“Some of them, they’re a tad nervous about things,” Rory said. “You know, about all this. Being on a rock flying through space headed for maybe the Moon and maybe – if we miss it – who knows where, and if we don’t miss it, well, then, you know… Anyway.”
“They tell us they’ll take us back,” Xander said. “Right now, it’s all I got. We have to trust them.”
“Mutiny would probably be easy,” Rory said. “There’s only four of them as best as I can tell, and the sheer numbers…”
“Easy? It would be naked savages with dart guns facing laser cannons,” Xander muttered. “But even if that were not the uncomfortable reality, it would be fairly pointless, wouldn’t it, because, well, take them out and what do we do next?... We just have to trust them. For the nonce. Not much real choice there.”
“Yes, but maybe… you could mention in passing… to that lot… that maybe, you know, I might have had something to do with them taking us home. Or just promising to take us home. You know, like that.”
“But they already promised that,” Libby said. “And people know…”
“Yes, well, maybe they don’t quite know yet. Or don’t believe it. Or something. Either way. You know. Dammit, I’m an actor, not a spaceship captain – but here we are in something that could have been torn from an episode of Invictus, and I did used to be the captain, and really, it would be nice if at least there was a story…”
“A story…?” Xander echoed, torn between being amused and merely mystified that a grown man who couldn’t shake the one moment in which he meant something to a significantly large number of people would be so willing – even eager – to leap with both feet into the pages of a self–created comic book narrative.
“You know. Just tell them I gave them the ultimatum. Or at least a talking to. Just mention it, even. In passing.” Rory was honest enough to follow that with a grimace, and then a wry little grin. “We all know it isn’t true. But still…”
“What, you mean now, wandering past them?”
“Well, yeah.”
“But they can see you pow–wowing with us right now,” Libby said. “Won’t they tumble onto the simple fact that you just, um, asked us…?”
Rory lowered his voice a conspiratorial notch, the ghost of that weird little smile from a moment ago still on his lips . “Or they might think we’re talking strategy, or something.”
Xander’s eyebrows crept towards the top of his forehead, and then back down again, and then he simply smiled and shook his head.
“Sure,” he said. “If it’ll make a difference. I mean, come on, it’s just one more unlikely thing that they would have to believe, now, isn’t it?”
Libby gave him a quick glance filled with consternation – he was basically taking what authority Andie Mae had, as con Chair, and handing it over to a has–been ex–movie–star with a big ego, just for the asking, and it was a honking big lie on top of it – but Xander seemed to have ‘reckless’ turned up to eleven. He had already started walking, tossing his head at Rory and Libby to follow. Just as they approached the girls, Xander simply started talking, beginning a sentence randomly in the middle.
“… and I’m sure you’ll realize it is best kept under wraps for now but they did agree to a slingshot and then back….”
They were past, and behind them there was a susurrus of whispers and indrawn breaths and soft admiring laughter.
Xander cocked an eyebrow at Rory. “Enough?”
“I can work with it,” Rory said, grinning a little more broadly. “Thanks. Appreciate it.”
Xander turned to glare after their movie star as he peeled off and looped back to the girls, and then he and Libby walked on, Xander shaking his head in amused disbelief.
“Seriously,” he said. “You’d think that someone like that didn’t have to concoct a cockamamie shaggy dog story to get some admiring girl being more than willing to make his con memorable, you know. Even the basic parameters of the flirtation factors have gone out the window with this con. Seems the stakes get higher when the stakes, you know, get higher. Now you have to be a hero. And if you can’t go in shooting like you do at the movies, you’re supposed to be able to make demands of the enemy – however diplomatically, but still – on behalf of the homeworld…”
“So long as you don’t give away the homeworld,” Libby said, with a quick grin of her own.
Xander lifted his arms, and laced his hands around the back of his shaved head, stretching into the cradle until his knuckles cracked.
“Speaking of homeworld,” he said conversationally, “has anyone checked recently on how fast the Moon’s gaining on this particular little piece of it that we’re no longer stuck on?”
Ξ
Back on the homeworld in question, Al Coe woke up woozy and disoriented in a familiar bed – but with every bone in his body aching in a way that was definitely not the usual status quo. Some ached more and some less – and arguably he had woken himself up by trying to roll over onto an arm that was still in a sling, possibly bone–cracked if not fully broken, certainly suffering from the post–traumatic agony of a dislocated shoulder now returned to its original position but still angry at the insult it had suffered the previous night.
His memory was patchy.
Posters.
Andie Mae. The convention. Errands.
Printer. Reprints.
Posters.
Accident. Emergency Room. Taxi ride to a hotel… that wasn’t there. And then somehow – with no further memory of how he had accomplished this – ending up back here in his own flat, in his own bed. Stark naked in the bed if you didn’t count the sling.
Accident. Accident. Doctor. Did the doctor say he had concussion? That he did not have concussion? Was this just post–traumatic shock?
Pain.
There had been pain pills. Had he taken any the night before? He had no memory of it.
Posters. The Terminator and Data. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bent Spinner. No, Brent Spiner. That was the problem with the posters. Had been the problem. He had fixed that. Historic meeting at the con. Two great Manufactured Men. Together. Perhaps for the first time ever. On Saturday. On Saturday afternoon.
Al glanced at the clock beside his bed; it informed him that the time was 10:37 and also offered up a day and a date.
Saturday. It was Saturday. The Saturday?
Why wasn’t he at the con…?
Where was everybody else? His flatmate? Andie Mae?
They were at the con. They were at the hotel.
Accident. Pain.
The hotel that wasn’t there.
…wasn’t there.
The memory of last night’s cab ride kicked in and Al sat up sharply – and immediately regretted that decision, sitting very still with his eyes closed until the world stopped spinning around him. Then he very slowly and very carefully swung his legs out of the bed, one at a time, and let himself sit there on the edge for another little while, staring at his bare feet on the floor.
What time was that meeting again? What did the poster say? Was it 3 PM or something like that?
“I’d better get down there,” Al muttered, and his voice sounded hoarse in his throat. There was nothing he would have liked more, right now, than to simply let himself topple back into the bed again and pull the covers over his head and groan himself back to sleep. But there was something stronger than that at work now.
A vision of Andie Mae’s eyes. And the message in them. Get up, get up, you’re all there is.
“I have to… go. Have to explain. Have to apologize,” Al said to himself, even though he was far from clear as to how he would explain the mystery of the hotel that had disappeared into the night to anyone else, something that he could not adequately explain to himself. It did cross his mind to wonder about whether it all might have just been a product of his own somewhat less than optimal state of mind… although just why he would ever imagine such a thing, he was very unclear on. He had tried to sound as stern and
convincing as he could bring himself to be. The words came out as more of a gurgle, but it was nonetheless an imperative.
The imperative necessitated the wearing of clothes, and this proved to be a problem that almost defeated him. Everything still hurt so badly, he could not begin to contemplate (for various painful reasons) wearing anything at all that necessitated being pulled on over his head – and fiddly things like shirt buttons presented their own set of difficulties when they had to be tackled with essentially just one hand, and not his dominant one, at that. He would not make a pretty picture when he met the two stars, but eventually – and it took him more than an hour to accomplish this – he was reasonably certain that he would make a presentable one.
He swallowed a couple of pills from the orange bottle that said it contained Vicodin, and hoped it would do something to make him stop hurting so badly; and then, because there was no way he could face the preparation of coffee or food, he threw his jacket on over his shoulders against the possibility of November chill and staggered gamely down a block and a half to a small local coffee shop which provided a bagel and a large black coffee. After this, he felt almost human, so he got another coffee to go and found himself a taxi to whom he optimistically gave the same address as the previous night.
If he had hoped for a different result, he was disappointed. This driver had a bit more trouble finding the correct destination – they drove up and down the road a few times looking for the place that Al insisted he wanted to go to, but it persisted in its absence, and finally Al paid off the taxi and stood by the side of the road, uncertain as to what to do next. If his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him and he remembered correctly, the Meeting of the Mecha Men was still at least two hours away, and he was at a complete loss. His phone seemed to have been a casualty of either the accident that had rendered him this helpless, or of the taxi ride the previous night – he couldn’t even remember that much – but he knew that his roommate had not planned to take the good DSLR camera with the decent lens to the con, and where it lived. He had simply picked up the entire camera bag and brought the whole kit and caboodle along with him – he would explain everything later – but when he turned the camera on he saw that the battery held very little juice and a red “LO–BATT” sign hovered in the corner of the viewfinder as he took a couple of desultory photos of the place where all of his faculties still screamed that the California Resort should have been… but was not… and then began walking down the road in the hopes of finding somewhere, anywhere, to sit down with perhaps yet another coffee (they seemed to be working better than the Vicodin) and wait for the two chief protagonists of this looming fiasco to show up in good time.
If they showed up. If this was the right Saturday. If this was still the right time and space continuum. If he was still, really, Al Coe.
A tiny strip mall, a short walk up the road from which the hotel appeared to have vanished, yielded a Mexican restaurant and a three–table hole–in–the–corner coffee shop whose main business seemed to be the drive–through window that faced the parking lot. Al took the opportunity to plug the battery charger for the camera, which had been in the camera bag where the rest of the equipment was kept, into a convenient socket. He sat in the table furthest in, next to a window without a view, until the camera charger light began to flicker from red to green and back – not a full charge, but it would have to do. It was tough to fumble the battery and camera in the reunification process but his damaged arm was starting to be a little bit more useful in terms of actually holding and positioning (although he didn’t want to try lifting anything heavier than a newspaper with it just yet). He paid for the coffee he had been nursing, struggled into his jacket as best he could, slung the camera around his neck, and began to trudge back to what two separate taxi GPS units had identified – apparently against all visual and empirical evidence – as the rendezvous spot.
Andie Mae had outdone herself in organizing the whole thing. Both her guests arrived punctually, within ten minutes of one another, driven by media escorts who had been hired to ensure everything ran smoothly. Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived first, nattily dressed in a grey suit with a silvery–blue tie, smiling broadly as he stepped out of the car and looked around. If he appeared nonplussed at his whereabouts he was too much of a professional to show it; he stood chatting affably with his driver until the second car pulled up and Brent Spiner emerged from the back seat, looking around.
“Pretty spot,” Spiner said. “Nice view.”
“They tell me it is much better when it is summer,” Schwarzenegger said in his inimitable accent, and stepped forward. “Good to see you.”
“And you,” Spiner said returning a firm handshake. “Now, what was it again that this was all about? I seem to remember that I had an itinerary – somewhere – and it seems to have comprehensively disappeared…”
Al swallowed hard, and started walking toward the two men, holding on to the camera with his good hand.
“Gentlemen, thank you for coming,” he said, and his voice sounded strange even to himself. He was an complete autopilot now; he had absolutely no idea what he was going to utter next. All he knew was that he was going to tell them about the missing con, and babble about the hotel that used to be right there behind them but now apparently no longer was, but the whole thing was so preposterous when he tried to frame it in those terms that it never came out at all. Instead, he told the two stars all about a non–existent children’s charity which was supposed to have been staging a photo op with the two of them there, in order to promote a fund–raiser for a science and astronomy workshop for kids. It would be funded by an auction of memorabilia such as the photo they had arrived there to have taken. And then, gesturing at his wounded arm, he spun them a further tale about how there had been an accident (which there had been) and apologized profusely for being there by himself – because his assistant was delayed – and perhaps they could reschedule for a more mutually convenient time when everyone was more themselves. Brent Spiner did mutter something about being certain there had been a conference of some sort involved and that his booking had included that – he had even brought a folder of photographs which he had planned to make available for the planned signing event that he was sure had been part of the deal. But then they both turned and looked at the empty land behind them and of course there was no conference there and while they looked a little bewildered they were professionals and they had been paid and they were there. So Al took a couple of pictures of the two of them shaking hands, against a backdrop of a spectacular ocean view, and then one of the handlers took a photo of Al himself standing wedged rather uncomfortably between the two stars, his arm in a sling braced against the ribcage of the Terminator’s human alter ego, and then they all shook hands again and smiled and nodded and the two stars of the show climbed back into their cars.
“Can we, uh, drop you somewhere?” one of the handlers said, seeing Al left standing there looking pathetic with his arm in its blue vinyl sling and the wind, which had kicked up, tousling his hair and tangling it over his eyes.
“That’s okay,” Al said, “I’m being picked up.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. Thanks, though. We’ll be in touch.”
One car and then the other purred into life and then pulled away. Al stood rooted in place for a moment and then sighed, lifting the camera and toggling the photo review button.
He stared hard at the final photograph in the camera’s memory.
The only thing that made sense in that picture was the three of them, standing side by side, smiling into the camera. Everything else… was making Al wonder with an edge of desperation just what had been in those pills he had taken that morning.
When he looked up and stared at the supposed backdrop of the photograph with his own unaided eyes, he saw a photogenic sky scudding with dramatic grey clouds with a patch of blue here and there, and a spectacular headland and view beyond. Al could swear on a stack of Bibles that the background
was exactly that – the pretty view, and open sky. But the photograph, when he brought his bewildered gaze back down to that, showed something quite different – disturbingly different. The headland that looked so deceptively pretty and peaceful was a blasted crater in the photograph, a blackened moonscape, where a chunk of the landscape appeared to have been bodily torn away by a giant clawed hand.
Where the hotel should have been.
Where the convention was.
Where Andie Mae was.
Photograph. Reality. Things did not match.
Al’s head was beginning to hurt again. He toggled the camera back off and let it drop back to where it dangled around his neck, turning to give the innocent landscape behind him one more long, hard look. It persisted in its illusion, as though someone had waved a Jedi hand in front of his face and told him, This is not the hotel you are looking for.
But the picture… the picture…
None of it made any sense. He shook his head hard, to try and clear it, with little success, and then gave up, heaving a deep sigh and beginning to trudge back to the coffee shop where he had waited for this whole thing to unfold and from where, he hoped, he could call another taxi to take him back home. Where he planned to collapse into bed and not get up for as long as he could help it.
“I need a vacation,” he muttered to himself, head down against the wind, and turned his back on the desolation that his mind would not let him see.
Ξ
In the halls and party rooms of the California Resort, on its way to the Moon, the social scene was hotter than usual on any given convention Saturday night. Parties started early, and had more of an air of a New Year’s Eve celebration than just any Saturday night rave. Some of the parties run by folks more tech–savvy than others had even rigged countdown clocks, and one inventive group (who were getting a lot of traffic) had even promised to set up the equivalent of a Times Square disco ball which would drop at the moment the flying hotel arrived at the Moon.
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