The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “Dear,” Grandma said, “I’d like you to meet Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie.”

  A gleaming blob like a six-foot chrome slug flowed out from under a pew and extruded an antenna toward us. The tip of the antenna swelled and winked open to reveal a monitor that displayed an older woman, the simple richness of her dress set off by a string of video pearls. Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie’s icon was a wealthier version of Grandma.

  “Your grandmother has told me everything about you,” Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie said. Her voice came from a grille just under the monitor. I wanted to touch her; I couldn’t tell if she was hard like steel or soft like mercury. “You know we all love her very much. You’re very lucky to have her.”

  I wondered what the word love meant to an organism that didn’t use serotonin and oxytocin as neurotransmitters, but I didn’t say anything. I read the brass letters shining on the wall behind the pulpit.

  GOD IS LOVE.

  * * *

  A couple of days later Grandma and I were in the kitchen of her mobile home. We’d finished supper and gone through the ritual fight over who was going to do the dishes. She won, as always. She wouldn’t let me do the laundry either. She said it was women’s work. It drove me nuts—she was putting me through school, even giving me pocket money, and the only thing she’d let me do for her was cook. It was bad enough that I let her do all that, but the worst part was that I liked being cared for.

  “I’ve invited Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie to bring some of her friends over for dinner on Wednesday.” She dabbed her lips with a napkin.

  I looked down at the willow-pattern plates, the celluloid handles of the silver, the cut-glass tumbler with the faded red band at the lip. All the things that I’d known since I was a child. All the safe things. “You want me to take care of it?”

  “Why don’t you make those things you make,” Grandma said, “those Spanish enchilladees.” She made a gesture with her mouth as though she’d just taken a bite. “Oh, those are so good.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Enchiladas, dirty rice, green salad, three-bean salad, and whatever you want for dessert. But do they even eat?”

  “Well, they can at least try it,” she said. “I think they’d like some of that nice Spanish food.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie brought two friends. Skipper was star-shaped, about fourteen inches across. A row of blue eyes the size of BBs twinkled under the lip of a shell gnarled as a walnut and spotted with patches of yellow and maroon moss. A fringe of hair-like legs spun him as he moved. At dinner he’d crawled over his table setting. When he was done eating, a lovely radial pattern was left in the enchilada sauce that clung to his plate. He was the only one who ate. That was because he occupied his real body. Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie and Doodad were simulacra. Their real bodies, if they had any, couldn’t live on Earth.

  Doodad had me on edge. Like Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie, she’d chosen to model herself on a human female. She was something out of a Japanese cartoon, a sexy cat-eared space girl with thick purple hair, eyes three inches across and cleavage that looked like it had a grip. The combination of manifest inhumanity with calculated sexual cues was exactly what I did not need.

  When dinner was over we sat in the living room. The room should have been crowded, but Grandma had arranged it in a way that made it feel roomy, as though it was a real house. She’d chosen the convenience of the mobile home, but still felt it was shabby to live in one.

  I’d always loved her living room. The little sandalwood table, square and red and fragrant, carved with figures from the Ramayana; the spinning circular brass table with its elaborate filigrees and scalloped lip; thick glass bowls of cookies and candy; the lamps and Chinese lacquer boxes she’d brought back from the Philippines after the war….

  Grandma held the coffee cup that was never more than a foot away from her. She had a small filter-drip machine and went through ten or fifteen little pots a day, easy. When she spoke to Skipper I could hear the frustration in her voice.

  “No,” she said. “I work for people, I don’t heal them.”

  Skipper lifted one edge of his shell and looked at Grandma. His voice came from Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie’s speaker grille, a vocoder baritone. “So God does the healing?”

  Grandma closed her eyes and pursed her lips, exaggerating her expression. “No,” she said. “There isn’t any healing. It makes me so mad when people in the church say that. They should know better.” She opened her eyes and relaxed her face. “It is simply a matter of recognizing God’s perfection. We are made in his image and likeness, and all of us are perfect. Imperfection is only a matter of mortal error, a belief in physical reality. Man is not material; he is spiritual.” She straightened up, adjusted her glasses, and took a sip from her cup.

  “Maybe you should give them an example,” I said.

  Grandma sipped her coffee and thought for a moment before speaking. “Back around 1969 I was driving back from Bodega Bay when I saw a roadside stand selling wild mushrooms. It was run by some of those hipsies or whatever you call them. They had the greasiest hair I’ve ever seen hanging down over their faces. The girl was barefoot and her feet were just filthy.” She shook her head. “Well, I bought a basket of mushrooms from them and they were so rude to me. They laughed as though buying mushrooms was the funniest thing in the world.

  “I had those mushrooms with my supper that night, and about an hour after that I started to feel awful. Those people hadn’t known what they were doing and they’d sold me poison mushrooms. So I sat down with my Science and Health—” she held up the black-bound volume bookmarked with neat rows of metal tabs “—and I did my work.” She looked seriously and deliberately around the room, held us silent with her gaze. “I sat there and recognized the perfection of all God’s creations, even those mushrooms, and before the night was over I felt fine again. Perfectly fine. And when I looked in the newspaper there weren’t any reports of people eating poison mushrooms. Not one.” Her face softened and her voice grew gentle. “When I was doing the work, when I should have been dying, I felt God’s presence more than I ever had before. I will carry that with me for the rest of my life.”

  I’d heard that story when I was a kid but this was the first time I understood that she’d bought psychedelic mushrooms. That was a rotten trick for a bunch of greasy hipsies to pull on an old lady. I wished I’d had the opportunity to lay hands on them.

  “That’s wonderful,” Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie said. “Truly marvelous.”

  “But it isn’t,” Grandma said. “It’s simply a matter of recognizing the divine principles that underlie all existence.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie said. “Our people need to hear exactly that message. I’ve been trying to figure out how to ask you this and I hope it isn’t too awkward, but would you consider coming home with us?”

  I sat up at that. “So you’re going to take people with you when you leave?”

  “Not people,” Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie said. “I mean your grandmother, or at least her teachings. There’s an audience for spirituality, and they are endlessly hungry.”

  Grandma set the coffee cup down in its saucer. “Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t try and force it on anyone.”

  Doodad put her purple-nailed hands on my Grandmother’s arm and looked into her face.

  “That is so wise,” she said, then turned to Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie. “Isn’t this exciting? Isn’t this just perfect?”

  “Truly,” Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie said, and curled a little closer, making the floor groan and shift. The metal in Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie’s simulacra must have weighed a quarter ton. I was waiting for her to go through the floor.

  Skipper flattened himself against the carpet.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “If God is perfect then why would He make us capable of imperfection?”

  “He didn’t,” Grandma said. Her voice got louder, and she sketched figures in the air with her hands. “We are perfec
t reflections of God. That kind of thinking is mortal error! You need to think this through because it all makes sense. It’s just like one and one is two.”

  Skipper made a moaning sound with his actual body, puckered his eyes shut, and ground himself into the floor. I knew just how he felt.

  * * *

  The next weekend Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie and her entourage showed up unannounced. I was three drinks into my Saturday routine. I’d get eight tallboys of malt liquor, which made a nice even gallon, and a half-pint of whatever vodka or tequila was the cheapest. I’d crack a can, take a slurp, and top it off with the hard stuff. Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie asked Grandma to take her to the Christian Science Reading Room. After they left, Skipper and Doodad crowded into my bedroom.

  My room was actually one end of Grandma’s office. The bed was too short for me so I’d packed some foam camping mattresses between the foot of the bed and the wall. That was the worst part of my living situation: I did not fit.

  Doodad leaned forward to put her hand on my leg and wave her stiff plastic boobs at me the way a real woman wouldn’t. I didn’t like her, but something in my pants was convinced of her fertility.

  Skipper was perched over a soup-bowl with about an inch of tequila-laced malt liquor in it. “Image-and-Likeness says your grandfather died from drinking,” he said.

  His voice came from a silver blob that Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie had stuck on his back before she left. His tone was a little more mechanical than it had been before, his English a little rough around the edges—running translation on a smaller processor was my guess. It got on my nerves when they called Grandma “Image-and-Likeness.” They used Christian Science jargon without understanding it.

  “She’s never given me the straight story about that,” I said. “Did she tell you how it happened?”

  Skipper rotated a bit, looked at me with fresh eyes. “Fell off a boat when he was drunk. Got into a fight with two merchant marines when he was drunk. Walked into a hurricane when he was drunk so he could get more beer. Fell off a dock when he was drunk.” He crouched and slurped. “Asked an engineer if she was seeing alternate timelines and now they laugh at me.”

  “Yeah, I totally bought the first couple of versions she told me,” I said. “Now I don’t know if she’s lying or if she’s really crazy.”

  Skipper collapsed on top of the bowl and splashed on the newspaper I’d laid down over the carpet. “I’m crazy. Crazy with mortal error. It makes everything my fault.”

  “That’s because you think too hard about it,” Doodad said. She turned to run her hand over the moss on Skipper’s back, and in the process park her cool silicone buttocks against my thigh. I let her and hated myself for it. “You need to feel the truth inside.”

  “No, I feel feelings inside,” Skipper said. “Image-and-Likeness doesn’t like drinking but it helps me evade the snare of rationality. May I have some more?”

  “Sure,” I said, leaned over and poured from my can into his bowl.

  “Image-and-Likeness is worried about you,” Doodad said, turning back to me. “She told us about Amy. You know it makes Image-and-Likeness sad to see you this way.”

  “What did she tell you?” I must have sounded a little defensive. I wondered how sophisticated their translation systems were.

  “That she was just a girl, that she didn’t know what she was doing.” Doodad stared off into the distance, face gone blank. “What did Amy do?”

  “She went to school,” I said. “I was going to follow her in a year, but she found someone else. I wish she’d just let me go, but she won’t. I’ve been demoted from boyfriend to house pet.” I took a gulp from the can and another, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “She says she didn’t start things between us because she thought I was asleep the first time she touched me. She says she didn’t dump me because she figures she can take me off the shelf when she wants me again. Maybe she’s right.”

  Doodad’s face came back to life and formed an expression of sympathy. She patted my thigh. Camera eyes and microphone ears; I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “What does Image-and-Likeness mean when she talks about sensuality?” Skipper asked. “She said that was what you and Amy did. She didn’t approve.”

  “That’s her word for pair-bonding behavior,” I said. “Sex stuff. There’s a lot more to it than sex, though. Grandma doesn’t want people to be primates. She likes to think we’re solid all the way through, like potatoes.” I gulped the last of my malt liquor. Time to grab the next one. “When I was a kid I thought that was how she was: simple, straight, and honest. I had no idea how weird she really is. How complicated. She wishes she was just a brain in a bucket so she could cut out all that sensuality.”

  “That’s not true,” Doodad said. She arched her back and turned her shoulders, displayed the exaggerated flow from waist to hips. “She says God is love. I know what love is.”

  Skipper slurped up a little more of the slop in his bowl. “I don’t have to worry about sensuality. No potato sex until I’m grown and rooted.”

  “Consider yourself lucky,” I said and crushed the can flat between my palms. A trickle of booze dribbled from a sharp-edged rupture and soaked into my T-shirt.

  * * *

  When Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie asked me to come talk to her on board the ship, I was excited and wary. The luminous curves of the spaceship made me think that it had been cultured rather than built. Once inside, the uneven surface under my feet had the texture of a sand dollar—porous, slightly yielding. Good traction. The air was warm, humid, and it had a spicy musk blended from the body odors of fifty or so different kinds of alien.

  I felt a sudden wash of self-pity, and wished I had been the one invited to go into space. It wasn’t like there was anything for me on Earth.

  Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie’s simulacrum slumped like a dot of solder touched by the iron; silver rivulets ran across the floor and soaked in until she’d vanished.

  “Aaah,” came a voice from all around me, not deafening but so forceful I felt it like the weight of a duvet. Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie’s icon appeared on the wall in front of me, twenty feet tall.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Is the ship your real body?”

  Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie smiled at me, lips barely letting her teeth show. “Image-and-Likeness said you were a bright young man.” The smile flattened and vanished. “So why are you feeling hostile right now?”

  “Yeah, you can read my heart rate, you’re probably giving me an EEG and a CAT scan and who knows what else,” I said. “If you really want to know, I’m bothered by the way that you’re trying to establish a position of dominance here.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a position—calm down. Calm down. I need to talk to you about Image-and-Likeness.”

  “I don’t think she wants to go with you.”

  “We aren’t going to take her, she’s going to come with us.” Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie’s image shrank and her voice softened. “I don’t want you to make this decision any harder for your grandmother than it needs to be,” she said. “She feels bad enough without you moping around like your life was over.” Next to her face she displayed a caricature of me, spine slumped in a depressive question mark, shuffling forward as if on a treadmill.

  “Oh, brother,” I said. “So how did I get to be your business?”

  “And I don’t know what you said to Skipper but he’s become quite unmanageable. He’s stopped reading his Science-and-Health-with-Keys-to-the-Scripture-by-Mary-Baker-Eddy, and now he spends all his time talking to off-duty engineering staff. When I tried to explain to him about fraternization he was quite rude and I believe he learned some of those words from you.”

  “Oh, brother,” I said.

  * * *

  Grandma and I drove through the high country, a quart thermos of coffee resting on the back seat. I looked out the window at winding mountain roads lined with evergreens set against the perfect porcelain blue of the sky, dusty nettles, blackberry bushes a
nd Queen Anne’s lace in the sunny patches.

  Since Grandma couldn’t hike anymore she drove when she was restless, sometimes for days at a time, just to be in motion. When she asked if I wanted to go north with her, I knew something was up. She may have refused to believe in mere matter, but she took her greatest consolation from the natural world.

  “It just seems ridiculous,” Grandma said. “A trip into space.”

  “I’m jealous,” I said, and shifted my legs. The car was too small. Everything was too small. “You’ve been everywhere from Kodiak Island to Tierra del Fuego, and now you’ve got a ticket to the stars. If I were in your shoes I’d go in a minute.”

  “I’m not saying I won’t go and I’m not saying I will.” There was a wistful tone to her voice. “I just can’t believe—” A shadow lurched across the windshield. We looked up, and Grandma cried out.

  She had drifted into the wrong lane. As we came around the curve a lumber truck came toward us. She twisted the steering wheel. The car squealed across the other lane and spat up a cloud of dust as we slid onto the unpaved shoulder. The sound of the truck’s air horn disappeared into the distance as we came to a stop.

  Grandma leaned forward, rested her head against the steering wheel. I pressed the button to raise the windows against the dust, then sat still and panted. I braced my hands against the dash. It was minutes before either of us could speak.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Grandma said. “We almost had a head-on conclusion.”

  I giggled.

  “It’s not funny,” Grandma said. “We could have died.”

  “You said head-on conclusion.”

  Grandma shook her head and smiled. Then she laughed, which set me off again.

  “Oh,” she said, and pulled a tissue from the sleeve of her sweater. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Oh, my.”

  She turned to me, still smiling.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll go with them.”