The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Art be damned! It’s Life that matters.”

  Author Ace Jefferson, who was in Germany touching up on last-minute research and helping select filming sites when the storm broke, mailed a calmer, more conciliatory letter from Munich. Among other things, Jefferson pled that, as the descendant of slaves, he could empathize with Epstein; but that at the same time he could testify as a personal friend of Michael Amber’s that the actor’s political position had been sensationalized in the media, that Amber supported only the principle of the native Palestinian people’s right to self-rule, without in any way condoning terrorism or violence as a tool to bring it about.

  It has been speculated that Epstein might have responded more favorably to Jefferson’s plea than to Soderstrum’s arguments, if producer Leslie Applebaum’s phone call had not reached Epstein first. The gist of the producer’s argument has been preserved in both an office memo and the personal diary of Applebaum’s secretary, Rose Jones. It boils down to the statement that the name Michael Amber alone would guarantee as many viewers as for a Superbowl, no matter what garbage he appeared in, and that meant big advertising dollars, not to mention the video sales six months later. It might be just as well that Epstein’s response to the producer’s line of reasoning has not been preserved in any form, but after this exchange, it hardly seems surprising that his letter of refusal to author Jefferson’s plea includes the statement:

  “Your great-grandparents may have known what it was to be slaves in the Old South, but you yourself have never known what it was to be a condemned prisoner in a Nazi death camp.”

  Casting director Yossarian wisely stayed out of the argument, quietly lining up alternate actors for the central role. At last, however, Michael Amber himself wrote his famous letter to Epstein. It has since been included in so many anthologies and collections of readings that it is unnecessary here to quote more than the single line:

  “Exactly the same basic human instinct that forces me to befriend the native people of Palestine today would, I hope, have forced me to befriend even to my own death the Jewish, Polish, Gypsy, Communist, and other oppressed victims of Nazi Europe, for humanity includes everybody.”

  To this plea, the old survivor never replied in writing; or, if he did, the document has never been reported. By the time Amber’s letter reached him, Epstein had suffered the heart attack from which he failed to recover. According to a tradition that one would like to believe, he phoned Amber from his deathbed and the final compromise was resolved amicably between the two of them at that time.

  What is certain is that Epstein’s wishes were posthumously honored. Jacob Brandywine, who was only fourth on the casting director’s list but had been among Epstein’s favorite students, played the part, which of course proved to be his major career breakthrough, while Ace Jefferson rewrote the basic story of Life Was the Encore as the science fiction allegory Death Planet, Michael Amber’s biggest widescreen hit of 1998.

  * * * *

  Variety had never seen either Death Planet or Life was the Encore, had never before heard of any of these people except Michael Amber, and had only the foggiest idea what the Palestinian thing was that had gotten them all scrambled up. But there was that word again, “compromise.” Wipe it, why couldn’t they have done either one thing or else the other? Even if she was having a little bit of trouble figuring out exactly what the compromise had been. The old man had gotten his way clear, hadn’t he? Still, somebody thought there’d been a compromise.

  She added Death Planet to her list of three Reeltime movies to ask for, but struck Michael Amber’s name out of competition for a model for her own new name. Who wanted a screenstar’s name, anyway? If she was going to name herself for anyone, why not for somebody who had done something really important, like making a Superbowl touchdown or winning a load of gold medals at the Olympics, or starting the asteroid colonies, or ...

  The computer gave her the warning beep that meant it was time for everybody younger than fourteen to go offline. Almost everybody said that was just honor system, there wasn’t really any way they could enforce it. Lots of kids ignored it. But Variety’s parents would question her if she went overtime in the public-access databanks. Besides, honor system was honor system. She signed off.

  That left the bookchips she had checked out of the library today, and one of them, she remembered, was about somebody who had helped save the last rainforests. Yes, that was something really important, almost as important as gold medals at the Olympics. She found the chip and fed it into the book reader. Hawkdove of the Amazon, A Novel about Imelda Carradine, by John H. Atramencious. Well, Carradine sounded pretty Vanilla, but Imelda was kind of pretty. Musical.

  It looked like an adult novel. Variety wondered how it had gotten into the “YA” drawer. She flipped to the back and spotted a place that sounded like it might be exciting.

  * * * *

  The scrabbling came again.

  She sat up in the creaky camp cot that had served so many years as her bed—her lonely bed since John left—and stared in the direction of the door, stretching her eyelids till they ached, as if that might help her pupils pierce the heavy dark of the Amazon night. There was a scrabbling at her door.

  It was not an animal noise. After ten years of research, Imelda knew them all, all the animal noises of the Amazon night. This one came of human origin, and some human ... she thought ... who was angered at finding the door locked, and trying not to let the anger be heard.

  Not to let anything be heard, because if the intentions were honest, why not knock, or call her name?

  John would have called her name. If he had lost his key.

  Or had she had that ancient lock yet, in John’s time?

  She thought not. Straining her memories backward, she thought it was a new addition since his time. Tulsa and Steele had forced it on her, installed it over her objections ... just two years ago? Just before John left? Ostensibly the lock was to keep her food stores safe from the marauding wild creatures of the Amazon. Actually it was because of the threats from encroaching civilization.

  The land developers had sworn to get her. Tulsa had brought her word only last week of the meeting in Altierra’s suite at the San Rosa Hotel, those five secret boardroom types in their white silk suits, drinking their Cokes with rum…the only kind of coke that ever touched their insides, those sleek big bosses who preferred to leave the snow—the hard white powder—to ruin the brains of paying suckers in the States ... smiling with their clean ivory teeth and saying, the Senora Imelda, she must go. Si, she must go. Jose, you know a man in Rio, a man with a jaw like the piranha and a mind like the Devil and a body like Rambo ... you know of such a man, no? A man who takes off anybody’s head with his bare hands for the price of a diamond ring and a cruise around the Caribbean with his woman of the hour ...

  The bellboy had told Tulsa about it. The bellboy who had taken up their drinks and collected their fat tips and been found dead in an alley on the other side of the city with his neck broken before he could have had a chance to spend much of the money. If any.

  The Senora Imelda Carradine must go. She who posts her people in the way of our bulldozers, who stirs up public opinion against us with her videotapes, who gets in the way of all the lovely new cocaine plantations we want to lay out where once the rainforest grew, profiting nobody but the people of the whole planet. She must go, and Jose knows of an hombre who can take off anybody’s head with his bare hands and leave no trace of it behind but the broken, bleeding body ...

  And the Senora Imelda, she never uses guns. Her brain, it was warped by her parents, those peace children of the Sixties. Never has she used violence. “Peaceful resistance,” this is her creed, this is what she preaches, what she practices. Chain yourselves to the trees, lie down in the path of the bulldozers, wait for the outrage of the world to turn your enemies aside…and it does. Too often for our profit sheet, it does. But no more. N
o more after ...

  Tonight?

  The gun stood against the far wall. The gun Steele had insisted that she keep, that he insisted on keeping cleaned, oiled, and loaded for her. The shotgun he said would stop an elephant in its tracks. And if an elephant ...

  She hated that gun. With the kind of hatred that bordered sickeningly on love. If it weren’t here, if Steele wasn’t so damned bossy about it, then she couldn’t be tempted ...

  No! Why not let herself be killed? Martyred for a cause, like all those others before her, Carlos, and Tiffany O’Flynn from Canada, and Estaban Sanchez, and ... Why not let her death stir up public outrage until ...

  Until it died away. Martyrs get forgotten. The furor over them boils up for a few hours and then dies away, like the boiling of water when the pan is lifted off the fire.

  And the man from Rio, with a mind like the Devil and a body like…the man who could lift a human head off human shoulders until the neck snapped. And all with his bare hands. Huge, hardskinned fingers, one set under the jaw, the other set under the back of the skull, pulling up and up until the skin stretched out like a rubber band and the vertebrae ...

  She dived across the cabin for the gun, got it into her hands, steadied it, tried to steady her shaking fingers ...

  It was an old lock, an oldstyle lock. He must be trying to pick it open, with ... what? The metal tongue of his belt buckle? A piece of bent earring? And the half knowledge from some old movie or TV show that such locks could be picked?

  “Who’s there?” she called out, suddenly appalled at the thought she might have been about to shoot someone totally innocent, some friend or ... “Who is it? Who’s there?”

  Silence answered her. Instant silence.

  A friend, anyone innocent, would have answered. She had called three times, and gotten back instant silence. Nothing but the cessation of sound.

  She found the trigger, and waited.

  The silence stretched out ... like a rubber band. After a few seconds, the natural noises of the rainforest at night started up again ... or maybe she only became aware of them again. Nothing else. Except ...

  Was that the rhythm of feet moving ... stealthily…away from the door?

  Or was it her imagination? Was she a fool, or in danger for her life, or only…dreaming? Asleep in her bed, and dreaming a nightmare?

  “Who’s there?” she shouted again. No answer. And then, feeling more like the fool than either of the other possibilities, “I’m warning you!” she shouted. “I’ve got a gun!”

  The north window shattered. She spun round to face it. There—in the palely moonlighted window—a shadow…but a shadow with the shoulders of Rambo.

  “Who is it? Oh, God! I have a gun! I’ll use this gun ...”

  The shadow pulled itself through the window. Its feet shook the cabin floor when they came to rest.

  “I’ve got a gun! I’m warning you, I’ll—”

  The kind of growl that could come only from a human throat: “So use it, lady,” delivered in the street slang of Rio.

  He sprang.

  She used the gun.

  The cabin—the whole camp—rattled with the roar.

  The gun had a double charge. She used it again.

  Imelda Carradine was quoted, eight years afterward at the dedication of the 10,000 hectare rainforest preserve that bears her name, as calling it the hardest part of her entire career to stay and continue her work after compromising her own lifelong principles of nonviolence, even though the shattered body left lifeless on her floor had indeed been that of the hired killer from Rio ...

  * * * *

  Yeah, okay, thought Variety, that was a little better than the other two, but Imelda didn’t exactly “compromise,” did she? She plain broke her lifelong principles. Well ...

  Imelda Carradine ... Michael Amber ... Winifred Hapgood ... Three tries, and not one of them had turned out to be exactly somebody Variety felt like spending the next several years of her life named after.

  Maybe she might just as well keep her final name as it was. Wasn’t her own Mom a lot better than any of these other people?

  Yes, but ... “Variety”? Oh, she had to find a different first name! Hey, how about taking Grandma’s family name for a first name? Tibawi Hepworth Ames ... Heck, wasn’t there some kind of a bone with a name that sounded something like “Tibawi”? She sure didn’t want to end up with any nickname like “Bonesy.” Let’s see ... Ames ... Amy? Amy Hepworth Tibawi? How about that?

  Better, much better, but she still wasn’t quite sure. Well, it was really getting late now. The parents were pretty good about bedtime, but there were limits, and any minute now they’d come knocking to shoo her into bed.

  She yawned. Have to sleep on it. Maybe ... yes, here’s a good idea! Talk them into giving her an extension, letting her reregister her name a couple of weeks after the Test. Explain that she’d like to see her reality/fantasy score before making her choice. Yeah, that should work.

  Smiling, Variety Hepworth Ames dialed her roomlight down and headed out to get her toothbrush.

  * * * *

  The editors complained that I didn’t get into the actual story until far too late. But the story is about a child combing through this mass of adult information in search of a good name for herself—with the overtones of personal identity and coming of age that implies. Her growing juvenile disillusionment with the element of compromise that seems to undergird the entire grown-up world provides the character-exploring glue that binds the three extracts together. This theme—this story—is present from the opening paragraphs.

  As nearly as I could make out, the editors for some reason persisted in the curious opinion that the “story” resides in the preposterously—and very deliberately—overwritten third extract. In which I was spoofing a melodramatically overblown “action/suspense” style which I personally consider bad writing, all the more blameworthy when it exploits real social and/or ecological problems. I myself cannot reread this section without laughing at its pretentiousness. If the editors did indeed mistake it for the heart rather than the comic relief of “Variety’s Name,” it must have been because the destruction of rain forests, the traffic in illicit drugs, and murder for hire are indeed serious, even though John A. Atramencious has done his best to trivialize them for the sake of lurid “suspense” fiction. A biography of Imelda Carradine by Ada A. Aaronstadt—in my opinion the one truly admirable wordsmith of the three—would be well worth reading.

  Variety Hepworth Ames is rare in being a central character whom I not only never used again but, as I remember, never intended to.

  ROSEMARY LOZINSKI LESTRADE

  THE MONDAY AFTER MURDER

  A Fanciers/Realizers Novel, first written 1983

  FOREWORD

  * * * *

  by Corwin Poe

  * * * *

  In many historical epochs, the persecution of fantasy perceivers has approached, in determination if not in extent or carnage, the persecutions of witches, heretics, Jews, and other minorities. Looked upon as lunatics, we have been shunned, imprisoned, starved, chained down in filth, whipped into subservience, tortured with electrodes, all for no other reason than that we perceive things otherwise than as our neighbors perceive them, and dare acknowledge it. A fortunate few, whose personal worlds marched with the dominant religion, have attained fame as mystics and visionaries; but the best that most fanciers could hope for has been to be regarded as harmless eccentrics. And few Don Quixotes, however romanticized by strangers and after ages, received better than ridicule and constraint at the hands of their close contemporaries. The numbers cannot be calculated of fanciers who learned perforce to dissemble.

  In the free and ecumenical atmosphere of the last half of the twentieth century—that is, more or less a hundred years ago—the numbers of avowed or obvious fanciers multiplied until, while still a mi
nority of the total population, they were too many for continued institutionalization on no other grounds than fantasy perception. The Great Reform, about the turn of that century, officially guaranteed our free and independent right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

  Inevitably, some minor inconveniences still attach to our otherwise comfortable present condition. For example, a fancier who lives—figuratively speaking—in the days of ancient Rome and perceives solarcars as a type of high-speed chariot cannot be granted a driver’s license without some danger to the general public. Perhaps because the legal limitations laid upon fanciers parallel those laid upon children, at some point the Law decided to classify all minors as fantasy perceivers, which does little to change the opinion of those reality perceivers, or “realizers,” who persist in regarding all fantasy perceivers as children.

  Nevertheless, we are the imaginative leaven of society, and our collective contribution to culture is incalculable.