special. I am personally pleased that you won. You’ve had me worried for years. You really couldn’t ever reach your full potential as you were, two people sharing one soul. But even if you were still having transportation problems, it’s not as if Janea or Doris couldn’t find friends.”
“I have found friends here,” Doris said. “A lot of friends. Speaking of which…”
“You may run into a few,” Regina said, leading her into one of the back corridors. “But this time of the con, it’s hard to get up to the Green Room other than through the special ways.”
“I thought there was other stuff we were going to do…?” Janea said. She sort of remembered it and sort of didn’t. Everything was getting a bit disconnected. For example, she wondered how they got onto one of the upper floors. She didn’t even remember an elevator. They were, though. From the upper walkway she could see the whole Hyatt spread below her. It was like being a god. There was an odd rainbow effect stretching down to the lobby. It looked almost like a bridge.
“Bit of a blur?” Regina said, pausing at the door of a suite. “Don’t worry, it’s all taken care of. And so we come to my true domain, the Green Room. Say hello to Carl.”
“Hi.” The guy was immense, but Doris sensed he was as kind as he was big. “My con name is Fir. If you need anything, or anybody’s giving you any trouble, just say my name and I’ll be there.”
“Thanks,” Doris said, following Regina into the suite.
The room was crowded and overheated. It also was…wrong. It must have been the size of a ballroom to hold all the people that were in it, and hotels didn’t put ballrooms on top floors. It also didn’t look that big. It looked like a normal suite.
She looked around for people that she knew, but they were all strangers. A bunch of them were half familiar, like she’d seen them in a movie or something, but she couldn’t place any names.
There was music coming from a stereo, but it was being drowned out by a young guy in Renaissance dress banging on a piano. An Elvis impersonator wearing stormtrooper armor was accompanying on guitar. Doris couldn’t figure out the tune, though, since they seemed to be playing two entirely different styles. Worked, though.
“I swear,” Regina said, shaking her head. “Wulfie and the King are never going to get ‘Nocturne for a Hound Dog’ down. And this is Clark, who you’d probably get along with.”
“Charmed,” the man said, taking her hand and kissing it.
Doris certainly was. She’d expected a kiss on the hand to be sloppy, but it was just a touch of dry lips. And the guy was the epitome of tall, dark and handsome. He was also, as usual, vaguely familiar.
“Have we met before?” Doris asked.
“I assure you we have not,” the guy said, smiling. Damn, he had nice teeth. “I would remember.”
“Alas, you two don’t have nearly enough time to get properly acquainted,” Regina said, smiling at him. “Which is a pity. Ah, I think that you might enjoy this group.”
“Look, I asked Pat!” a man with a wild head of hair and shaggy eyebrows said. “Pat says He doesn’t play dice with the universe. Take that, Niels!”
“Al? Eddie? Isaac?” Regina said. “This is Doris. She’s the winner of the Dawn Contest.”
“If Pat doesn’t play dice with the universe, how exactly does He explain wave particle duality?” Doris asked.
“He said, and I find myself troubled by this, that He did it to see how many atheist brains He could get to explode.” Isaac was dressed in English period dress and wore a powdered wig. “Of course, I am troubled by any scientist discounting the obvious existence of a benevolent Creator.”
“God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent,” Eddie said, grinning. “Clearly He is also omnihumorous.”
“I rarely find him so,” Isaac said. “But perhaps the joke is too subtle for my intellect?”
“Or too slapstick?” Eddie said. “Like putting me through hell inventing the lightbulb just so that comics could finally have a visual representation for gestalt?”
“So…quantum mechanics is a joke?” Doris said.
“If you think about it clearly it makes a certain degree of sense,” Isaac replied with a pained expression. “But one must first accept a Creator as a given. If you fail to include a thinking being as part of your thesis, the entire universe becomes unbalanced. I have carefully examined this quantum theory problem, and a thinking being with a specific agenda is the simplest answer to the many conundrums. Take wave particle duality. Mass is undetectable at the quantum level. Yet it interacts with all things using a logic which is indefinable as well. Last, it is in everything. Omnipresent, omnipotent and ineffable. This is the definition of the Lord.”
“I’m going to go find Niels and say…What is that phrase that the children are using these days?” Al said, distractedly.
“‘In your face’?” Doris said hesitantly.
“That, yes, exactly…” Al said then sat down again. “But what is its exact meaning? To what, exactly, does it refer? A portion of the body? Is it, at some level, a metaphor for the constancy of problems being central to the human existence?”
“Or maybe some people who are a bit more grounded,” Regina said, leading her over to another set of couches. Three men were engrossed in an article in a magazine.
“I keep wanting to go down to Houston and strangle the head of NASA,” one of the men said. He was tall with a rangy build, bald as a cue ball and wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “There was so much promise there.”
“It’s like SFWA, really,” another man said. Slighter and darker, he wore a suit that was rumpled and had papers sticking out of most of the pockets. “At a certain point, the rule weenies take over.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s quite as bad as SFWA…” The third man was slight, blond and darkly tanned, with an English accent.
“Robert, Ike, John, this is Doris,” Regina said.
“Ah, the Dawn Queen,” John said, standing up and bowing over her hand. Unlike Clark, he didn’t attempt to kiss it. “Welcome to the Green Room, charming lady.”
“Down, John,” Robert said, smiling at her. “What do you think of the modern space program, miss?”
“I think they jumped the shark with the Shuttle,” Doris said. “Once they’d dug the hole they just kept digging deeper to see if they could find gold. Which was a bit like looking for it in Kansas.”
“I suspect it went to an earlier point than that,” Ike said, shaking his head. “One could see the future history of the program in the early control by the bureaucracy of almost every aspect. If one had a sufficiently advanced computer and a proper model, one could almost certainly predict every action that has taken place…”
“Yes, yes, if you had a sufficiently advanced computer,” Robert said. “One terabyte not enough. One petabyte not enough? How much is enough, Ike?”
“Hey, I’ve practically got a terabyte in my phone.”
Doris spun around at the voice and grinned when she saw Kelly.
“They let you in here?” she asked.
“I can get anywhere,” Kelly said.
“Yes,” Regina said, dryly. “Like crotch rot.”
“Technically, I think that is only found in the cro…” Ike said then trailed off at her glare.
“A terabyte in your phone?” Robert said, incredulously. “I hate modern society. I suppose you… text?”
“Blackberry,” Kelly said, holding up his phone. “You really need to catch up here, Robert. It’s embarrassing that somebody like me can figure out something you envisioned better than you can.”
“I didn’t envision…ringtones,” Robert said dryly. “I wish no one had. If I hear one more acid rock song in the restaurant…”
“Unless you’re talking about Jimmy,” Kelly said, gesturing over to a black guy by the wall, chatting up a blonde in a long white dress, “you’re probably not talking about acid rock. Metal, maybe…”
“Whatever,” Robert said. “It all sounds the same. And I also didn’t envision phone porn.”
“Got that one right,” John said, holding up a finger. “But the social implications turned out to be somewhat…muted,” he finished in a puzzled tone.
“ I refused to switch to that newfangled touch tone,” Ike said, proudly.
“Isaac, did you just use ‘newfangled’ in a sentence?” Kelly asked. “Regina, you’ve got things to do to prepare for Closing. Why don’t I show her around?”
“I think I’d rather entrust a child to a tiger,” Regina said.
“But you do have things to do, don’t you?” Kelly said.
