Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE ^{BEST NOVELLA} EXCERPT FROM CALENDRICAL REGRESSION ^{LAWRENCE M. SCHOEN}

The pirate queen was a young brunette who in another life might have been a celebrity spokesperson. She glanced down at her wounded arm, attempted to raise it and failed. Instead she passed her photonic cutlass to her other hand. The move required less than a second, and to the chagrin of her alien opponent she brought the blade up in an effective block and managed to force him back. He stumbled and an instant later she struck the weapon from his grasp in a shower of high velocity sparks that caused his phlox-colored hair to stand on end.

“Where does a pirate learn to do that?” gasped the Auditor in Black, his fishbelly white skin a stark contrast to his ebony suit—marking him as a Clarkeson, a colony creature pretending to be a humanoid. His feet slid on the ever slicker surface of the dirigible as it descended toward the swamp below and the humid air condensed upon its skin.

“I wasn’t always a pirate, Hiram,” she replied, bringing her cutlass closer and forcing him to his knees. “Before my airship began harrying your tax collectors, I was a princess of the realm, and the darling of Daddy’s fencing master.”

“What happens now?” asked the Clarkeson, smirking despite defeat. “Am I your prisoner? You cannot bring me to trial; I’m not accountable to the courts of Earth.”

“I’ve never been a fan of the legal system. Simpler just to kill you.”

Hiram laughed. “Gutting me a like human won’t end me. I’m not a singular being like you. My sapience results from the collective efforts of more than a million self-aware cellular collectives working in committee.”

“Then I’ll just have to carve you up into lots of little pieces and scatter them overboard into the swamp. Goodbye, my Lord Auditor. Your committee is hereby disbanded.”

She raised the photonic cutlass above her head in preparation for the first stroke.

“Wait! Who’s that behind you?”

The pirate queen’s contempt at the ploy was palpable. “Please. You can’t expect that to actually work. We’re fighting on top of a sinking airship, and any harness lines someone might use to climb up here are in front of me.”

That’s when I reached from behind her, lightly grasped the wrist of her upraised hand, and commanded, “Sleep!” Her body went limp. She slumped against me as her head lolled upon her chest. I caught her as she collapsed and half-dragged / half-carried her a short distance to deposit her in a folding chair at the center of the stage.

The Auditor in Black wasn’t a Clarkeson at all but actually a blue-collar worker from Des Moines named Hiram Gustuvson. He’d also succumbed to my command and lay sprawled, illuminated by a spotlight on the stage that mere moments ago had seemed to be the slippery surface of a dirigible. He was bigger than the recent pirate queen and I didn’t want to drag him. A quick whisper in his ear, and he stood up, eyes blinking. I guided him back to the chair next to his foe. Next, I stepped behind her chair and brought my lips close to her ear, speaking softly to her as I brought her back to full wakefulness. Then I turned to the audience.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it has been your great fortune to witness, for the first time anywhere, this performance of the Revenge of the Pirate Queen! Please show your appreciation for our players, who despite having no history of pointless violence or weapons training, nonetheless slaughtered dozens of imaginary foes before finally confronting one another for your entertainment.”

Thunderous applause met my dazed volunteers. They grinned sheepishly, looked to one another, and—better than I could have choreographed it—joined hands, rose to their feet, and took a bow. It was a great end to the last of a week of shows. Seven days I’d taken off from my regular, unwelcome job as CEO of a hugely successful corporation, a vacation spent returning to my original profession as a stage hypnotist. I’m the Amazing Conroy, and I’m very good at what I do, when I can get away to do it.

The applause ended and I escorted my recent hypnotic subjects off the stage and into the waiting arms of their friends and colleagues. One of the small tables in front stood vacant now. Earlier, I’d invited its occupant on stage as a volunteer but she’d demurred. At some point in the show she’d slipped away, her escape covered by darkness, obscured by spotlights, and masked by the antics on stage.

I bid everyone a good night and as soon as the stage lights went dark I slipped through the rear curtain, ending my week of headlining at the Hotel Rotundo in downtown Omaha.

I’d been putting in two shows a night to an audience that had consisted of the attendees of several different groups that had opted to hold their national meetings there in Nebraska, including the Association of Midwestern Pipefitters, Mothers Against Migraines, and my personal favorite the Royal Order of Otters. It wasn’t a bad gig as far as such things went; Omaha rarely attracts really big name acts, so a stage hypnotist can do pretty well. But I wasn’t there for the money. A couple years earlier I’d stumbled into a venture breeding and leasing buffalo dogs and I was now richer than I had any right to be. The work had taken me to Mars a month earlier, and after returning to Earth, I’d decided to treat myself to a little time off. When I had mentioned this to my secretary, she promptly presented me with an array of terrestrial vacation spots featuring a nice assortment of white sandy beaches, private forests, and mountain vistas. Moreover, each included nearby, five-star restaurants that catered to ultra-rich humans and a wide range of xenophilic aliens.

I was tempted. The venues were all variations on paradise, obscenely expensive, and well within my budget. But it was neither what I wanted nor needed. I had no use for paradise, though I almost relented after reviewing the restaurants’ menus. In the end, my resolution held and I slipped away by returning to my earlier career, leaving the running of my company in the hands of people who knew what they were doing far better than me. Instead, to the horror of my security chief, I called in a favor from a friend in the stage performers’ union and within an hour had gotten myself booked at the Hotel Rotundo to perform my hypnosis act and make utter strangers believe outlandish suggestions for the entertainment of others.

It had been a glorious and restful week, but as I undid the knot of my bowtie and walked down the backstage corridor to my dressing room I knew it was time to hang up my tuxedo and return to the corporate office back in Philadelphia.

The woman waiting for me in the hallway changed all that.

She was the same woman who’d vanished before the end of my show, vacating a front table that usually went to master plumbers or reverend otters of great distinction. In hindsight, I should have taken that as an omen.

When selecting volunteers for a show I tend toward two types: either the sort of ordinary person who blends in and goes through life otherwise unnoticed, and at the other extreme someone who has made a significant, though not necessarily conscious, effort to stand out. This woman fell into the second group.

A single glance revealed that she wasn’t from the Midwest. Her tanned skin had that perfect seamless look that only comes from salons in New York or L.A., where you spend ten minutes hanging in zero gee while melanin wielding nano-machines paint your epidermis one cell at a time. I assumed a similar treatment had been applied to her shoulder length blonde hair; it had an otherworldly look, the way it bounced in curly streamers all around her head. She probably came by her dimples honestly and they worked to give her a girl-next-door flavor that was at odds with the perfection of skin and hair. Her clothes didn’t help things. Sure, we were in Omaha, but the rest of my audience still made a point of showing up in the latest definition of ‘office casual.’ The men all had collared shirts and the women all wore dresses. She had clothed herself in new jeans and an oversized sports jersey representing a team from the Martian dustball minor league. I’d followed the disapproving glances of more than one of the women gathered in Omaha to rally against migraines when I’d sought her out as a volunteer. When she turned down my invitation, I’d switched to a pretty plumber and put her out of my mind.

Now she stepped back into it, having apparently left my show early the better to lay in wait for me in the dilapidated hallway backstage. She stood there now, leaning against the door to my dressing room, the shiny blue fabric of her Helium Hurlers jersey stretched in interesting ways across her torso. I stopped a few feet away, still trying to determine if she was a groupie or a crazie. Neither were unheard of in my field, though the latter were more common.

If she was a crazie, I certainly didn’t want her coming into my dressing room. For that matter, while it would be flattering if she were a groupie, I wasn’t looking for that sort of thing either. It was Friday night and I had a ticket for a redeye back home with a plan to spend the weekend catching up on my sleep and dining at a couple of five-star restaurants. All too quickly it’d be Monday morning, and I’d be expected to show up at the corporate offices of Buffalogic, Inc. bright and early to resume reviewing business proposals and taking meetings with corporate leaders from all over the Earth and beyond. So, regardless of her story, or my own wishful thinking, she wasn’t going to be joining me in my dressing room.

“Good evening, Mr. Conroy. My name is Nicole. I very much enjoyed your show tonight. The things you made your volunteers do, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I offered up a tight smile, nodding my head to acknowledge the praise, and had pretty much decided she belonged in the groupie category. “Thank you, you’re very kind. But, if you’ll excuse me, I—”

“And that last part where you made that plumber believe he was a Clarkeson? Incredible. It was spot on. Plots within plots with them. Have you met many Clarkesons?”

An odd question, but then I’d already pegged her as a bit more worldly than the rest of the audience. “A few,” I answered. “Thanks for coming. I’m glad you enjoyed the show. Now I really must—”

“You know, my uncle saw one of your earliest performances, what was it, fourteen years ago? On Hesnarj.”

It was like she’d slapped me. Hesnarj was an alien mausoleum world where I’d been marooned while a college student. There’d been precious few humans anywhere on that planet. I’d discovered my talent as a stage hypnotist there, befriended my first aliens, and even met one who had helped me to channel my deceased great aunt Fiona.

I started to reply but she cut me off again.

“But that’s not why I’m here. The show was just a delightful bonus. I actually came to meet you for a completely unrelated reason.”

Okay, maybe not a groupie. “Oh? You did? I see. Well, and that’s—”

“There’s someone quite extraordinary that I’d like you to meet. His name is Juan Sho. He’s involved with sorghum, that and cookbooks.”

Sorghum cookbooks? I made a point of looking up and down the length of our empty hallway. Just that quickly the scales had tipped toward crazie.

“He’s not here, Mr. Conroy. He’s waiting for us in Mexico.”

“Mexico?”

She smiled, revealing perfect, gleaming teeth. “Well, yes. Like yourself, he’s a busy executive by day, and also shares your passion for cuisine, though in his case it’s more about how it’s crafted than how it tastes. Right now he’s probably in a little restaurant in Veracruz, reverse-engineering the best mole poblano you’ve ever had.”

This time my smile was genuine. If you can appreciate a truly fine mole then you’ll understand why. Excellent food is my weakness and Nicole—whoever she was—had done her homework. Some part of my brain threw away both of the likely pigeonholes I’d laid out for her and tabled further attempts at classification. She had my attention. I unlocked my dressing room and opened the door.

“Really? You know, I’ve never been to Veracruz. Why don’t you come in and tell me more about this.”