AbductiCon Page 21

  Obi–wan Kenobi… is that you?

  (handwave) There is no Obi–wan Kenobi…

  I find your lack of faith disturbing. – D.Vader

  Floor 4 went back to banter.

  OUT OF ORDER

  PLEASE USE STAIRS

  Fitness 4 Fen

  Fitness forfend

  Fitness Forever!

  Fitness final, 20th floor, required. Fail = not permitted to leave premises

  “There is no 20th floor,” Dave said.

  “Someone thinks there might be heaven, though,” Libby said, tapping the next sheet.

  Floor 5 did indeed seem to put forward that hypothesis.

  OUT OF ORDER

  PLEASE USE STAIRS

  Stairway to Heaven

  Go looking for stardust!

  MOONdust, twit

  Green cheese

  …and ham…

  Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

  Today the Moon, tomorrow the Klingon Empire…

  The final floor of Tower 1 had a number of entries that had been scored through by each successive contributor, until the final triumphant line.

  OUT OF ORDER

  PLEASE USE STAIRS

  Out of whack

  Danger

  LETHAL danger

  You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

  Inconceivable!

  Dave was laughing out loud again as he put the papers down. “Can I keep one?”

  “No way,” Libby said. “They’re a set. And they’re mine.”

  “How’s everything else going?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a Monday. The sun rose like it always does, just like nothing strange had happened at all. I know, I saw it, I was awake and working at sunrise, and somehow it seemed so… miraculous. Just to see a sun rise in the morning. There’s a feeling I don’t leave a convention with every day.” She paused, looking down at the hands folded in her lap, and when she lifted her eyes again they were inexplicably full of tears. “I went out, for a walk, just after it was light,” she said. “There, in the parking lot. No further. Went to the edge of the bluff and stared at the ocean. And I – you know, I hate to use that word again, it feels like I’m wearing it out – but there’s nothing else to explain – it was simply a miracle, and that’s final. The fact that I was walking, on solid ground, here, on my own world. The light on the water. Everything. Everything. I wasn’t sure whether I’d just woken up from a dream, or had just entered one, but it almost felt like I myself was the dream, you know what I mean? That I was the only thing that could not possibly be real, because I couldn’t exist in both the world as it was around me and the world that I’d been in all weekend – they didn’t seem like they could both contain the reality of myself…”

  “I know,” Dave said. “I went for that walk too. I came down from Callahan’s last night, just after the big landing, and I actually went outside, just to… just to… I don’t know. Make sure, I guess. And all of a sudden the very idea of a Moon hanging in that heaven seemed to be so impossible that I laughed out loud, out there in the parking lot, all by myself, like a loon… You didn’t put any of that in the newsletter, did you?”

  “It would have seemed like I was gushing, or being pretentious, or something,” Libby said. “Somehow it was just so… private. Like going into a temple to say a prayer, and nobody else would understand if you tried to explain to which god you were praying, or for what. On the whole… well, but the elevator signs were a godsend. I don’t think they could have coped with the profound, not in the newsletter, not when everyone probably had their own experience of it, and nothing you and I could say would match it.”

  “I know what I was praying for,” Dave said with a small dry laugh. “At least while it was all going on – just to make sure that everything went… I mean… I spent most of the last three days braced for some horrendous disaster and we went around the Moon and back and the worst that happened was a stuck elevator and a bunch of psyched–out civilians and a couple of con people… speaking of whom… has the doc been in touch…?”

  “Far as I know, he requested an ambulance or two for this morning,” Libby said. “One’s been and gone already, roughly around the time the sun came up. I watched on the cameras, the woman they took out was in a wheelchair, awake, but looking around in a confused sort of way as though she wasn’t quite sure where she was or how she’d got there. But she seemed okay, otherwise, and she should be fine with about ten years of therapy, I guess.”

  “Or two, you said – what’s the matter with the other ambulance patient?”

  “I either missed it coming and going or it hasn’t been yet,” Libby said. “No idea. Xander’s down there, though, look. He would probably know.”

  “I suppose I’d better go down. I’m supposed to be hotel liaison after all. I should be on hand in case anyone decides they wish to register a complaint.”

  Gaining the lobby, Dave found Xander in conversation with Luke the hapless hotel manager, who was looking pale and exhausted but impeccably groomed, his grey waistcoat somehow miraculously clean and unwrinkled and his brass nametag gleaming.

  “Hey, Luke,” Dave said, lifting a hand in greeting. “What, your replacement isn’t here yet?”

  “I checked in with the head office, this morning,” Luke said. “An entirely new shift of staff is on the way. I just have to wait until they get here to hand over the report.”

  “You have to write a report? On this weekend? You poor bastard,” Dave said. “What are you going to tell the corporate office?”

  “As little as I can, actually,” Luke said, offering up a wan smile. “But it’s going to be a fine line between telling them something that sounds sane and is an absolute lie, and something that is at least marginally true but doesn’t make me sound like I spent my first stint as Night Manager up in Callahan’s stuck into the sauce. Either way, I hope I still do have a job when the next shift change happens.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Dave said, and meant it sincerely. “We certainly had no idea any of this would happen.”

  “Of course not,” Luke said. And then appeared to stiffen his back and brace himself against an assault as he muttered, “Oh, good, here comes another one…”

  The receptionist had just pointed him out to a woman with her dark hair scraped up into a pony tail, and the woman was bearing down on the group by the door dragging a small wheeled suitcase behind her and wearing a thunderous expression.

  “You the manager?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Luke murmured soothingly.

  “Well, I just wanted to let you know that I am not happy. I don’t know what kind of service you think you are providing, but I wanted to watch the game on Saturday afternoon and could I get anything on my TV? Nothing at all except your crappy pay–per–view movies. I am simply not going to be blackmailed into that! I will be writing a strong letter of complaint to the management!”

  “I’m very sorry, Ma’am. We had technical difficulties…”

  “That’s not my problem! I am so not happy! And all these absolutely weird people you have crawling around the corridors – really, one would appreciate a heads–up in the future so that one can make plans that don’t include a Trekkie invasion!”

  She stuck her nose in the air, very nearly literally, and flounced out of the door without waiting for a response.

  “Trekkies,” Dave growled softly. “She probably wouldn’t recognize a Star Trek uniform if it bit her. She probably thinks that Rory Grissom is a Trekkie.”

  “Speaking of,” Xander said, “I still haven’t managed to locate the man. Now that the phones are functioning again I even tried phoning him but it goes straight to voicemail. I suspect he left it lying around somewhere and the battery is sending a weak SOS by now, but still. I kind of feel awful. Our Guest of Honor was basically abandoned to…”

  “To the convention of his dreams, most likely, from your account of what his room looked like when you didn’t f
ind him there,” Dave said. “Speaking of captains, though, isn’t that our guy from before – when the replicators first came online? The airline pilot?”

  “I think you’re right,” Xander said.

  The airline pilot in question, in shirtsleeves with a jacket over one arm and dragging a small overnight case, approached them with a smile.

  “Glad I caught you guys,” he said. “Once again, thanks. It’s been… something.”

  “Don’t you have to write a report on this? I mean, were you supposed to report to work anywhere…?”

  “Yes,” the pilot said, “but my flight is this morning and I’ll be right on time. No report needed. And you can be sure that I won’t elaborate too much on what – well – let me put it this way. Those pilots who report having seen UFOs out there … tend to have short careers. And this weekend – if I reported this… Well, I won’t. There isn’t a soul in the world who really needs to know the details. Anyway, I’m on my way to the airport now, with the rest of my crew.”

  “Uh, were they… was everybody else… okay?” Dave asked carefully.

  The pilot laughed. “I talked everyone round,” he said. “All is well. But I’ll not be forgetting these last few days in a hurry. I actually went out there earlier, out into the garden, and just stood looking at the sky – I fly large metal objects for a living, and I think nothing of it, it’s an everyday thing – but now, all of a sudden, it seems to me like I’ve never really done it before. Not truly. Not being aware of what I was actually doing, or of how improbable it was… or of how trivial it all seems, now, after a real miracle just happened.”

  “Are you going to be okay? Flying?” Dave asked carefully.

  “Oh, yes,” the pilot said. “Once I’m in the cockpit of the plane it’s going to be the familiar routines that kick in. I’ll be fine. But still and all… there was… there was the Moon.” He lifted his hands in a gesture that was pure helpless wonder, unable to articulate further the things that he was thinking. “Are your… friends… still around?” he inquired at length, glancing around him and lowering his voice as if he were asking for classified information from an intelligence operative.

  “Disappeared around midnight last night,” Dave said.

  “Well, if you ever run into them again, be sure to give them my regards,” the pilot said. “Thanks again, and good luck!”

  “One down on the good side of the ledger,” Dave muttered as the pilot walked away.

  “But here comes trouble again,” Xander said in a low voice.

  A corpulent man in a crumpled business suit, his hair in a severe crew–cut, stalked purposefully toward poor Luke. He was a head taller and twice as broad as Luke, and the hands that emerged from the sleeves of his suit jacket looked like small shovels; Xander, himself of a wiry build and looking like a child next to the approaching brute, felt an irrational urge to step out in front of Luke to protect him.

  “You’re Luke Barnes?”

  “Y–yes,” Luke said, unsure if it was entirely safe to admit this but resigned to the fact that his name tag confirmed his identity to whoever cared to establish it. “I’m Luke Barnes. How can I be of assistance?”

  The man in the suit threw out one his massive hands, and Luke actually ducked away for an instant before he became aware that the hand in question was holding a business card that looked lost and tiny in the grip of those sausage–sized fingers.

  “Thaddeus Smyrnoff, CEO of All Steel Incorporated and prisoner of this hotel for the past three days. I had a very important meeting with possible investors in my company on this past Saturday, the sole reason I had taken time off work to be in town, and I was prevented from being at this meeting by the staff of this hotel and other guests whose activities may have been a direct cause of my situation. You may consider this your first and only notification of my intent to sue this hotel and possibly the event it has been hosting this weekend for damages and loss of income. Good day to you, sir.”

  “The event…?” Luke echoed, blindsided.

  Thaddeus Smyrnoff reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled and badly folded copy of Libby’s Saturday newsletter – with ABDUCTICON plastered firmly across its title page.

  “I have the evidence,” he said. “I will be passing the details on to my lawyer.”

  He turned and stalked off, and Luke stared after his retreating back, open–mouthed, holding onto the business card by pure reflex.

  “They’re going to fire me now,” he said, after a moment. “For sure.”

  Xander snorted. “Please. For all his huff and bluster, I’d like to see him go into any sane lawyer and offer up a case.”

  “Was he one of the doc’s headcases?” Dave asked warily. “He might well have a case of claiming he was given sedatives or something…”

  “Dave, it all falls down the moment someone chirps that we went to the Moon,” Xander said. “No court in the land is going to take this seriously.”

  “But I saw people taking pictures,” Luke said faintly. “I can’t see them all disappearing. And if there’s visual evidence…”

  “Where there’s photos there’s Photoshop,” Xander said. “And if it’s video… you can CGI your way out of anything these days.”

  “You make it all sound so fake,” Dave said unexpectedly, and a shade defensively.

  Xander shrugged. “It’s worse than that, it’s dead, Jim. All you’d have to do is call The National Inquirer and give them an anonymous tip about how a whole hotel was, you know, abducted by aliens and taken on a joyride in the solar system over the course of a wild weekend. Which immediately makes a judge put it in the same folder with the case of the nun who swears she bore Elvis’s love child. And after that, no ‘real’ news organization is going to touch it – except to point and laugh – and if the media don’t treat it as ‘real’ news, the courts are hardly likely to take on something considered to be ridiculous. Judges take their dignity too seriously for that.”

  “But we did go,” Dave said, suddenly reluctant to let go of the smallest incandescent iota of his out–of–planet experience.

  Xander looked at him, eyes shining. “And we all know that,” he said. “But there is, I suspect, precious little that anyone who is not One Of Us is going to believe if they are told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about this weekend. That’s the joy of it, in a way. It’s ours, only ours, and nobody else believes. The truth is out there, it always has been, and we’ve seen the future, and man, I’m still high from all of it. And a little scared, to be sure – perhaps we know too much. But nothing will ever take this away from me. And it’ll never…”

  A gaggle of young con–goers, average age about twenty one, trooped past the trio at the door, and halted beside them. One of the group, his hair a vivid shade of green, turned to Xander with an expression of such glowing delight that it was impossible not to smile back, and Xander did, giving him a broad grin. Nothing more needed to be said, it was all understood between them, and it seemed to come as a direct validation of what Xander himself had just been saying. But then one of the group stepped up and stuck out his hand for Luke to shake – and the manager did so, instinctively, without quite knowing why.

  “Thanks, man, you were great,” the kid said enthusiastically. “It’s a pretty cool hotel, this, I don’t know how you pulled it all off – where are the droid dudes, anyway? – but you were really cool with it all. It’s been the best con, ever. Um, do you know how to get in touch with those guys? I mean, can we do this again next year? That would just be frigging awesome.”

  “Probably not,” Xander said. “We had our shot. But I know. They came to me, too. Awesome doesn’t begin to describe it.”

  “There’s always hope,” said one of the other kids. “We’ll be back next year anyway. Who knows who else might come along for the ride.”

  “My roommate was supposed to come, but had to cancel at the last minute, family emergency,” a third one from the group crowed. “Man, is he going to
be steamed he missed this one. Can’t wait to tell him all about it.”

  Dave and Xander exchanged a quick glance, and then Dave shrugged, a defeated but delighted grin creeping across his features, and Xander merely gave the kid who had shaken Luke’s hand a high five.

  “Live long, and prosper,” he said. “Whatever happens after, you’ll always have this weekend. Just remember, it’s a memory, not a dream.”

  He got back an enthusiastic fist–pump in response and then they were gone – and Luke was drawn away for a moment by another arriving ambulance and, this time, the good doctor from the Asylum Floor steering a bleary–eyed but still ambulatory patient across the lobby toward the main doors. While they were discussing the matter, another group approached from the general direction of the gamers’ ballroom. Several of them were wearing what looked like clean t–shirts, but a couple of them had just pulled on crumpled hoodies over clothes they had not changed out of all weekend, tucked away in the gamers’ room and their own world.

  “Hey, Dave,” one of them said, squinting at Dave and Xander from a couple of paces away and recognizing at least one face. “How’d the con do? Andie Mae happy?”

  “It, uh….” Dave began, and Xander offered up a wide grin.

  “How did the game go?”

  “Oh, you know,” the gamer said. “Intense. Pretty good.”

  “Hah,” said a mate from the back of the group smugly. “I smeared you in that fight. Rolled a sixteen in strength, fifteen in dexterity, you were so out of it, dude…”

  It was obviously a sore point because they began to re–argue the encounter all over again, touching on which one of them must have cheated, and one of the others pointedly lifted an eyebrow in their direction and then turned back to Dave.

  “The pizza was great this year,” he said. “You know. Really good. Did you change the pizza place? You should so keep these new guys on for next time. Seriously.”

  “He remembers the pizza? From last year? Seriously?” Xander muttered to himself.