So there I was, putting off working, one hand doing a landed fish
impression on the keyboard, a coffee-cup in the other. I shifted my
attention into neutral and let just whatever turn up, eyes focussed in the
middle distance, coffee approaching the optimum temperature for swigging.
Idly flipping over a mental loose rock, something caught my mental eye.
Merely through the act of coming into the focus of my consciousness, it was
immediately bolstered by the increased attention paid to it; so important
to be noticed, it obviously warranted having more thought applied in
fleshing it out. By the time I was consciously aware of it, it was
effectively what I've written.
I jotted it down. I made one or two quick passes over the result for the
sake of such things as grammatical cohesiveness; and in one or two
transitional points I had to add a few words so that they'd be at least
vaguely referenced, rather than utterly obscured. But the detail given was
all there at the time - I almost got the impression that there was a swarm
of stagehands just out of shot scrambling about readying things Just In
Time. (Kind of like an ad that used to be on TV for a range of printers.)
While I wrote it all down at the time, some bits I only recognised (like
the caramel floor) or understood (like the name) later.
All this is said in apology for the condition of what follows. There's no
plot or other context that serves to frame or border it - hence "vignette".
Character development is basically not present. And (something which
annoyed me slightly at the time) virtually no soundtrack whatsoever. I can
say that the setting is "in space" (not that that narrows things down much:
I'm figuring it must be interplanetary), and that the shuttle features the
ellipse as a major design element. (I've just realised where I saw the main
window before - Arthur C. Clarke's _Against the Fall of Night_ - only it
was a video display there. So much for originality.)
Oh, and why I'm posting it? Well, I flatter myself to think that it might
give some people ideas for images - there are more fractals in it than meet
the eye. Myself, I came up with a new kind of abstract machine that could
be modelled as an n-unsigned counter machines with an unorthodox repertory
of operations (and verified that it's equivalent to a Turing machine). But
that reminds me: time to get back to work.
Morgan L. Owens
"A man is a small thing. And the night is very large and full of wonders."
-{*}-
There was a shaft of light shining from floor to ceiling beside the window
- or was it ceiling to floor? At neither end was there any visible light
source, just a bright spot as if it were the target of the beam. The real
give-away of course was the fact that it violated the truism about the
invisibility of light: it was able to shine with a milky glow without any
assistance from anything in the air to scatter it. She figured the effect
could be achieved by some sort of standing wave effect: elaborate
radio-frequency fields generated at points unknown around the cabin,
interfering with each other to dump all their energy into this one narrow
region, harmonising to produce the visible range of frequencies. She
thought she could see it wriggle slightly in response to her movements.
The shaft of light spoke; well, if the builders could manage it with light,
then sound shouldn't have been too much trouble.
All it said was "Your destination," brightening briefly at the same time.
Outside she could see what the beam was probably referring to. She tried on
a few descriptive comparisons: a cartoon cloud, or a bunch of grapes with
pearls instead of grapes.
"K'," the shaft said. She looked at it, for lack of anything more
appropriate to focus on. "Its name is K'. You are unable to pronounce it."
"Kih?"
"K'."
"K."
"K'."
"K'."
"K'."
She gave up. They had drawn nearer. A sculpture of a bunch of grapes
perhaps - sculpted in opal. The overall greyness was resolving into
something less easy to characterise. The sweeps and blurs of colour gave
the impression of being layered, as if the apparent surface allowed partial
views into deeper parts.
They were more than just sweeps and blurs, however. As the shuttle
continued to approach, shifting perspectives told her that they represented
elaborate structures, tangled branchings, clumps of woolly cables, (more)
bunches of grapes. But nothing was so straightforward to be one particular
colour, and some shifted both in response to changing angle of view and
internal changes of their own. She was also gaining an idea of the size of
K' - at least a dozen kilometres in length.
Not all of what she saw was attached to the main body, she saw. Almost
every structure was accompanied by a swarm of objects of bewildering
variety, from sizes that would dwarf their shuttle (and festooned with
their own elaborate structures and escorts) down to the limit of
visibility. Things would attach themselves to the main body; attachments
would break off and move freely.
She didn't see the entrance ahead: her eyes kept snagging on one detail
after another and there was too much for her to assimilate. Nevertheless,
before too long she realised that their view was no longer shifting, and
that the surface like a broken rockface before her, decorated with bursts
of capillary piping, could be called a wall. What got her attention was the
shuttle being opened.
The shuttle wasn't opening. Instead, it was being swiftly dismantled around
her. The shaft of light had already vanished without her noticing. Starting
with the largest components in the shuttle's design, psychedelic shrubbery
of various proportions and assisted by clouds of insect-like things, from
the size of small birds down to gnats, would separate each part from its
neighbours and then dismantle each. In some cases, the process was so
thorough that pieces would effectively dissolve before her eyes into the
haze of midges enveloping them.
Everything seemed to ignore her as she stepped aside for the floor to be
chewed up. Otherwise she wouldn't still be standing. She looked down
between her feet at a string of beads that was being drawn out from
somewhere underneath the shuttle. About half a metre away, a bundle of
straight wires about ten centimetres long was hovering horizontally just
above the floor and engaged in a rapid dance about each other. Every time a
bead passed underneath one of the wires would drop down and slice it in
two. The wire would return to the bundle, the two pieces of the bead would
be carried away through one hole in the wall or another, and the thread on
which it had been strung would be drawn further into a puckering in the floor.
The wires were about the simplest things she saw there. Then without
warning one of the wires leapt up out of the bundle, crumpled in on itself
like a protein finding its tertiary structure, and threw itself to the
floor; this extended a pseudopod and drew it in. As the pseudopod collapsed
back (the wire within dissolving), ripples of density spread outwards
through the floor and interfered with other ripples passing back and forth
from other events in the floor (not all of them apparent). The floor itself
had the appearance of glitter and grit suspended in acrylic. It was
difficult to tell, given the back-and-forth swaying that was the rippling
effect, but the individual flecks appeared to be moving about. She had no
idea how deep it was, and nothing caught her eye that didn't demand her
fullest attention. Was that a cluster of pipes down there or just a
denser-than-average accumulation of grit?
Now the swirl of activity developed a focus on her, though there was no
specific indication to the effect. Instead, she found herself nudged and
guided out of the room by passing objects, each apparently by complete
accident as it raced off to carry out some far more important task, toward
a short corridor lined with more of the piping that had been scattered on
clumps on the wall. Here, they made up the wall. "Piping" didn't do them
justice. Every pipe was thickly carbuncled with tiny opalescent stacks of
thin plates of various diameters. Mites were clambering from plate to
plate, trekking from stack to stack. Spindly spiders clambered above,
disassembling, reassembling and shuffling whole stacks. Spots of diffuse
brightness moved along the pipes, as if shining things were flowing within
at different speeds and in different directions. They provided the only
illumination in the corridor but it was quite sufficient, as any given tube
was lit along at least half its length by these spots. Refracted sparkles
from the stacks provided another layer of illumination. Out of the corner
of her eye, they appeared to combine to form elaborate signs, but she
couldn't parse any meaning.
The corridor was only a few metres long, and she arrived in a small room.
The floor was a smooth caramel hue, while the ceiling glowed softly in a
shifting arrangement of colours, like coloured oils swirling on a light
box. The colour of each of the walls wasn't fixed either; being one tint
directly before of her, and shading into another as the angle the wall made
with her gaze narrowed. Not only that, but she was sure the colours
themselves were shifting up and down the spectrum, just too slowly for her
to apprehend. She had already mislaid the corridor. Close up, the walls
appeared to be obsessively grooved in a rectilinear labyrinth, with antlike
dots of at least two different sizes crawling along in the grooves.
Sometimes when two dots met, they'd both reverse directions; other times
only one would do so. Larger and smaller dots could apparently pass over or
through each other. In short, it was much more understated than the
(shuttlebay?) she'd just left.
To say that she was overwhelmed by this stage would be an extreme
understatement. There was literally so much going on around her that she
could feel her brains starting to leak out of her ears. Whatever she
glanced at screamed its significance and activity.
Sitting exhaustedly on the floor, she shook and bowed her head. She made
the mistake of allowing her eyes to focus on what she was sitting on. It
wasn't a single colour. Instead, it was divided up into a grid of brown and
yellow squares, each roughly a millimetre on a side. She couldn't help but
try and determine the pattern, but if there was one it always just barely
eluded her. There was definitely one there: it was certainly not just a
random arrangement of noise - she searched in vain for three consecutive
brown or yellow squares (except diagonally, but even then only as part of a
longer row) - but nor was there any periodicity she could put her finger on.
