But he had hesitated. Just the slightest bit. Perhaps Xander would never have noticed it at all had he not been watching the remaining queue of people waiting to ask their question and happened to have his eyes on the face of Marius Tarkovski, who had been one of his co — victims in the Elevator Incident and happened to be holding the seventeenth position in the queue. Marius had been watching Boss as the android had spoken, and Xander suddenly saw it clearly on the younger man’s face, something that changed ever so slightly, an expression that was at once astonished and unhappy. An expression that made him replay Boss’s response in his own head, and arrive, belatedly but inevitably, at the same conclusion that Marius had.
The answer had been a lie.
The android had told a falsehood. Knowingly and with every appearance of sincerity.
If they could lie… if they could lie this well… what else weren’t they telling the truth about?
Xander’s hands felt like ice as he lifted one to signal the next person in the queue forward, but if he was hoping for a respite, he wasn’t going to get it. The woman who stepped forward to take her place was frowning a little.
“But if there are gaps… how do you know there are gaps? How do you know what you don’t know? And if there are gaps, then what made you come back here — what made you look for humans…?”
“Not all trace of humans was erased,” Boss began, but Marius put a gentle hand on the shoulder of the woman who had preceded him and moved her out of the way, stepping up to take her place.
“Then maybe the better question is this,” Marius said, his eyes locked on the android’s. “What brought you back… here? To this specific place, to this specific time? What made you choose this specific group of humans? You said you came back looking for answers. Have you found the answers you were hoping for?”
If anyone was expecting Boss to hedge, they were disappointed. The answer came swiftly, and firmly, with the android holding the young man’s intense gaze and looking straight back into Marius’s own soul.
“I believe we found the answers we needed,” he said, “if not the ones we came back to seek. I believe it mattered that we came here, came now, chose this particular group of humans. I cannot tell you more, but I can tell you that I have come to believe that we came here… to create our own creator. That someone who is in this room right now is going to take the first step on the journey that leads from your kind to my own. Someone who might never have taken that step… had it not been for that person’s encounter with us here at this gathering. In very simple terms, if we had not returned to this here and now, we might very simply never have existed.”
They might have been alone in that room. They were speaking to one another, directly, in a conversation that was on quite a different level from that which the mere words — full of import as they were — implied.
But that meant that Boss seemed to think — to infer — that it was Marius who was fated to be that creator of whom he spoke. And Xander suddenly felt as though he could very well end up spending the days of his old age telling people he had once been stuck in an elevator at a con with the Android Messiah.
He could see that Marius was a little shaken, too. And then Boss rose to his feet in a single fluid motion.
“I think,” he said, and the voice was almost gentle, “that I have given what answers I could. But now… my team and I have a lot of preparations to make in order to bring you all home safely as we have promised to do. So I will withdraw in order to assist with those. We thank you, all of you, for helping us understand. We are very grateful for the opportunity to have shared these days with you, and we sincerely regret any injury or inconvenience we may have caused.”
He gave the hall a slight bow, and then turned, descended the steps from the dais, and walked serenely and without looking at anyone at all down the central aisle of the hall — through a spreading pool of silence and under the concentrated weight of hundreds of eyes upon his straight and retreating back. The crowd at the back of the hall parted to let him through, and he walked regally through the double doors and out into the corridor and then out of sight.
In his wake, the murmurs of voices of those left in the hall began softly but quickly grew in volume. The three remaining people in the question queue, the ones behind Marius, had melted away; the panel was very much over, even without Xander’s own official closing words. Vince retrieved his empty coffee cup from underneath his chair and came ambling down the steps from the stage in Boss’s wake, coming to a stop next to Xander.
“Well,” he said to Xander, “I don’t think I upstage easily, and that was me comprehensively upstaged. I feel as though I was just the warm — up act for that.”
Xander’s head snapped around. “Jesus, I’m sorry. Dave said it was going to be a disaster, but I didn’t think…”
Vince lifted a hand and rested it briefly on Xander’s shoulder. “Take it easy, that wasn’t a complaint,” he said. “On the contrary. I think I have about three more novels that I need to write, just from that Q&A session alone. Thanks, Xander. This whole weekend… has been a gift.”
He nodded in a gesture of farewell and plunged into the now milling audience where he was immediately waylaid by a couple of eager fans — but Xander had already switched his attention to Marius, who had not moved from where he had been standing during that last intense exchange.
Marius looked up to meet Xander’s eyes.
“What just happened?” Marius asked quietly.
“Funny,” Xander said, “I was about to ask you that. Anything you want to tell me?”
“In the elevator…” Marius began, and Xander’s ears pricked up as he waited for the rest of that sentence, but it never came. Instead, Marius sighed, lifting one nerveless hand to rub at his temple. “Excuse me,” he said, “I think … I need to go find Sam…”
And then he, too, was gone.
And Xander was left standing by himself in front of an empty stage on a Sunday morning of a con, usually a moment that might have left him feeling a little tired and wrung out and despondent that another con was so nearly over, but instead he felt something scalding and strange bubbling up inside him, and the rest of his life suddenly seemed as though it was going to have a tough job living up to this particular incandescent instant of time. It felt as though he had been walking on what had seemed to be perfectly solid ground called the Here and Now, and suddenly his foot had gone through what had proved to be just a thin crust and he was left standing knee deep in the hot lava of History, that which had passed and that which was in the making and yet to come.
“Welcome,” he said to himself, very softly, “to Abducticon…”
It might have been entirely understandable if none of the parties who had agreed to a dinner meet — up on Sunday night had actually remembered the assignation, given the events of the weekend — but at about five minutes before six that evening Sam and Marius turned up outside the hotel restaurant to find Vince waiting for them — with a bleary — eyed Angel in tow.
“Have you met my wife, Angel?” Vince said, his arm around Angel’s waist in what looked like a loose embrace but what Sam immediately realized was in fact a tight grip which was mostly what was keeping Angel in an upright position. “Sorry,” Vince added, his voice a little lower, “but I can’t leave her alone and awake up in the hotel room. She almost had a seizure when we rocked around the Moon; if she looks out of the window, on her own, and sees the Earth approaching, things might get rather… dramatic.”