The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Yes.”

  “So the only ones we can eliminate, because what they saw wouldn’t have made a good club, are M. Angela, M. White, and probably M. ... Seren?” said M. Weaver, still very slightly unsure of a few names.

  “Unless they were lying about what they saw. To be a fancier is not necessarily to be naive or unintelligent.”

  “M. Poe told us he saw a thick black candle in a skull, but who knows what he told the pollies? And the Countess DiMedici would have used poison in preference to any bludgeon,” M. Weaver added with a strong hint of sarcasm.

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me. On the balcony, just before we got news you were on the estate and all trooped in to meet you in the living room.”

  Margaret pressed the review tab and swallowed cool coffee as the narrow screen ran through their list two lines at a time.

  “And I believe M. DiMedici would have tried poison first,” M. Weaver went on. “But whatever she has in all those rings of hers, that she thinks is poison, can’t be. Not unless some realizer is selling her the real stuff like a stupid fool. So if she tried to poison him and it didn’t work, she might have grabbed her heavy candlestick and ...” She lifted her head with a small shudder and rubbed the back of her neck.

  Margaret became aware of faint chimes from her briefcase, where it lay on the bed in the other room. She usually wore her penphone at her belt beside the notecom, but today she had packed it in her briefcase. Uncaring, she ignored it for the moment. “What kind of flashlight did M. Quantum see?”

  “Large and heavy, dented and the glass broken.” M. Weaver politely ignored the chimes.

  Margaret pressed the review tab again. “I think Angela Garvey and M. Serendip were probably telling the truth. And if DiMedici had tried poison first, she might have assumed it was a slow one, or else tried another of her rings today. Among the women, M. Quantum would be the one to watch.”

  “But you think it was one of the men.”

  “Percentage-wise, women are less likely to go homicidal than men,” The Standard said, hearing her own voice as a whir of antique clockwork. “And women are less likely to try it with bludgeons, even now. Unless they perceive themselves as under attack, and Aelfric wouldn’t have attacked anyone.”

  “He might have refused to join one of their fancy orgies.”

  “I can’t believe any of them killed him for that. Not any of the ones out there.” Margaret got up and went to the bedroom, but as she reached her briefcase she understood that the chimes inside had stopped. If it were anything important, they’d have gone on trying. Tricia was alone in the office this weekend—one of the newest temporary staff members. Norm Daggett was out in the Rockies fishing, enjoying a few days alone with no line to the outside but his emergency phone. Margaret had chosen not to spoil his short vacation by notifying him at once, either of Aelfric’s death or of his own appointment as her new heir. He would learn in time for the funeral next week; he could do nothing meanwhile. Tricia might need to be reminded not to buzz people outside of work hours unless it was not only a valid emergency, but one that could be affected by the individual notified.

  Margaret was grateful not to be her grandmother. That generation must have lived on a showscreen. But reaction had been starting even before the classes split. Reaction against newsmongers who probed people’s fresh wounds in the wake of disaster and personal tragedy. Against “investigative reporters” who badgered interviewees until nerves snapped, assumed suspects’ guilt, accepted anonymous testimony at surface value, and otherwise applied techniques they themselves decried when used in courts of law. Against media that flooded the public mind with an overload of more information than any one person could assimilate and, in order to sell their packaged news, worked at creating guilt complexes in people who did not try to consume it all. The twenty-first century had, blessedly, seen the “Public’s Right to Privacy” triumph over the “Public’s Right to Know.” The governing class spread most of its vital news in terse, objective bulletins and memos. Workers took their doses of essential current events in equally concise broadcasts and public news printout sheets from coin-operated vending machines. Outside of fancy-class publications, what had once been called “human interest stories” were so rare nowadays that only students of social history, like Margaret Walking-Horse Standard, appreciated the old meaning of the term, and people who might once have pecked out editorials, philosophical columns, and what had been termed “special features” instead wrote books to enter into the public computer or risk in the limited industry of codex publishing. Only comic strips and an occasional political cartoon still decorated the news printout sheets aimed at reality perceivers.

  Newspapers for the fancy class were published, many monthlies, several weeklies, one or two dailies, in what looked like the old-fashioned format. But fanciers used newspapers more for props than information, and the student of social history who examined actual newspapers from previous centuries soon saw that the modern fanciers’ imitations were more like special interest publications. Some, such as The Obelisk and The Western Clarion, catered to large groups who shared roughly similar fantasies. Others resembled gossip sheets, but reported only doings among the wealthy class of fanciers. Comic strips were almost the only feature they had in common with the news printouts prepared for realizers: a few strips were popular with both types of perceivers. Fanciers who retained interest in actual current events availed themselves of the realizers’ sources and occasionally begged unclassified bulletins from acquaintances in the governing class.

  In the era of Margaret’s grandparents, unless they had exaggerated their daily frustrations in the retelling, people had been at the mercy of their phones, even hurrying dripping wet from a bath, clad only in a towel, to be trapped for half an hour by a talkative friend. In those days, it would have been rude not to answer a phone. At last the technology that produced wireless wristphones and penphones forced a new etiquette to evolve, freeing people not to answer and suffer no stigma of rudeness. Phones buzzed or chimed softly, in sounds entirely unlike the harsh jangle that shocked modern senses when heard (generally through earphones) in museums. Under most circumstances, it was rude to remark that a companion’s phone was sounding.

  In the old times, Margaret thought wryly, Squire Fitzhugh’s house would have swarmed with reporters poking at the tender nerves of the living, dissecting the dead with hasty biography and undigested theory for the vidcasts that would already have been peppering the screens. Thank God for letting me live now when we can cope with this in private dignity, when tomorrow will be soon enough for the public to learn The Standard’s heir is dead—not how he died, only the fact of his loss—and when I don’t have to answer my penphone.

  She left it in her briefcase. She would not wear it down to dinner.

  Chapter 17

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant Lestrade,” M. Tempstand said on the other end of the phonewave. “She’s not answering.”

  “Keep trying.”

  “M. Margaret has very definite ideas about phone etiquette,” replied The Standard’s temporary office assistant. “As it is, she may lecture me for even trying to reach her at this time.”

  Lestrade drummed her nails against her pipe. “Damn it, this may be an emergency.”

  “But unless you can com me documentary proof of that, M. Lestrade, I’m afraid I can’t use the emergency buzz.”

  “All right, M. Tempstand. Thank you. I may get back in touch.”

  “I ... I’ll be available all night, M. I’ll keep my penphone beside my pillow,” Tempstand said just before cutting off.

  “Sounds like a nice young woman,” Click remarked.

  Lestrade sighed and tabbed her notecom. “Squire Fitzhugh doesn’t wear a phone. Not in line with his fantasy. I’ll try to reach him through one of his servants. He should see reason, put in a request for police guard himself if he can’t t
alk The Standard into sanctioning us.” Consulting the comscreen, she spoke Portent’s code into the police receiver.

  Click whistled softly to himself. By the time his senior partner reached Fitzhugh via one of the servants, Controller Flynn would be on duty, and they quipped behind Flynn’s back that he was a secret fancier—fancied himself a turtle. Without The Standard’s own direct comdocumented sanction, it would be midnight by the time Flynn checked, considered, digested and okayed the forms on Lestrade’s and the squire’s requests. And without her okayed forms, Lestrade couldn’t hold Click on duty after he was scheduled to go off. “Tell you what,” he said as they waited to see whether Portent was answering his phone. “I’m not going to waste my plans for the evening. They’re two weeks old. But I’ll check in at twenty-four hundred in case you want me.”

  “If you’re not around, I’ll take Carpenter or Oggam,” said Lestrade. “Maybe I will anyway, if you show up blunted. Hello, M. Portent?”

  Chapter 18

  Corwin Poe tucked his fingertips beneath his knuckles, hesitated an instant, and gave three gentle raps at her door, following the rhythm of her name: An-ge-la.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  He bent and whispered at the keyhole, “Hush! It is I.”

  “Oh? Just a minute, then. I was getting dressed for dinner.”

  When she came to the door, she opened it only a few feet. She was in her dressing-gown: a demure, opaque robe that covered her from neck to toe with no more than a shallow V at her throat, and even that slight deference to lewd thoughts filled in with a wealth of frothy feather-fronds. A confection far more modest than many styles worn on the public thoroughfares, yet endowed by long social custom with a certain aspect of invitation. “Why did you come to my room?” she asked.

  “Intrigue.”

  “Oh, Poe, you know how I am about men in my bedroom.” She looked down, veiling the glance of her exquisite eyes. “I’m saving myself for marriage. A hopeless romantic.”

  “I, too.” He slipped into the room and closed the door softly. “To be a hopeless romantic is among the defined conditions of being a fancier. But that was not the species of intrigue for which I came.”

  “M. Corwin Poe, you don’t mean you still want to—”

  “Of course.”

  “But Sergeant Click told you very clearly to put it out of your mind. He said he’d arrest you if you tried any such thing.”

  “And thus compelled me to it all the more. My own Imp of the Perverse.” He longed to take her into his arms for a moment. (Chastely, of course.) But, sobered by his own latest words, he sat in one of the velvet-upholstered chairs instead. “Garvey…the man in that tale was a murderer.”

  “And you are not!”

  “Can we be sure? Can I be sure, except by helping to discover which of us it is?” He had argued staunchly to the detectives that had it been him, he would have done it with greater polish; but the man in the story of the Black Cat, for one, had murdered with no nicety or finesse. Nor was amnesia of guilt unknown.

  “Oh, all right, I’ll help you.” She pulled the gilt chair to her vanity table over to face him, and settled down. “As long as you’re here, shall we see if your fingers are healed up yet?”

  He gave her his right hand. Quickly but tenderly, her small cream-pink digits unbandaged his thumb. “There!” she said. “All well.” And, lifting his hand, she brushed his thumbtip with a kiss.

  He still saw an unpleasant discoloration. Rather than forgo the sensations of her hands on his, however, and the thrill of nine more kisses, one to each successive fingertip, he agreed that they were indeed whole again. Not until the ministration was completed did he return to the intrigue in question. “We’ll need counters.” Trying not to show the lingering tenderness, he brought pen and half-sized solitaire cards from his pocket and gave them to her. “I would prefer that you inscribed the names.”

  She opened the cardbox. “The deuces and fours will give me most space for writing. And the sixes, if we need them. How many do you want?”

  “We were thirteen in the house: ten guests, our host, and two servants. We became twelve, not including she who arrived only this afternoon. Jones and Portent will require a somewhat modified approach, if it should come so far as them, which I doubt. And we must of course omit you for innocence and me for inability to apply the technique to myself. That leaves eight.”

  “How do you know,” she said with a mischievous smile, “that it can’t be me?”

  “Because if it were, I would go to the asylum in silence rather than discover your secret.”

  “That’s very sweet, Poe, but not very practical. Well, I’ll only need the deuces and fours, then.” She extracted them from the pack and poised the pen. “Eight? Surely you don’t plan to include the squire?”

  “I hold no one in this house above suspicion, save only you and Dame Margaret.”

  “Well, if you’re going to include everybody, you might as well include her, too. She could have instructed one of us to do it.”

  “That, I misdoubt. But if so, the truth should come out when whoever struck the actual blow is discovered.”

  Angela nodded her golden head, and inscribed the cards, handing each one to him as she finished it. He had pictured the counters as court cards appropriately matched to the suspects, but Angela’s choice was indeed more logical, less likely to cloud the judgment with emotional overlays of the Queen of Spades or Knave of Clubs.

  Deuce of Spades, Squire Fitzhugh. Four of Spades, Willa Quantum. Deuce of Diamonds, Tertius White. Four of Diamonds, Nantice Serendip. Deuce of Clubs, Stanley Livingstone. Four of Clubs, Countess DiMedici. Deuce of Hearts, Captain Drake. Four of Hearts ... “ Oh, come!” said Angela. “You surely don’t think it could be M. Weaver?”

  Corwin sighed and reconsidered. “Well, leave her out for now.”

  Angela nodded and closed up the pen.

  He found a clean cup, put the seven small cards into it, held his hand over it and shook the cards well, then offered her the cup, above eye level.

  She drew a card and looked at it. “Captain Drake. Oh, really now, Poe, it couldn’t be dear old Dobbert!”

  “Garvey—dear, sweet Garvey. Which of us would you not dismiss out of hand? Which of us would you admit capable of the deed? And yet one of us it must be. Such things are not done without a doer.”

  “You admitted it couldn’t be M. Weaver.”

  “I admitted no such theory. I simply remembered that as a perceiver of reality she may require a different approach, and therefore agreed to leave her until we have finished with our own class.”

  “But you’re afraid she may be in danger, too. That’s why we’re doing all this, isn’t it?”

  “In part. But while I do not consider her a likely suspect, we should not close our eyes to any possibility. Who better forearmed than a realizer to baffle a party of fanciers?”

  “Oh. Well, since it can’t be Dobbert Drake, at least you’ll be safe with him.”

  “I’ll try to find my chance at him before dinner, or soon thereafter. Now, since time may be limited, draw again.”

  She drew again, and her chimelike voice seemed to grow hollow. “Countess DiMedici. Oh, Corwin, no! Not at dinnertime!”

  “The countess it must be, or we destroy our own rules at the outset.”

  “Poe, you asked me which one of us I’d admit might have done it. Well, she’s the only one I’m a little afraid of.”

  “Ah! Shall we go by your instincts, Garvey? I’m willing to try that first and only return to my game of chance if you prove wrong.”

  She shook her head. “No. If you must go through with this, I’d much rather you took Captain Drake before dinner. Only promise me you won’t approach the countess until after we’ve eaten.”

  “I must give her some chance to use one of her showy rings, else the expe
riment is without meaning.”

  “Not until after dinner. Not until you have a decent chance to pour it away. You’ll have to wait long enough to give poor Dobbert his chance all clear, you know, or we can’t keep tally.”

  “True. But let me carry some small vials in which to secret samples of any drink she may dose.”

  “In fact,” said Angela, “I really don’t think we ought to line two up like this. We might get confused. No, try Dobbert first and we’ll forget about Countess DiMedici for this evening.” She dropped the Four of Clubs back into the cup, but Corwin fished it out again.

  “I doubt that a mere two cards will confuse me.” He laid them face up on Angela’s mantelpiece, Drake’s first and DiMedici’s beside it to the right. “The captain as soon as convenience affords, and then, after we’ve had our fair chance at each other, I’ll give you the signal and watch for my chance at her.”

  “But not before dinner. Not with her.”

  “Definitely not until after dinner with the countess.”

  Angela sighed, came over to stand beside him, and looked at the two cards. “I can’t wait to turn them both face down. That is the way we’ll keep track?”

  “Whatever you find convenient.”

  “Yes. I’ll figure out someplace better to keep them before morning. Where M. Jones won’t dust them away. Or see them and wonder. Poe, I have some little sample bottles of perfume with me. We can rinse them out for you to keep the samples in.”

  “I hardly like to rob you of your scents.”

  “And I don’t at all like leaving you to find your own sample bottles. Oh, was that a pun, what you just said? ‘Scents’ and ‘sense.’ If you can’t find any clean bottles, you may take it into your head to drink down anything just to prove your point.” She went to the vanity table and found her leather and velvet case of sample perfumes: a dozen small, sleek bottles of clear colored glass, each with a distinctively shaped cap, each bottle and cap together the length of her thumb.

  “They always say you’re supposed to pick one scent and stay with it, make it a sort of personal trademark,” she said. “For once I’m glad I’ve never been able to decide.”