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“The panel doesn't start until 3:30, right?” Danny asked, peering at the map. “We should have plenty of time–-it looks like the hotel’s only ten miles from where we had lunch. And it’s just a panel, not like you’re giving a keynote speech or anything. If you get nervous, you can just gesture gracefully and say, ‘I’d like to hear some thoughts on that from’--what was his name again?”
F. C. Stone was sure Danny knew the answer perfectly well; he was just trying to make her feel better about sharing the stage with a household name. “Ted Mallory. You know, he wrote The Curse on the Cottage, Shadowfall, that thing with the demon that pops up out of the loo… It’s a great honor for me to be on a panel with him, really. He’s so much more famous than I am, it’s ridiculous. Everyone will be there to see him, and they’ll all be wondering who’s that strange frumpy woman taking up space next to him.”
“You’ve got just as many fans as he has,” said Danny loyally. “And your books are miles better than his. The New York Times Book Review called that toilet demon juvenile and tasteless.”
F. C. Stone felt a warm glow at this. “I’m glad I’ve got you with me,” she said. “I hope it won’t be too dull for you. I think the newsletter said Mallory was bringing his son to the convention–-he’d be about your age. What was his name? Nigel, Ned, something like that… bother, I think I’ve missed the turn.” She abruptly stomped on the brakes, earning a chorus of honks from the traffic behind them, and pulled over onto the side of the road. “Let me see that map.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” she said, looking back and forth between the map and the directions she had hastily scrawled on the back of an old shopping list. “We’re on Bartlett Road now, and we should be turning onto Anderson Way. But I never saw any sign for that, and we’ve gone much too far by now.”
“Let me have a look,” Danny said, extending his hand for the directions. “This is even worse than your usual handwriting, Mum. I think this says Partlett, not Bartlett.”
F. C. Stone felt a sudden cold tendril of uneasiness in her gut that had nothing to do with nerves about the panel. “Partlett? That can’t be right-–I must have been thinking of something else while I was writing it down.”
“But here it is on the map,” said Danny, pointing. “And here’s Adnerson Way intersecting it–-Adnerson, not Anderson. It’s spelled A-D-N-”
She snatched the map and looked for herself. There it was, Partlett, in the same tiny, hard-to-read font as the other labels. And there was Adnerson, which did in fact seem to lead in the direction of the hotel. She recognized other street names from the final lines of her driving directions.
“Well, damn,” she said, handing the map back to Danny and putting the car into gear. “We’ll have to turn around and go back to find this Partlett turnoff. Why they would have two such similar road names in the same town, I ask you…”
“We can’t turn around,” Danny said. “Bartlett Road becomes one-way here.”
“Shit,” said F. C. Stone with feeling. “You didn’t hear that,” she added, for Danny’s benefit. She kept her gaze fixed on the road ahead, but she could feel him rolling his eyes beside her.
It seemed a minor miracle when they managed to reach the hotel after only three or four more wrong turns and diversions, with plenty of time to spare before the panel. In the lobby, F. C. Stone noticed with pleasure and a certain amount of pride a stand serving hot drinks, with a menu offering quaffy, gav, and xfy. It seemed to be doing a brisk business. Next door was a booth selling what appeared to be toilet-paper dispensers in the shape of Ted Mallory’s most fearsome demon. “Can you imagine anyone voluntarily paying money for one of those?” she asked, pointing them out to Danny. “The panel is supposed to be in some room called Alternate Reality 13–that must be it there.”
An inkjet-printed sign taped beside the door read, “Panel Discussion: Parallel Universes in Science Fiction, Fantasy, nad Horror.” Danny nudged his mother and grinned. “I wonder what nad horror is.”
“I think I’d rather not know,” she replied. That cold tendril wriggled briefly again in the pit of her stomach. She sternly told it to go away.
Despite the travails of the journey, they had still managed to arrive earlier than the other panelists, it seemed. Some workers were arranging chairs and testing the sound system, but otherwise the room was empty–-no, not quite empty. Ted Mallory was sitting in a chair in the back corner; he was immediately recognizable, if not nearly as darkly imposing as his official author photos liked to suggest. She’d met him briefly at a few other events, although they’d never exchanged more than a few words. The tall, dark-haired teenager beside him, absorbed in doing something on a laptop computer, must be his son. An extra-large cup of xfy was balanced precariously on one arm of his chair. The boy doesn’t look at all like him, F. C. Stone thought. Favors his mother’s side, I suppose.
She didn’t much fancy making awkward conversation with Mallory while waiting for the other panelists. Could they make a dash for it and kill some time back out in the lobby? No, too late; he caught her eye and gave a cordial nod.
“Ted, how nice to see you,” she said, crossing over to Mallory’s corner of the room. “This is my son Danny. And this must be…?”
“Nick,” the boy supplied, looking up from his screen for the first time. His eyes slid over her as teenage boys’ eyes usually did, but rested a bit longer on Danny.
“Nice to meet you,” Danny said, holding out his hand to shake. At least some of us trouble to teach our children manners, F. C. Stone thought with a mild burst of self-satisfaction.
“Pleasure to see you again,” Mallory said to her, smiling vaguely. She suspected he couldn’t remember her name. “Glad to see you made it here all right.”
“We nearly didn’t,” she said, relieved to have hit upon a safe, if dull, topic of conversation to fill the time. “The roads around here seem unnecessarily confusing. That one-way system!”
“We had the same trouble last night,” Nick said, suddenly looking interested for some reason. “Not to mention that five-way intersection where Partlett Road meets Partlett Lane, South Partlett Drive, Old Partlett Road, and an unmarked dirt track. It’s almost as if someone didn’t want us to get here. Rather like at the Hotel Babylon for Phatasmacon a few months ago…” He gave his father a significant look.
Mallory opened his mouth as if to say something, and then closed it again. He was fiddling with a sheaf of paper in his hands, rolling it into a tight cone, then unrolling it and twisting it back the other way. He’s nervous, she realized suddenly. Even more nervous than I am, about this silly panel. It made her like him, just a little.
“Are those your notes for the panel?” she asked. “I always admire anyone organized enough to type up notes–-I just have mine scrawled by hand on odd little bits of paper.”
Mallory flattened the papers again with a scowl. “No, I never use notes; I find I do my best speaking extemporaneously.” Her tiny spark of goodwill toward him instantly evaporated. “No, this is yet another piece of unsolicited fan writing that someone flung at me in the corridor just now. No matter how many times I say I never read fanfic of my own work, they never seem to give up. Dreadful nuisance, honestly.”
“Oh, yes, I completely agree,” she said, feeling a little stab of envy. She wasn’t certain whether anyone had ever written fanfic about her own books; certainly no one had ever attempted to share it with her. “Still, I suppose it could be interesting to see what gets written about someone else’s work. Finger on the pulse of the reading public, and all that.”
He held the papers out to her. “Be my guest. Saves me the trouble of finding a rubbish bin.”
The stapled pages had been printed on a terrible dot-matrix printer that was running low on ink. In a couple of places, the paper had been ripped at the edges in an attempt to tear off the sprocket holes along the perforations. “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls,” the title read. Below that was a summary: “A reimagining of Shadowfall in an alternate universe where all the characters are werewolf mermaids attending high school in space.”
“What exactly do you suppose a werewolf mermaid is?” she asked, bemused.
“I’d think it would be just a wolf head and forepaws on top, then a fish tail at the other end,” Danny said.
“That doesn’t seem very aerodynamic–-ah, hydrodynamic,” F. C. Stone objected. “I think you might want something more like a sort of hairy shark with claws on its fins.”
Ted Mallory got a faraway look on his face. “That’s an idea…” He extracted a pen and a battered notebook from his jacket pocket and began scribbling furiously.
Nick grinned. “Now you’ve done it. Let’s just hope he doesn’t make a run for it before the panel starts.” He pushed his laptop to one side and took a large gulp of his xfy.
This motion left Nick’s computer screen visible to Danny. “What’s that game you’re playing?” Danny asked, in a casual-sounding tone that she knew was actually a marker of intense interest. “I don’t think I’ve seen it before.”
“It’s called Bristolia,” Nick said. “I designed it myself, actually, based on some ideas my cousin and I came up with. This is a tricky bit here, because I’ve just got to the Castle of the Warden of the Green Wastes…”
Nick and Danny were soon utterly absorbed in the game, and Ted Mallory hadn’t once looked up from his notebook after beginning to write. F. C. Stone looked again at the fanfic manuscript and considered turning the page… no, it obviously made more sense to look over her notes one last time before the other panelists arrived.
That hadn’t been so bad, really, F. C. Stone thought. She’d made it through all of the moderator’s prepared questions with no major stumbles, and even had some rather good repartee with some of her fellow panelists. Danny’s little waves and thumbs-up signs from the audience had given her a nice boost. Now there was just the question-and-answer period to get through.
The moderator pointed at one of the wildly waving hands, this one belonging to a teenager wearing a headband with two sparkly antennae attached. “Where do you get your ideas?” the mouth below the antennae blurted out nervously. Well, that certainly was a classic. “F. C. Stone, would you like to take this one?” the moderator said with a forced smile.
Luckily, her notes had included plenty of relevant material. “I find that ideas can pop up in the most unexpected places,” she said brightly. “Even typos, for example. I always find myself typing ‘velcoity,’ instead of ‘velocity,’ which is why I decided to invent the term ‘velcoity’ to describe the rapidity of hyperspace jumps. That then made me think about the possibility of different ships taking different amounts of time to complete the same jump, which–not to spoil anything–ends up being a pivotal factor in a crucial space battle in my upcoming book.”
There were some chuckles and a smattering of applause from the audience. “I agree,” said Ted Mallory unexpectedly. “Ideas can crop up anywhere, from some mundane happening or offhand remark. In fact, my conversation with Ms. Stone before this very panel sparked the most incredible idea for a new book.”
“I’ve often said that writing is just a job, like building a bicycle,” Mallory went on. F. C. Stone saw Nick, in the audience, rolling his eyes. “Well, it is a job, and it does require a lot of hard, careful work. But those times when an idea seems to shine out from underneath the everyday world, when it seizes you in its grasp and you don’t quite know where it’s going to take you… that’s a feeling I can only call magical.”
More applause broke out. F. C. Stone looked at Ted Mallory in utter astonishment. She’d never heard of him saying anything remotely like this before. Nick was looking astonished as well, and also rather pleased. She remembered suddenly that there had been some sort of funny business at Phantasmacon–-all very hush-hush, but it had inspired a flurry of conspiracy-minded tabloid articles. Had something happened to Mallory that had fundamentally changed him?
“What was the new book idea?” someone called out.
“That would be telling. But you should expect to find out soon at a bookstore near you.” This was said with a slight smirk, and sounded much more like the old Mallory.
“Next question,” the moderator said, indicating a small man in the back row with a long face and a comb-over that utterly failed to hide the bald spot on top of his head. F. C. Stone thought she recognized the face from somewhere–-had he been at other conventions, perhaps? The man was wearing a T-shirt featuring a drawing of an anatomically improbable woman wearing some sort of chain-mail bikini. Well, at least he’s got clothes on, she thought, then wondered where that thought had come from. Why on Earth had her subconscious been expecting him to be naked? And why was that same cold fear brushing at her insides again?
“Do you think science fiction these days has become too politically correct?” the man asked. His voice was unexpectedly beautiful, a polished, golden baritone that sounded as if it might belong to a professional actor. F. C. Stone noted this even as she thought, oh, no, one of those. Perhaps that was what had caused her unpleasant association with his face–-had he made an ass of himself at some previous event of hers?
The moderator tried to say something, but the man continued talking over her. “I mean, take Candy’s latest book…”
Hearing that voice saying Candy finally triggered the memory of where she’d seen that face before. It had been grinning in triumph while launching an attack on Nad at the controls of the starship Partlett M32/A401.
The golden voice was still talking, but she was no longer listening to the words. She leaned back into her chair, taking deep breaths, and tried to look anywhere but at the comb-over man–-at Adny. No, that was ridiculous–-it couldn’t be him, not here in an auditorium full of people at some third-rate hotel at the back of beyond. The man had to be an actor; this must be some kind of publicity stunt the publisher had launched to promote her new book. They might have had the decency to warn me first, she thought. I’ll skin my editor alive.
A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she turned to see a door she hadn’t noticed before opening in the back of the room, behind the rows of chairs. A woman peered cautiously around the edge of the door, and then walked through. She was wearing a flowing garment that seemed to be made of light, glimmering softly in a rainbow of colors. The woman looked F. C. Stone straight in the eye and winked. The woman’s face was instantly recognizable, because it was her own face–-or a youthful, idealized version of it. This was Candida One.
Adny’s voice thundered mellifluously on and on, now saying things like, “This planet is ripe for takeover! Prepare to welcome your new overlords!” The moderator and several of the other panelists attempted to interrupt, but the voice simply flowed over them like a river in flood. All eyes in the audience were fixed on Adny now. No one except F. C. Stone appeared to notice the twelve other women following Candida One through the door, dressed in similar ethereal garments. They were of varied heights, body types, and coloring, but all of them appeared dazzlingly beautiful to her in this moment. Candida One stood against the wall directly behind Adny’s chair, and the others arranged themselves symmetrically in a semicircle on either side, smoothly slipping in between the folding chairs. Other audience members were beginning to notice them now, and a murmur of reaction began to grow, but Adny continued to speak, apparently mesmerized by the sound of his own voice.
“NOW!” Candida One suddenly shouted, cutting through Adny’s polished tones like a laser. The thirteen women, moving as one, raised gleaming weapons to their shoulders, pointed them at Adny, and fired. Lines of light, glimmering like the womens’ clothing, shot toward Adny and wrapped around him like ropes, covering him from head to toe.
At a signal from Candida One, the women lowered their weapons. The ends of the light beams appeared to tie themselves in knots, wrapping Adny in a neat package. His struggling shape could just barely be made out through the layers of luminous fibers. His mouth was still moving, but no sound emerged.
Once again, Candida One looked directly at F. C. Stone. She smiled and gave a little wave of her hand. Then, without warning, she vanished. So did the other twelve women and the captive Adny. No sign remained of any of them save for Adny’s empty chair.
For a moment, there was utter silence in the auditorium. Then, somewhere in the audience, someone began to clap. Others quickly joined in, until thunderous applause filled the room, along with scattered whoops and cheers. A middle-aged woman in the front row leapt to her feet, and others followed for a full standing ovation.
When the applause finally began to die away, the moderator cleared her throat and announced, “Well, I think that’s all the time we have for today! Thank you all for coming, and we hope you have found today’s panel a memorable experience. Don’t forget to stop and enjoy the refreshments and gift shop in the lobby.” Over the noise of people gathering their things and leaving the room, she turned to F. C. Stone and hissed, “Next time tell me if your publisher has a stunt like that planned!” F. C. Stone managed an apologetic smile and quickly hustled herself off the stage.
In the lobby, she caught sight of Danny and Nick Mallory huddling over Nick’s laptop. “... and this is my email address,” Danny was saying. “Oh, hi, Mum. That was amazing! How did they pull off those special effects? And how did you ever manage to keep the secret all that time?”
F. C. Stone smiled what she hoped was a mysterious smile and said nothing. She wouldn’t be able to put off Danny forever, but perhaps she could buy herself a little time to come up with a plausible explanation. Nick Mallory, meanwhile, was giving her an appraising look. Somehow she got the impression he knew something.
“My dad said to tell you goodbye, Ms. Stone, and thank you for the inspiration,” Nick said. “He said he was sorry, but he couldn’t stay; he had to go off immediately to start working on the new book.” He gestured toward the hot-drink stand with his empty xfy cup. “Do you think I should try gav or quaffy next?”
“Oh, it’s all coffee, really,” F. C. Stone said. “It was lovely to meet you, Nick, but we really must be going. It turns out I've had an inspiration for a new book of my own.”