AbductiCon (2 page)

“Any update on…”

“She says there have been thirty more registrations in the past hour,” Libby said, preempting the question. “But they said their friends would be coming, apparently. After work. Give them a few more hours.”

Andie Mae drummed her fingers on the back of Libby’s chair. The
posters
needed to be up by then, dammit. The posters with their star turn attractions. The posters, which might have moved more registrations. The posters that were still at the printer’s with Al.

“I wish I could clone myself,” Andie Mae muttered under her breath. It was necessary for her to oversee everything, or else nothing would turn out right – but being everywhere at once was proving to be rather wearying on a body. She found herself wishing that Al was back, already – and not for the reasons that were foremost in her mind just a moment before. She desperately wanted a cup of good coffee.

Ξ

“You sure this is the right place?” Angel Silverman said doubtfully as the yellow cab pulled up under the shimmering canopy of the fake–mother–of–pearl portico arching above the entrance to the California Resort.

“That’s the address,” Vince Silverman said, fishing in his pocket for his wallet. “Here, keep the change,” he said to the driver, handing over a fifty–dollar bill.

The driver took the money with a delicate two–fingered grip. “Much obliged,” he said. “Let me get your bags.”

Angel had already got out of the car, and had taken the few steps off to her right where the driveway ended at a sturdy stainless steel fence wreathed with flowering creeper. “At least it has a nice view,” she called back over her shoulder.

“Maybe we rate a room with one,” Vince said. “Come on, let’s get checked in and then you can go exploring.”

“There’s a pool,” Angel said, pointing.

“Swell,” Vince muttered. “Later, Angel. Come on.”

Angel left her vantage point with reluctance, and shouldered one of the smaller bags piled by the entrance. “OK, hon,” she said. “Right behind you.”

“I suppose I’d better find someone from the committee first,” Vince said, tackling the revolving doors with the finesse of someone who was no stranger to handling such things with a double armful of luggage.

An expressionless man with too–perfect silvery–white skin just a little too tightly stretched over the bones of his face watched them enter, standing without moving only a few steps away as the Silvermans fell into the foyer with their baggage. Vince looked up, rearranging his grip on his rolling carry–on, and gave the other man a once–over. Con goer, definitely; one learned to recognize them on sight, after enough conventions. Just enough of a too–weird vibe to be a mundane.

“I don’t suppose you know where the reg desk is?” he asked conversationally.

The man lifted one hand and pointed off to his right.

“Ah. Okay. Thanks.” There was indeed a U–shaped barricade of generic hotel tables, complete with white tablecloths and starched white ruffled ‘skirts’ velcroed on and already coming off at the corners. It was arranged in one corner of the foyer, with an array of computer screens and a tangle of black lanyards in evidence next to one workstation. Another nest of tables had a large orange and green sign that proclaimed “T SHIRTS!” – although, as yet, the advertised merchandise hadn’t manifested. The registration tables were currently manned by a solitary girl whose long hair, which might have originally have been a mousy light brown but was now dyed in multicolored streaks of improbable hues, was draped over a black leather corset. She slouched in her chair behind one of the computers, seemingly totally engrossed in a manga.

“Stay here,” Vince said to Angel. “The hotel desk is in the opposite direction, I’ll see if I can’t get someone in charge and then we can go check in – no point in dragging all this luggage both ways.”

Angel nodded, and Vince shrugged off his own shoulder duffel bag to add to the pile at her feet, and thus unencumbered strode off toward the computer bank.

The girl behind the table showed no awareness of his approach – nor, indeed, of his presence, as he came to a halt in front of her and waited politely for a few moments. Then he cleared his throat, and she looked up, languid, her eyes almost manga–big in her narrow pale face.

“You want to register?” she asked, putting the manga down with evident reluctance.

“I’m Vincent Silverman,” Vince said. And then, when she simply stared at him without any apparent recognition, added gently, “Your Guest of Honor?”

The girl shot up in her seat, her spine straight, appeared to think about getting up, opened and closed her mouth a few times, and then said, desperately, “Oh! I’m so sorry! I didn’t… I mean, I thought… I didn’t know that you… I’ll just… call somebody…?”

“You do that,” Vince said, giving her a calming smile.

She fumbled with a small microphone that led off a bud inside her left ear and gabbled into it, almost as incoherent as she had been with Vince himself – listened briefly – and then looked up with evident relief.

“Andie Mae is on her way down,” she said. “The Chair.”

“Thank you,” Vince said.

“I, uh, she’ll have your badge,” the girl babbled. “I’m
so
sorry, Mr Silverman.”

She might have been a generation too young to understand the basis for any of his books. Vince, never as conscious of his graying hair as he was in that moment, found himself torn between wishing that he had that innocence back, that anonymity of his younger days that made it almost certain that nobody at all could be expected to recognize him on sight, and a strange kind of annoyed resentment that all of the years he had put into this job, into his reputation, meant absolutely nothing at all and the younger generation of fans, the ones who had followed his own cohort, had no reason to know who he was.

But he could see someone almost running down the foyer now, a delicate blonde girl who looked entirely too fragile to bear the load of a con Chair but whose badge, with its long tail of colorful ribbons attached to it, branded her such. She sailed right past Angel and the bags, and came to a skidding halt at his side, flushed and out of breath.

“I sent Dave to get you at the airport!” she said, by way of greeting. “How did you get here? He just phoned upstairs that he was still waiting for…”

“Oh dear, I am sorry if I managed to miss the connection,” Vince said. “We took a cab.”

She turned briefly to follow the direction in which he nodded when he said ‘we’ and appeared to have only just become aware of Angel’s presence.

“My wife,” Vince said helpfully. “Might we get checked in, and dump the bags? Angel saw a pool, earlier…”

“Yes, of course. I’m Andie Mae, we emailed…”

“Pleasure,” Vince said.

“This way,” Andie Mae said, motioning for him to follow. “Your room’s ready. Would you just excuse me…”

He nodded and started walking toward the hotel desk, stopping only to collect Angel and the bags on the way, and Andie Mae turned to the still flustered and round–eyed girl behind the desk.

“Get Libby to phone Dave and tell him to get back here,” she snapped. “I don’t know how he managed it but he let our guest of honor sail straight past him and now I’ve a cab fare to reimburse on top of all else. And how could you
possibly
have embarrassed us like that by not knowing
who he was
?”

“Yes, I mean, sorry, I mean, I’ll sort it out,” the girl babbled.

“By the way, how many registrations so far?” Andie Mae said, changing direction with such speed and agility that the other girl could only open and close her mouth several times in response, like a guppy out of its fishbowl, and then offer, quietly and very lamely, that she wasn’t sure at all but she thought there had been more than fifty people who had registered on her own shift so far.

“It’s okay, but hopefully it’ll pick up,” Andie Mae muttered. She glanced at the pile of pocket programs stacked on the table by the computers, and lifted one up, flipping through it with a quick, nervous motion. “Have these all been corrected? Call Xander, if he needs to fix the wrong time.” And then she turned, realized that her VIP was almost at the hotel desk, dropped the program back on its pile and strode off after the Silvermans in a flurry of swirling skirts, leaving her volunteer feeling as though she had just been wrung out like a wet dishcloth and by someone who knew how.

The expressionless man by the door had not moved, and had watched the entire exchange with a sort of dispassionate curiosity.

Ξ

“It’s after four. What’s the foyer looking like?”

“Healthier,” Libby said, walking into the room where Andie Mae was pacing. “I’ve just been down there. There’s a doubled–back queue from the reg desk all the way to the hotel desk. And I’m starting to see the regulars, out there. Chicken Man is back, I’ve seen him all over the place in that weird cluck–onesie of his, bless him for classing up the joint. How does he ever go to the bathroom in a hurry?”

“TMI,” someone said from the back of the room, and a ripple of laughter spread out into the volunteers.

“This year the Hair Color of Choice seems to be bright purple or neon green,” Libby said, continuing her report, “but I’ve seen a couple of oranges and a handful of bright pinks, and one or two lemon–yellow mohawks – I think there’s a posse of them out there. Is there a new manga or something? Anyway, as for the classics, there’s three Leias so far, one Original Edition and two Slave Girls, about par for the course, and one guy who thinks he might be Chewbacca but if you ask me I think Bigfoot’s Mom slipped up and let him off the leash and out on his own.”

“There’s one girl who really is not wearing nearly enough to even be classed as a costume,” said Xander Washington, programming chair, who had himself been roaming the halls only a half hour previous. “If you were to put together everything she’s got on into a single piece of material, you wouldn’t have enough to make a barstool covering.”

“Is that the same girl who tried to convince me that Saran Wrap was a costume, last year?” asked Simon Ballard, head of security, in his full Viking regalia, an anachronistic earbud glowing blue in his left ear. “She had the unmitigated gall to tell me, when every other logical thing to try had failed her, that it was a statement on existentialism.”

“One of your postgraduate buddy bunnies, letting it all hang out?” Xander teased, grinning.

“Honestly? That’s healthier than the zombie crowd,” Libby said, and then, as one or two of the others lifted their heads at the comment, added, “Sorry, but they
freak me out
. Why would any living thing dress up as something half rotten and think that is attractive?”

“You’re more into
wompires
,” Xander said, lifting his arms up into a bad imitation of throwing out a cloak or maybe a set of batwings. “Just as dead, you know.”

“But way more interesting,” Libby retorted. “Hi, can I help you?”

“Carol Elliot,” said a woman who had just walked into the Green Room where the ConCom had congregated. “You have my badge up here?”

“Somewhere,” Libby said. “Elliot… E… it’ll be in this box…” She rummaged through a pile of manila envelopes and pulled one out with a triumphant flourish. “There we are. Your itinerary’s inside, we printed them on the back of the name tents this year.”

“Oh good, it’s always great to know where you’re supposed to be next,” Carol said, opening her envelope and riffling through it. “Um, and my husband’s badge…?”

“Eep. They might have that downstairs, but you don’t want to go down into that zoo. Let me call them and double check, in the meantime you can get Mike over there to just print you a temp one and that’ll be fine until we sort it out.”

“ ‘Kay. Thanks.”

“Do you have mine there, while you’re at it?” Another pro, wearing a pith helmet crowned by a pair of truly spectacular steampunk goggles, pushed forward past Carol Elliot’s retreating back. “I’m Bob Williamson.”

Libby reached for a different stack of envelopes. “Lemme see…”

She had almost a dozen of them turn up in quick succession, pros who were at the convention to work – writers who were on panels, artists from the art show, one of the musicians who were to give a concert later that weekend – they needed their badges, they needed information, they needed supplies and minions for setup work that needed to be done, they often just needed coffee. Libby had her head down and was waist high in manila envelopes when she lifted her head and smiled at the next person standing in front of her.

“Name?”

“Oh, no, no, sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude if you’re busy,” the young man said apologetically. It was only then that she noticed the shiny brass badge on the lapel of a waistcoat that was entirely unlike anything that a con–goer would be seen in. She squinted at the badge, and he offered up a preemptive hand. “I’m Luke, Luke Barnes, I’m the Night Manager, just come on duty – actually, it’s my first time in the hot seat, tonight – just wandered by to see if you guys were okay out here, if you had everything you needed…”

“How sweet,” Libby said, and meant it literally. In general they were not much given to receiving visits from the managerial staff up in the Green Room and Con Ops. Maybe it was just that ‘first time in the hot seat’ thing. The boy – and he didn’t look much older than someone who could still legitimately be called a boy – was still so very new at this, earnest, and eager to please. “I think we’re fine, really.”

“Good. I, uh, it’s my first time – and something this big – I don’t think this hotel has had this many people – I’m perfectly certain that we’re
this
close to breaking the fire codes…” He sounded a little nervous, and Libby gave him a wide and encouraging smile.

“You’ll be fine. I know it all must look weird, but…”

“Oh, no, I love sci fi,” Luke said. Xander, who had just come into the room, gave a theatrical eye roll at this, but Luke failed to notice.

“Ever been to a con?” Libby asked.

“Well,
this
one,” Luke said, grinning. “Let me know if you guys need anything.”

“Will do,” Libby said. There was something that she might have asked for but she couldn’t remember it, right there and then, and Luke ducked his head at her, gave everyone else a cheery wave, and wriggled out of the increasingly crowded room.