Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  In the library, Diogenes and Hubert busied themselves shelving and re-shelving books for the saurs who perused them, whether they could read them or not—fascinated by pictures, colophons, shapes and even the smell of the paper and binding.

  Over the noise of the “Dizz” music and the tinny accompaniment of the hapless piano movers on the video, Doc could hear Agnes shouting to someone on a skate, “Hey! Slow that down! What d’you think you’re doing? Racing?”

  The world was in order—for the moment. Doc closed his eyes and basked in the warmth. What there was to worry over, he thought, could wait.

  “Hey Doc!”

  Doc opened his eyes. Axel stood before him.

  “Guess what I saw this morning?”

  Doc trembled. “Not another robot, was it?”

  “Nooo!” Axel waved the notion away with his forepaw. “It was a frog! In here! He was watching the video!”

  “Yes, Axel.” Doc tried to smile. “And what was he watching?”

  “I didn’t see, but I heard news-guy-type voices, like when they talk about stocking markets and underwater volcanoes.” He looked up at Doc, who was glancing back at the video screen: the fat man was wailing and the piano was rolling down the stairs.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” Axel said.

  “My friend, I remember when you warned us of the giant tidal wave bearing down on us. And I remember you telling us that the Army of Northern Virginia was camped outside on the driveway. There were the Saracen hordes riding their horses through the woods—I remember that too. And who can forget the battle-cruisers from Alpha Centauri firing their photon rays at the power lines?”

  “But that was playing,” Axel insisted. “This was a real-real frog-guy!”

  “Axel,” Doc patted him on the head, “I believe that you saw a frog here this morning. But the rest I’d rather leave as a matter of conjecture.”

  Doc closed his eyes and went back to his basking, but the spot of sunlight had shifted by then. He pushed his stool over a bit to recapture it.

  Axel, however, wondering over the meaning of “conjecture,” moved on.

  Kara and Hetman were close by. She was reading the passage from the novel where Clarence describes to Harry Morgan the trap laid by King Arthur against Sir Launcelot.

  “Lancelot?” Axel forgot about the frog for an instant and asked Kara, “Where? Where’s Lancelot?”

  “Laun-celot,” Kara said. “The name is Sir Launcelot. He isn’t anywhere. He’s a character in this book.”

  “Ohhh.” Axel remembered Lancelot, but not Launcelot. Lancelot wasn’t a character, he was a saur—a buddy—long-long-long ago. Axel tried to remember more, but the harder he tried the more he forgot.

  “Hey!” he said to Kara, as Lancelot faded back from his memory, “Guess what I saw this morning?”

  And he told them all about the frog who watched the video.

  He told Bronte, sitting with her egg. He told Tyrone and Alfie and the other saurs gathered around the Reggiesystem computer. He told Hubert, Diogenes, Charlie, Rosie and the Five Wise Buddhasaurs, but none of them believed him.

  He even told Tom Groverton, once he finished cleaning up in the kitchen. Tom sat down on the floor and explained to Axel why he couldn’t have really seen a frog in the living room.

  “You know that the house and the grounds are covered by a security system.” Tom ran his hand over the blue saur’s back. “It’s heat and motion sensitive. If anything enters the security zone that’s not one of us, it sets off an alarm.”

  “Like when the cat got in and tried to eat Symphony Syd,” Axel said. “Or that raccoon that scratched Agnes.”

  “Exactly. A long time ago. And since then the system’s been improved. So how can a frog enter the grounds without setting off the alarm?”

  Axel glanced back at the window where he had seen the frog make his escape. “He must be a really smart frog.”

  Tom showed Axel the security system log on the Reggiesystem, indicating that nothing had even touched the security perimeter the night before, at least nothing bigger than a moth.

  “Maybe Reggie knows that he just came here to watch the video and that he wasn’t here to hurt anyone.”

  “I don’t think Reggie works that way, Axel.”

  “Why not?”

  Tom opened his mouth as if to speak, then erased the action with a shake of his head and tugged on one end of his droopy mustache.

  “Okay. Let’s say Reggie did that. Since there seems to be some question about the objective reality of this creature, Reggie figured it was okay for the frog to come in and watch the video.”

  “So you think the TV frog’s not an objectionable reality.”

  That look came over Tom’s face again and again he went for that end of his mustache. “Okay. Let’s leave it at that. The frog is not an objectionable reality.”

  “Then you don’t mind TV Frog coming in and watching the video?”

  “TV Frog?”

  “That’s what I’m gonna call him.”

  “Well,” Tom patted Axel on the head, “as long as he’s not stealing anything, or hurting anyone, and as long as he shuts off the video before he goes, like you said he did, I don’t mind.”

  A few saurs—some of the little guys, Sluggo, Hetman—believed him, or at least said they did.

  And Geraldine came out of the cardboard box she called her “lab” and told Axel that she believed him too.

  “He’s not a real frog,” she said in her soft, tinny voice. “He’s from a planet on the other side of the galaxy. He’s made a little tunnel through space-time to get here.”

  Axel took this in without question and concluded: “Wow!”

  “Don’t pay attention to her,” Agnes cautioned him. “She’s making fun of you. She makes fun of everyone. She thinks we’re all stupid.”

  “You all are stupid.” Geraldine said, then returned to her lab. Axel watched the box until the flickering lights coming from inside worried him. Tom put those fire extinguishers nearby for a reason.

  “Maybe you need to sleep some more, Axel,” Preston counseled him. “Maybe you’re dreaming in the daytime because you don’t sleep enough.”

  But that night, Axel stayed behind when the other saurs went upstairs to sleep. He hid behind the couch and waited until the frog hopped through the window onto the back of the couch, then to the seat of the couch, then to the floor. He hopped to the center of the room and slapped the remote pad with his left forepaw.

  The screen flickered on, and the frog watched—all night long, occasionally slapping the remote pad to change the program.

  He watched old films and talk shows. He looked at nature programs and documentaries about automobiles and the wars of the previous century. He watched a chorus of dancing girls sing the praises of bottled water and a man on a weather program talk for a whole hour about cloud patterns. It put Axel to sleep.

  But the frog watched on. He seemed comforted by the images, as if they were relieving him of a great anxiety, or perhaps he was just grateful for the light, for that sense of life moving from moment to moment without threat or danger that the video provided.

  “TV Frog” left at dawn, but came back the next night and the night after that.

  Axel resolved not to disturb the frog. In the morning, as Axel ran past on his way to the Reggiesystem computer, he would call out, “Hiya, TV Frog!” and leave it at that.

  But by the end of the week, as Axel ran past, TV Frog lingered long enough on the window sill so that Axel could see him, in silhouette, raising his left forepaw as if in greeting before hopping out the window to wherever TV Frogs went in the daytime.

  * * *

  When the crate containing Rotomotoman finally arrived, all the saurs gathered to watch as Tom Groverton opened it in the center of the living room.

  The crate was enormous. Even Diogenes had to get up on his toes to peer inside. Axel climbed up on his shoulders, expecting to see Rotomotoman inside just as he envis
ioned him, fully charged and ready to go.

  What Axel actually saw was about a dozen batches of components wrapped in vinyl bags and cushioned with packing foam.

  Along with a copy of the invoice were several sheets of paper filled with very tiny type and headed with big bold letters:

  “Some assembly required.”

  As everyone knows, “some” is a relative word. The creation of the Grand Canyon took “some” time and the formation of matter at the instant of the Big Bang required “some” assembly.

  Tom carefully took the components out of the crate. As the pieces slowly collected on the floor, Agnes looked them over, frowning and sniffing.

  “Hmph! Looks like they sent you the trash instead of the trashcan!”

  “He’s all in pieces,” Bronte whispered, looking from one component to the next.

  “Did he fall apart?” asked Rosie.

  “They forgot to put him together,” Charlie observed.

  Diogenes bent over so that Axel could climb down and survey his unassembled creation. He stood with his mouth agape, looking slightly appalled and definitely overwhelmed.

  “We’re in luck,” Agnes whispered to Doc. “With all these pieces, it’ll take months for him to put it together.”

  “If he manages to put it together at all,” Doc replied. “Not that I doubt the little fellow’s enthusiasm and determination, but his attention does tend to wander.”

  “Then we’ll gather up the pieces and throw them in the cellar, or put them out with the trash, where they belong!”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Doc said in his deep whisper. “I really don’t want to see the little fellow despondent or disappointed.”

  “No, you want that big hunk of metal rolling over your toes every ten minutes!”

  Axel wandered around the unassembled Rotomotoman not unlike an accident investigator surveying the wreckage of a train or a jet. He looked up at Tom Groverton.

  “What do we do now?”

  “That’s up to you, Axel.”

  The other saurs watched silently as Axel took another turn around the components.

  Tibor—the brooding, runt-size apatosaur—came up to the crate with a crayon in his mouth and quickly scrawled on it: “Tibor’s Imperial Winter Palace—do NOT throw out, by order of Tibor.”

  Axel pointed to a dome-shaped piece of metal and said to the others, “Look! That’s his head! And this other part here—” he slapped the cylinder which was the largest piece taken out of the crate “—that’s his body! Those are his wheels in that bag over there! Those rods in that other bag are his arms! And this—” He held up a large white disk which contained a dark, intricate retina in its Plexiglas frame “—this is one of his eyes!” He held it up between his forepaws and against his chest and approached one section of the circle of saurs. The retina rolled around inside the larger disk as if the disembodied eye was scrutinizing the room.

  The saurs retreated a few steps. Alfie hid his head against Tyrone’s chest.

  “Don’t be afraid! It’s Rotomotoman! Rotomotoman is good!”

  With the retina rolling back and forth, right to left, along the bottom perimeter of the disk, the smaller saurs were unconvinced.

  “You’ll see, when I put him together!”

  Axel sang the “Rotomotoman Song” and tried to get the other saurs to sing it with him, but as they looked over the pile of parts they appeared justifiably unenthused.

  “Beware of any trashcan with its own theme song,” Agnes trudged away with the hope that this was the last she would see of Rotomotoman.

  * * *

  The contents of the crate were moved into the same workroom upstairs where Preston wrote his novels and Alphonse sent out his quiz and contest entries. It was also where Geraldine kept her cardboard “lab” and, at another desk, Tibor hid in his cardboard “castle.”

  Axel walked around the still-wrapped components laid out on the floor in a kind of random formation, a kind of “Metal Henge.”

  In the center of the formation he turned around and around until he was in danger of making himself dizzy.

  “Where do I start?”

  Preston handed Axel the several pages of tiny type that came in the crate. “Try to read this over all the way through once—at least once. Then read each section and do what it tells you and don’t go any farther until you finish what it tells you to do.”

  “Okay. How do you do that?”

  Preston shut his eyes and summoned his patience with a great sigh.

  “We’ll read the instructions together.” He sat down next to Axel, took the instructions and held them out where both of them could see. “To paraphrase Aristotle, ‘First things first.’ ”

  After reading through the instructions twice together, and after addressing Axel’s occasionally pertinent interruptions, Preston arranged the components or sets of components in a circle around Rotomotoman’s main cylinder.

  “You’ll start here,” Preston pointed to a little black box that contained a quantity of intricate circuitry. “You put that into the cylinder where the instructions tell you, then you move to the next piece, and the next piece, clockwise. That way you can keep track of what goes first and what goes next. When you get all the way around the circle—and as long as there are no parts left over—Rotomotoman should be completely assembled and ready to go.”

  “Wow!” Axel walked around the main cylinder and looked at all the surrounding parts. “When do you think we’ll be finished?”

  Preston shrugged and shook his head. “The sooner you get started the sooner you’ll be done.” He made sure to stress the “you” in that statement.

  “Yeah!” Axel looked up at the ceiling as if he could stare straight through it.

  Preston looked at Axel. For the first time in years he took notice of the long scar down his back, then followed Axel’s gaze. He gently put his forepaw on Axel’s head. He had been looking at the stars through that ceiling for many years himself.

  “You’ll do fine,” he said softly. “Just fine.”

  * * *

  The discipline of doing one thing at a time was almost too much for Axel to comprehend, but he was undeterred. His energies—which were capable of flying off in a dozen directions at once—were for once singly directed to the task of assembling Rotomotoman.

  It wasn’t quite high-energy physics, or as the saying went in another century, “rocket science.” The most detailed aspects of circuitry and data systems had been assembled at the company that produced the prototype. But each set of components had to be linked to another set, and those to another set. A had to be plugged into B, and B had to be slipped inside C, and so on.

  Axel worked until long past sleep-time that first night, and did not join the other saurs when exhaustion finally took him. He curled up next to Rotomotoman’s dormant head.

  “It won’t be long,” he said to the polished metal dome, placing his forepaw in the place between where Rotomotoman’s eyes would eventually go. “I’ll have you all put together in no time.”

  The next day, he started after breakfast and only stepped away from the work for lunch, dinner, trips to the litter facilities and two times when he asked the Reggiesystem for explanations and advice.

  Doc, with great economy, managed to explain to Axel the saurian techniques for manipulating certain tools designed for human hands, specifically the screwdriver and the adjustable wrench.

  By the time the other saurs were wrapping up their daily routines and heading up to the sleep room, Axel had made it through the circle of components Preston had laid out from twelve o’clock (the first piece) to three o’clock.

  It took all of the following day for Axel to get from three o’clock to five. He didn’t go downstairs to eat, but Sluggo brought food up to him.

  “He’d finish faster if we helped him,” Sluggo told Agnes, as she peeled a strip of rind from an orange.

  “So?” she asked. “That’s his own damn problem. I didn’t ask fo
r that rolling trashcan to be brought here. Besides,” she mashed up a piece of orange with her teeth, “the longer he works on that thing, the longer he isn’t knocking around here jumping off the couch and screaming about holes in time and space or tidal waves or some damn frog sneaking in and watching the video.”

  “He might get sick,” Sluggo insisted.

  “Well, what if he does? We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

  She motioned to where Bronte and Kara stared with worried expressions into the little cotton-filled box.

  “It’s been too long,” Bronte whispered. “A bird’s egg would have hatched by now.”

  “It’s not a bird’s egg,” Kara said. “It’s your egg. And we just don’t know how long it might take.”

  “Too long.” Bronte bent down and with slightest pressure touched the egg with her snout. “Too long.”

  * * *

  By sleep-time, Axel had made it to seven o’clock on the circle of parts. The components were joined together, but they had to be placed inside the main cylinder. Together, they weighed much more than Axel could possibly lift, or even drag. And by this time Axel’s head was filled with numbers and letters: Bs and Ds and Cs and Qs floated around like tadpoles in a pond; he looked at the joined components, but all he could see was a wall of binary numbers.

  Still, he made the effort, grabbing on to one end with his forepaws and pulling mightily.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  He went around to the other side and pushed. The assemblage remained immobile. He kept pushing.

  He pushed until Sluggo came by.

  “You need to sleep,” he said.

  “First,” Axel said breathlessly, “I have to get this stuff,” he took several deep breaths and patted the block of components, “into that thing—” His voice trailed off as he took more deep breaths and weakly pointed at the cylinder.

  They both pushed, but all they could manage to do was polish the floor under their feet.

  “Get some rest,” Sluggo said when they finally gave up. “We’ll think of something in the morning.”