The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “And you, M. Weaver?” Corwin said to bring the conversation back from the balcony. “What did you see on the library table?”

  “I’m sorry, M. Poe. I saw an ink pad and fingerprint paper.”

  “And?” White pressed her. “Come, M. Weaver, now while you are our most important perceiver of reality. The crucial item? M. Poe’s black candle in a plastic skull?”

  Squire Fitzhugh rose. “M. Tertius—”

  “Well?” returned the Harlequin. “She’s questioned each of us about it, I believe.”

  “You were almost the last one to come in, M. White,” said M. Willa Quantum. (Corwin saw her as Ulalume. Since he was not entirely sure what Ulalume looked like, M. Quantum tended to be a bit vague about the edges.) “Or were you standing around listening at the airlock—the door?” she went on.

  “Remembering the manner in which our good captain quizzed our bosun on this point, and remarking how careful M. Weaver was to put the question to him, myself, and now M. Poe, I find the deduction no more than logical,” White replied.

  Drake slapped his thigh. “Lud save us, yawing out to sea at ten knots on a vessel full of amateur detectives!”

  “A lamp,” said M. Weaver. “A plain brass lamp, cordless.”

  “Oh,” said M. Serendip. “If it’s plain brass, they’ll be able to match prints right away and find out who—So M. Poe will be able to stop worrying.”

  “Only a very foolish murderer would have left fingerprints on the weapon,” remarked the countess.

  White looked at M. Weaver. “If there are no fingerprints on the brass lamp, it would appear the minions of the Law have put our hapless M. Poe to considerable discomfort for a mere whim.”

  “Now, you know as well as any of us that ain’t the only reason they take our prints,” the squire began.

  “I am not mad,” Corwin said steadily. “I am aware that last year fingerprints finally replaced government numbers for all purposes of official identification. I am also aware that if there were indeed no prints on the candle—the lamp—as seems likely or they would not have requested me to lift it—they might nevertheless have had their reasons for applying something other than ink to the hands of their principal suspect. Not one of you can state with absolute certitude,” he went on, glancing around at them, “that your perceptions are more accurate than mine, or that they may not have honored me with somewhat different treatment than they accorded each of you. Not one except the realizers,” he added quickly, “and who can say but that they pretend to see no injury in order to soothe and comfort the victim? Or perhaps to soothe the supposed bludgeoner into thinking their suspicion exists only in his own mind.” He spoke with the utmost calm. That proved his sanity, at least to his own satisfaction. He raised his glass and swallowed more smooth fire.

  He looked up, and Portent was ushering Angela into the room.

  “And now,” said the countess, “our number is complete.”

  “Angela!” Corwin cried, half starting from his chair. “You’re all right? How did it go? They treated you with due respect?”

  “Of course.” Her smile took in the whole assemblage. “They’re very kind, friendly people. If only they weren’t here on such unhappy business.” A cloud passed over her face. She brushed it away, took the glass Portent filled for her, and found a place on the couch. She was a creature of gold and rosy white among all these funereal black shadows (Corwin himself included).

  “And what did you see on the library table, M. Garvey?” Corwin asked, to spare M. Weaver the necessity.

  “A Japanese paper lantern—or are they Chinese?—orange and yellow with flower designs. I suppose you saw something entirely different, but that’s what I saw, and I’m glad.”

  “So you, too, have joined the amateur detectives, M. Poe?” said White. “To clear your own name, no doubt.”

  Corwin wished the Harlequin would move away from him. “I am more saddened than angered by the suspicion aimed at me, M. White.”

  “Nonsense, Corwin, you love it,” said Angela. “Just as you loved whatever you thought they were doing to you when they took your prints.”

  He gazed at her. “M. Angela, if my screams of agony distressed you, or exacerbated in any way your own wait,” he apologized, although she did not look one whit distressed, “I am humbly sorry.”

  “They didn’t bother me in the least.” This time her smile seemed meant for him alone. “In fact, I thought they were rather musical. Because I knew you were enjoying every minute.”

  When she said it, he thought it not totally inconceivable that she might have seen more deeply into his soul than he himself ever had.

  Chapter 8

  Irene, Countess DiMedici, knew exactly whom the fatuous Squire Fitzhugh had chosen for her: that insufferable fool Livingstone, who dared to see her—a DiMedici of the purest spiritual blood—as some sort of half-clothed tribal princess.

  Yes, she knew herself capable of murder. She had struck half a dozen times before. But her first mark this weekend would have been Livingstone. Her second, perhaps, the squire. And her instrument would have been that of the Renaissance noblewoman. Always she carried about with her a virtual apothecary shop of the essentials: beneath the ruby on her right forefinger, belladonna. Beneath the diamond on her right midfinger, cantarella. Beneath the tourmaline on her right ring finger, wolf-bane aconite. And so on. True, once in her callow youth she had tipped the contents of the sapphire ring on her left midfinger into the wine of a man who spurned her, and he had suffered no ill results. The druggist had cheated her, as peasant shopkeepers delighted to cheat the aristocracy who lived in worlds of a texture, color, and richness that beggared the drab plane of reality perception. That druggist had died, and she had since taken care to find more reliable suppliers. But if all else failed, there was always the distillation beneath the pale white pearl on her left little finger, her own potent extract of the Destroying Angel mushrooms she herself gathered with her own hands by moonlight.

  She understood very well why the peasant Weaver had put her bold question to them. But Irene of the Medicis would have had no reason to kill Aelfric Standard. He had been a mere cipher, irrelevant to her world for all his supposed political power as The Standard’s heir apparent. And the bludgeon would have been a weapon for the hand of Livingstone’s fancied chieftain’s daughter, not for Irene, Countess DiMedici.

  Still, one must be careful, cautious, and subtle. Let the world fancy her rings were mere adornments, and she was safe. A death by poison, if traced to her, would mean incarceration for life in the dungeons of the governing usurpers. She no longer struck for mere rash whim. That was why, although the despised Livingstone sat next her at the luncheon board, he remained safe, at least for this present hour. That was why she concealed her loathing beneath a mask of indifference.

  The squire had his accustomed solitary place at the table’s head, with the countess at his right hand, as befit her consequence. Ill-advisedly, he had moved the peasant Weaver to his left hand, as if it might help her forget her bereavement. The fop Drake, called Captain by sufferance, sat beside Weaver, across from Livingstone, so that Irene DiMedici was surrounded by the least desirable of the company. Almost the least desirable: in some misguided attempt to conceal Aelfric Standard’s empty chair (that could be the only explanation), Squire Fitzhugh had prevailed upon Lestrade and Click to partake of the midday meal with their betters. Lestrade sat at the table’s foot and Click at her left hand.

  Beyond Livingstone sat the comparatively inoffensive sparrow Angela Garvey Garvey, and—oh, admirable piece of impromptu tact!—Corwin Poe had been seated between Garvey and his fancied Inquisitors. Beyond Drake on the other side of the table, silly Nantice Serendip and sullen M. Quantum flanked the one promising man in the house, M. Tertius White with his fine dark eyes and aquiline Roman nose.

  A corpse having been removed from the house only hou
rs ago, and three peasants obtruding at table—two of them deaths-head constables—the conversation did not scintillate. Indeed, so painfully did it lumber in its efforts to avoid the very subject that was weighing it down that the Countess DiMedici determined on drastic measures.

  “So,” she observed, apropos of some rambling jungle anecdote that Livingstone might or might not have finished, “one of us is a murderer.”

  “Did you have to remind us at lunch?” said Nantice Serendip.

  “It is reasonably obvious, my dear child,” Irene told her, “that we are all thinking of it.”

  “Could have been someone from outside,” Livingstone offered lamely.

  “Oh, dear,” said Serendip.

  “But surely it’s perfectly safe out here?” said Angela Garvey. “With Tige and Trooper.”

  “Which hounds would hesitate to hurt an Arctic flea,” said M. Quantum, “in case it was a guest.”

  “They’d bark right enough,” the squire assured the company. “Not dangerous hounds, but fine watchdogs for raising the alarm. And the wall around my grounds is set up with what the manufacturer promised me was the best intruder alert system to be had today. Not that it’s ever had occasion to go off before now.” He looked at the constables.

  “Right,” said Click. “Magruder buzz radar was the best on the market up until four or five years ago when the Telmark-Howells system came out. Still more than good enough to do the job. Besides, there’s no sign of a break-in. M.’s Sanzuki and O’Flanagan gave your house and grounds a thorough check.”

  “I’d have expected the suggestion of an intruder from the outside world to issue from M. Quantum’s mouth,” M. Tertius White remarked with a glance at Livingstone. “She is the one who saw the murder weapon as a burglar’s tool. A flashlight, she tells us.”

  “Oh, my,” said Garvey. “You mean that was the—what it was done with?”

  “I saw a flashlight,” M. Quantum repeated, “but honest people keep flashlights in their houses, too.”

  “A couple right in my kitchen,” said the squire. “Keep one hanging by the outside door, another by the cellar steps. At least, that’s what M. Jones tells me they are. See ’em as lanterns, myself.”

  “If we could decide it by vote,” M. Quantum went on, “it would probably be a candle in some kind of holder.”

  “Very well, what is it?” M. White crooked one of his magnificent eyebrows first toward the head of the table, then toward its foot. “We give the riddle up. Will our reality perceivers inform us? M. Weaver? Sergeant Lestrade? Sergeant Click? Or will you guard it as your little trade secret?”

  “I think we’ll guard it as our little trade secret for the time being, M. White,” said Lestrade.

  “To make yourselves feel important, no doubt,” the countess remarked.

  “If that’s the way your Grace wants to interpret it,” Lestrade replied.

  “You are insolent, Sergeant.” The countess clicked her rings on her goblet as she lifted it. “But this time I shall overlook your insolence as a mere mark of your ignorance.”

  Lestrade had the further insolence to shrug and return to his plate of vitello a la Milanese. Finer fare, no doubt, than usually met his palate. Such a peasant would be too highly honored by poison in aristocratic food or wine.

  “You’re missing the point.” Corwin Poe gestured with one pretentiously bandaged hand. “An intruder from the outside world? Some faceless criminal unknown to us? That would be no tragedy in the classic mold, only a sad, ragged, untidy affair. It must be one of us, for the symmetry of the thing. But the rest of you may sleep tranquilly, all save one having easy consciences and that one feeling as much smug impunity as the Furies may allow, for the Law has already made its choice.” He inclined his head toward the constables. “They’ll manufacture sufficient circumstantial evidence if they fail to wring out a confession.”

  “M. Poe, you become tedious,” said Irene, Countess DiMedici. “Half an hour in my private dungeons with my personal inquisitor, and you would confess these constables to be the rankest of amateurs.”

  “Ah, yes, my Lady Countess,” Poe replied. “We are all aware that your private torture chamber was designed by Torquemada, with equipment by Raguel of Toledo and murals by El Greco. Why not offer it and your monkish confessor’s service to our stalwart gendarmes here present?”

  Lestrade grunted. Click paused in the act of heaping his plate with ravioli to wag the spoon and say, “Oh, I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Poe. You’re doing well enough with your own imagination.”

  M. Weaver brought her fist down on the table and said, “Oh, I am so sick of your stupid games!” A petulant display of ill breeding that showed her lower-class birth. Nothing overset or spilled, but the tableware rattled a bit.

  Drake looked up and said, “Eh? Bit of a ground swell. Nothing to worry about.”

  The Countess DiMedici demonstrated her contempt by taking a sip of wine and ignoring Weaver, looking instead at M. Tertius White. “I think you are not dressed with your customary opulence, my Lord Tertius,” she remarked. “Indeed, your giacchetta appears to have been cut from rather coarse stuff better suited to a tradesperson.”

  Smiling, he lifted his goblet to her. “Casual attire, Countess. In honor of our reality-perceiving guests.”

  With the corner of her eye, the countess saw Click open his mouth but close it again at a slight frown from Lestrade.

  Weaver was less mindful of her place. “You don’t have to dress down on my account, M. White. I know good cloth even if I can’t always afford the very best that comes from our own looms. And I love to watch the fancy class all dressed alike in their plain, high-priced dun.”

  After a heartbeat’s pause, the squire said, “Afraid you asked for that, M. White.”

  “He begged for it,” said Angela Garvey. “What a dreadful, rude thing to say, M. Tertius!”

  “Excessive care not to tread on lower creatures is one mark of a shallow mind.” The Countess DiMedici raised her goblet and aimed a smile at M. Tertius White.

  “By that criterion, my lady,” said Poe, “your own mind must be deep enough to drown in.”

  She ignored Poe’s criticism as she would ignore a buzzing gnat. M. Tertius was returning her smile, reverencing her again with his wine. In all this party there was one, at least, not unworthy the notice of a DiMedici.

  Chapter 9

  Stanley Abercrombie Livingston was not shy about his family name. It went very nicely with his self-chosen first and last names. But most people avoided using it. Polite rule of drawing-room etiquette.

  As fanciers went, he flattered himself he had a reasonable grasp on reality. Everybody, or as near everybody as made no difference, knew what they saw wasn’t necessarily what their friends saw. But not everybody seemed to understand that what they saw wasn’t necessarily so. Most individuals, fanciers and realizers alike, seemed to think what they saw was the standard and what everyone else saw was the delusion. Stanley Livingston knew that his own perceptions were just as false as everybody else’s. It didn’t much affect his life, but he understood it nevertheless.

  For example, he knew that the trophy heads of lions, tigers, elephants and rhinos on his walls at home were “really” the heads of rabbits, wild dogs, and a few particularly fine old tree stumps he had bagged as they stalked him. And he knew that M. DiMedici wasn’t “really” a native African princess any more than she was a countess. Although, having accidentally learned her family name a few years back from a voluble carrier, he wasn’t sure but what her skin might actually be as dusky as he saw it. He perceived her as one of those Oxford-educated scions who return to the tribe to wear feathers and discuss Shakespeare with white hunters. And he found her tiresome, with her Renaissance pretenses and her apparent determination to rebuff advances he wasn’t making. True, he’d told her she could call him Abercrombie Livingstone. He
guessed she had taken offense at the very suggestion.

  What people like Her Highness Mbunga DiMedici failed to understand was that when he saw them as black that wasn’t, per se, uncomplimentary. No one had a higher respect than Abercrombie Livingstone for young M. Aelfric, or more friendly feelings toward M. Nantice. And no one put more trust in the loyalty of Fitzhugh’s servants, unless it was his old friend the squire himself. When “on” the African continent, as he was most of the time, he saw everyone who was of known Chocolate descent, and all realizers of whatever descent, as native Africans. He saw an unusually high percentage of whites to blacks around him this weekend, but Fitz’s house was on the edge of civilization. To the east, a clear supply line to the coast, good for bringing in society and European comforts. To the west, the primeval Jungle, with its big game and uncivilized tribes.

  Unlike poor Corwin Poe, Abercrombie Livingstone knew they were in no actual danger. The occasional drums, the charging beasts, only added the essential tingle to life, while Livingstone remained in control.

  That is, he had known they were safe last night, when he went to bed beneath his mosquito netting. Didn’t feel quite so safe now. Hard to remember that young Standard would never be rejoining them, cultured Chocolate face above his dress shirt and white jacket with its slightly frayed cuffs.

  Squire Fitz had gone out in the jeep to meet Dame Margaret Standard at the aeroport. The senior polly, M. Lestrade, had gone with him, and Portent to do the driving. For the hour or two they’d be gone, Abercrombie Livingstone was filling in as host for his old chum.

  Not that he could find much to do as nominal master of ceremonies. No ceremonies to nominally master. Anything to be done in the way of serving and bell-answering, M. Jones was a wise old hand at doing it, quiet and efficient. The rest of the pollies—coroner, photographer, grounds-searchers and all—had been gone before luncheon, along with the body, but Lestrade’s junior sergeant, that fellow Click, hovered around in the rattanwork keeping his big white eyes open.