The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “The public obit just wants to prevent a Carmine’s panic in this locality.”

  “Agreed. I made printouts of all three documents, but we can probably toss the public obit right away. It’s the other two ... Let’s see, where are they? ... Never mind, I memorized the signature on the death report. James Fitzpatrick Macumber, M.D. Makes ‘Jamie’ a logical code name on the researchers’ access datasheet. A new code, too—

  number two eighty-eight was Jamie’s first Carmine’s report. Was Macumber Rob’s regular physician?”

  I swallowed and said, “I’m afraid we hadn’t reached the stage of swapping health care anecdotes, Sergeant.”

  “No, of course not, why should you? Well, I believe they usually like to get the regular physician in for this kind of work when they can. Although it’s more than possible he didn’t actually have a regular physician, at least not around here in Marltown.” She hesitated, as if not quite sure she should tell me something, then went on, “He ... uh ... seems to have been a Twenties Floater, Tommi. I looked up the rest of his personal access file, and ... Well, what did he tell you about his past? Came from out of state, didn’t he?”

  In those days, “Floaters” was what we called people who were trying to live down their 2020s past by accomplishing a complete change of persona.

  It wasn’t that difficult. For one thing, data-collecting and record-keeping had gone more or less haywire everywhere during the 2020s. Then millions of records were lost, thanks to not having been copied soon enough for secondary repositories, when the Great Christmas Quake of December 2029 hit lower California. And after that disaster had shocked us back to sanity, the general attitude of the ’30s was that anyone who wanted to bury a wild ’20s past and live within the law from now on should be left alone to do it in peace and privacy. After all, who hadn’t been doing at least one criminal thing—spending home-printed money—during those years when the Federal Government tried to abolish all pocket coins and currency and force everybody into the electronic creditline system for all transactions? My own parents had run our neighborhood mint for a while; my friends and I used to color the bills with instamarkers after school.

  And then, strangely, that other fashion grew up in the ’30s of letting on that you had a lurid ’20s past whether you really had or not. Many, maybe most of the people who redocumented their past lives were probably harmless—fanciers and fashion-hoppers; freesoul eccentrics and protesters against what they called the methodical depersonalization of the National Registration system; people who had broken unpopular laws without breaking popular morality; and the kind of people who in any era find themselves in bad situations, maybe through no fault of their own, and run away into new identities.

  From 2033 until 2041 the National Name and Print Directory was open to any access code at all; but in 2036, before the Metterkranz System, it could still take up to a couple of months of computer time to run a full check on all possible identities of any given fingerprint; and even the regular police were rarely interested in going to all that trouble without strong evidence that a Twenties Floater was still committing serious crimes. For almost everybody, the social thing was to accept people’s own word for it about their past lives.

  Thinking back over the tidbits Rob had confided to me, I told my employer, “He came from Colorado, most recently. He’d also lived in New York, Quebec, Arizona, I think a little town near Mexico City for a while…but he’d been in Marltown for ... let me think…about a year and a half.” If Marltown had been the hick village out-of-staters seem to assume it is, I might have met him sooner.

  “Long enough to stop in somewhere for at least one annual checkup,” said Cagey. “Assuming he had the checkup habit. For the time being, we may as well assume he did, and that he had his last one either from Macumber or from Macumber’s senior partner in the Sunvale Family Health Clinic. Where is that city directory page? Oh, here!”

  Turning from the pile of printout sheets between us to the few sheets she herself had carried in and put beneath her mug on the arm of the sofa, she jerked around so quickly that her elbow knocked the mug over. Sluicing black coffee, it bounced to the floor and rolled half a meter across the carpet.

  Around her own home, Cagey had long ago learned how to live with such everyday accidents. The mugs were plastichine, top quality, but unbreakable by anything short of a blow from a sledgehammer. The carpeting and as much furniture as possible was coffee-colored, and about a third of the papers tucked away in her files had coffee stains.

  Now I got a couple of old towels out of the bottom file drawer and mopped up the worst of the spill, while she returned the mug to the wall-unit washer-dispenser, drew herself a new serving, and spread the most badly splashed printouts on the carpet to dry.

  One of the sheets, however, she shook off and brought back to the sofa: her copy of the printout page from the Marltown city directory.

  It featured a quarter-screen ad for the Sunvale Family Health Clinic, listing the names of Raisa Rachmaninova Suttler, M.D.; James Fitzpatrick Macumber, M.D.; and Arlington Johnson Coffield, Phar.D.

  Chapter 3

  Our next step, as Cagey planned it the following morning over a breakfast of pancakes and coffee, was to get into Sunvale Family Health Clinic undercover as new patients. I should call for an appointment as if for a regular yearly checkup, and the same afternoon or morning I had my visit, she would develop a “medical emergency” and be rushed there. That way, we ought to have the best chance of seeing both physicians, she drawing the one who wasn’t busy with me.

  “How do you know they’ll rush you to Sunvale Clinic instead of the nearest hospital?” I said.

  “I’ll have a fit in Soleri Shoppers Paradise. It’s no more than a block away down Madden Drive, a mile closer than the nearest hospital, which would be ... let’s see ... St. Lucy’s, isn’t it?”

  Anyway, it wasn’t Marltown General, where Rob had died.

  Relieved that she had decided on a fit instead of staging a “minor” injury—which could go major for an accident-prone person—I ran down Madden Drive in my own memory. Yes, there was the “St. Lucy’s” sign outside the tidy white brick building, and another mile to the Soleri mall. “But Sunvale might have a standing policy that all Shoppers’ Paradise emergencies go direct to St. Lucy’s in spite of the extra distance.”

  “Come on, Officer Tomlinson! You don’t think they’d be exactly flooded with emergencies at a shopping complex as small as Soleri’s? But if anybody threatens to rush me all the way to St. Lucy’s, I’ll just ‘recover,’ walk out, stage another fit right in front of Sunvale Clinic, and stagger through the door myself with the last twinges of my own failing strength.”

  “It sounds like a good plan, Sergeant,” I agreed. “But whenever you come in, they’ll probably have to bump one of their regularly scheduled patients for you. Suppose it’s me? Then we’d both end up seeing the same doctor, after all.”

  She sighed. “We’ll just have to take that chance. If it happens, we’ll correlate our data on the medic we both get and find some other way to access the other one. Once you’re established as a clinic’s patient, you can usually get a look at all its medicos, if you go in often enough. But try to get yourself scheduled for a Thursday, Officer Tomlinson. My lucky day.”

  I pointed out, “Today’s a Thursday, Sergeant.”

  “And it’ll be both our lucky day, if you can get in this early.” Pushing her swivel chair back, she swung her feet up to her desktop (almost upsetting her “In/Out” basket), and sipped her third mug of coffee since breakfast. The third mug she had filled, that is. I doubt she had actually drunk more than thirty milliliters all total of her first two mugs.

  “There might be a way I can do it, Sergeant,” I said. “Explaining how concerned I am about maybe having contacted Carmine’s.”

  “Excellent, Officer! That’s really—” Trying to swing her legs down too
abruptly, she set her chair rolling violently backward. It hit the far wall with a rattling thud, knocking a ragged fountain of coffee up from her mug .

  She rose and pulled the chair a few centimeters forward to glance at the damage to its finish and the wall’s paint. “Make a note for Mickey,” she remarked; Mickey being our household maintenance engineer. Then, returning to her desk, she perched herself on its edge, set her nearly empty mug down to make a ring on the nearest pile of papers, and went on, “In fact, somebody must be slipping at Marltown General. If Doc ‘Jamie’ Macumber was aware you’d been dating Rob, he should’ve contacted you himself by now.”

  I said a little bitterly, “They can hardly run down all the casual contacts Rob must have made in town.”

  “But you aren’t really worried about having Carmine’s, are you, Tommi?”

  “Not really, no, I suppose not,” I replied, lying a little; I saw that Cagey couldn’t be worried about it at all, or she’d have come up with the suggestion that I get it checked, rather than just calling for a routine examination. But then, she’d never believed that Rob had had Carmine’s. “Still,” I couldn’t help adding,” it’d be nice to know for sure.”

  “And Carmine’s should be a top priority with clinics and places.” She nodded eagerly. “Tommi, how come you haven’t made sergeant yet? All right, give it a try. The sooner the better. Let’s see ... it’s oh eight twenty-three now ... Yes, according to their ad, they should’ve been open twenty-three minutes already.”

  “All right,” I said. Pulling my chair closer to the desk, I swiveled the phonebox around to face me. It was a convertible unit, with both oldfashioned handheld speaker-receiver; the usual more convenient microphone-amplifier combo; and a vidphone screen, which was still standard equipment at that time.

  Handheld receivers had made a comeback in the ’20s, and Cagey liked them for the ambience. I preferred the convenience of the speaker design; so did she, when it was a question of both of us hearing the whole conversation. As for the screen ...

  “Do I look all right?” I asked automatically.

  “Uh ... no,” she replied. “That is, I mean, you look fine, Tommi. You always look fine. The trouble is, you look so healthy that if they see you, they may not believe you need an appointment for anything, and put it off three or four months. So don’t use vidphone today. We don’t want to risk them seeing any background that’d give it away you’re phoning from a police station, anyway.”

  “I could phone from another room.”

  “Mmm ... No, better do it right here and just leave the visuals dead. No matter what room you phoned from, there’s always the offchance they’d see something in the background that might identify Warrington House, and we don’t want them making any connection between you and me.”

  Her unspoken reason might have been that she didn’t like the thought of my getting a look at the face of anyone at Sunvale so long before she did. There were still phones available that could receive visual without sending it, but by the ’30s that was considered frightful phone manners. It was even more rude to printout still photos from your vidphone. And as for recording phone conversations ... Well, that was why she always liked for both of us to hear all our “police” calls.

  Society was suffering one of its strange schizophrenias in this area, because it was common practice to record conversations, as long as all the parties understood it was being done. Consultations with doctors, psychohygienic counselors, lawyers, business and political associates ... some people even said Catholic confessions. The 2020s had given us a sort of sense that the conversations which were not recorded were the illicit ones, that recording a conversation highlighted its honesty. Whether or not any recorded statements could ever be admitted as court evidence was always up to the defense.

  People sometimes demanded copies of some of their conversations. A few spectacular cases of the ’20s had created a feeling that it could be safer to be able to demonstrate what you really had said than to depend on the memories or malice of witnesses testifying to what they remembered you as saying.

  If not demanded, most conversations ended up erased within a month or two, because people could afford only so much recording matrix and storage space for it; but people still made the recordings, both as professionals and as amateurs. Not that very many people were still carrying around recording devices constantly in operation—by 2036, probably no more than three people in a hundred were doing it. Still, nobody would have thought too much about it if they saw Cagey and me doing it. In fact, everybody who knew Cagey probably assumed it of her and her “partner.” The only reason we kept our recorders hidden and didn’t change chips unless we could do so without being see was to keep up Cagey’s fanciful scenario of crime detection twentieth-century style.

  That was, when we were talking with people face to face. Recording phone conversations secretly was another thing. In the ’30s the Privacy Protection Mandate was beginning to be strictly observed, and flash-and-ping devices to signal recordings in progress were required equipment on all phones. Then, as now, the police always publicly denied ever making unauthorized recordings, and they had cracked down so heavily on Cagey the time she tried to get an electronics specialist to silence her phone recorder and printer, that she had had to live up to that particular guiderule. Sunvale Clinic might record it from their end, with the correctly authorized ping, but what circumstances would let us ask for a copy without looking suspicious?

  Keying the phone for audio only, I entered the number from the directory. The chimes played maybe two measures of “In the Jolly Old Land of Oz,” the familiar recording ping sounded, and then an incredibly vibrant baritone voice said, “Good morning, Sunvale Family Health Clinic, Angelo Stavropolos speaking, how may we serve you?”

  Cagey’s eyebrows shot up. So, probably, did mine. I wished I could see the face that went with that voice; but at the same time, not having run a comb through my hair beforehand, I felt just as glad that the visual was off.

  Controlling my voice, I explained that I wanted to make an appointment, and that I’d be a new Sunvale client.

  A simple regular checkup, he inquired, or for anything specific? He added a few words about how knowing my needs would help him better determine which of the clinic’s physicians could best service me; I remember that because on hearing it, Cagey rolled her eyes at the ceiling and held up two fingers for the clinic’s two listed M.D.’s.

  I told M. Stavropolos that I was afraid I might have contacted Carmine’s disease.

  “Carmine’s?” he responded, and I could almost hear his long-suffering nod. “I see. Yes., M., that could be serious, and of course we’ll check it out for you at once.” He then ran on for what seemed like five minutes about how very likely it was to be something else, how many minor complaints presented symptoms closely resembling those of Carmine’s, how most of the known cases had clustered around distant population centers, how Carmine’s carried off its known victims so quickly that if I’d had the symptoms longer than six hours it almost had to be something else. All this sounded like a memorized speech, and I wondered at first why he gave it to prospective patients; but by the time he’d finished it, I’d figured out that clinics must get hypochondriac calls by the hundreds about such popular alarm diseases as Carmine’s.

  He was obviously building me up for a long wait before my appointment. Cagey had started drumming the pads of her fingertips impatiently on her coffee mug.

  At last M. Stavropolos got around to reassuring me how completely competent every member of the Sunvale medical team was at spotting Carmine’s, and asked me if two weeks from ... Monday, I think he said ... would be all right for me. It wasn’t a Thursday, but Cagey threw up her hands—happily her mug was almost empty—and nodded for me to take it anyway.

  M. Stavropolos asked for my name, and I gave him my real one, family name first: Tomlinson, Sylvia, Marlene. Then he asked, as if “
just for the record,” what had led me to choose Sunvale Family Health Clinic.

  By now it had occurred to me that, if Cagey didn’t want them to make any connection between her and me, maybe she didn’t want them to make any connection between either of us and Rob. So, thinking that we should have foreseen this last question and planned my answer in advance, I shot my employer a glance.

  She looked up from mopping the small puddles of coffee that had flown out of her mug on her last wild gesture, and mouthed something at me. Guessing it was Rob’s name, I took the chance and told M. Stavropolos, “You were recommended to me by…by M. Grove.”

  “Grove?” The receptionist’s tone changed completely. “M. Robyn Hopkins Grove? M. Tomlinson, if you’d hold on just a moment, one of our team just came through the door ...”

  Cagey dropped her rag and leaned over the phonebox as we both listened hard. There was a murmur of voices that sounded some distance away from the Sunvale phone unit; we couldn’t quite make out any of the words.

  After a few minutes a different male voice came through at me: “Ms. Marlene?”

  “That’s Tomlinson, M.,” I said politely.

  “Tomlinson? Oh, yes, that’s the way Angel took it down, right enough. You’ll have to excuse an old fuddy-dud who was born ’way back before the Reformed System, M. Tomlinson, ’way back when everybody was ‘Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms.’ and the family name was the final name. My own caller’s Macumber, James Fitzpatrick Macumber, M.D. Now, then, you say you got our little clinic’s name from M. Robyn Hopkins Grove?”

  “Yes. At least ... I think that Sunvale was the name he mentioned.”

  Dr. Macumber coughed diplomatically. “M. Tomlinson, may I ask ... you are aware—”