The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Her Highness DiMedici and Trader White—less manners between the two of them than you’d see in a charging hippo—were out on the verandah playing backgammon or stones or some such game and keeping each other out of trouble, and they should be the only ones likely to cause social unpleasantness. M. Quantum (strange one, M. Quantum, the original Mysterious Female) and little M. Nantice had paired off for a walk around the garden.

  That left four in the living room, not counting Click, M. Jones who glided in and out, and Livingstone himself. Poe was safe with Angela Garvey, sitting side by side on one of the small divans. He might or might not be stone drunk: hadn’t said a word for a good quarter of an hour, just stared into a half-filled tumbler while she read him poetry in a low voice. Sweet child, Angela, still didn’t quite seem to understand this wasn’t just a little game the squire had cooked up for their entertainment.

  What did you do to entertain a houseful of people after a murder? Any kind of formal entertainment, planned or impromptu, looked irreverent. But no entertainment at all left everyone at loose ends, wandering around or sitting down to drink and brood. Well, no entertainment was still probably best; but M. Weaver hadn’t let her glass get far from her hand since before lunch. As long as she seemed to be holding her liquor well, why not? Dobbert Drake was sometimes standing still, sometimes pacing around behind Livingstone’s rattan armchair, and the hunter didn’t doubt the captain had a glass in hand, too.

  So should Livingstone go to M. Weaver or to Drake? Tricky point. She was a female and the more in need of comforting, but she acted as if she wanted to be left alone. Under the circumstances, she might regard any male who approached her as already trying to take over young Standard’s territory. On the other hand, Drake would start spinning sea yarns as soon as he got an ear to pour them into, but a man would be free to puff his cigar as he listened, and take his turn for a few favorite hunting anecdotes of his own. Livingstone hove himself up from his chair.

  As if his movement had been a signal, M. Weaver said, “God, they’re probably cutting him up right now!”

  “Have to do it, M. Weaver,” said Click, “if we want to find out who killed him.”

  “No, you don’t,” she returned. “It’s a barbaric old custom from the last century. You know perfectly well what killed him, and you’re not going to learn any more by cutting him open and analyzing samples of him.”

  Angela Garvey opened her eyes wide. “I never knew they did anything like that?”

  Abercrombie Livingstone stood. “Freshen your drink, M. Weaver?”

  “I’ve seen documentaries,” the realizer went on. “People look just like meat when they’re cut up. Is that how you make out on your pay, Sergeant? Make stew out of the organs and stitch up the empty shells for the undertakers?”

  Poe started to say, “At least it prevents pre ...” and let his voice die.

  Livingstone got the seltzer bottle and squirted bubbling water into M. Weaver’s glass. “A few ice cubes, maybe? Remarkable thing, ice-making machinery out here. Comforts of civilization.”

  She got up and for a moment he thought she was about to throw her glass at something. “Civilization!” she repeated. Then she seemed to take better hold of herself. “I’m sorry. I’ve had too much. To drink. I must have had more than I thought. Don’t give me any more. I’ll just finish this ... I’ll be better company by dinnertime.”

  “If you’d like to take a little siesta,” Livingstone suggested. “Lie down for an hour or two ...”

  “Yes. Yes, maybe I will. After I finish this drink.” She crossed the room, opened the door and joined M. DiMedici and White on the verandah.

  “I never knew they cut people up like that,” Angela repeated. “Why?”

  “Necessary, M.,” Click replied. “We never know what clues we might find.” He seemed about to elaborate, but Angela said,

  “Oh, I see! And you don’t really make stew out of them, do you?”

  He flashed his white teeth at her. “Of course not, M. Garvey. We have our own professional mortuists right there to put them back together.” He had not been smoking in the ladies’ presence, only fingering his pipe, but now he began to knock the old dottle into the fireplace.

  Angela seemed better reassured than Livingstone, who had sometimes, on various safaris, passed through cannibal villages. He knew they were not “really” cannibal villages, but at the moment he couldn’t imagine what else they could be, to a realizer.

  “At least,” said Poe, “it precludes any possibility of premature burial. M. Aelfric is not, perhaps, unenviable in that one respect.”

  “Heavy seas today,” said Dobbert Drake. Livingstone turned and saw he was looking a bit green about the gills. “Don’t have this problem often,” Drake went on. “They say Lord Nelson would have it at the first little choppiness.”

  Livingstone made his decision, gave their excuses to the others, took Drake’s arm and headed with him for the smoking room.

  Chapter 10

  Tertius Black White had used a certain irony in tailoring chosen final name to inherited family name. He saw the black and white of everything, as clearly as he saw the green and cream of the reversi pieces on the board between him and M. DiMedici. He was a reality perceiver.

  A secret one, a reality perceiver in lifelong masquerade, a realizer born to upper-class fanciers. There was the double rub. Which was worse, that his family were fantasy perceivers, or that they were upper-class? For the wealth his great-grandmother had amassed, his grandfather had already allowed to fray about its interest and dividend edges; his parents had converted too much of the principal into private estates; his older sister had virtually completed the ruin before her long overdue death in a fortunate transport accident; and Tertius was left with two properties, one barely comfortable enough for his own residence, the other an unsalable pachyderm even to members of the fancy class.

  He suspected that many other inherited fortunes besides his own were more traditional than factual by now. This nicety about asking and telling family names rose less, no doubt, from discrepancy between inherited name and chosen role than from reluctance to help muckrakers check which fortunes were rotten. Fanciers of the third and fourth generations were rarely equipped with the talents needed for making and keeping money, were usually dependent on the honesty of their lawyers, brokers, and managers. Soon they must all sink into the lowest level of society, the slums even now populated by impoverished fanciers spinning whatever worlds they could spin out of squalor and cheap booze, perhaps unable any longer to so much as feel quality silk from coarse ragged polysil.

  But until they sank, they played their games, using bluff and credit to buy their simple but high-quality props, pretending wealth to one another and the world. What else was left between them and the slums?

  Only the working class. And producers were reality perceivers: yes, that course was open to Tertius White. But at the price of revealing the objective accuracy of his own perceptions—a revelation that must plummet him to the social level of a servant or, at best, an M. Weaver. He would never sink to abject poverty, but he would postpone his midway fall as long as possible.

  Others in his position had married for money. Those others had often learned too late that their supposed wealthy spouses had married for the same reason. The only reliably moneyed female in Fitzhugh Manor this weekend was M. Weaver, and her income, though reliable, could scarcely be termed luxurious. To marry her might be called unselfish by the more romantic of his own social set: the aristo deigning to raise the peasant. And then what? Her money derived from her daily labor, which she must therefore continue, thus demonstrating the falsity of his family fortune. Ought he sell his remaining pretense, tissue paper though it might be, for the steady pittance and lowly status of a producer?

  Yet she was a shop supervisor. Such a wife might ease his own way into the working class. She was not a possibility to ign
ore out of hand.

  M. Aelfric’s death opened up another and a better possibility. M. Aelfric had been chief assistant and designated heir to Dame Margaret, The Standard herself. He left a gap that needed filling. Why not by Tertius White? Tertius Standard: a dignified role. Although some argued the point, realizers of the governing class were generally conceded to be the social equals, even the social superiors, of wealthy fanciers. The Standard, whose judgment defined the objective world, was among the highest in the governing class. Nor did that office depend upon the whim of any electorate, however limited. Each Standard settled his or her own immediate succession, and so the role had descended in an unbroken line—of aptitude, not of blood—for almost a century. The first Standard had been a moneyed aristocrat, Arlyn Sanders Sanders, in the generation when aristos could confess without shame to perceiving reality, because the split was still fresh. Why should the centenary of the office’s creation not see another aristo in The Standard’s role?

  Dame Margaret would be here within the hour, drawn by her heir apparent’s passing. A propitious time to court her favor. Carefully, choosing his moment with the utmost cunning, he must reveal to her when they were alone that he, too, perceived reality as it was.

  Behind the snap of reversi pieces as he turned over a row, he heard the sliding door’s whisper and the sound of soft footsteps. He was annoyed. M. DiMedici was a relatively undemanding companion, content to play in silence, leaving most of his mind free to plan. The newcomer would probably want to chat, and the proximity of death seemed to make chatter even more inane than usual. He glanced around.

  “Don’t mind me,” said the newcomer.

  “We were not,” DiMedici replied.

  “I just came out to finish my drink. I won’t even watch you play.”

  “That is a matter of supreme indifference to us,” DiMedici informed her.

  The newcomer shrugged and sat on the balustrade, gazing moodily out toward the garden.

  “Common peasant,” said M. DiMedici, ostentatiously under her breath.

  Tertius studied the woman who had joined them without joining them. “M. Weaver? I grieve to tell you, Countess, that her indifference is superior to your own. She permitted you the last word.”

  M. DiMedici accepted the hint and made her play in silence, although she must have wondered why M. Weaver should leave the company of those who tolerated her with some friendliness for that of those who rebuffed her. Had M. DiMedici voiced the thought, Tertius would have told her he believed that M. Weaver came seeking solitude. What solitude more complete than the company of persons who despised one?

  But M. Weaver was a possibility, he reminded himself. A possibility he ought rather to nurture than to smother.

  He sensed that M. DiMedici looked upon him as a possibility, that her present behavior, translated into another woman, would have amounted to flirtation. M. DiMedici possessed too great a dignity to flirt. Call her “Countess” and she deigned to drop you a smile. Nevertheless, she had taken his part at lunch, in that foolish exchange of wit.

  He had paid M. Weaver a compliment. She and everyone else had elected to interpret it as an insult. Could it be that she had now, an hour afterwards, joined them not to find solitude but to be near him? Romance, said old novels and new alike, often grew from the seed of insult.

  Yet M. DiMedici’s inherited fortune might still be sound. How to balance the situation so as to alienate neither woman?

  How else than by continuing as he had begun? His current mask had certainly drawn the DiMedici, had not improbably drawn the Weaver. Strange that a reality perceiver should enjoy insults, but having lost Aelfric Standard perhaps she felt that by enduring a measure of social martyrdom she shared her almost-lover’s fate. So Tertius need only watch for the moment when her need to suffer reversed itself, and gauge his conduct accordingly. He had learned supreme confidence in his ability to recognize the right moment. He laid his last reversi piece on the board, turned the row, and won the game.

  M. DiMedici nodded at him with a passing smile. “Tonight,” she said, “we will try whether you can defeat me so easily at chess. Meanwhile, we will play this again.”

  They began removing the pieces for another game.

  Chapter 11

  Through the wrought-iron grillwork of the doors, replete with its Yellin gargoyles, rosettes, and fanciful birds kissed by time, Corwin Poe could watch the interaction on the balcony, fragmented as if glimpsed through the bars of some exotic prison cell, but comprehensible. Yet not entirely comprehensible. Like a leaf from the magnum opus of some deep author, the scene appeared to bear a plain enough interpretation on the surface, but another meaning more difficult to decipher lurked between the printed lines.

  A pause in Angela’s musical voice told him she had finished one poem and was choosing another. Into that pause, and mindful of the policeman Click somewhere at his back, he dropped the statement, “I fear for M. Weaver.”

  “You do?” said Angela. “I know it’s especially terrible for her, but surely ... That is, she only knew him since last night, surely she’ll get over it. People always do.”

  “I meant for her physical safety. Opportunity, weapon, motive: those, I think, are the three elements to be considered when investigating murder.” He shot a deliberate glance over his shoulder at Click.

  The police sergeant tapped his pipe lightly against the fireplace. “I think we’ll just avoid the subject for the time being, M. Poe.”

  “I defy you to void it from our thoughts. It clogs the very atmosphere like a dense and miasmic fog.”

  “Corwin,” Angela said softly, “I could put it out of my thoughts.” Her hand had crept to his sleeve. He covered her fingers with his, holding gingerly because too much pressure still hurt.

  He lowered his voice to match hers. “A better man than I died last night as I lay abed reading in comfort. I may have heard the actual blow and thought it no more than another of the usual bumps in the night.” Louder, to take the policeman back into the conversation, he continued, “Opportunity: everyone in this house had it. Weapon: we need entertain no serious doubt that you officers have it safe in your custody. But motive? Which of us would gain any material benefit from the death of M. Aelfric Standard? I am driven to the hypothesis that one among us has been touched by some deadly lunacy. A violent aversion, perhaps, to the mixing of reality perceivers in our more ethereal society of the imagination. In such a case, M. Weaver might well be next. She also perceives standard reality, and to snobbish minds she has less pretension to mingle with the aristocracy than had The Standard’s heir.”

  “That’s ugly!” said Angela, but without slipping her hand out from under his.

  “Very ugly. But bigotry finds dividing lines in every age.”

  Sergeant Click came around to lean on the arm of a chair upholstered in velvet the color and texture of shaded moss. He balanced in profile so that with a slight turn of his head in one direction he could watch the balcony, in the other Corwin and Angela. “Ingenious theory, M. Poe, but stretching things a little more than necessary. Murders have been committed with no better motive than a trivial argument getting out of control.”

  “Oh, no!” said Angela.

  “Sorry, M.,” Click went on. “But if both men had been drinking a little too much—”

  “We are alone, Sergeant,” Corwin interrupted. “You may drop the polite third person. I drink very moderately, I retired last night at half past eleven to read in bed until almost three—my story has not changed since my being questioned, you observe—and I was not describing my own social aberration just now. Consciously, my mind registered the usual sounds of storm, wind, and the crack in this house creaking a hairsbreadth wider. I believe I should have noticed, as being something out of the ordinary, any snatches of a quarrel sufficiently violent to end in homicide.”

  The policeman grinned at Angela. “We didn’
t really torture him, M. Garvey.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she replied. “But so long as he thinks you did, that’s all that matters.”

  Corwin watched her in sudden fascination. “Are you aware, Angela, how often you employ the sound of long ‘oh’ in your speech? Don’t blush. It’s a visually beautiful sound. It forms your lips into a rose.”

  “She wasn’t blushing,” said Click.

  She was smiling, however. Of that he felt sure. “Say my final name. I feel persuaded I chose it expressly for your lips.”

  “M. Poe.” She lingered sweetly over the sound. When it could be drawn out no longer, she smiled. But her smile diminished and she dropped her lucent gaze. “I wish whoever it was hadn’t really killed M. Aelfric.”

  “It could not be,” Corwin suggested with a glance at Click, “that he only thinks he was murdered?”

  “He wouldn’t think so without solid reason,” said the policeman. “That’s where our perceptions differ from yours, M. Poe.”

  “So you tell us. Perhaps the reality you perceive is nothing more than a set of propositions which you have conspired as a group to accept.”

  “Why would they do that, Corwin?” said Angela.

  “Poe,” he reminded her gently.

  “Poe. But only if you call me by my last name, also.”

  “Well, agreed. Do you not remember the old rumor of our schooldays, Garvey, that somewhere a secret computer prints out the Realizers’ Handbook, newly edited each year by The Standard on a small terminal hidden far beneath the surface of the earth, and that all so-called perceivers of reality keep their copies carefully concealed? That by this means they coordinate their version of the world and foist it off on us as the objective truth to which our perceptions are but fanciful personal chimeras?”

  Click laughed. “Believe it if it keeps you happy.”