The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “The range of material is stunning,” Peter said, his voice tinny. “These are some of the most knowledgeable actors I’ve had the pleasure to work with in all my years in theatre. Opening night is going to be groundbreaking.”

  “We can hope,” said Roger.

  She frowned. “Don’t.”

  Emily had never vilified Dramatons the way other actors had, back when it was a battle. She joined the Actors’ Rights Union but never campaigned, and declined the “Live Theatre is Really Living” radio spots. She and Roger had rows over it, loud and mean enough that Phil had to intervene.

  Roger didn’t understand why Emily seemed so devoid of disgust for them. He wasn’t given to it, but he hated their fame, and he hated audiences who couldn’t see the difference between real and manufactured.

  “I’m going to talk to United Entertainment tomorrow,” she said. “They’re always looking for writers.”

  “Fine,” he said around the ache in his chest. “Best get some sleep, then. Lots of groveling in the morning.”

  “Go to your room and shut your face, I’ll be brilliant,” she said, and got up to brush her teeth.

  United kept her for three hours.

  He’d gone with her, and it only made sense to apply as a voiceover artist while he was waiting. They sent him home with a table-top recorder and a stack of scripts.

  “Whatever you think suits,” the lady said, in a tone that made it clear this was his first test of employment.

  So they set up on his bed, and Emily flipped through the scripts and sorted them into piles.

  “Crap,” she said, dropped one onto the larger stack beside the bed. “Crap. Crap. Very good,” she said, tucked one under her knee. “Crap. Crap. You should give these people a talking-to, they sent you home with awful stuff.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see anything.”

  She shoved something into his hands. “Read this first, then we’ll do the other one.”

  It was a good monologue, that gray space between hero and villain that he most liked to occupy. Inflections, intonations, pushed forward from the page. All he’d have to do was open his mouth.

  “What’s the other?” he asked.

  “The one where I’m your wife,” she said, dropped another on the pile. “Watch out with these people. They’re trying to turn you into a Lothario. At your age it will kill you.”

  When he woke it was full night. The darkness pressed on him through the window, as if the streetlights had turned away. Music poured from the club downstairs; some foxtrot he didn’t know.

  Emily was asleep, turned away from him. The libris was still on, resting in the space between them, the Condemned Woman’s speech flickering faintly in the dark.

  Two years ago, in Cardiff, she’d missed a line and thrown them three minutes past the pivotal reconciliation. There was no way to go back from where she’d put them, and they’d had to go on without it. The audience didn’t know the play enough to complain, but they knew something was missing; it read in the limpid applause.

  Peter was furious with her; Emily was more furious at herself than Peter was.

  “It’s just not what it was,” she’d said, shaken, after Peter had stormed out of the dressing room. “I mean, you’re rubbish in the farewell scene anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Terrible,” Roger agreed.

  After a minute he realized; in a pinch, you could cut out crowd scenes and the magistrate and perform the play with two actors.

  He held out his hand to her, hesitated. When she breathed in her shoulder almost touched his palm; when she breathed out it sank away from him, out of reach.

  Downstairs they struck up the first bars of “Forgetting You.” The bandleader murmured something into the microphone, and the singer began.

  Roger brought his hand back to his chest, stared at the ceiling, tried to breathe.

  IV. When All Else Fails, Drop the Curtain

  For six weeks Emily wrote afternoon radio dramas—half an hour minus the time it took to advertise ipecac and baking soda—and clocked them quickly enough to make an income.

  It was great fun; it was every overwrought scenario from vaudeville without a sense of humor, and she and Roger sat up nights running lines and trying not to break.

  “ ‘Oh, Charles, my dearest love, shot, shot down in the street! The Black Masques must be behind this! Oh, Detective Allan, you must believe me! You must help me!’”

  “ ‘By all heaven’s gold, I will do neither!’ God, Em, really?”

  “Keep going. I need to fill two minutes before the butter advert.”

  Eventually, British Broadcast Radio 4 began to send back notes suggesting that her characters make good use of baking soda, or butter, or men’s suits.

  “They’re not serious,” said Roger.

  “Oh, I’ve taken care of it.” She handed him a paper.

  “ ‘Damn you, Brewster, the police will be on us any second! We have to get this blood off our clothes! Quick, grab me Lincoln’s Own baking soda!’”

  “Too much?” she asked.

  He grinned.

  The BBR chose not to record that scene.

  Instead, Autumn the socialite insisted that the cake for her dinner party be made only with Lincoln’s Own, “since anything else is simply déclassé.”

  “They’re censoring art, you know,” she said.

  “Dictators,” said Roger from his half of the bed.

  Six weeks they’d slept in the suite, and neither of them had put a hand out of line.

  Rose (when Rose finally showed, in the lobby bar, two weeks after they arrived) was mortified nonetheless. Rose loved being mortified.

  “WHAT are you doing sleeping in one bedroom with Roger?” she said between kisses on the cheek. “We’ve all heard, it’s a scandal, you’ve gone mad, are you trying to give Peter a heart attack?”

  “Oh, I could never top what he did,” Emily said, reassuring.

  Rose rolled her eyes and twisted her long braid. “Can you imagine? I nearly fainted when I heard, I turned right to Phil and said, ‘Well, that’s the end of it, innit,’ and it was just terrible, terrible to hear, I could hardly work all the next day I was so distracted, I felt so awful.”

  “You poor thing,” said Emily, and then Rose had the grace to look abashed and laugh.

  “Well, at least you and Roger are finally left to yourselves.”

  “Rose.”

  “Oh, come off! Your stage tricks are no better than anyone’s.” She leaned forward, planted her elbows on the bar. “How long did he wait before he kissed you? Phil said Roger seemed likely to wait until you were here, but I guessed it was right off.”

  Emily smiled. “Rose, we’re too old to go mooning around. We’re only sharing a suite so that when one of us kicks the bucket the other can call the concierge.”

  Rose changed the subject.

  She was a designer for one of the London houses—car coats. (She’d always been flash. Emily approved.) She lived in the hotel because Phil kept rent low and because she fancied having someone else change the sheets.

  Abigail was a fit model when they met, “Oh, ages ago”; Abigail had grown tired of standing around getting stuck with pins, so now she was a comptroller, cataloging Rose’s expensive fabrics.

  “I love her to pieces,” Rose said when Emily asked. “Just to pieces. We’ve been three years now. She’s always taking the piss, it’s brilliant, it’s just like the Understudies again, only not so difficult.” Rose flushed. “I mean, not that it was difficult, it was never difficult, it’s just that now. Well, now.”

  Rose gently spun her glass between her fingers as if she was turning back the clock.

  “You’ll realize soon,” Rose went on, sounding happier now that the worst was out. “No more stage fright, no more living out of bags, no more worrying if you have enough money for a cup of tea. No more stage managers. No more smearing up your face and acting a fool every night. It’s lovely.”


  Rose was lying. Smearing up her face and acting a fool had been Rose’s favorite thing in the world, and she pounced on any play that had the ingénue in disguise. Rose loved a pantomime more than anyone.

  Maybe the fashion business wasn’t such a fine idea.

  “Do you go to the theatre much?”

  Rose blinked hard several times, shook her head, stared into her glass. “Oh no, no. Not often. Abigail doesn’t care for automatons, and I’m so busy these days. And it’s so different—sort of sad sometimes, too, to see all those plays we used to do. You understand.”

  “Of course.” Emily signaled for drinks.

  They laughed through the second one, peeled away the years until it was as it had been when they slept in rickety train bunks, shuddering to a stop and falling to the floor before the sun was out.

  “Do you remember,” said Emily, “the night in Venice for Carnival, and we got masks and kitted up like birds? Roger looked an idiot, but you were lovely, remember?”

  “I think the machines are beautiful,” Rose said.

  Emily fell quiet.

  Rose looked mortified, but after a moment she went on, too far in to turn back. “I mean, all of them, even the old men and women—even their wrinkles are smooth somehow, have you seen them up close? I went backstage once. Someone recognized me and wanted to show me around.”

  Rose dropped her gaze back to the bar. “Their eyelids are all painted over with different colors, you know—from far away it looks like it’s just shadows, but the Ingénues have purple and the Lotharios have dark green. Their eyes aren’t colored, it’s just little lumps of celluloid in the sockets, so they color the lids instead. It’s a real stage trick. It frightened me the first time I saw; it’s one thing to think they’re all just lovely robots, but to paint up their faces to fool the audience, that’s human. I can’t even be afraid of them, though, they’re so beautiful.”

  Rose looked up from her drink. “But you never hated them like the rest did, anyway, did you?”

  “No,” Emily said after a minute.

  “So you’ve seen them, too.”

  Emily shook her head. “Three of them went to war instead of Phil and Peter and Roger. When I look at the Dramatons all I think is, Was it you?”

  Rose had no answer.

  “Don’t tell Phil or anyone,” Emily said after a while. “They’d think I’d gone daft.”

  Rose shook her head.

  Emily believed it. Rose had her own secrets about Dramatons.

  “God,” said Rose after a moment, trying to revive, “it’s just like the old days, innit?”

  Emily’s new drink was cold; the bartender had put ice in it. She set the cubes on the bar, watched them melt.

  Roger ended up playing a three-off villain in one of her radio dramas.

  “You wrote that for me on purpose,” he accused when he came back from his first day at the recording studio. “You knew they’d call me in.”

  “Nonsense. If I’d written it for you he would be taking Doctor-Make ipecac for his rheumatism. Have you brought anything?”

  “Thought we’d eat in the lobby,” he said. “Phil’s invited us to eat, with Rose.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “We’re staying in his hotel for free. The least we could do is provide some company.”

  “I know that profession.”

  “It would be a gesture. And I’ve wanted to see Rose.”

  “Don’t ask her about the Dramatons,” Emily warned him, gathering her notes. “She’s gone sentimental.”

  The divorce papers were delivered by a bellboy, on behalf of Peter’s attorney.

  She didn’t know he had an attorney. She wondered if the Dramaturgica had given him one so he could squirrel out of it all above board.

  She showed Roger. “Pretend you’re an attorney.”

  He looked them over, frowning now and then. “Am I pretending to be a good one?”

  “You’re not that good.”

  But it was clean-cut—she kept the rights to the Understudies name, and her accounts were untouched. It was the most generous exit Peter had ever made.

  It was, for Peter, as close to an apology as he was capable of.

  She signed them without any changes.

  When he wasn’t in his hotel room to receive them, she walked all the way to the Dramaturgica.

  Peter looked ten years younger, having cast off the troupe that had weighed on him. His shirt (new, crisp white, just right for photographs should a cameraman happen to stop by) was rolled at the cuffs and open at the topmost button, as if he was too busy creating wondrous art to bother fastening his shirt properly.

  “I want the queen to pause before she gives the order,” he was saying, “make the audience think she might not. Ramp up the drama.”

  The handler wrote some notes.

  “Yes,” the automaton said, blinked. She had no lashes, just dark-painted lids, and her celluloid eyes gleamed under the lights.

  “I think five seconds,” Peter said after a moment.

  The queen-Dramaton nodded. “Five seconds. Yes.”

  “Again,” said Peter.

  The automatons walked back to their places and waited with hands held at ease, in arcs like lobster claws.

  “Your Majesty,” said an automaton dressed as a page, “the King demands his answer.” The page swung his arm wide.

  (Emily thought, Was it you?)

  The queen walked to the edge of the stage; her arms were aloft to make the most of her sleeves, and if it made her look like a pageant winner, she was a lovely one.

  Emily counted: one, two, three, four, five.

  “Tell the king he shall have his wedding.”

  The next went flawlessly (of course); the King made his entrance, was revealed as the man the Queen had fallen in love with when he was disguised as the shepherd, and they were wed with much fanfare amid a parade of faces, all lovely, all smooth, all somehow exactly the same.

  The queen’s cloak was blue velvet, spangled with stars. Emily hoped it was coincidence.

  (The King’s voice was Allan McGannon. The Understudies had invited him one season to play the husband in The Bright Affair. Greaselight Weekly had a picture of McGannon with Rose at the premiere, both grinning under the headline ‘SHINING ROMANCE BETWEEN THEATRE’S BRIGHTEST STARS’.

  Rose’s particular friend was visible just at the edge of the flash, holding Rose’s coat and laughing with Phil.

  They’d played the romance out all season—Peter’s idea. They’d made a mint.)

  “Wonderful,” Peter called. “So the curtain falls, the end. I’ll have some notes for tomorrow; I’d like to see the handlers at four? Is that all right?”

  There were murmurs of assent.

  “Lovely. Dramatons, thank you. That is all.”

  Like he’d spoken a command, the automatons slumped, hands slack, two dozen iron jaws snapping shut.

  “Finally,” Emily said, “actors who listen to you. You must be elated.”

  Peter turned.

  Behind him, the dozen handlers moved onstage and slid keys into their charges. They shuffled into the wings in pairs. At last the stage was empty.

  Peter said, “Emily.”

  “Well, at least you came up with a stunning rejoinder in the interim.” She held out the envelope. “I’ve brought your papers.”

  Peter frowned. “Can I buy you dinner?”

  “Yes.”

  He buttoned the topmost button on his shirt.

  The restaurant was nicer than they’d been to in years, the sort where the menu was determined for you.

  Pete spent the first four courses saying how lovely the Dramaturgica was, and the next two courses apologizing.

  “Really, Emily, I never meant to hurt you.”

  “And the divorce?”

  “Well, I thought I might as well get out of your way.”

  “Nicely done.”

  “Well, I only thought.” He frowned, trying to work through something,
but apparently his bravery came in bursts and he’d run out for the moment; he shook his head, prodded at his beef medallions with his fork. “Would you have stayed with me, after I did this?”

  She laughed. “No, of course not.”

  He leaned forward, nearly getting his cuffs in the gravy. “There’s no honor, you know, in being the last of a line. If we had come back from it with something—I couldn’t let some shabby theatre to be my legacy, Em, you know I couldn’t.”

  “Don’t apologize to me.”

  “Who, then? Roger? What do I have that he doesn’t have, now?”

  An income, she thought, but Peter was looking at her like he still loved her, and instead she said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I am. I’m so sorry.”

  She took pity on him, and changed the subject.

  Over dessert he said, “Of course you and Roger will come to the premiere?”

  Emily watched the streetlight bleeding through the drapes.

  What do I have that he doesn’t have, now?

  “What happened?”

  Roger was in the bedroom doorway; his voice was rich and even. You’d never know he’d been asleep.

  She wanted to tell him she’d been to see Peter, to tell him what Peter said, ask Roger what it meant.

  But she knew what it meant; it was why she hadn’t told him she’d been to see Peter.

  She said, “I should write plays.”

  Roger picked up the phone and ordered breakfast.

  “You should,” he said after they’d eaten enough to wake up. He put the glass back on the butter dish. “You write very well.”

  “Don’t expect a part from me,” she said with a mouthful of toast. “Human geriatrics are right out.”

  He smiled, and the room around them lit up.

  She dropped off the scripts with United, pocketed a check, and picked up a typewriter they’d set aside for her because her penmanship was so awful.

  “Are there any companies that might want plays?” she asked, as if it had only occurred to her.

  He looked through his ledger. “You can submit something on speculation. A historical. Georgian. Not your usual; something light and clever, please.”

  “Deadline?”

  “End of the week.”

  “Oh, lovely.”

  “Prize money’s three hundred.”