XVII. Marginalia
Small pieces of fiction, literary analysis, bits of doggerel, other things that have no natural home. The Mongoose at play.
The piece in which the Mongoose reads Élisabeth Vonarburg’s The Silent City with Élisabeth listening in on the other side of the screen. The unicorn meets the serpent. And they turn out to be the same figure.
A heuromancer's apprentice rides to a village where the well has gone bad — except the well is fine, and the question the reeve asked is not the question he needs answered. A short story about the discipline that doesn't have a name, the one you only learn by failing the obvious test first.
A block-party procession through four millennia of rhetorical scheme. Geoffrey from Accounting thinks em-dashes prove the AI; the Blind Poet, Julius Caesar, and a Sumerian tavern-keeper would like a word. The disco ball, it turns out, has been spinning since clay was soft.
Well, I’ve been to Rock and Roll Heaven, and you know they got a Hell of a band! An examination of the infernal realms, starting with a play from Dr. David Brin and working in several directions at once.
