Back at Burgerdroid, I moved through the restaurant, fitting new canisters into the sauce dispensers, filling the toy hopper, replenishing the condiment bar and napkin stations. Sometimes when you're driving, you “wake up” and realize you've driven for miles, vacant but present. I awoke as the maglocks clicked on the front door and the Burgerdroid sign winked off. Penny and Vikram clopped into the back, and I began stacking chairs on shining tables. I could hear Roy cleaning the deep fryer and powering down the equipment.
“Roy,” I said in my robot voice as we retreated through the double doors ourselves, “do you think this job is hurting us?”
He took off his mask and looked quizzical. “More than any other way of trading life for money?”
I laughed tinnily through the robot mouth and shuffled to my locker. Helmet off, bracers and breastplate.
“Yes,” Roy said across the divider, muffled.
“Yes, what?”
“It's hurting us.”
I walked down the bank of women's lockers, trespassed through the little maze to the men's. Roy was sitting on the bench with his breastplate beside him, head in his gloved hands.
“I can't dance. I tried yesterday.” I looked down and started plucking at my gauntlets.
“I'll be the judge,” he said. I looked up and he was standing, the metallic pajamas we wore under our armor clinging in patches to his sweat. He reached out and took my hand, cooling my skin with the metal pads on his fingers. Right foot forward, he drove me around the bench in a cramped but elegant waltz. He dipped me over the bench and brought me up, our greaves creaking.
“You dance fine.” He tried to smile.
“If I can dance here, half-robot, and not at home ... what does that mean?”
“What does any of it mean? I honestly thought I'd be playing Hamlet at this age. Hamlet. Like anyone even does that.”
“How old are you?” I said.
“Thirty-one. You?”
“Thirty-two,” I smiled.
“You know, pretending to be a pizza boy is the greatest thing I've done since hitting thirty.”
“I did a mean Sugarplum Fairy last Christmas with the Living Room company. My audience of one was very impressed.” Our waltz had paused, and I lifted one leg in an example attitude. Roy crooked his hand under my knee and dipped me again.
“That's more tango than sugarplum,” I said as he brought me up. My muscles were humming where his hand touched my thigh. I pushed the hood of his silver tunic off his sweaty mess of hair, and he dropped the dance hands, drawing my face toward his with his still-silver fingers.
I pulled him down onto the bench, and tried to get his gloves off—as it was, the weight of his hands on my breasts reminded me of the breastplate, and the cup sizes between me and those gunmetal gazongas. The gloves gave, and I put off the difficult task of taking the tunic off of him without bringing his ears or nose along by mistake. He in turn settled for going under my shirt, for the moment. Our costumes were so awkward I felt like a teenager, unsure of myself and my man, how to handle all the zippers and buttons and parts.
He was a good kisser—actors probably practice—and I was just starting to forget where I was, why our mixed-up legs were heavy with greaves and we smelled of beef fat.
“Brrt, brrrt, brrt,” said something nearby, and we looked up to see the yellow light, the “change shifts” signal flashing on Roy's breastplate, a few inches above my head.
“I must have forgotten to turn it off.” He fumbled for the switch inside the molded plastic and I scooted onto my elbows, put my feet back on the floor. The noise stopped, and Roy sat down beside me, dropping the breastplate with a clatter.
“What are we doing?” I said finally.
“I don't know.”
“You're not ready to get involved with a single mom, are you?”
Roy looked down, and picked up one of my discarded gloves. “How is Prince Hal, anyway?”
“Not quite that much trouble—yet. But ... oh God, I have to pick him up.” I sprang up. “Roy ... I'm sorry.”
He stood up, too. “Hey, I'm not,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek.
* * * *
I arrived early the next morning, was already dressed when Penny got there. I ignored her, listening to the lack of conversation on the men's side. I wondered if Roy was thinking about me, or busy getting into lack of character.
We moved to our marks. The first customers were a high-school robotics club. Two or three kids craned over the counter, studying the cooking equipment. A skinny girl in dreadlocks asked lame questions about the menu, as if intimidated by our attentive silence. I was on grill, then moved to assembly during the lunch rush. The primitive arithmetic of fulfilling the meal was easy, but strangely satisfying. I watched the faces of the regulars, and realized that I had seen some of them almost every day for over a year, but I had no idea what they did, what their names were. They were just faces and orders, lists of items and condiments.
I wished there was some way I didn't have to be alone on my break. Mel gave me a look as I walked by that made me want to search the whole locker bank for camera lenses. I longed to talk to Roy, or to Penny. Instead I made faces at every corner I thought might conceal an extra camera and waited for the minutes to tick by.
I fell back into my shift, into my mindless state, hitting buttons as if they were cues I had moved beyond, at one with the system, playing without thinking. The sound of human voices rose slowly, and as I sleepwalked from assembly to register, I saw we were in deep dinner rush already; three families spilling and running among the chairs, a few bored businessmen with magazines. My stare was broken by the door opening again—Ginger and Bashful were back.
Ginger smiled as he reached into his waistband and took out a large automatic pistol. Bashful put his back to the door and racked the slide of a sawed-off shotgun. The parents shrieked and grabbed their children, and the older kids dropped fries and milkshakes. There was a sudden scent of urine.
Ginger sauntered up to me. “Robobabe! It's been too long. Now, give us the kitty or we start punching holes.”
When in doubt, the training manual had said, try to act as robotic as possible. Do robots comply with robbers? Do robots value their metal skins? I could remember hearing something about Laws of Robotics when I was little. Why hadn't they taught us any laws?
“Hey, Robobitch, we don't have all day.” I waited for Mel to say something into my ear, for a signal. One came—the intimidation lineup beep, though from who, I wasn't sure. The others clanked into place around me, and I opened my mouth to say that the police had been called.
“Look, folks, a can-can line of tin cans! NOT SCARY.” Ginger rolled his eyes and grabbed a nearby child. “If you don't mind more ventilation in yourselves, maybe you're programmed to stop this headline?” The kid winced away from the shining automatic and dropped his toy robot.
I moved efficiently to press “Large Fries,” “Cash,” to collect the twenties, the tens, the fives.
“That's more like it,” said Ginger, dropping the hostage and reaching for the cash. He shook it as if he were smoothing together a deck of shuffled cards, and folded it into his jacket pocket. Bashful propped open the door, covered the row of us with his gun as Ginger ran toward him. The smaller man turned on the threshold. “Stupid fucking robots,” he said with a grin, and shot me in the chest.
I don't know if he saw what his bullet did, how it tore through the thin metal and shattered the molded plastic, embedding shards of robot skin into my shoulder, ripping into my breast. I fell back against the prep tables, and I could see every customer in the place taking in my exposed flesh, the chrysanthemum of blood.
As I hit the floor, my mouth opened and closed. “Fuck,” I wanted to say, “Shit,” but no words made it through the mask.
Copyright (c) 2008 Felicity Shoulders
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Novelette: THE AUCTIONEER AND THE ANTIQUARIAN, OR, 1962
by Forrest Ag
uirre
Forrest Aguirre lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife and four children. He received a World Fantasy Award for his work as an anthologist, and is the author of Swans Over the Moon (Wheatland). The author tells us that although he was born years after the conclusion of his first tale for Asimov's, “the story arises, as all stories do, from memories. One of my earliest recollections as a child was seeing wounded soldiers disembarking from medical helicopters when I lived in the Philippines during the closing years of the Vietnam War. That memory, like all others, has been corrupted by my shifting perceptions and experiences in the years since. But the angst-ridden feeling of that time, which carried through my youth as a military brat living overseas during the Cold War, had a very deep impression on my inner psyche. This anxiety mingled with an innocent fascination with things fantastical—space exploration was still relatively new then. In writing ‘Auctioneer,’ I wanted to capture some of those conflicting, though not mutually exclusive, feelings and examine them through the unreliable lens of my memory."
The Auctioneer and the Antiquarian, or, 1962
The auctioneer and the antiquarian could have been ancient brothers, for all Hayden White knew. At least their ages were right for it, or it seemed that way to Hayden. He could never be quite sure. Old Lenny had been fielding bids since before the war and Mister Simms was as musty as the disintegrating tomes that lined his trailer's walls. Those books must have been outdated when Simms taught school, and he had retired eighteen years ago, five years before Hayden's birth, before Stalin died, before spaceflight, before chemotherapy.
Cancer, gravity, and expansionism were age-old. Even the Neanderthal was likely to find himself affected by, if not afflicted with, all three. But to Hayden, who had so little experience of the world, this trifecta was new, fascinating, and horrifying all the same. He wondered why the antidotes, each imposed, explored, or discovered in his lifetime, filled Lenny and Simms with an even more acute dread than the awe he felt as he grew towards his own manhood in that thirteenth year.
* * * *
January
“Twenty-two thousand miles?” Lenny slapped his leg, shaking the trailer. “How can you miss the moon by twenty-two thousand miles? It's not like it ain't the biggest thing in the sky.”
Simms smiled in that knowing way that a trained academic asserts his intellectual superiority—at least to himself. He couldn't expect old Lenny to understand his smirk, though he thought that Hayden might grasp it, if the boy would just look up from the bubblegum trading cards that held his attention, no, scattered his attention across the little trailer's floor.
“A slight miscalculation can send a spacecraft veering off into the void. One transposed digit in the ten-thousandths column would more than do it.”
“Oh, would you listen to him?” Lenny bellowed.
Hayden smiled, but didn't look up from his cards.
“Why'd they name it ‘Ranger’ if it can't find its own way?”
The smirk on Simms’ long, thin face faded to a look of exasperation.
“It couldn't find its way precisely because it is an it.”
Lenny's fat face scrunched up into incomprehension.
“Wha?”
“It is a mechanical device. It can't find its way any more than your toaster could wander off to the river and go fishing. If it were piloted by a human, the spacecraft might be made to find its mark.”
A dreamy look had washed over Lenny's face. “My toaster, fishing. If it had a filet knife it could bring home warmed up crappie cuts, ha, ha!” He burst into a laugh that shook the trailer so hard that Hayden couldn't help but laugh himself.
Simms shook his head.
“Well,” Lenny said after his laughter had subsided, “I don't know if a pilot would have been any help anyways. I bet the rocket got veered off by something that didn't want it on the moon.”
Simms glared at Lenny. Did he seriously think...
“Maybe,” Lenny roared, reaching down to pick up one of Hayden's cards, the one closest to him, the one that cost him the least effort to move his substantial frame, “it was one of these here Martians!”
He held up the card, squinting as if scrying some hidden message from the “raygun-wielding, brain-headed, bug-eyed, skull-faced, dark-hearted” figures that stalked the city's streets, disintegrating the U.S. Army, leaving nothing but glowing red bones smoldering in ossified piles.
“Hey, give me that!” Hayden snapped the card from Lenny's pudgy fingers.
Simms chuckled at the slowness of Lenny's reaction.
“All right,” Lenny said, as if offended. “But only ‘cuz you're sick and your dad ain't around to help you.”
“Lenny!” Simms chided.
“Didn't mean anything mean,” Lenny explained. “I'm serious, Hayden. Me and Simms here are going to help take care of you. We promised your mom.”
“Mom!” Hayden's long red bangs flung back as he suddenly looked up to the grandfather clock that Lenny had somehow muscled up into the trailer.
“It's past dinnertime. Mom's going to kill me!”
“And rightfully so,” Simms reminded him, “You have school tomorrow. Christmas break is over.”
He gathered the cards up into two piles, threw on his coat, and stuffed the cards, one pile in each hand, into the pockets. Simms held the door open as he rushed out into the cold toward home.
“Good boy,” Lenny said solemnly after the door had shut.
“Bright boy,” Simms added. “And tough, too.”
“He's gonna need it,” Lenny finished the thought for Simms.
“Indeed he is. I wonder if he understands the magnitude of what's happening inside him.”
“Let's hope not,” Lenny said. There was no humor in his voice.
* * * *
February
Hayden's trailer was substantially larger than old Lenny's. Still, Lenny felt like he took up too much space—a lot more space, in any case, than Hayden's father had taken up when he was alive. Lenny wondered, whenever he visited, if he were crowding out Robert White's ghost. He found a contradiction in the fact that while his body was so much bigger than Bobby's had been, his soul felt so much smaller. He could never step in for Hayden's father—nor did he want to. Heaven knows he was too old for that. Besides, Lenny viewed Lydia as a cousin or niece, not a potential wife. No, Lenny would remain unmarried till the day he died. He was resigned to that fact.
This is not to say that Lydia ever made him feel unwelcome. In fact, she often invited him over, especially during the cold months, as she had done on this occasion. She was a strong woman, of good German Wisconsin stock. But she knew that there were times when a boy needed encouragement from a man, and Hayden was coming to that age when the sweetness of a good mother needed to be braced by the courage of a bold man. This was such a time.
A voice on the radio ebbed and flowed in static waves: “The United States announced that it would enact a trade embargo against the communist regime in Cuba ... Astronaut John Glenn, pilot of the Friendship 7 space capsule, became the first American to orbit the Earth, circling the globe...”
Lenny banged the radio with the flat of his hand, startling Lydia, who dropped a handful of silverware back into the sink from which she had just retrieved them.
“Oh, sorry Mrs. White. I just really wanted to hear...”
The trailer's front door swung open and Hayden entered in a swish of snow that turned to mist as it hit the hot air inside.
“Hayden, come in quickly,” his mother said with practiced patience.
“Sorry, mom. Say, mom,” he said with scarcely a breath between sentences, “Devon's dad is going to be coaching the football team next year...”
“Hayden,” his mother interrupted him so politely that it confused Lenny, who sat watching the interchange, both hands still on the now faintly scratching radio. “Hayden,” she repeated, “are you going to say hello to our guest?”
“Oh, heh. Hi, Lenny,” he said, then, as if his init
ial conversation had continued unabated, “...and he thought I might make a good running back if I...”
“Hayden!” Lydia's terseness surprised everyone, herself included. “I'm sorry, son, but our guest is here for a specific reason.”
Hayden stared at his mother, wide-eyed. Then, the gravity of her demeanor settling on his shoulders, he turned to Lenny, looking at him quizzically, wondering what could be so important.
Lenny, who had also been staring at Lydia with something approaching amazement, came to himself and removed his hands from the radio as if it had suddenly become red hot, or he had been caught with his hands in the cookie jar.
“Ah, um. Yeah,” Lenny wilted under the hard stare that Lydia shot his way. Then he looked into the boy's eyes and straightened himself up in his chair.
“Hayden, I've known you for some time now, your whole life, in fact,” Lenny tried to speak with as much dignity as he could muster, but he quickly realized that he'd never be the statesman that Simms seemed to be. “Outside of your mom...” he paused awkwardly, “...and dad, I know you best of all. Well, me and Mister Simms, really.”
Hayden's puzzled look was not improving, Lenny thought. Best to just cut to the chase.
“Boy, you're not well. You know it and I know it. Most of all, your mother knows it. So I'm here to talk to you, to help you with what's coming. Now, I don't understand everything, but I do know that the doctors are gonna try something new with you. Some kinda chemo-therapeutics, I think they call it.”
Hayden's look changed from confusion to guarded interest. He took a seat opposite Lenny, with his back to his mother. Lydia smiled, knowing that his talk was already doing her son some good, despite his silence.
“Now what do you know about these chemo-therapeutics, Hayden?”
The boy looked at his own hands, folded in his lap. He wondered how far down the cancer was—in the bones? In the muscle? Just below the creases of his fingers and palms? He began, at that moment, to realize just how much he did not know.
“Well, the doctors said they'd be giving me a few shots or an IV or something.”
Asimov's SF, June 2008 Page 9
