Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3) Page 16

  11.

  Aimee’s boyfriend:

  Geof is not at all what Aimee expected from a boyfriend. For one thing, he’s fifteen years younger than Aimee, twenty-eight to her forty-three. For another, he’s sort of quiet. For a third, he’s gorgeous, silky thick hair pulled into a shoulder-length ponytail, shaved sides showing off his strong jaw line. He smiles a lot, but he doesn’t laugh very often.

  Geof has a degree in history, which means that he was working in a bike-repair shop when she met him at the Montana Fair. Aimee never has much to do right after the show, so when he offered to buy her a beer she said yes. And then it was four am and they were kissing in the bus, monkeys letting themselves in and getting ready for bed; and Aimee and Geof made love.

  In the morning over breakfast, the monkeys came up one by one and shook his hand solemnly, and then he was with the band, so to speak. She helped him pick up his cameras and clothes and the surfboard his sister had painted for him one year as a Christmas present. There’s no room for the surfboard, so it’s suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes the squirrel monkeys hang out there and peek over the side.

  Aimee and Geof never talk about love.

  Geof has a class-C driver’s license, but this is just lagniappe.

  * * * *

  12.

  Zeb is dying.

  Generally speaking, the monkeys are remarkably healthy and Aimee can handle their occasional sinus infections and gastrointestinal ailments. For anything more difficult, she’s found a couple of communities online and some helpful specialists.

  But Zeb’s coughing some, and the last of his fur is falling out. He moves very slowly and sometimes has trouble remembering simple tasks. When the show was up in St. Paul six months ago, a Como Zoo biologist came to visit the monkeys, complimented her on their general health and well-being, and at her request looked Zeb over.

  “How old is he?” the biologist, Gina, asked.

  “I don’t know,” Aimee said. The man she bought the show from hadn’t known either.

  “I’ll tell you then,” Gina said. “He’s old. I mean, seriously old.”

  Senile dementia, arthritis, a heart murmur. No telling when, Gina said. “He’s a happy monkey,” she said. “He’ll go when he goes.”

  * * * *

  13.

  Aimee thinks a lot about this. What happens to the act when Zeb’s dead? Through each show he sits calm and poised on his bright stool. She feels he is somehow at the heart of the monkeys’ amiability and cleverness. She keeps thinking that he is somehow the reason the monkeys all vanish and return.

  Because there’s always a reason for everything, isn’t there? Because if there isn’t a reason for even one thing, like how you can get sick, or your husband stop loving you or people you love die—then there’s no reason for anything. So there must be reasons. Zeb’s as good a guess as any.

  * * * *

  14.

  What Aimee likes about this life:

  It doesn’t mean anything. She doesn’t live anywhere. Her world is thirty-eight feet and 127 shows long and currently twenty-six monkeys deep. This is manageable.

  Fairs don’t mean anything, either. Her tiny world travels within a slightly larger world, the identical, interchangeable fairs. Sometimes the only things that cue Aimee to the town she’s in are the nighttime temperatures and the shape of the horizon: badlands, mountains, plains, or city skyline.

  Fairs are as artificial as titanium knees: the carnival, the animal barns, the stock-car races, the concerts, the smell of burnt sugar and funnel cakes and animal bedding. Everything is an overly bright symbol for something real, food or pets or hanging out with friends. None of this has anything to do with the world Aimee used to live in, the world from which these people visit.

  She has decided that Geof is like the rest of it: temporary, meaningless. Not for loving.

  * * * *

  15.

  These are some ways Aimee’s life might have come apart:

  a. She might have broken her ankle a few years ago, and gotten a bone infection that left her on crutches for ten months, and in pain for longer.

  b. Her husband might have fallen in love with his admin and left her.

  c. She might have been fired from her job in the same week she found out her sister had colon cancer.

  d. She might have gone insane for a time and made a series of questionable choices that left her alone in a furnished apartment in a city she picked out of the atlas.

  Nothing is certain. You can lose everything. Eventually, even at your luckiest, you will die and then you will lose it all. When you are a certain age or when you have lost certain things and people, Aimee’s crippling grief will make a terrible poisoned dark sense.

  * * * *

  16.

  Aimee has read up a lot, so she knows how strange all this is.

  There aren’t any locks on the cages. The monkeys use them as bedrooms, places to store their special possessions and get away from the others when they want some privacy. Much of the time, however, they are loose in the bus or poking around outside.

  Right now, three monkeys are sitting on the bed playing a game where they match colored cards. Others are playing with skeins of bright wool, or rolling around on the floor, or poking at a piece of wood with a screwdriver, or climbing on Aimee and Geof and the battered sofa. Some of the monkeys are crowded around the computer watching kitten videos on a pirated wireless connection.

  The black colubus is stacking children’s wooden blocks on the kitchenette’s table. He brought them back one night a couple of weeks ago, and since then he’s been trying to make an arch. After two weeks and Aimee’s showing him repeatedly how a keystone works, he still hasn’t figured it out, but he’s still patiently trying.

  Geof’s reading a novel out loud to Pango, who watches the pages as if she’s reading along. Sometimes she points to a word and looks up at him with her bright eyes, and he repeats it to her, smiling, and then spells it out.

  Zeb is sleeping in his cage. He crept in there at dusk, fluffed up his toys and his blanket, and pulled the door closed behind him. He does this a lot lately.

  * * * *

  17.

  Aimee’s going to lose Zeb, and then what? What happens to the other monkeys? Twenty-six monkeys is a lot of monkeys, but they all like each other. No one except maybe a zoo or a circus can keep that many monkeys, and she doesn’t think anyone else will let them sleep wherever they like or watch kitten videos. And if Zeb’s not there, where will they go, those nights when they can no longer drop through the bathtub and into their mystery? And she doesn’t even know whether it is Zeb, whether he is the cause of this, or that’s just her flailing for reasons again.

  And Aimee? She’ll lose her safe artificial world: the bus, the identical fairs, the meaningless boyfriend. The monkeys. And then what?

  * * * *

  18.

  Just a few months after she bought the act, when she didn’t care much about whether she lived or died, she followed the monkeys up the ladder in the closing act. Zeb raced up the ladder, stepped into the bathtub and stood, lungs filling for his great call. And she ran up after him. She glimpsed the bathtub’s interior, the monkeys tidily sardined in, scrambling to get out of her way as they realized what she was doing. She hopped into the hole they made for her, curled up tight.

  This only took an instant. Zeb finished his breath, boomed it out. There was a flash of light, she heard the chains release, and felt the bathtub swing down, monkeys shifting around her.

  She fell the ten feet alone. Her ankle twisted when she hit the stage but she managed to stay upright. The monkeys were gone again.

  There was an awkward silence. It wasn’t one of her more successful performances.

  * * * *

  19.

  Aimee and Geof walk through the midway at the Salina Fair. She’s hungry and doesn’t want to cook, so they’re looking for somewhere that sells $4.50 hotdogs and $3.25 Cokes, and suddenly Geof turns to
Aimee and says, “This is bullshit. Why don’t we go into town? Have real food. Act like normal people.”

  So they do: pasta and wine at a place called Irina’s Villa. “You’re always asking why they go,” Geof says, a bottle and a half in. His eyes are an indeterminate blue-gray, but in this light they look black and very warm. “See, I don’t think we’re ever going to find out what happens. But I don’t think that’s the real question, anyway. Maybe the question is, why do they come back?”

  Aimee thinks of the foreign coins, the wood blocks, the wonderful things they bring home. “I don’t know,” she says. “Why do they come back?”

  Later that night, back at the bus, Geof says, “Wherever they go, yeah, it’s cool. But see, here’s my theory.” He gestures to the crowded bus with its clutter of toys and tools. The two tamarins have just come in, and they’re sitting on the kitchenette counter, heads close as they examine some new small thing. “They like visiting wherever it is, sure. But this is their home. Everyone likes to come home sooner or later.”

  “If they have a home,” Aimee says.

  “Everyone has a home, even if they don’t believe in it,” Geof says.

  * * * *

  20.

  That night, when Geof’s asleep curled up around one of the macaques, Aimee kneels by Zeb’s cage. “Can you at least show me?” she asks. “Please? Before you go?”

  Zeb is an indeterminate lump under his baby-blue blanket, but he gives a little sigh and climbs slowly out of his cage. He takes her hand with his own hot leathery paw, and they walk out the door into the night.

  The back lot where all the trailers and buses are parked is quiet, only a few voices still audible from behind curtained windows. The sky is blue-black and scattered with stars. The moon shines straight down on them, shadowing Zeb’s face. His eyes when he looks up seem bottomless.

  The bathtub is backstage, already on its wheeled dais waiting for the next show. The space is nearly pitch dark, lit by some red EXIT signs and a single sodium-vapor away off to one side. Zeb walks her up to the tub, lets her run her hands along its cold curves and the lions’ paws, and shows her the dimly lit interior.

  And then he heaves himself onto the dais and over the tub lip. She stands beside him, looking down. He lifts himself upright and gives a boom. And then he drops flat and the bathtub is empty.

  She saw it, him vanishing. He was there and then he was gone. But there was nothing to see, no gate, no flickering reality or soft pop as air snapped in to fill the vacated space. It still doesn’t make sense, but it’s the answer that Zeb has.

  He’s already back at the bus when she gets there, already buried under his blanket and wheezing in his sleep.

  * * * *

  21.

  Then one day:

  Everyone is backstage. Aimee is finishing her makeup, and Geof is double-checking everything. The monkeys are sitting neatly in a circle in the dressing room, as if trying to keep their bright vests and skirts from creasing. Zeb sits in the middle, Pango beside him in her little green sequined outfit. They grunt a bit, then lean back. One after the other, the rest of the monkeys crawl forward and shake his hand, and then hers. She nods, like a small queen at a flower show.

  That night, Zeb doesn’t run up the ladder. He stays on his stool and it’s Pango who is the last monkey up the ladder, who climbs into the bathtub and gives a screech. Aimee has been wrong to think Zeb had to be the reason for what is happening with the monkeys, but she was so sure of it that she missed all the cues. But Geof didn’t miss a thing, so when Pango screeches, he hits the flash powder. The flash, the empty bathtub.

  Zeb stands on his stool, bowing like an impresario called onstage for the curtain call. When the curtain drops for the last time, he reaches up to be lifted. Aimee cuddles him as they walk back to the bus, Geof’s arm around them both.

  Zeb falls asleep with them that night, between them in the bed. When she wakes up in the morning, he’s back in his cage with his favorite toy. He doesn’t wake up. The monkeys cluster at the bars peeking in.

  Aimee cries all day. “It’s okay,” Geof says.

  “It’s not about Zeb,” she sobs.

  “I know,” he says. “It’s okay. Come home, Aimee.”

  But she’s already there. She just hadn’t noticed.

  * * * *

  22.

  Here’s the trick to the bathtub trick. There is no trick. The monkeys pour across the stage and up the ladder and into the bathtub and they settle in and then they vanish. The world is full of strange things, things that make no sense, and maybe this is one of them. Maybe the monkeys choose not to share, that’s cool, who can blame them.

  Maybe this is the monkeys’ mystery, how they found other monkeys that ask questions and try things, and figured out a way to all be together to share it. Maybe Aimee and Geof are really just houseguests in the monkeys’ world: they are there for a while and then they leave.

  * * * *

  23.

  Six weeks later, a man walks up to Aimee as she and Geof kiss after a show. He’s short, pale, balding. He has the shell-shocked look of a man eaten hollow from the inside. She knows the look.

  “I need to buy this,” he says.

  Aimee nods. “I know you do.”

  She sells it to him for a dollar.

  * * * *

  Three months later, Aimee and Geof get their first houseguest in their apartment in Bellingham. They hear the refrigerator close and come out to the kitchen to find Pango pouring orange juice from a carton.

  They send her home with a pinochle deck.

  EVIL ROBOT MONKEY

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands, making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers, he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

  Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

  In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms, aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. He swung down from his stool, crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote: SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.

  The students’ teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.

  Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now before a handler came to talk to him.

  Damn.

  He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the center and tried to lose himself.

  In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snicked open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.

  Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”

  Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.

  “Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”

  “You should have told them that I was not an animal.”

  Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”

  “And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.

  “It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”

  Sly scowled and yanked his
hands free. “I’m not like the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”

  “I’m sorry.” Vern knelt in front of Sly, closer than anyone else would come when he wasn’t sedated. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. “It was a lousy thing to do.”

  Sly pushed the clay around on the wheel. Vern was better than the others. He seemed to understand the hellish limbo where Sly lived—too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans. Vern was the one who had brought Sly the potter’s wheel which, by the Earth and Trees, Sly loved. Sly looked up and raised his eyebrows. “So what did they think of my show?”

  Vern covered his mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey.’”

  Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.

  “But Delilah thinks you should be disciplined.” Vern, still so close that Sly could reach out and break him, stayed very still. “She wants me to take the clay away since you used it for an anger display.”

  Sly’s lips drew back in a grimace built of anger and fear. Rage threatened to blind him, but he held on, clutching the wheel. If he lost it with Vern—rational thought danced out of his reach. Panting, he spun the wheel, trying to push his anger into the clay.

  The wheel spun. Clay slid between his fingers. Soft. Firm and smooth. The smell of earth lived in his nostrils. He held the world in his hands. Turning, turning, the walls rose around a kernel of anger, subsuming it.

  His heart slowed with the wheel and Sly blinked, becoming aware again as if he were slipping out of sleep. The vase on the wheel still seemed to dance with life. Its walls held the shape of the world within them. He passed a finger across the rim.