“What happens now?” asked the Clarkeson, smirking despite defeat. “Am I your prisoner? You cannot bring me to trial; I’m not accountable to the courts of Earth.”
“I’ve never been a fan of the legal system. Simpler just to kill you.”
Hiram laughed. “Gutting me a like human won’t end me. I’m not a singular being like you. My sapience results from the collective efforts of more than a million self-aware cellular collectives working in committee.”
“Then I’ll just have to carve you up into lots of little pieces and scatter them overboard into the swamp. Goodbye, my Lord Auditor. Your committee is hereby disbanded.”
She raised the photonic cutlass above her head in preparation for the first stroke.
“Wait! Who’s that behind you?”
The pirate queen’s contempt at the ploy was palpable. “Please. You can’t expect that to actually work. We’re fighting on top of a sinking airship, and any harness lines someone might use to climb up here are in front of me.”
That’s when I reached from behind her, lightly grasped the wrist of her upraised hand, and commanded, “Sleep!” Her body went limp. She slumped against me as her head lolled upon her chest. I caught her as she collapsed and half-dragged / half-carried her a short distance to deposit her in a folding chair at the center of the stage.
The Auditor in Black wasn’t a Clarkeson at all but actually a blue-collar worker from Des Moines named Hiram Gustuvson. He’d also succumbed to my command and lay sprawled, illuminated by a spotlight on the stage that mere moments ago had seemed to be the slippery surface of a dirigible. He was bigger than the recent pirate queen and I didn’t want to drag him. A quick whisper in his ear, and he stood up, eyes blinking. I guided him back to the chair next to his foe. Next, I stepped behind her chair and brought my lips close to her ear, speaking softly to her as I brought her back to full wakefulness. Then I turned to the audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it has been your great fortune to witness, for the first time anywhere, this performance of the Revenge of the Pirate Queen! Please show your appreciation for our players, who despite having no history of pointless violence or weapons training, nonetheless slaughtered dozens of imaginary foes before finally confronting one another for your entertainment.”
Thunderous applause met my dazed volunteers. They grinned sheepishly, looked to one another, and—better than I could have choreographed it—joined hands, rose to their feet, and took a bow. It was a great end to the last of a week of shows. Seven days I’d taken off from my regular, unwelcome job as CEO of a hugely successful corporation, a vacation spent returning to my original profession as a stage hypnotist. I’m the Amazing Conroy, and I’m very good at what I do, when I can get away to do it.
The applause ended and I escorted my recent hypnotic subjects off the stage and into the waiting arms of their friends and colleagues. One of the small tables in front stood vacant now. Earlier, I’d invited its occupant on stage as a volunteer but she’d demurred. At some point in the show she’d slipped away, her escape covered by darkness, obscured by spotlights, and masked by the antics on stage.
I bid everyone a good night and as soon as the stage lights went dark I slipped through the rear curtain, ending my week of headlining at the Hotel Rotundo in downtown Omaha.
I’d been putting in two shows a night to an audience that had consisted of the attendees of several different groups that had opted to hold their national meetings there in Nebraska, including the Association of Midwestern Pipefitters, Mothers Against Migraines, and my personal favorite the Royal Order of Otters. It wasn’t a bad gig as far as such things went; Omaha rarely attracts really big name acts, so a stage hypnotist can do pretty well. But I wasn’t there for the money. A couple years earlier I’d stumbled into a venture breeding and leasing buffalo dogs and I was now richer than I had any right to be. The work had taken me to Mars a month earlier, and after returning to Earth, I’d decided to treat myself to a little time off. When I had mentioned this to my secretary, she promptly presented me with an array of terrestrial vacation spots featuring a nice assortment of white sandy beaches, private forests, and mountain vistas. Moreover, each included nearby, five-star restaurants that catered to ultra-rich humans and a wide range of xenophilic aliens.
I was tempted. The venues were all variations on paradise, obscenely expensive, and well within my budget. But it was neither what I wanted nor needed. I had no use for paradise, though I almost relented after reviewing the restaurants’ menus. In the end, my resolution held and I slipped away by returning to my earlier career, leaving the running of my company in the hands of people who knew what they were doing far better than me. Instead, to the horror of my security chief, I called in a favor from a friend in the stage performers’ union and within an hour had gotten myself booked at the Hotel Rotundo to perform my hypnosis act and make utter strangers believe outlandish suggestions for the entertainment of others.
It had been a glorious and restful week, but as I undid the knot of my bowtie and walked down the backstage corridor to my dressing room I knew it was time to hang up my tuxedo and return to the corporate office back in Philadelphia.
The woman waiting for me in the hallway changed all that.
She was the same woman who’d vanished before the end of my show, vacating a front table that usually went to master plumbers or reverend otters of great distinction. In hindsight, I should have taken that as an omen.
When selecting volunteers for a show I tend toward two types: either the sort of ordinary person who blends in and goes through life otherwise unnoticed, and at the other extreme someone who has made a significant, though not necessarily conscious, effort to stand out. This woman fell into the second group.
A single glance revealed that she wasn’t from the Midwest. Her tanned skin had that perfect seamless look that only comes from salons in New York or L.A., where you spend ten minutes hanging in zero gee while melanin wielding nano-machines paint your epidermis one cell at a time. I assumed a similar treatment had been applied to her shoulder length blonde hair; it had an otherworldly look, the way it bounced in curly streamers all around her head. She probably came by her dimples honestly and they worked to give her a girl-next-door flavor that was at odds with the perfection of skin and hair. Her clothes didn’t help things. Sure, we were in Omaha, but the rest of my audience still made a point of showing up in the latest definition of ‘office casual.’ The men all had collared shirts and the women all wore dresses. She had clothed herself in new jeans and an oversized sports jersey representing a team from the Martian dustball minor league. I’d followed the disapproving glances of more than one of the women gathered in Omaha to rally against migraines when I’d sought her out as a volunteer. When she turned down my invitation, I’d switched to a pretty plumber and put her out of my mind.
Now she stepped back into it, having apparently left my show early the better to lay in wait for me in the dilapidated hallway backstage. She stood there now, leaning against the door to my dressing room, the shiny blue fabric of her Helium Hurlers jersey stretched in interesting ways across her torso. I stopped a few feet away, still trying to determine if she was a groupie or a crazie. Neither were unheard of in my field, though the latter were more common.
If she was a crazie, I certainly didn’t want her coming into my dressing room. For that matter, while it would be flattering if she were a groupie, I wasn’t looking for that sort of thing either. It was Friday night and I had a ticket for a redeye back home with a plan to spend the weekend catching up on my sleep and dining at a couple of five-star restaurants. All too quickly it’d be Monday morning, and I’d be expected to show up at the corporate offices of Buffalogic, Inc. bright and early to resume reviewing business proposals and taking meetings with corporate leaders from all over the Earth and beyond. So, regardless of her story, or my own wishful thinking, she wasn’t going to be joining me in my dressing room.
“Good evening, Mr. Conroy. My name is Nicole. I very much enj
oyed your show tonight. The things you made your volunteers do, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I offered up a tight smile, nodding my head to acknowledge the praise, and had pretty much decided she belonged in the groupie category. “Thank you, you’re very kind. But, if you’ll excuse me, I—”
“And that last part where you made that plumber believe he was a Clarkeson? Incredible. It was spot on. Plots within plots with them. Have you met many Clarkesons?”
An odd question, but then I’d already pegged her as a bit more worldly than the rest of the audience. “A few,” I answered. “Thanks for coming. I’m glad you enjoyed the show. Now I really must—”
“You know, my uncle saw one of your earliest performances, what was it, fourteen years ago? On Hesnarj.”
It was like she’d slapped me. Hesnarj was an alien mausoleum world where I’d been marooned while a college student. There’d been precious few humans anywhere on that planet. I’d discovered my talent as a stage hypnotist there, befriended my first aliens, and even met one who had helped me to channel my deceased great aunt Fiona.
I started to reply but she cut me off again.
“But that’s not why I’m here. The show was just a delightful bonus. I actually came to meet you for a completely unrelated reason.”
Okay, maybe not a groupie. “Oh? You did? I see. Well, and that’s—”
“There’s someone quite extraordinary that I’d like you to meet. His name is Juan Sho. He’s involved with sorghum, that and cookbooks.”
Sorghum cookbooks? I made a point of looking up and down the length of our empty hallway. Just that quickly the scales had tipped toward crazie.
“He’s not here, Mr. Conroy. He’s waiting for us in Mexico.”
“Mexico?”
She smiled, revealing perfect, gleaming teeth. “Well, yes. Like yourself, he’s a busy executive by day, and also shares your passion for cuisine, though in his case it’s more about how it’s crafted than how it tastes. Right now he’s probably in a little restaurant in Veracruz, reverse-engineering the best mole poblano you’ve ever had.”
This time my smile was genuine. If you can appreciate a truly fine mole then you’ll understand why. Excellent food is my weakness and Nicole—whoever she was—had done her homework. Some part of my brain threw away both of the likely pigeonholes I’d laid out for her and tabled further attempts at classification. She had my attention. I unlocked my dressing room and opened the door.
“Really? You know, I’ve never been to Veracruz. Why don’t you come in and tell me more about this.”
EXCERPT FROM “THE MOTHERS OF VOORHISVILLE”
MARY RICKERT
Mary Rickert has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Locus Award, a Shirley Jackson Award, and a Crawford Award, and has been nominated for many others. “The Mothers of Voorhisville” was originally published on Tor.com.
The things you have heard are true; we are the mothers of monsters. We would, however, like to clarify a few points. For instance, by the time we realized what Jeffrey had been up to, he was gone. At first we thought maybe the paper mill was to blame; it closed down in 1969, but perhaps it had taken that long for the poisonous chemicals to seep into our drinking water. We hid it from one another, of course, the strange shape of our newborns and the identity of the father. Each of us thought we were his secret lover. That was much of the seduction. (Though he was also beautiful, with those blue eyes and that intense way of his.)
It is true that he arrived in that big black car with the curtains across the back windows, as has been reported. But though Voorhisville is a small town, we are not ignorant, toothless, or the spawn of generations of incest. We did recognize the car as a hearse. However, we did not immediately assume the worst of the man who drove it. Perhaps we in Voorhisville are not as sheltered from death as people elsewhere. We, the mothers of Voorhisville, did not look at Jeffrey and immediately think of death. Instead, we looked into those blue eyes of his and thought of sex. You might have to have met him yourself to understand. There is a small but growing contingency of us that believes we were put under a type of spell. Not in regards to our later actions, which we take responsibility for, but in regards to him.
What mother wouldn’t kill to save her babies? The only thing unusual about our story is that our children can fly. (Sometimes, even now, we think we hear wings brushing the air beside us.) We mothers take the blame because we understand, someone has to suffer. So we do. Gladly.
We would gladly do it all again to have one more day with our darlings. Even knowing the damage, we would gladly agree. This is not the apology you might have expected. Think of it more as a manifesto. A map, in case any of them seek to return to us, though our hope of that happening is faint. Why would anyone choose this ruined world?
Elli
The mothers have asked me to write what I know about what happened, most specifically what happened to me. I am suspicious of their motives. They insist this story must be told to “set the record straight.” What I think is that they are annoyed that I, Elli Ratcher, with my red hair and freckles and barely sixteen years old, shared a lover with them. The mothers like to believe they were driven to the horrible things they did by mother-love. I can tell you, though; they have always been capable of cruelty.
The mothers, who have a way of hovering over me, citing my recent suicide attempt, say I should start at the beginning. That is an easy thing to say. It’s the kind of thing I probably would have said to Timmy, had he not fallen through my arms and crashed to the ground at my feet.
The mothers say if this is too hard, I should give the pen to someone else. “We all have stuff to tell,” Maddy Melvern says. Maddy is, as everyone knows, jealous. She was just seventeen when she did it with Jeffrey and would be getting all the special attention if not for me. The mothers say they really mean it—if I can’t start at the beginning, someone else will. So, all right.
It’s my fifteenth birthday, and Grandma Joyce, who taught high school English for forty-six years, gives me one of her watercolor cards with a poem and five dollars. I know she’s trying to tell me something important with the poem, but the most I can figure out about what it means is that she doesn’t want me to grow up. That’s okay. She’s my grandma. I give her a kiss. She touches my hair. “Where did this come from?” she says, which annoys my mom. I don’t know why. When she says it in front of my dad, he says, “Let it rest, Ma.”
Right now my dad is out in the barn showing Uncle Bobby the beams. The barn beams have been a subject of much concern for my father, and endless conversations—at dinner, or church, or in parent-teacher conferences, the grocery store, or the post office—have been reduced to “the beams.”
I stand on the porch and feel the sun on my skin. I can hear my mom and aunt in the kitchen and the cartoon voices from Shrek 2, which my cousins are watching. When I look at the barn I think I hear my dad saying “beams.” I look out over the front yard to the road that goes by our house. Right then, a long black car comes over the hill, real slow, like the driver is lost. I shade my eyes to watch it pass the cornfield. I wonder if it is some kind of birthday present for me. A ride in a limousine! It slows down even more in front of our house. That’s when I realize it’s a hearse.
Then my dad and Uncle Bobby come out of the barn. When my dad sees me he says, “Hey! You can’t be fifteen, not my little stinkbottom,” which he’s been saying all day, “stinkbottom” being what he used to call me when I was in diapers. I have to use all my will and power not to roll my eyes, because he hates it when I roll my eyes. I am trying not to make anyone mad, because today is my birthday.
As far as I can figure out, that is the beginning. But is it? Is it the beginning? There are so many of us, and maybe there are just as many beginnings. What does “beginning” mean, anyway? What does anything mean? What is meaning? What is? Is Timmy? Or is he not? Once, I held him in my arms and he smiled and I thought I loved him. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe everything was already me
throwing babies out the window; maybe everything was already tiny homemade caskets with flies buzzing around them; maybe everything has always been this place, this time, this sorrowful house and the weeping of the mothers.
The Mothers
We have decided Elli should take a little time to compose herself. Tamara Singh, who, up until Ravi’s birth, worked at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday, has graciously volunteered. In the course of persuading us that she is, in fact, perfect for the position of chronicler, Tamara—perhaps overcome with enthusiasm—cited the fantastic aspects of her several unpublished novels. This delayed our assent considerably. Tamara said she would not be writing about “elves and unicorns.” She explained that the word fantasy comes from the Latin phantasia, which means “an idea, notion, image, or a making visible.”
“Essentially, it’s making an idea visible. Everyone knows what we did. I thought we were trying to make them see why,” she said.
The mothers have decided to let Tamara tell what she can. We agree that what we have experienced, and heretofore have not adequately explained (or why would we still be here?)—might be best served by “a making visible.”
We can hope, at least. Many of us, though surprised to discover it, still have hope.
Tamara
There is, on late summer days, a certain perfume to Voorhisville. It’s the coppery smell of water, the sweet scent of grass with a touch of corn and lawn mower gas, lemon slices in ice-tea glasses and citronella. Sometimes, if the wind blows just right, it carries the perfume of the angel roses in Sylvia Lansmorth’s garden, a scent so seductive that everyone, from toddlers playing in the sandbox at Fletcher’s Park to senior citizens in rocking chairs at The Celia Wathmore Nursing Home, is made just a little bit drunk.
On just such a morning, Sylvia Lansmorth (whose beauty was not diminished by the recent arrival of gray in her long hair), sat in her garden, in the chair her husband had made for her during that strange year after the cancer diagnosis.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 Page 30