Unidentified Funny Objects 7, page 1
Unidentified Funny Objects 7
Edited by Alex Shvartsman
Contents
Foreword
The Dragon, the Drudge, and the Drone
Chad Versus the Rebel Alliance
The Secret Destiny of Heroes
Old School: An Oral History of Captain Dick Chase
Take Meme to Your Leader
Contractual Obligations
Bimble Bimble Bop Bop!
The Sit Down
The Ebony Egg
The Day After Halloween
Falling's Free, Gravity Costs
Mission Log Nuptials
Quick Cash in the Old Kingdom
Key Fang and Klaw
The Vampire’s Apprentice
The Assassination of 2063
Dethroning the Champeen
Spear Carriers’ Union #109
The Fermi Loneliness Problem
Three Ways to Leave Hawaii
Acknowledgments
About the Editor
PUBLISHED BY:
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UFO Publishing
1685 E 15th St.
Brooklyn, NY 11229
www.ufopub.com
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Copyright © 2018 by UFO Publishing
Stories copyright © 2018 by the authors
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Trade paperback ISBN: 9781720094883
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All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
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Cover art: Tomasz Maronski
Interior art: Barry Munden
Typesetting & interior design: Melissa Neely
Graphics design: Emerson Matsuuchi
Logo design: Martin Dare
Copyeditor: Elektra Hammond
Associate editors: Cyd Athens, James Beamon, Frank Dutkiewicz, James A. Miller, Russ Nickel, Tarryn Thomas
Created with Vellum
Foreword
Alex Shvartsman
If this is your first time reading a volume in the UFO series, welcome! I hope you enjoy this selection of strange and humorous fiction. Although some of our regular authors write stories in the same world across many volumes, they're not chapters and you can dive in at any point.
If you're a returning reader, thank you. You'll find wacky, unusual stories that maintain the consistent style and voice of the series but, if I did my job right, will manage to surprise and delight you in new ways.
Finding stories that feel fresh year after year is no easy feat. My team and I work on each volume for the better part of the year. We begin by sending out invitations to a small group of headliners: authors whose names appear on the cover and who consistently write the kind of great stories we—and our readers—tend to enjoy. We try to bring back reader favorites but also reach out to authors we have not previously featured. This year we're honored to include a Seanan McGuire story for the first time.
While we solicit five to eight authors directly each year, the bulk of the material comes from an open submissions call. The submission window opens, appropriately enough, on April 1st, and lasts a full month. We accept submissions from authors anywhere in the world, regardless of their publishing history or background. Sometimes we're fortunate to discover a brand-new voice. Elin Korund's story in this book is her first publication!
There's never a shortage of authors and stories looking for a good home. Over the course of the month we typically receive about eight hundred submissions! A team of associate editors helps me winnow the short list down to approximately twenty stories and I end up buying a dozen or so for the book. There's a lot of great material out there and many of the stories we pass on are of high quality, but we look for that consistent style and voice I mentioned earlier.
Each year the ceiling-high pile of manuscripts manages to surprise us in all kinds of ways. One year we may see a ton of mermaid stories, another year djinn-in-a-bottle tales will seem to be in fashion. And always, zombie stories shuffle into our submission queue with mindless persistence. Which isn't to say we're totally opposed to those tropes—we might publish an occasional merfolk story or a djinn story or even a zombie story. But what really stands out to us are stories that break the common molds and surprise us with their settings as much as they win us over with the voice in which they're told. Most of the stories that make it into the books fall into that last category.
The trend that surprised us this year was the much-larger-than-average presence of bizarro and absurdist stories. We usually see a very small fraction of those in the submission queue and tend to publish maybe one per volume, but this year there are several in the book and we read many more on submission. I figure it's the authors' reaction to the contentious political climate and general absurdity of recent times.
Open submissions is the most time-consuming part of producing an anthology, but I'm glad to do it each and every year because it allows us to discover new voices and produce a much stronger book than I possibly could do by merely inviting a bunch of authors whose work I already know. And I feel that the quality of what we see and what I buy gets better year after year. I hope that, after having read the yarns collected herein, you'll agree.
Happy reading!
The Dragon, the Drudge, and the Drone
Esther Friesner
“This wouldn’t happen to belong to you, would it?” the dragon inquired, holding the still-humming drone as delicately as possible between two of his saber-sized talons. His voice was remarkably soft for a creature of such size. Sunlight made his scales glow like a crucible filled with molten gold.
Gavin Crane goggled, his throat tight, his lips transformed to sandpaper. One moment he had been steeped in bitterness, flying his new drone with a daredevil panache born of nothing-to-lose resignation, and the next he was facing a gargantuan beast out of legend, nightmare, and fantasy novel-cum-television series. Such things were not supposed to happen to anyone sane, least of all in the middle of the local high school’s football field.
The dragon leaned nearer. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me,” he said, affable as you please. “Is this yours?” The corners of his mouth twitched up in what might have been meant as a reassuring smile. If so, his intended purpose failed utterly since that selfsame grin revealed a distinctly unreassuring view of the monster’s teeth.
Gavin began to shake, hands tightening on the transmitter. The drone responded obediently, jerking from side to side in the dragon’s grasp. The beast frowned. “Sir, I asked the question merely for form’s sake,” he grumbled. “Even if I did not already know the answer, I assure you that I am not stupid. I both understand and speak the tongues of countless worlds. You could simply tell me your answer, without the need to demonstrate that you are the master of this thing. Or are you trying to be condescending?”
“Actually, I’m trying not to wet myself!” Gavin blurted.
The dragon’s laugh made both of the goal posts quake. In ordinary circumstances, it would have fetched the entire population of the school to the windows facing the field, but winter break in that small Florida community had left the isolated building desolate. “My dear man, you must be joking. I mean you no harm. I wouldn’t dare. I have not attained my ripe and comfortable age by starting fights against opponents whose full complement of skills and weapons is unknown to me.”
“Weapons?” The word emerged as a squeak. Gavin felt his glasses begin to slide down his nose on a rivulet of sweat. Bit by bit, his terror was being replaced by wild confusion. It was a lose-lose swap.
“In your case I’m referring to magical weapons, of course. Spells. Cantrips. Enchantments.” The dragon raised the drone until it was level with his nostrils and snorted at it lightly. “Whatever word you use to define the type of arcane power you employed to sail this missile into my world, summoning me to yours.” Now he gave the dangling drone a sniff. “I don’t detect any especially malicious incantations clinging to it, though many a foul deed is done with only the best intentions behind it. My realm once welcomed a sorcerer named Pilyx the Dawnstar—handsome, well-spoken, kind to small animals, played the ukulele—and before we managed to send him back to his own dimension, he’d laid waste to half a continent.”
“What does being handsome have to do with anything?” said Gavin, who was not. “That doesn’t mean he couldn’t be evil, too. Damned evil, if he came to your land ready to destroy—”
“He was looking for his kitten.”
“Beg pardon?”
“His kitten, Foofums.”
“Foofums,” Gavin repeated dully, stunned by the horror of anyone giving an innocent cat such a moniker. “‘Kind to small animals,’ my butt,” he muttered.
“He meant well, I suppose,” said the dragon. “Perhaps that name had a noble history, where he hailed from. Or maybe he was both a mighty sorcerer and a bit of a git. We later learned that Pilyx the Dawnstar was the paramount wizard of his world. Unfortunately, he was so distracted by the urgency of his quest that he neglected to allow for the different aethrospheric conditions his spells encountered when released in an alien environment. Nor was he the only one at fault for what happened. He explained to our own Council of Mages that he’d be using Foofum’s inherently high level of destructive mischief as the target of his find-and-fetch incantations. He even produced proof that the kitten’s charmingly naughty nature was unequalled throughout all adjacent dimensions, including o ur own. The Council neglected to perform due diligence, simply gave him permission to get on with it, and then—” The dragon shook his head slowly.
“Boom?” Gavin suggested.
“Boom,” the dragon agreed. “With a side helping of crash and aiiieeeee!”
“Wow. That must’ve been one bad kitten.”
“The kitten, once located, was indeed significantly worse behaved than others of its age. If the beast had not counterbalanced this with jaw-dropping levels of cuteness, Pilyx might have dealt that adorable disaster a sterner punishment, once he found him. Ah, but he was a reasonable wizard and knew he was also at fault. The trouble was that, in seeking Foofums, his spells called forth the inherent mischief in all things. Whatever could catch fire, or spread disease, or topple walls, or decide that now was a good time to get back at the neighbors with an ax, did so. By the time Pilyx left our land, things were pretty much higgledy-piggledy. Also dead, dying, shattered, on fire, or clawed to pieces, although that last one was mostly the work of Foofums.” The dragon uttered a monstrous sigh.
“Sooooooo, you think I’m like Pilyx?” Gavin ventured. “A powerful magician?”
“In the face of the evidence, what else could you be?” The dragon twitched his talon, making the drone bobble like an underachieving fidget spinner. “Breaching the barriers between worlds isn’t child’s play. You sent your minion forth and it bonked me on the snout. That can be taken as either a sorcerer’s summons or a request for immediate immolation. I’m choosing to treat it as the former until, as I said, I have some idea of your strength.”
With a small moan, Gavin dropped cross-legged to the ground. “Fire away.” He bent his head.
“What?”
“I said, go ahead: burn me to ashes. Might as well get it over with.”
The huge, heavily armored head tilted into a pose favored by perplexed puppy-dogs everywhere. “Are you saying that you’re not—?”
“Not a sorcerer. Not a magician. I can’t even do a decent card trick. You’d have found out the truth soon enough, so why postpone the inevitable? I’m toast. Or I will be, once you get through with me.”
“But—but the arcane means of summoning me—?” The dragon gestured with the drone.
Gavin looked up again. “Hey, I have no idea how that thing managed to leave Florida air space, zip into your world, bump you in the nose and lead you back here. It’s a drone, and a pretty cheap-ass one at that. Our Secret Santa gift-swap has a ceiling on how much we can spend.”
“I don’t understand.”
Gavin took a deep breath and brought the dragon up to speed as to this aspect of American office culture. His account took somewhat longer than he’d anticipated, since the illuminating narrative inevitably branched out into whole thickets of sub-explanations. By the time the dragon reached full comprehension concerning how Gavin came to be in possession of the drone, the beast had also gleaned a heaping helping of basic knowledge about Santa Claus, Christmas, Christianity and its origins, and Western religions in general. He had also learned that—
“—your boss is a duck?”
“No, a dick. That means—”
“Say no more. Your facial expression when speaking of him is more than eloquent. To what does he owe your abysmal opinion of this Mr. . . . Pendleton, you said?”
“Well for one thing, he’s going to take that away from me.” Gavin pointed at the drone. “The first halfway decent Secret Santa gift I ever got in my life and I can’t keep it.” Before the dragon could confess to a further lack of comprehension, Gavin gave him a capsule version of Office Bullying 101.
Now there’s a fantastic gift, Crane, Pendleton had remarked when Gavin unwrapped the box at the office Christmas party. More of a kid’s thing, though, isn’t it? God knows my Bobby would love to have one, but by the time he mentioned it, the wife and I already bought his big gift for this Christmas. It doesn’t do to let a boy think he can get everything he wants just by asking, even if I do hate to see him disappointed. Well, maybe one of the relatives will come through, or one of our friends. I’d be glad of that. Glad and grateful. Something I’d remember for a long, long time.
He continued in this vein for the rest of the Christmas party, dropping hints that were as light and subtle as a volley of cannonballs. The brutally belabored message was clear, though he managed to drive it home with a final blow of the figurative sledgehammer: performance reviews were coming up soon.
“—and that’s why I’m going to bring that” —Gavin indicated the drone—“back to the office tomorrow and hand it over. No way I can survive a performance review if Pendleton’s out to get me. Hell, even when he’s not gunning for me, I just squeak by.”
“I take it that your employment history does not shine?” The dragon spoke in kindly tones, but his words still stung. The truth can do that.
“You a music lover? Because my work’s a symphony in the key of mediocre. The only thing I’m good at is being good enough. Maybe it’d be different if I’d ever cared about what I do. When I first came on board, I was happy because the economy was in the tank and jobs were scarce. Doing cold-call sales wasn’t my dream job, but it paid the bills. I figured I’d hang onto it until things got better.” He shook his head. “They didn’t. And they won’t. I waited too long before I realized that, and by then I was too old to take the same chances that a young guy can. Plus, we get dental.” He gritted his securely insured teeth. “I’m trapped.”
“Indeed.” Twin curlicues of silver smoke wafted up from the dragon’s nostrils. “Comfort and custom make better shackles than iron and steel. I applaud your honesty. I will spare your life.”
“Yay,” came the apathetic response. Gavin got to his feet slowly. “Okay, that’s that, nice talking to you, see you around—Um, I mean, ’bye.”
The dragon remained where it was. Before Gavin could renew his encouragement for the beast’s departure, pronto, a quartet of likely lads appeared on the street bordering the high school and veered off to cut across the playing field. They wore lettermen’s jackets identifying them as members of the football team and they were in raucous good spirits. Gavin felt his bones freeze. What would the dragon do to them? And why were they heading straight for the monster, its glittering bulk looming in plain sight? What was wrong with those kids? Were they high or stupid or—or—?
Well, those were pretty much the only two options he could think of, offhand.
Oh my God, how am I going to explain this to the cops? And what if someone else comes along and sees the kids get barbecued and calls the cops while the dragon’s still here? How will I explain a pile of dead cops to more cops? He was visibly vibrating with anxiety as the four young men came abreast of the dragon, all of them smiling.
“Hey, man, sweet drone,” one of them said to Gavin. “Gonna use it to take pictures of naked chicks sunbathing?” He indulged in a round of high fives and shoulder blocks with his pals, celebrating this witticism. They did not slow their pace by even a second and were soon across the field and gone. Their faces had not registered so much as mild bemusement at the presence of the monster.
Gavin turned wide eyes and a gaping mouth to the dragon. “You’re real, right?” he asked. “Wait, don’t tell me. If I’m crazy and imagining you then I could also imagine you telling me you’re real.”
The dragon bit him. It was the teensiest nip with the uttermost tip of a single fang, but it was enough to draw blood and make Gavin yelp in pain. “Did you imagine that?” the dragon asked genially. “Because if you think so, I could bite you again, much harder, to prove that I am quite real. Optionally visible, but real. A fine time I’d have, fulfilling my obligation to you in this alien world if I couldn’t command a simple concealment spell!”
