P H O T O P I A (by Adam Cadre)

[Lord Daril Riuuallon]

Siguiendo la discusión sobre el destino, me pareció apropiado postear este cuento.
En realidad no se trata de un cuento, sinó de un extracto de los textos de un juego conversacional escrito por Adam Cadre y que fue presentado en la competición de Interactive Fiction en 1998, ganando el primer premio(*). El textos fueron extraídos mientras jugaba, y luego compilados con pequeñas modificaciones para que tengan continuidad. Lamentablemente los mismos están en inglés, dado que no tuve tiempo de sentarme a traducirlos.

(*)
Nominee, Best Use of Medium, Xyzzy Awards 1998
Nominee, Best Game, Xyzzy Awards 1998
Winner, Best Writing, Xyzzy Awards 1998
Winner, Best Story, Xyzzy Awards 1998
Nominee, Best NPCs, Xyzzy Awards 1998
Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle, Xyzzy Awards 1998
Nominee, Best Individual NPC, Xyzzy Awards 1998
1st place, rec.arts.int-fiction competition 1998
_________________

[Lord Daril Riuuallon]

P H O T O P I A
by Adam Cadre

The streetlights are bright. Unbearably bright. You have to squint as hard as you can to keep your retinas from bursting into flame.

"Welcome back to the land of the fucking LIVING, bud," Rob says. "You planning to stick around for a while or you gonna pass out again? Cause one thing I've learned about chicks is that they actually DON'T LIKE IT when you pass out on them in the middle of gettin' it on. You hear me? So if that's, like, your PLAN, then I'm droppin' you off and showin' up solo."

You don't exactly remember where the day went, but as you listen to Rob rant on, bits of it start to float back to you: a day on the slopes, the brisk February wind against your face; polishing off a keg back at the lodge; those two girls you and Rob had hit it off with, the ones who'd given you their address in town. "We all should get together sometime!" they'd said. Of course, Rob insisted that by "sometime" they'd meant "later tonight." You hadn't been so sure, but then you'd blacked out before you could argue the point.

How Rob came to be driving your car you're not exactly sure. Apparently he couldn't wait till you were sober enough to drive it yourself. From the way he's weaving all over the road, he also apparently couldn't wait till HE was sober enough to drive it, either.

Rob looks at the scrap of paper with the address on it as the two of you go screaming through an empty intersection. "Bartlett Hill Road," he mutters. "Where the fuck is Bartlett Hill Road?"

His face is flushed, as you might expect from someone fresh off the slopes. Except you're NOT fresh off the slopes. You came in at maybe three or three-thirty, and now it's past midnight.

You look up. "Hey, it's red," you say.

"Huh what?" Rob says.

"The light," you say. "You know, red? As in STOP?"

But you don't stop. You don't even slow down as you fly into the intersection, and the light stays an unmistakable red...


RED

You are Wendy Mackaye, first girl on the red planet.

When you signed up for this mission, you thought that you were going to be coming to a habitable colony. ("Habitable" means you can live there.) See, the orbiter was supposed to drop all the pieces of the colony -- the power plant, the living quarters, the greenhouse, things like that -- onto the planet's surface, packed in airbags which would bounce around and then open up once they were safely on the ground. Some of the airbags were supposed to hold big trucks which would be operated by remote control, dragging the pieces of the colony into their proper places; your job was going to be to take a tour of the place and verify that everything was up and running. ("Verify" means to make sure.)

Instead, something went wrong on the orbiter, and it blew up before it had a chance to drop off its payload. Pieces of the orbiter and the colony rained all over the landscape. So this has become a salvage mission. Your instruments indicate that there's at least one piece that's still functioning. ("Functioning" means it's not broken.) Your job is to find that piece, or pieces if there's more than one.

So you climb down the ladder of your ship and step onto the surface of an alien world.

You are standing at the base of your ship. The onboard computers selected this general area as the most likely place to find salvageable remains of what would have been the colony. ("Salvageable" means you can save it.) The battered rust-red landscape stretches out before you in every direction, pitted and pockmarked and littered with boulders. A ladder leads up to the hatch of your ship.

You take a few steps to the west, amazed at how the light gravity turns each step into a great bounding leap.

The power plant is in substantially worse shape than the living quarters, and considering that those were completely wrecked, that's saying something. Though the fissionable materials were specially packaged to prevent them from exploding, the Geiger counter in your suit indicates that this area is still very radioactive. (I'll explain that part later. For now let's just say it's very dangerous and you should probably be moving along.)

As you walk, you find first one geodesic panel, then another. (When people make a dome out of simple polygons like triangles or hexagons, that's called "geodesic.") Soon the clear plastic panels are as plentiful as the rust-red boulders -- this must be where the dome for the living quarters landed.

Soon you find you're right. Scattered around you are the remains of what would have been home to the first wave of colonists. Most of the housing units have been reduced to unidentifiable splintered heaps, but there's one that seems to be intact. ("Intact" means that it isn't so damaged that it's unusable.) The entrance is partially obstructed -- "obstructed" means blocked -- by debris, but you're small enough that you could probably squeeze through. That's part of what makes you the perfect person for this job, aside from your astronautical expertise. ("Astronautical" doesn't really mean anything. I just made it up.)

Since no one ever moved into this unit, it's really nothing but an empty gray box, no bigger than your bedroom back home. These quarters weren't designed with anything but sleeping in mind: the first colonists were expected to take their meals in a central dining commons, and bathrooms were to be in a separate structure, with each one shared by a number of people. Still, you can't help but feel a twinge. This was going to be someone's HOME. The first thing they saw when they woke up, the place they looked forward to retreating to after a hard day doing research or exploring the planet's surface or helping to maintain the colony. There were going to be pictures on these walls, footprints on the floor. Now the only footprints left here will be yours.

The clicking in your helmet grows steadily louder -- you must be getting closer to what you're looking for. Soon you find yourself...

...among the ruins of the greenhouse.
The colonization plans called for a central dome where plants designed to thrive in the harsh, lifeless soil of the red planet would be grown and used for food. Everywhere you look are broken containers that once held seed pods and now contain nothing but cinders and ash.

Among the shattered seed pod containers you see one single undamaged one.

The moment you touch the seed pod container, the clicking in your helmet stops. This is the only item you will be able to save.

The seed pod, designed for rapid growth even in a hostile environment, looks sort of like a cross between a pine cone and a small pineapple. Its dip in the ocean seems to have caused wispy green sprouts to emerge from deep inside it.

You return to your ship.

Gently placing the seed pod on the seat next to you, you rocket back into space, leaving the red planet in your wake. Soon a familiar cloud-streaked blue ball appears on your monitors. You are home again at last.

But something goes terribly wrong. The heat shields hold up fine during re-entry, but the parachutes fail to open as you head for splashdown. And so you plummet at an incredible rate, the ocean growing closer and closer...


YOU HEAR A SPLASH

When you and Sam put that down payment on this house five years ago, you were expecting that you were going to need all four bedrooms eventually; but after the complications with Alison, you found yourself with a couple of extras on your hands. This one came in very handy when you started telecommuting. You can't say you're exactly glad that this room became an office instead of a bedroom for a brother or sister of Alley's, but you ARE glad that you and Sam decided not to move into that smaller house you were considering.

You've managed to get good use out of the fourth bedroom as well, taking in an exchange student through the Turtalia World Youth program. In exchange for you providing Gabriel with room and board, Alison is entitled to spend a year attending school and living with Gabriel's family in Paraguay when she's eighteen, should she choose to go. Whether Alley will have any inclination to visit Paraguay in fourteen years is an open question.

You walk up to the window and take a look outside, and feel a bayonet slice through your heart. Alley is floating face down in the pool. It takes all the willpower you possess to take the stairs merely five at a time instead of simply throwing yourself down the staircase.

Your back yard isn't exactly sprawling, but it was more than big enough to accomodate the small swimming pool which Alison was never supposed to be allowed near. At least not until she learned to swim.

Gabriel pokes his head outside to see what's the matter. "Aieee!" he cries. "Save her from the pool! I will call the emergency!"

You jump into the pool and in a matter of seconds have Alley safely on the cement bank. But she still isn't breathing.

You push her chest over and over again until the water begins to pull up from her.

Gabriel comes dashing back outside, telephone in hand.

"Alison!" you cry. "Alison, baby, how many times have we told you NOT to go near the pool, another minute and we would've lost you, you KNOW you're not supposed to go near--"

"I wanted to see," she says.

"What?" you say.

"I wanted to see," she says, "if the world looked the same UNDER the water as it does OVER it."


DEEP BLUE

Well, this is a first. You're standing on the door of the airlock. Usually you're firmly rooted to the floor and the door is just as firmly set in the wall, or else you're floating weightlessly and there is no real "up" or "down." But the ship landed at an odd angle, and you're not quite sure what to expect when you open the doors. If there isn't enough room for you to crawl out between the door and the ocean bottom, you're in some serious trouble.

You've had a couple of experiences with explosive decompression, where you open up the airlock door and the rush of escaping air blows you out into space. This time the rush of water flooding into the airlock smashes you up into the ceiling -- or at least now it's the ceiling; it used to be the back wall. Luckily, your suit is able to cushion the blow. Soon the airlock is full of water and you are able to swim out the door, which closes behind you.

At first you're confused. You'd expected the ocean bottom to be centimeters from the open door; instead, you drift down, down, ever down, and when your feet do finally touch something solid, it isn't the silt of the bottom of the sea, but a stone floor. You look up, hoping to see a glimmer of the surface. Instead you find a stone ceiling, far too high above your head to reach, and right where you might expect to find a chandelier, you see the blinking blue lights around the outside of your ship's airlock through the hole it made upon impact.

You have crashed into an undersea castle.

Moldy stone walls stand all around you, dimly visible through the murk: you feel them more than see them. Chunks of fallen stone from the ceiling lie scattered about at your feet. You can barely make out arched doorways leading north and south.

Also at your feet is the seed pod -- you lost track of it in the rush of water. You scoop it up.

You are standing in the keep, a fortified tower inside the castle walls. ("Fortified" means strengthened.) A stone spiral staircase leads upward, but stops abruptly when it reaches the ceiling.

This is a great empty chamber except for a long stone slab that you decide must be a dining table. You don't have any evidence for this: you don't know how this castle got here, or who might've lived in it... for all you know, they might have been incredibly tall, skinny, water-breathing creatures, and this was one of their beds. But for the time being we'll call it a dining table. It is several meters long, but only about a meter wide. People sitting at the ends of the table would need to scream to hear each other. Assuming they had some way of hearing each other underwater at all. (Water actually conducts sound better than air -- it's the change from air in your throat to water and then from the water to your ears that makes it sound too muffled to understand. Just so you know.)
A barnacle-encrusted object in the unmistakable shape of a chair; given the place you've found it and the fact that it's built into the floor, you can only conclude that it must be a throne. The far wall features a carved-out alcove that looks like it must have been a fireplace, though how one might go about lighting a fire underwater is anyone's guess. Mounted on the wall above the fireplace in an "X" shape are a pickaxe and a shovel.

The arched doorway leading east is completely blocked by a cascade of fallen stone. Whether it was caused by the impact of the crash or something else altogether you have no idea.

The pickaxe looks sharp enough to allow you to easily chisel your way to freedom. (A "chisel" is what sculptors use to chip away at stone, so chipping away at stone is called "chiselling.") You tug on it and the handle moves a few centimeters; then you feel a distinct click. The castle begins to rumble, with the shaking most pronounced in the direction of the keep. The shovel which was wedged behind the pickaxe clatters to the ground, and the rumbling stops. After that, the pickaxe swings back into place.

You get the shovel.

The stone spiral staircase leads upward to the ocean's surface.

You start up the stairs, the murk gradually diminishing as you come closer and closer to the surface. But just as the sun starts to resolve from a general glow into a specific bright blob above you, a vicious rip current pulls you off the staircase and drags you further out to sea.

The sheer power of the current throws you for a loop. You thrash in vain against it, crying out in frustration as your muscles begin to cramp from the effort while you continue to be dragged further and further out to sea. Finally you try swimming parallel to shore, and that frees you from the current's grip. For several long moments you drift aimlessly in the ocean, exhausted. When you do at last get your wind back and take your bearings, you find yourself kilometers from the nearest hint of land. Sighing, you start for shore. Your suit feels unexpectedly cumbersome, but you dare not take it off: even if it does make you tire that much faster, at least you don't risk drowning.

Or, rather, you don't risk drowning until your oxygen supply runs out. Luckily, this doesn't happen until your feet at long last touch the shore. You drag yourself onto the beach, blinding spots dancing before your eyes; your knees give even as you tear off your helmet, and everything goes dark.


DARKNESS

Everything is dark -- no matter how much you strain your eyes, you can't see the faintest hint of light. But whispering voices tickle the edge of your hearing.

"...level of point fifteen..."
"...distance call to Asunción..."
"...fratboys completely uninjured..."
"...husband has an excellent..."
"...least she didn't suffer..."
"...vending machine ate my dollar..."

Light flickers before your eyes. At first you don't see anything familiar. And then suddenly Linda is there at your side.

"What... what...?" you start to ask.

"Shhh," Linda says. "You need to save your strength. The doctors say you'll be fine, but it'll take some time."

"Is she-- how--?" The effort to speak become too much and you have to rest for a moment. "How...?"

For a moment Linda seems confused. Then she realizes what you're asking, and shakes her head sadly.

And suddenly the room seems colder...


GOLD

The sand is curiously cold against your face as you wake up, the waves licking at the soles of your boots. Cold and hard, more like gravel or even cobblestone than sand. As you lift your head and look around, you notice something else wrong. The sand is the wrong color. It's darker, more metallic...

It's gold.

You are at the south end of the beach, a glittering crescent nestled between the crashing ocean to the east and towering cliffs to the west, ankle-deep in gold. You run your hands through it: rings, coins, nuggets... and gold dust. Drifting down from the sky, collecting in dunes, the dust is everywhere. You run your hands through your hair and your gloves come out looking like they belong to a statuette.

To your relief, your seed pod has washed up onto the beach in excellent condition, though the container it was in is nowhere to be found. And though you thought you'd lost it a long way from shore, your shovel is here too.

Your head swims for a moment -- you still haven't fully recovered from your struggle against the ocean.

Something wooden is buried in the "sand" at your feet, but it's buried so deeply that only a corner of it is visible.

You dig for a few minutes, and seem to be making good progress when suddenly the handle of the shovel snaps off: apparently all that time underwater weakened it after all. Luckily, you no longer need it -- you've done enough digging that you're able to grab the wooden object and pull it loose. It's a treasure chest! A tiny one. What's more, it doesn't seem to be locked!

Opening the container reveals... dirt! Someone must have found this very precious. Which makes sense: it was buried in a place where gold was everywhere and so wasn't especially valuable. Dirt, on the other hand, seems to be quite rare around here. Since it's so scarce, it's worth keeping safe.

You go to the north end of the golden beach, which stretches off to the south. Though the cliffs to the north butt right up against the ocean, there is a pass to the northwest, with something shiny visible through the gap in the cliffs.

You take one last look at the golden beach and stride off through the pass.


STRETCH

You take one last look at the hockey game on TV and stride through the garage door to tell Alley it's time to come in.

This was supposed to be a two-car garage, but with the trash cans, your workbench, Alley's bike (It's a boys' model, blue with a horizontal crossbar. Alley was pretty insistent about that) and all the rest of the junk that's taken up residence in this place, you're lucky to be able to even squeeze just the Volvo in here.

Mary was the one who wanted the Volvo. She said it was more practical than what you wanted, which was a Porsche. So you compromised and got a Volvo with racing stripes on it.

One of the advantages of living on the outskirts of town is that you were able to get a house with a little bit of land around it. Which isn't to say that you have to walk a kilometer to get to your neighbor's house, just that you can actually take a few steps outside your door and not be on anyone else's property.

Alley is sprawled on the front lawn, gazing up at the stars. "Hi, Daddy," she says. "Hey, how come the night sky is dark? I mean, with all the stars in the universe, if you look in any direction wouldn't you eventually see a star?"

"Well," you say, "people USED to think it was because there were only a few stars, and that they were just tiny points of light set in the outermost of a set of crystalline spheres that surrounded the earth. ('Crystalline' just means 'like a crystal.') There were a whole bunch of these spheres, nested inside of one another -- I think the moon was closest, then Mercury, then Venus, then the sun, then Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, then the stars, and outside that was heaven."

"So how does it REALLY work?" Alley asks.

Mary thinks it's a little strange that you've started choosing introductory astrophysics texts as your bedtime reading material, but it really pays off at moments like this. "Well," you say, lying down on the grass next to Alley, "it has to do with the inverse square law. Think of a star, and imagine putting up an enormous sheet of paper about one astronomical unit away. The star'll light up a certain area of the sheet of paper. Now take that paper and put it two astronomical units away. The area that the star lights up will be twice as tall and twice as wide, but it's the same amount of light hitting it -- the same number of photons, only spread out over an area four times as big. That means if you look at a small area of the sheet of paper, only one-fourth as many photons are hitting it, so it looks one-fourth as bright. If you look at it from ten times as far away, it looks one one-hundredth as bright.

"That means that the further away you get, the fewer photons have a chance of reaching your eyes. Now, you may think that you'd have the number of stars in your visual field increasing just as fast as their intensity decreases. But the universe is finite: you could write the number of stars in the universe on a single piece of notebook paper. And the observable universe is even more finite -- the universe expanding fast enough that the photons from a lot of stars haven't had a chance to reach us yet and maybe never will. So eventually you run out. And if you factor in all the things that can block the photons that do have a chance to get here -- clouds of hydrogen gas, for instance -- only the photons from the closest and brightest stars make it to your eyes. The rest of the sky looks dark."

"Cool," Alley says. "Is that true about everything a star sends out, or just light?"

"Well," you say, "a star doesn't emit a whole lot EXCEPT light, if by light you mean photons, which can range anywhere from radio waves to X-rays and beyond. Then there's the solar wind, which is mostly protons. And then there are neutrinos, which go through pretty much everything. People have collected huge pools of gallium, put them deep underground, and it turns out that thirty tons of the stuff -- thirty TONS -- will catch ONE neutrino a day. The neutrino will turn ONE atom of gallium into germanium. All the other billions and billions of neutrinos just go streaming right through the earth. But you can't see them, because they go right through your eyes."

"Awesome," Alley says. "Where does the gallium come from?"

"Good question," you say. "The easy answer is that it's mined. But here's the more interesting answer. You know what a star is, right?"

"Sure," Alley says. "It's a big ball of hydrogen being fused into helium."

"Bing," you say. "Right as usual. Now, eventually the hydrogen runs out. What happens to the helium left over? Some of it gets expelled out into space, and the rest of it contracts even tighter, till the HELIUM starts to fuse. So the star lights up again, turning helium into carbon, and then into oxygen. And the process keeps going -- some of the matter is expelled into space, the rest keeps contracting, fusing, into neon, magnesium, silicon, and eventually, into iron. Iron is pretty much the most stable thing there is. Right now hydrogen is the most common substance there is, but if you wait long enough, it'll be iron.

"Now, iron is element #26, and gallium is #31, so you'll never get to gallium that way. Heavy elements like gallium, or gold, are produced in supernovae -- they're formed when stars explode, and fly out into space."

"Really? Gold?" Alley says. "It just comes raining down out of space?"

"Maybe indirectly," you say. "See, the newly-formed heavy elements fly out into space, and collect in gravity wells, start clumping together... some end up inside new second- or third-generation stars, while others get locked up in planets only to get dug up a few billion years later and used for neutrino detection, or jewelry, or coins. Of course gold is used in coins because it's valuable, and it's valuable because it's rare, and it's rare because... well, to a certain extent, it's the luck of the draw. If you look at a chart of the elements in the earth's crust, it turns out that iridium and the elements around it are rarer than you might expect. Right after iridium is platinum, which is very precious, and after that is gold, which is just slightly more common and just slightly less precious. But if you look at meteorites, you find that they're not lacking in iridium the way the earth is -- meteorites are loaded with the stuff. And they've got even more platinum. So it's easy to imagine that there are planets out there where there just so happened to be a lot of gold and platinum in the area of space where the planet was formed, and so they're considered common while something else -- zirconium, maybe -- is considered really valuable."

"I've heard of iridium before," Alley says. "Isn't there a lot of it in the layer of the earth's crust that comes from right when all the dinosaurs died out? I remember reading something like that."

"That's right," you say. "That's usually counted as evidence that it was a meteorite impact that led to them all dying off -- not that the iridium killed them, but that iridium is a sign that there was a big meteorite around that time, and it's easy to see how a big impact could lead to massive die-offs. But that's also an important thing to keep in mind when you think about this stuff. One bit of pure gold is exactly the same as any other bit of pure gold -- the substance behaves the same way. So from one point of view, any particular piece of gold isn't valuable at all, since you can always get another. You can even replace your iridium. But Michael Crichton notwithstanding, you can't get back any of the dinosaurs.

"You're not made of a whole lot that's particularly exotic -- the only stuff heavier than iron, the only things you'd need a supernova for, are trace elements: a little iodine to keep the goiter away, that kind of thing. You're made mainly of the most common star stuff: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. But you can't just trade yourself in for a sack of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen the way you can trade gold for gold. What makes you you is the way that star stuff is arranged, and that's totally unique. Which makes you more valuable than all the gold from all the stars in the sky."

"And what am I, chopped liver?" Mary asks, emerging from the garage. "'All the stars in the sky'? Really, Sam. When you start trying to wax poetic it's a pretty good sign that it's past your bedtime. Let alone Alley's. Time to come in, kids."

"All right," Alley says. She doesn't budge, however. "Hey, how can I get into space?" she asks. "I don't mean the mechanics of how rockets work, I mean how do they pick who gets to go?"

"Well, it used to be pretty much exclusively test pilots," you say. "Spaceflight was just an extension of aviation, really. And not just aviation -- military aviation. But now that we actually need better reasons to go into space than just beating the Russians there, you're more likely to get a chance to go if you have something to do up there. So become an expert in some field where the cutting edge of research requires weightlessness, or firsthand data from Mars, or something like that, and if you're at the top of your field, you might get your chance."

"That sounds kind of iffy," Alley says. "I really, REALLY have to get up there SOME time in my life. I just HAVE to. Are you sure that's the best way?"

"That's the best way I can think of," you say. "On the other hand, there are a lot of people who'd know better than me. And... well, I was going to save this till your birthday, but what the heck. You'll get to meet them, and you can ask them yourself."

"What do you mean?" Alley asks.

"Your mom and I signed you up for Space Camp," you say. "I'm sure the folks you meet there'll be able to answer any of your questions."

"Space Camp?" Alley says. "Are you serious?"

"You bet," you say. "You'll have to miss a week of school, but we figured you wouldn't mind."

"Mind?" Alley says. "MIND? This ROCKS! Does Gabriel know?"

"Gabriel?" you say. "We haven't talked to him since we sent in--"

"He doesn't?" she says. "I'm going to call him right now! When he hears this he'll just die! This is the coolest thing ever!" She kisses you on the cheek and rushes inside.

As you follow her, you pause to take a quick look at the sky yourself. It's certainly pretty, but it's been a long time since you were as enraptured by it as Alley seems to be. You can't help but feel a little sad about that.


BLUE SKY

As you walk through the pass, you encounter first one shard of glass on the ground, then another. But it isn't until you crest the final hill that you see what you've discovered.

You are standing on a ridge above the entrance to a vast crystal labyrinth. You'd be tempted to call it a city, with its haphazard collection of iridescent towers and spires and arches -- "iridescent" means shimmering with rainbow colors -- but from what you can see from your vantage point, there is barely enough space between the crystal walls to permit one person to pass between them. The labyrinth is ringed by steep mountains, so going around it is impossible: your only choices are to enter it to the west, or to head back the way you came.

Though the crystal sparkles in every color, the dominant note seems to be a beautiful light blue, refracted from the sky above. ("Refraction" is what happens when light passes through a medium that bends it, like water or a prism.)

You step into the crystal labyrinth and immediately get lost.

You wander around the maze of glass until you find yourself at another intersection...
Two of the nearby walls intersect to form the base of an immense spire.

With an audible sputter, the cooling unit of your spacesuit finally gives out.

With its cooling unit broken, your bulky spacesuit begins to feel very uncomfortable. It's like wearing a parka on a warm, sunny day.

You take off your spacesuit and drop it on the ground and the cool breeze ruffles the feathers of your wings.

You soar into the sky.

You are hovering above the crystal labyrinth; from this perspective, it looks like a mind-bogglingly complex mandala. (A "mandala" is a pattern that some people use in prayer.) There is no way your could have possibly navigated it on the ground -- in fact, it almost gives you a headache. Much more relaxing is the cloudless, sparkling blue sky all around you.

A bird flies by, disappearing through the gap in the mountains to the west.

You fly through the pass, reveling in the rush of the wind against your white feathered wings.


SHE'S AN ANGEL

She's an absolute angel.

No. No. Can't think like that. She's just a kid like any other kid. Completely approachable. Puts her pants on one leg at a time like anyone else.

Oops. Bad move. Should not have thought about her putting on pants.

Concentrate. Concentrate. Focus power. Eye of the tiger. Wax on, wax off. Wait, that's not right. C'mon, don't overthink this. Just go in and ask her. "Hey, Alley, what's up? Want to go to the dance with me?" Easy as that. What's the worst that could happen?

Well, you could wet your pants. Funny how it always comes back to pants.

You walk into the gym.

Usually rather damp and dingy, the gym is currently festooned with colorful balloons and streamers in preparation for the big dance Friday night. The first ones went up at lunch, so when you went in for your fifth-period PE class, the coach looked around, shrieked, and declared that there was a change in plans and that the class would be playing soccer for the rest of the week.

You look around and there, far above your head, is Alley, glowing like a star -- or maybe that's just from standing in front of the spotlight rigged to the ceiling. She's balanced on a tall ladder, draping streamers from the rafters.[MORE]

Her colleagues on the Student Activities Committee, Joyce and Sherrill, are standing around a helium tank, filling balloons and letting them float up to the ceiling.

Alley looks down at you as you come in. "Hey, Jon," she says. "Can you turn off that light for me? It's burning kind of hot." She points at the switch.

You turn the light off. "Thanks," Alley says. "That about does it for the streamers." She climbs back down the ladder, digs around in her backpack, and pulls out an orange. "Want one?" she asks.

Alley digs around in her backpack. "Oops, looks like that was the last one," she says. "I've got an apple left, though." She tosses it to you.

"So, um, are you, like, seeing anyone, or not, or...?" Your voice dies away.

"Not so as you'd notice," Alley says cheerfully.

You take a deep breath. It doesn't take, so you try it again. "Well," you say. "Um. So. I was just kind of wondering whether maybe if you weren't doing anything and weren't already going whether you might want to go to the dance with me if you want I mean it's no big deal or anything it's up to you I just thought you know why not." There, you think. That was pretty smooth.

But Alley shakes her head. "Sorry," she says. "I'm babysitting that evening."

Your heart plummets into your stomach with what you're sure is an audible splash. You're trying to decide whether to throw yourself in front of the nearest bus or if you should just go home and slash your wrists when you realize Alley isn't finished talking.

"...so it'll have to be Saturday," she concludes.

"Satur-- wait, so that's a yes?" you ask, gaping.

"Sure," she says. "It won't be a dance, but I'm sure we can find something fun to do. Can you come by around seven?"

Saturday. Seven o'clock. Seventy-five hours, forty-three minutes, seventeen seconds from now. Suddenly, it seems like a lifetime.


LIFETIME

Your are driving down Bartlett Hill Road. As you pass Alley's school, you can't help but notice that the message board outside says "DANCE FRIDAY GYM 6-10 PM". "There was a dance tonight?" you ask. "You should have told us. We could've found another sitter."

"That's okay," Alley says drowsily. "You and Ms. Mackaye asked before any boys did."

"Still," you say. "Next time you just call us and give us the old heave-ho, okay? I'm sure there must be a legion of boys out there who cried themselves to sleep thanks to us."

Alley smiles sleepily. "You sound like my dad," she says.

You cruise through the Polk Boulevard intersection and ask: "Why?"

"Hmm?" Alley says. "Oh, it's just that when you were talking about 'legions of boys crying themselves to sleep' it reminded me of how my dad's always telling me that 'you're at the age now where you're going to have to deal with droves of grubby little boys vying for your affections, and I just wanted to warn you that I'm bound to show an inordinate amount of glee with every heart you break. So go to it!'" She smiles.

"Inordinate glee?"

"Well," Alley says, "when I asked him about that, he said, 'You see, it's just like Freud said: the parent of the powerless sex always longs to have a child of the powerful sex. And sure enough, after years of having to deal with being on the receiving end of possible rejection every time I was interested in someone, it's going to be a thrill to see my very own kid dishing it out. It's a clear-cut case of Venus envy.'"

You cruise through the Nelson Boulevard intersection. Wow -- all of the lights seem to be green this evening.

"I hate to ask you to come over twice in less than a week," you say, "but are you free to look after Wendy on Thursday? If not, please, just say the word and we can find someone else. I don't want to keep you from hanging out with kids your own age."

"Sure, no problem," Alley says. "I don't mind, really. I like spending time with Wendy. Most of my friends are either significantly younger or significantly older than me anyhow."

"You know, Wendy's crazy about you," you say. "We take her to buy clothes, she wants to dress like you. We take her to get her hair cut, she wants it done like yours. And every time you come over she spends the next couple of days throwing around words like 'conquistador' and 'geosynchronous'. When she gets an 800 on her verbal SAT we'll know who to thank."

"Well, when I was her age I hated it when people talked down to me," Alley shrugs. "So it'd be hypocritical of me to talk down to her."

You enter the Montgomery Boulevard intersection...

...and are blindsided by a car screaming down the road with its lights off at a hundred kilometers an hour, maybe more. The impact caves in the passenger-side door and sends the car spinning wildly, the air thick with smoke and the acrid smell of burnt rubber, Alley's blood hot against your face, and as you black out, you catch a glimpse of the light, and it was green, it was green, it was GREEN...


GREEN

On the other side of the pass, you find yourself flying over a vast forest that stretches as far as you can see. The mere sight of it is enough to make your wings ache -- there's no way you can fly that far under your own power. Besides, the idea of strolling through a shady forest seems awfully appealing right about now. You touch down and wander through the woods.

After a few minutes, you reach a small clearing, and pause to take a look around. Something is wrong. In fact, everything is just slightly off. The leaves of the trees don't sway enough in the breeze; the subtle sounds of the forest are conspicuously absent; everything smells sterile and dead. But you can't quite put your finger on why this is.

You don't have much time to ponder this mystery, however: suddenly you hear a growling in the distance, and turn to see a wolf charging right at you!

The wolf looks rather emaciated. ("Emaciated" means scrawny from lack of food.) This in no way makes it any less terrifying.

The wolf jumps at you, knocking you to the ground -- and starts playfully licking your face! The danger past, you get up and gather up your possessions, the wolf trotting merrily along at your heel.

As you look more closely at the trees, you suddenly realize what's wrong with them: they're not alive. The trunks and branches of the trees are solid stone: petrified wood, the organic material replaced with silica from the groundwater over the course of millions of years. ("Silica" is silicon dioxide, which makes up sand, quartz, and all kinds of things.) But these are not mere stone pillars: they're still trees, complete with leaves made of malachite, a green marbled stone derived from copper and as arresting in its own way as emerald. ("Arresting" means it makes you stop and look.)

The wolf bays with hunger. Perhaps you have something to feed him?

You open the treasure chest, and drop the dirt. Then, you plant the seed pod, step back, and wait for it to grow.

Nothing happens.

You hear a soft chuckling behind you. "Well, well," says a voice. "If it ain't pirate-turned-astronaut Wendy Mackaye. What're YOU doing in the Queen's realms?"

You turn around to find a diminutive man with a bushy white beard, pushing along a white cart almost as big as he is. ("Diminutive" is another word for "small".) "Who are you? What queen?" you ask.

"I'm the local weather salesman," he says. "And I'd say that you're not going to have much success growing things without some rain handy." He rummages through his cart. "You're in luck," he says. "I just happen t'have some in stock. And about the queen, no one's ever seen her. No one I know of, anyhow. Makes sense. Nothing lives for long in any land that falls into her realm. Looking at her probably turns people to stone."

The wolf whimpers with hunger.

"It's yours?" you ask.

"No, and can't be from around here, that's for sure," the weather salesman says. "Nothing stays living for long anyplace that falls into the Queen's domain. Trees turn to stone, birds fly away... even the dirt turns to metal. Poor thing prolly wandered in, got lost, and half starved to death with nothing to eat."

"Can I bought you some rain?"

"Hmm," the salesman says. "Normally I ask for a gold piece. But it looks as though you have enough of the stuff in your hair for me to change my price." He reaches into his cart and pulls out a comb. "What say ye?"

You run your fingers through your hair and they come out golden: apparently it collected quite a bit of gold dust while you were wandering around on the beach. "Fair enough," you say.

You sit down on the ground and the weather salesman goes to work with his comb; a few moments later, he gleefully puts two handfuls of gold dust in his cart. Then you stand up, and he snaps his fingers; a tiny cloud appears at knee level, raining a trickle of water onto the planted pod. You start to complain, but suddenly there's no one to complain to -- the salesman is gone without a trace.

And in the end, it doesn't matter: even this tiny rainstorm does its job. Shortly after the cloud dissipates, the pod shudders, and a full-grown shrubbery erupts from inside, loaded with deep red berries and bright green leaves. The wolf starts nibbling at the berries, first tentatively, then with relish.

And with the berries springing forth from the bush as fast as the wolf can eat them, it seems pretty clear that the wolf isn't going to starve to death after all. So while it looks as though you won't have anything from the red planet to hand over to headquarters once you get home, you have saved a life.


THE END

"And that's the end of our story for tonight," Alley says.

What? But that can't be the END -- there's still so much you don't know! Like, how do you get home? Are you even on the right planet? Do you get in trouble for not having the pod anymore? Who's this queen the weather salesman talked about? "But wait," you begin, "what about--"

"Come on, Wendy," Alley says. "You know the rules. It's way past your bedtime. Your parents'll be home soon and if you're still up it won't look too good for either of us. I'll be right here if you need anything." She pulls a book out of her backpack and starts in on her homework.

Alley is your regular babysitter, but she doesn't just throw a TV dinner at you and make you go to bed at six: she tells you stories, and helps you with your homework, and lets you help cook, and tells you which boys she likes, and all in all acts like a friend: a friend who's older and smarter and more beautiful than you could ever be, but still, a friend.

"But, how I get home?" you ask.

"You'll find out next time," Alley says, smiling. "Or maybe I'll play you, and YOU can tell ME what happens depending on what I choose to do."

"And the queen?"

"You're not going to stay up any longer by stalling," Alley says. "I know all the tricks -- I used to use 'em."

She puts down her pencil. "But I guess I did slip that in there, didn't I." She flashes a bittersweet smile. "Well, all the settings from that story came from these weird dreams I've been having lately," she says. "But there's one more, one I haven't told you about... are you sure you want to hear about this?"

"Yeah!" you say.

"Okay," Alley says. "It starts like this..."


PURPLE

I open my eyes, and I am in a cold, dim, lonely place. I blink, thinking my eyes are still closed, but then I realize that it is not pitch black: there is a dark purple fog billowing all around me, so close to black as to make nearly no difference. There is a faint purple glow to the stone floor, too, though I might not even notice it if it weren't holding me up.

I try to find my way out of this place, but no matter which direction I try, or however far I go, it's all the same. Eventually -- and maybe it's minutes, maybe it's days -- I can suddenly make out a vague shape in the fog.

It's strange, because parts of it look distinctly human, but others are just as clearly not. I come closer, and I discover the answer: it's a person sitting in a huge throne made of rock. No, that's not right. It's not MADE of rock -- it IS a rock, one single stone in the rough shape of a high-backed chair.

Her face is turned away from me, but I can tell that it's a young woman, dressed in long flowing purple garments. Dressed in royal purple, sitting in a throne, I can only assume that she's a queen or princess of some sort, but since I don't believe in monarchy, and certainly am not one of her subjects, I don't feel the need to bow or scrape or call her "Your Majesty". "Hello?" I say.

After a moment, she turns to face me. And that's when I start to get really scared.

She has my face.

She's a lot older -- she's got to be at least twenty -- but there can be no mistake: I'm talking to myself. Normally this would be a sign of impending mental collapse, but luckily it's already a dream. "Well?" she says. "Aren't you going to flee in terror? Can't you feel the life seeping out of you already just by being near me? Can't you?"

She pauses. "No, I suppose you wouldn't know. Not yet. You're new here. But I suppose I might as well confess. See, I'm one of those girls with a rep. Everything I look at is supposed to die. And it's true -- I am the queen of all I survey, and all I survey is long dead. But here's the part that no one believes: it was like that when I got here."

I start to ask her another question, but then she starts talking again. "When I arrived here I was given proprietorship over all the realms I had dreamt of as a child," she says. "But those were all places from which life had long since fled. Barren planets and crumbling castles, forests of stone and vacant crystal cities, worlds upon worlds that were mine, all mine, and not a bit of it populated by any living thing. Sure, the occasional fish or fowl might wander through, but any creature that enters my domain either dies or leaves me. Nothing ever stays."

"How to get out?" I think to ask, but I decide to say nothing after all. The last thing she needs after what she just said is me asking the way to the nearest exit.

"No," the queen says. "By all means, go. Go. You'll be back soon enough."

She pauses. "You see," she says, "I remember this conversation. From the other direction. After all..."


"WE'RE HOME"

You announce. "Wendy! What are YOU still doing up?"

"Sorry, Ms. Mackaye," says Alley, the sitter. "It's my fault -- our bedtime story sort of segued into a conversation about these dreams I've been having... I shouldn't have kept her up this late."

"Well, at least it's not a school night," you say. "No harm done, I guess. Jim's waiting in the car, so you probably ought to get out there. As for YOU, Miss Wendy, you need to get to sleep, pronto."

"Kiss!" Wendy cries.

"Very well--" you begin, but Wendy shakes her head. "I mean Alley," she says.

"Hmmf," you say, as Alley flashes you an embarrassed smile and kisses Wendy on the cheek. "Good night, kiddo," she says. "Hope your dreams are sweeter than mine."

Alley and your daughter Wendy struck up a friendship a couple summers back, when the teacher of Wendy's swimming class brought in some of the kids from her youth league team to help out. Since then Alley's been your regular babysitter. She's bright, polite, doesn't charge very much, and Wendy likes her enough that her first question whenever you and Linda get home from an outing is when you'll be going out again.

Alley finishes stuffing her books in her backpack and puts it on. "Okay, see you soon," she says. You follow her out to the garage door; Jim's car is waiting in the driveway, and as she walks toward it, she is swallowed up in the glare of the headlights.


WHITE

Pure white light blazes down on Alley's crib as Sam plugs in the huge screen he ordered through the mail and mounted on the ceiling. Alley rubs her eyes.

"What is that thing, anyway?" you ask. "Just a fluorescent light?"

"Not at all," Sam says. "The Photopia is a low-energy, high-intensity LCD screen with a bunch of different settings." He tosses you the remote. "Just push the white button to cycle through them."

The Photopia is firmly affixed to the ceiling above Alley's crib -- it's supposed to be "the next generation in mobiles." Right now it is blazing with white light.

You push the white button, and the Photopia suddenly goes dark -- but not, you realize after a moment, completely dark. Instead, it displays a field of stars, as if it were a skylight. Alley blinks and regards it curiously.

Sam has lately taken to ordering all kinds of strange things through the mail: today it was the Photopia; the day before that it was some kind of "baby-safe" blender; tomorrow it'll be a bag of llama feed or something.

"There's more," Sam says. "Hit the button again and there's another mode that's even better."

The screen changes once again. This time it shows a black field, over which three large circles -- one red, one blue, one green -- slowly drift. They bounce off the sides of the screen, but when they collide, they blend to form other colors: magenta, cyan, yellow, white.

Alley claps with delight. "I think we have a winner," Sam grins. "Money well spent, sez I. Okay, I know one little kid who's up way past her bedtime. Can you get the lights, hon?"

You glance into the crib as you reach the light switch. "Good night, Alley," you say. "Sleep well."

You turn off the light.


P H O T O P I A
(The End)
_________________

[Smaug]

Como soy de madera para el ingles, tuve que copiarlo y luego tradirlo con el Reverso y despues hacer algunas correcciones, me salío bastante bien.

Está muy bueno.
_________________
NO ES BUENO NO TENER EN CUENTA UN DRAGON VIVO Y MENOS SI ESTA ACOMPAÑADO POR UNA ELFA.

[Lord Daril Riuuallon]

Jeje, yo pensaba publicarlo en castellano, pero es un tocaso. Aparte que tiene pasajes muy bien escritos que ni idea de como sonarían en castellano, como:

[Smaug]

Si la verdad, que despues de rebizar bien la tradución, me encontre con unos baches bastantes grandes.
Bueno mi señora se va a tener que poner a trabajar.
_________________
NO ES BUENO NO TENER EN CUENTA UN DRAGON VIVO Y MENOS SI ESTA ACOMPAÑADO POR UNA ELFA.

[Calimë]

MUY BUENO LORD!! Gracias por postearlo, la verdad es que recién lo bajé a Word y lo leí, y sólo puedo decir que tuve que releerlo inmediatamente! Es tremendo...me puso la piel de gallina...qué triste
Pero con respecto al tema del destino...vos creés que ella estaba destinada a ser "contadora de cuentos" o a tener ese final? o que es una manera genial de enlazar los hechos para que nosotros veamos que todo puede tener muchas lecturas? Me inclino por lo segundo.
Saludos
Cali
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Había yo limado mis dientes para evitar que las palabras se lastimaran al salir de mi boca. Y me enjuagué con agua salada, para que las mentiras no prosperaran en el hueco de la garganta. Por último, me unté la lengua con savia pegajosa. Lo hice para que las palabras se demoraran lo suficiente y no se enredaran en su propio sonido. - Liliana Bodoc

[Lord Daril Riuuallon]