs an introduction than my distinguished colleague? Let me present to you the most exalted of scholars, a living intellectual treasure, and the finest speciment in our collections - " Sirin nudged Jane with her elbow. "Professor Tarapple."
In the ensuing applause he gracefully retreated to an empty chair and a wizened figure climbed up on the dais.
Even for the School of Grammarie, which was widely held to have pushed the concept of liberal arts to an extreme, Professor Tarapple was grotesque. A burnt and criped cinder of a creature was he, blackened and small, his limbs charred sticks, his torso rendered, reduced and carbonized. His mouth hung open and his step was slow and painful. He seemed a catalog of the infirmities of age.
He felt for the microphone. His hand closed about it with a soft boom, then retreated.
The professor lectures them briefly about the three metaphysical states of reality.
A long silence. "First slide, please."
The lights went down and from the projection booth in the rear came a distinct click. On the wall behind him appeared a bright vision of what might be some monstrous bleached seashell, large as a mountain, hanging over a limitless ocean. The audience was totally silent.
Professor Tarapple groped for a laser pointer, leaving sooty handprints on the lectern top. He directged the pointer toward the slide with motions as jerky and unconvincing as a rod puppet’s. The red dot of light jiggled off to the side of the screen. "This is - " The head wobbled. "This is - is Spiral Castle itself." Nobody so much as breathed. "No one but I myself has ever delved so deep into the Goddess’s mysteries. The Ocean above which it is suspended is Time itself, and so far as could be determined with our limited instrumentation extends to infinity in all directions. Next slide."
After many slides, the lecture concludes with a peroration.
"Toadswivers! Curly-mounted bobtail jades! Codheaded pigfuck bastards!"
With a start, Jane came to herself. Throughout the auditorium, the audience members were rousing themselves. A Teggish professor directly before Jane’s seat straightened with a lurch and a snort. A gnome to her left passed a hand over his mushroom-spotted pate.
Professor Tarapple had abandoned his lecture in a rage. He was berating his audience. "Only one being - one! me! - has ever delved so far into the Goddess’s secrets and returned to talk of them. By cannon-fire, holywater and bells, listen to me! I risked more than life and sanity to bring you these hotographs. I-I-I was once young and tall and handsome. I had friends who died in this expedition and will never be reborn. We were caught and punished and punished again. I alone escaped. Look at me! See the price that I paid! So many times I have tried to tell you! Why do you never listen?"
He was weeping now. "Woe!" he cried. "Alas for those who seek after Truth, for such is the Goddess’s most hoarded treasure. Ah, she is cruel and unfathomable and bitter, bitter is her vengeance."
The lights came gently up. The applause was thunderous.
Henry Farrell pressed copies of Swanwick urgently upon me. You should read Stations of the Tide. I should read the rest of his books. He writes about dinosaurs and everything. He has a personal site with lots of links to stuff online. I like his periodic table of SF elements.
Comments
I’m a big fan of Swanwick...this one is definitely going on my list.
The link to the personal site got me nothing. Yet it seems impossible that the address could be wrong. A temporary problem perhaps?
I like the table - check out “krypton.” Hah!