“Perfectly,” Marius said, but his breath still caught a little at the word.
“Maybe we should get the doc to look you guys over,” Dave said. “Just in case. “You know, if this were a real rescue they’d probably have EMTs with oxygen tents out here for you guys or something.”
“We’re fine,” Vince said. “We’re all perfectly fine and in one piece.”
They had hauled Zach out of the hole now, and Marius’s head came up, eyes narrowed in sudden and concentrated attention. But nobody noticed him looking, or what he was looking at… nobody, that is, except Boss, whose pale eyes went inexorably from Marius’s face to the thing that Marius was looking at.
Zach’s right hand.
Which was missing two fingers.
It was done as smoothly as anything, and nobody even realized that it had been done, but Boss stepped away from the outer hoistway doors which shuddered again as he let go of them.
“Perhaps it would be best if we closed these,” Boss suggested. Zach, without being prompted, took hold of the other side of the door, and between them the two androids physically pulled the two wings together until they almost met in the middle. Boss removed his hand, but Zach kept his own in the crack between the doors just that little bit too long; and it was only then, when he removed his hand from the now closed gap between the two wings of the door, that someone focused on that hand.
“Your fingers! What happened?” Dave exclaimed, staring at Zach’s maimed limb.
“Accident. Please do not concern yourself. We can replace the missing digits,” said Boss. But his eyes went to Marius, briefly.
Marius met them, and then looked down, flushing. He stuck his hand into his pocket, and closed around the thing that he had picked up on the floor of the shattered elevator car when the cable came tumbling down and Zach dived into the car to escape it.
A single android finger.
Marius knew he should volunteer the information that he had it. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that he should surrender it. And yet he did neither of those things. It seemed as though something greater than himself had gripped him, had closed his throat to sound, had closed his mind to the sense of the right thing to do – or perhaps he
was
listening to something telling him the right thing to do, it was just not the same thing that his usual instincts would point him to.
The android known as Boss appeared to be content not to force the issue, at least not here and not now. He turned away while everyone else was gathered around Vince and Xander and quietly, unobtrusively, pointed the index finger of his right hand at the line where the doors met. A quiet crackle emanated from his hand as he drew that finger, without quite touching the metal of the doors, from the top to the bottom, and then, when he was done, turned his head a little to look at Andy, the handyman, the only one who was paying any attention.
“That is sealed,” Boss said quietly. “I do apologize for future inconvenience because these doors cannot be opened again without a great deal of force. But their safety features have been disabled, and under the circumstances it would appear to be better if they could not be opened accidentally by someone who is merely curious.”
“Oh, agreed, agreed,” Andy said, nodding vigorously. “Indeed. Thank you very much, sir.”
Boss inclined his head in a gesture both acknowledgment and farewell, and stepped away… to come very nearly face–to–face with Andie Mae.
“How are you…” Boss began, but she lifted a hand to silence him, and he obediently stopped speaking.
“It never
happened,” she said in a low, intense voice.
“But I have…”
“It
never happened
.”
“As you wish,” Boss said, giving her a small bow and stepping away.
“Exactly
what
never happened, then?” Simon said in almost a whisper, very close to Andie Mae’s ear. “I mean, I wouldn’t normally – but Xander said– I was –
‘Yee haw’
? What is going on….?”
“You were spying on me?” Andie Mae said, her cheeks flushed again.
“Just looking out for you,” Simon said, backing away from the famous Steel Magnolia glare.
Xander, unaware that he was under discussion, had stumbled to his feet and shaken himself off. And with that, apparently, he began to circle back to the pre–elevator–incident situation… and looked at his watch with frantic consternation.
“Did we completely screw up the panel…?”
“We were in there just about forty minutes,” Vince said, consulting his own wrist. “There is a remote possibility that there may still be an audience hanging around with nothing better to do. If someone can first provide me with a cup of decent black coffee, preferably laced with something stronger, I’m game. Now I even have a story to tell – life and death rescue from an elevator hanging by a thread…”
“There’s a replicator just a couple of doors down,” said Dave, beyond caring about who overheard his words or who shouldn’t have been aware of the replicators’ existence. “I’m sure we can manage that coffee. Follow me.”
“Thank you,” Andie Mae said, reaching out to grab Vince’s arm. “There would be plenty who would insist on lying down in a dark room for an hour after all this. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“We’re all in one piece, and a little adrenaline never hurt anybody,” Vince said.
“Helen has informed the audience that there was an emergency and the panel has been slightly delayed,” Boss said calmly.
“There’s an audience?” Xander said, his head swiveling to the android.
“I am informed there is. Not all of them chose to wait, but a number of them are still present.”
“Can we make that coffee to go?” Xander said to Vince, pleading. “I mean, if you’re sure you’re up to it…”
“Lead on,” Vince said. “And damned be the hindmost.”
“Wait. I have an idea. It isn’t fair – not to you – not alone – we can’t find Rory, not even with the delay and if we did I have no idea if he is remotely able to be coherent in public right now – it’s a GoH panel, and technically we kind of acquired you guys as extracurricular GoHs – you’re going on with him, Boss.”
“You tried that – remember how well it worked out the last time?” Dave snapped.
“That was Bob. Bob could not operate without an instruction manual. This time we have the Captain of that Crew. I don’t know if you found the answers you came looking for, Mr. Boss, but I’m perfectly certain that there are plenty of questions out there that
you
can answer for
us
.”
“Xander, it’s going to be a disaster…”
“I will do it,” Boss said calmly.
After a beat of silence, Dave heaved a deep sigh of exasperated resignation. “I’ll fetch the coffee. Go.”
Ξ
Xander was expecting a handful of die–hard fen in the audience, possibly evenly split between those who were genuinely there for the Guests of Honor listed on the program, those who were there because they had nothing better to do on a Sunday morning in interplanetary space, and those who needed an excuse to be somewhere so that they wouldn’t have to be somewhere else or doing something else – plus the occasional attendee who might have snuck in to grab a seat in the back of the room and zone out for a while out of the public eye. But somehow – whether because Andie Mae’s idea of holding this panel this late in the convention had turned out to be a genuinely good one, or because this really was just a captive audience on what was really a stolen resort hurtling through space on what was essentially a small asteroid – there appeared to be at least a hundred people in the room when Xander walked in with his panelists in tow, and more audience members followed him in.
Dave ducked in behind them, and trotted up to Vince, proffering a travel mug which bore the same logo that Xander had designed on the fly for the pizza box on the first occasion that the replicator had been tested. The replicator had since assumed that the same logo had to appear on every item specified as a take–away.
“Coffee, and a shot of ‘something stronger’, as you specified,” Dave said in a low voice. “Break a leg, as it were.”
He was kind of smiling, but his eyes were still worried, and Xander caught himself replaying Dave’s earlier words over and over in the back of his mind –
Xander, this is going to be a disaster!
All of a sudden they seemed less of a warning and more of a promise. Either way, it was far too late to duck out now.
The speakers made their way to the stage and claimed their seats, and Xander turned to the audience.
Now that he was up here and they were down there, looking expectantly up at him, they seemed even more numerous than he had realized, or maybe that was just his angst whispering cautions into his ear. Either way… he was up.
“Welcome to the GoH panel,” he said, and if his voice wavered just a little on that first sentence, he had himself in hand now and his next words were firmer, filled with the confidence he was very far from feeling at that point. “Unfortunately one of your panelists was somewhat… indisposed… this morning…”
“Moonlighting, was he?” someone from the audience heckled, and there was a ripple of laughter.
Xander grinned.
“I suspect all of us feel rather… struck… by last night’s Lunar Extravaganza,” he said. “I know I was. Am. This isn’t me talking quite yet. Automatic pilot at least half engaged. More coffee required for a full reboot of the system. But that probably applies to everyone in this room – except one of our guests. Either way – we’ve got our writer GoH, Vincent J. Silverman, who says he’s got plenty to tell you about life, the Universe, and everything. Or at least about life, as it pertains to the way a writer lives it. Perhaps we can leave at least some of the questions about the Universe and everything to our extracurricular jack–of–all–trades GoH here on my left, who goes by the name of Boss – you couldn’t pronounce his real name – and whom you can praise or blame for this little excursion that we’ve been taking this weekend.” He didn’t say it out loud but he added, in his own head, the rider,
And we still need him – at least until he comes through and puts us back where he found us – if he can – so please don’t disassemble him…
There was a smattering of applause, and Xander backed up and made his way back down the steps from the stage, leaving Vince and Boss in command of it. He had his fingers crossed so hard they hurt.
“Picture this,” Vince said easily, leaning back in his chair and crossing his long legs at the ankle before him. “Just before we all got here – you heard there was an emergency, didn’t you? Well, I was kind of the emergency. At least a third of the emergency, anyway. One of three people stuck in a malfunctioning elevator, and no jolly little firemen on call to come get us out. So there we were, hanging in the shaft, not knowing when…”
Xander had to hand it to the man, he knew how to spin a yarn. Vince gathered them all in, talked to that crowd as if he were talking to each one of them individually, holding everyone’s attention. He told the story of the elevator rescue in a way that brought the audience to the edge of their seats with tension one moment and had them outright giggling the next, and when he had exhausted that tale he segued smoothly into talking about writing, painting a picture of a writing life as something lived to its full potential and milked of its experiences and contacts and ideas for the purpose of re–creating it as something
else,
something new, something that existed just between the pages of a book but was every bit as ‘real’ as the world in which the writer lived in his or her everyday existence.
“It’s a burden,” he said, “and it’s a gift, and sometimes it’s damned hard to tell the difference. Like, right now, right here. It actually feels as though we’re all staring back at ourselves from a comic book panel, or the pages of a particularly weird novel… and yet here we are, all of us, and if we look out of the window it’s
real
even though it’s impossible to believe, and let me tell you, this convention is the best con I’ve been to. Ever. Because this is living the writer’s life. Take the impossible and make it believable. Take doubt and make it into faith. Take lunacy and make it into a trip around the Moon. But maybe at this point I’d better defer to Mr. Boss… because sometimes truth just
is
that little bit stranger than fiction, it would appear. And if there are any questions as to the nature of our current reality, he’s better placed to answer those.”
“We get to ask questions?” someone from the audience called out.
“We get
true
answers?” someone else asked, sharpening the question.
“I will answer,” Boss said unexpectedly.
Several people began to talk at once, and Xander leapt up from a seat he had taken at the side of the room and raced to the front of the stage, raising his arms. “One at a time, please.”
Almost every hand in the room was up and waving urgently, and Xander glanced at Boss, and then back to the crowd, and then at his watch.
“We have a limited amount of time, and he said he’ll
answer
, not that he’ll spend the next six hours doing so. How about we play the game of twenty questions. Twenty people. And just to keep this random, I’ll call out people by seat number – your row, and the number of your seat in your row, counting from the right – from
my
right. In the unlikely event that I call out an empty seat, or I call out your seat and you don’t want to ask a question, the next person on the right of the seat I called who actually
does
want to ask something gets picked. And if I call you, come out here, and ask a question from the front so that everyone can hear it. Okay? Okay. Here goes. R for row, S for seat. R3S7, R5S9, R2D2….”
There was a ripple of laughter, and Xander grinned.
“Make that R2S2, R10S1, R2S7, R6S6, R7S12, R1S8, R9S1….”
He did the roll call of twenty seats, and twenty people scrambled out of their chairs and made their way to the front of the room, lining up expectantly a little to the side of the dais.
“Can we please not have the existential questions first?” Xander asked. “If you go first and shoot your wad right at the outset, the rest of you guys might as well go back and sit down. And I do suspect that some answers may fall into two categories that may not be popular – the ‘can’t explain so you’ll understand it’ and ‘you really don’t want to know’. You may want to think carefully about what you want to ask so you’ll get full value out of being picked to pose your question. Okay? Okay. Within those parameters. Shoot.”