ZOMBIE WATERFALL -ROUGH DRAFT- MARK ANTHONY MASTERSON 2002
Chapter 2
The Dean of Special Projects cocked his hip and drove the ferrule of his cane a quarter-inch into the soft wood of the station dock as he watched the approaching cars and coaches with weary anticipation. This was an undergraduate task. God and blood, it was a volunteer task, even, something those chirpy people liked to do when they weren't creating petitions to stuff in his postal box or cutting out paper animals for the dormitory hallways. Who kept creating people like that? Where did they go after graduation? Probably the same place as children named Chad. Outside Dean Rowan Humbert's sphere, and therefore out of existence.
Shouldn't joke about that. Not temporally correct, but still. You never did meet many adults named Chad, even before Event Zero. Yet Chads were always underfoot at picnics, being screamed at by faculty wives.
Dean Humbert watched as a thick chested foppish sort in a cheap plum suit who looked to be in his early-late twenties popped the hatch on a battered old Conestoga that had been fit to an early model Cadillac Superior hearse with a pulsing radiagical engine thrusting out of its hood. His wavy dark blonde hair fell into his face as he squinted up at the station sign. He disappeared back into the coach. He reappeared, backing out slowly with a leather valise in one hand and a larger cardboard clad suitcase in the other, feeling blindly for the ladder steps with thick-heeled, red, ankle-high boots.
"That's our fish..." said Humbert softly to himself. He swung his cane out and ambled in that direction.
The student stepped badly back from the coach, overbalanced and swaying, but soon righted himself and smiled. He looked around at the other passengers disembarking from the caravan, mostly government-types, families reuniting with Guardsmen, then seemed to start with the realization that anyone here to pick him up would be behind him, and swung his bags around heavily, pointedly failing to notice the clanging Tip Bell and Cup which had come away from the coachman's flexi-glass sealed compartment.
He hasn't just got student written all over him, thought Humbert. He's a positive neon sign.
"Ho there!" called out the Dean. The new arrival continued to meet expectations by turning his head back and forth and squinting at the station sign again.
"I say, ho there!" called the Dean again, and raised his cane with a waggle.
The boy, who could only be the famous Harold Curtiz of Old America, much talked about in the Dining Hall and anticipated by at least three departments, squinted again, but at least in the Dean's direction, and half-raised the valise in tentative acknowledgment.
The Dean stuck out his left hand as he closed the gap between them. "Rowan Humbert, Dean of Special Projects. Mister Curtiz, if I'm not mistaken?" asked Dean Humbert.
The young man smiled broadly and dropped the valise to shake hands. "Yes. Yes, I am. How did you find me?"
"You have the demeanor of intelligence which our institution attracts and rewards," said Humbert.
"Let's not kid a kidder, Dean. You can't get a donation out of me until I graduate."
Humbert let go of Harold's hand and raised an eyebrow. "You dress like a student, although about six months out of fashion, which I believe now runs to peacock hats and shades of grey. Furthermore, you have neither scars nor breasts." He made a brief gesture with the cane that managed to indicate the the black Nehru jackets of the government clerks, the torn and lipstick-smeared faces of the recently arrived Guardsmen and the young girls who had stepped off the cattle cars with plastic knapsacks and tennis shoes.
"But the station must get students all the time."
"Undergraduates smell like fear, Mister Curtiz. And they arrive in the late summer," The Dean swept up the cane again. "Which we here enjoy with some regularity that I know you would debate me on, but let me assure you that the remarkable temporal stability of this region is what allows an Institution such as ours to exist in such calamitous, you shall pardon the expression, times. At this point, you see, someone like you could only be you."
"You're not the person who sent me this acceptance letter, are you?" Harold shook the valise a little. "I couldn't read the signature."
"No. That would be your Department Head. You will officially attend the Time and Extraordinary Science School. F.F.U.U., they call it. But as your work is of interest to many departments, not least of which is the Advanced Mathemagics School, your scholarship falls under my purview, Special Projects. Shall we walk?"
Harold fell in beside Humbert. "How far?"
"To the stables? They're just over this rise."
Harold whistled rhythmic violin screams, the murder theme from Psycho, dropping back a pace. "Horses?"
The Dean paused to beat some dust off of his trousers. "Donkey, I'm afraid. I do know you put down riding as a particular hobby in your application, but we had a spot of trouble a few years ago, about a decade your time, when the horses began to bolt whenever they got more than fifty yards from the City center. The hostlers said they acted as though they smelled blood everywhere, but that sounds hogwashy to me. A bit of I don't know, so I'll cook something up, didn't study for the mid-term about it. Well, it amuses the students, anyway, to occasionally spot the faculty riding jackasses."
Harold cocked his head and lifted his bags with renewed vigor. "You're a good egg, Dean Humbert, and don't let anyone tell you different."
"Oh, they never do."
The stables were pungent, and attended by clearly past-time hands in day-glo green jumpsuits. Dean Humbert reached into his suit coat pocket for the ticket and handed it to an older woman who had obviously sewn her name, "Gwenyfhar," over the pocket herself.
After they'd roiled on the blanketed backs of the twin brown beasts for more than twenty minutes, moving less-than-stately through the gates of the station and on to the hilly paths that led to the larger community, Harold gripped with his knees and forced a casual grin to his face. "There's another thing, though, that I had wondered about..."
"You want to know why I'm meeting you instead of some tarty volunteer undergraduate? I'm wondering that myself. You've an excellent mind, young Mister Curtiz."
"Yes, but..."
"No," said Humbert with a waggled finger. "No false modesty among the uppers. The practical reason for this meeting of ours is actually a matter you'll be studying. About two days I experienced a localized bout of slippage."
"Time slippage?"
"Not a banana in the county, young man. So, yes, time slippage." The dean rubbed his donkey's mane absently, watching the palm trees and firs on the hillsides. "I was in my office, polishing some pewter photo frames, and I'm assured there could not have been a measurable piezoelectric discharge from the effort, yet in any case, they sprang out of my hands and I found myself on the station an hour ago, waiting for you."
Harold coughed. "Remarkable stability, you said."
"We live in a Crashed World, nonetheless. The fringineering department took some readings, stretched a line from the office to the station, called in a radiagical expert, decided there was no reason for me not to be a smeared rainbow of jelly across length of the campus, and could not explain why I had slipped, nor why I had returned so quickly, but emphasized that to be on the safe side... Oh, you will like this."
"What? The safe side?"
"No, the view." Dean Humbert drew out his cane and smacked both donkeys at the rear, urging a little speed out of the creatures to take them to the top of the crest and out of the trees.
The wide valley stretched below them, thirty miles across, filled from end to end with human artefacts.
"So much time," whispered Harold, staring. "I hadn't thought there was enough time..."
Gleaming with silicon under the swift sun, the dizzying architecture of the valley spoke in many voices, all of the polyglot steel and stone punctuated, wrapped parenthetically, by long languorous dragons of white smoke and dark fog that curved around the spires and spinnarets, sidled around Roman columns flickering with ecstatic luminescence even in the daylight, ran over statues of generals on ziggurats, between thrusting pyramids atop office towers, spinning, ghost clutching at whirling gyroscopic flyers racing along wires, lit from arcing exposed wires, flowed down cobblestones and pavements, past frozen dinosaurs that held tolling yellow submarines in their bellies, filled Greek amphitheaters that would seat legions, caressed pagodas shining radioactive and lovely, fondled the thighs of Colossus striding over the bazaar, erupted from white and pink tents, belched from the stacks of cruise liner run aground on the far eastern hills, chirped out of factory after factory, puffed from the windows of the low dormitories, and spiralled at last from and around the black and gothically solid castle seemingly made of promethium spitfire that rose from a natural hill in the center of the valley, crackling purple fireballs arcing between the ivory towers.
"We've had over thirty subjective years, and most of it showed up on its own. Here," said the older man, holding out a set of folding opera glasses. Harold slid off the donkey and stood closer to the edge.
And there were people, at first only implied by tremblings in the fog, but then apparent through the whole place, making the campus vibrate with vitality, with a scrambled motion, with mankind, not like ants on an anthill at all, still scurrying but with an element of purposelessness, an endearing random quality, free and alive, people moving, pulling trams and trolleys, hollow men walking on stilts, tiny unseen drivers working the levers in their chests, people swinging cranes, people swinging starlings, a flock of fringineers leaping from a tower block, their measuring harnesses fluttering out behind them, plunging into the yellowing fog, rickshaws tumbling down steep hills, sending up plumes of rice dust, people working ecstatic dials and whirligigs in the brass gyroscopes, frantic flyers, women wrestling with firedogs in the clearings, children loaded onto carts, being hauled out to the grassy knolls, black suited men precision drilling with axe handles, all of them, all of them thrumming through the streets, animating the bones of the buildings, making them tremble, and growing the coral reef of civilization.
Harold's mouth would not close. He felt an unfamiliar ache at the back of his throat and behind his eyes.
"Welcome," said Dean Humbert, "to the Omniversity of Berkeley."