The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Chapter 1

  “I hate this kind of case,” said Senior Sergeant Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade.

  “You hate every homicide,” her junior sergeant rejoined.

  “Also rape, robbery, arson, reckless driving, blimp sabotage—”

  “So how did you grow up to be a polly?” Junior Sergeant Click cut in, opening his eyes in mock innocence.

  She gave him a stare and clicked the stem of her pipe against her teeth. She never smoked it. She had taken it up as a prop for use when dealing with fantasy perceivers, and it had become a nervous habit.

  Dave Click grinned at her, fiddled with the safety catch, and tabbed the poolside button. For the eighth or ninth time that morning, the steelglass cover slid across the aquanatorium, freezing the slight choppiness into a smooth viewing surface.

  “But I especially hate this kind of homicide,” Lestrade repeated.

  “Think the kid did it?”

  “No. But the damn situation points that way.” She walked out on the steelglass and stared down at the ’natorium specimens of Owlsfane Garber Middle college.

  Middle College. When I was in grades four to eight, she thought, they still called it plain old midschool. We didn’t even have the option of skipping eighth grade if we could get all our credits into four years. So nobody tried. Hey, I’m not that old. Only forty. Some days it just feels like eighty. Maybe in this tuition range they were already Middle Colleges back in my day.

  She looked up at the high, vaulted roof, almost like that of a medieval cathedral. Skylights were tucked tastefully into white, gold, and aquamarine groining, but at this hour they showed dark and the illumination came from ultrasun lamps glistening between rows of tile. Enough to make realizers think their own perception had slipped them into the fancy class sometime since breakfast. Most kids from a midschool like Owlsfane Garber had to turn out fanciers. If they had any realizer bent in them, a school plant like this would stifle it out, ruin any young mind for the drab old real world. Well, most of the student body here came from fancy-class families in the first place. Only their teachers were realizers. For the most part.

  She sighed and gazed down, picking out a couple of giant black angelfish at play in the seaweed near the bottom. She sighed again and sucked anise-flavored air through her otherwise empty pipe. She was mind-idling to put off another reconstruction of what had happened here some hours ago.

  The alarm had gone off at 19:53, alerting the Fire Department that someone had opened a door at Owlsfane Garber after the building was locked up for the night. When the fireflies arrived, they found a ten-year-old kid, one of the school’s fifth grade “sophomores,” waiting inside the front vestibule, holding the door closed against the autumn chill.

  The kid, one Cunningham Roberts Cunningham, brought the fireflies inside here to find Professor Douglas Hatto Sapperfield floating dead in the water. Since about five minutes after the firesquad hauled the corpse out and their paramed admitted that it was a corpse, the whole mess had been police software.

  In this elegant, high-budget aquanatorium a man had died, probably scrabbling, a regulation poolside life jacket ironically pressing him up against the steelglass that guaranteed he’d drown. And a ten-year-old kid had either discovered the result, or caused it and maybe stood by watching and waiting.

  “Hey!” said Click.

  Lestrade glanced around at him. Grinning back, he teased one finger over the safety catch and pointed the stem of his own pipe above the button.

  “Don’t do it,” she said calmly.

  “Then come in and get warmed up. The temptation is unbearable.”

  “Looking for motives, Dave?” Deliberately, she crossed the glass to step off on the far side of the pool. Probably her shoes left faint prints. She should have taken them off, airfoam soles or not. Photolab had already recorded the scene of the crime, meticulous as archeologists and a lot faster, and cleaned up after themselves, so her prints would concern only the building keeper. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time someone scuffed the glass. A lot of covered ’natoriums doubled as dance floors, sometimes in defiance of aeration guidelines.

  “It wasn’t suicide, anyway,” Click said over the whirr of retracting steelglass. He must have tabbed the button a nanosecond after his senior stepped off.

  “Don’t blank it completely.”

  “Suicide wearing a life jacket?”

  She strolled back around the pool. “He could’ve put it on automatically. School regulations—all non-swimmers must slip into life jackets at the door.” She pointed her pipestem at the rack of life jackets.

  “Then we’re breaking school regulations right now, you and me.”

  “We haven’t been teachers here for X number of years. Habits have a way of programming themselves into you. He comes here preoccupied with whatever’s pushing him to self-destruct, just slips a jacket on without thinking, jumps in without ever becoming aware that he’s got it on. Or maybe he wants to drown but not to sink.”

  “Funny fetish.”

  “To you and me, Dave. Maybe not to a suicide. He might think it’s more dignified to float. Or he might want to be found right away, not risk accidental camouflage beneath the seaweed. He might even feel romantic about fish—wants to die with them but not disturb them too much.”

  “Except he tabs the button and jumps in on Friday night, leaving the glass on until Monday morning. No respect for the guideline against covering ’natoriums longer than half an hour at a stretch.”

  “All these newer models should have automatic safety aerating systems that come on if the cover stays closed too long. Check that. Also check if this is one of those self-sustaining ’natoriums that can be left on its own for two days. Should be open information in the school’s maintenance databank. I see that button as the biggest mechanical argument against suicide.”

  He nodded and tabbed it again, standing up immediately. They both watched the glass slide back across the water. It came out from the same side of the pool where the button was located, and if it didn’t move at the speed of shuttlecraft, it did move faster than a rolling pedway. Dave Click had good, young reflexes, and already by the time he got to his feet after tabbing, he would have had to broadjump across the edge of advancing glass. Sapperfield had been fifty-seven and, according to Nance Coron of the Photolab team, flabby. If any athletics turned up in his records, they’d be years—more like decades—in his past. Not impossible to suicide with this set-up, but unhandy. Lestrade tried to visualize a flabby, sedentary, middle-aged midschool prof stooping over to fiddle with safety catch and button, straightening up, and broadjumping out to beat the glass as it slid forth, or not straightening but falling forward still jack-knifed to somersault beneath it, or sprawling down in a feverish roll to go off the edge before it reached the far side.

  “Here’s how he did it,” Click offered. “The life jacket was an integral part of the suicide plan. He jumped in the pool, swam over to the button, and pushed it while he was already in the water.

  She stared at him. He put his pipe in the left corner of his mouth, tugged it down a little, and winked. Recognizing everything but the wink as his sportive caricature of her own mannerisms, she took her pipe from her mouth (she had forgotten she was chewing the stem again) and put it away in her belt-pouch.

  “Let’s go interview that kid,” she said.

  Chapter 2

  Going to interview the kid entailed a ten-minute drive from Owlsfane Garber Middle College on the outskirts of its suburbia to Novoposhni Restates in the northeast sector. On Junior Captain Frye’s authority, the fireflies had shuttled Cunningham home, after a call to his parents, setting off between 20:16, when the police were notified, and 20:24, when the Photolab team arrived. Sensible. Probably what Lestrade would have done herself, considering the youth of the witness and the unresolved circumstances of the victim’s death. It might have made th
e police work easier if Cunningham had been held in isolation until she and Click got a chance at his relatively unreprogrammed cranial database. But in the old squabble between the people’s duty to be protected and their right to freedom from fear of Big Brother, almost every inning in the twenty-first century had gone against “police encroachment.”

  “We should get more out of a relaxed kid than a nervous one, anyway,” she mused aloud.

  “Mmm?” said Click. “Croo! There’s something about these wide-open stretches of roadway. Under the old ninety kpm speed limit—”

  “You could get us there in two-thirds the time. Unless someone got in our way walking the family dog. You want to put your foot through the floor, do it on one of those coin-op speedways.”

  “Electric bugs going around a figure-eight electric track.” Pulling back the corners of his mouth, he white-knuckled the wheel and hunched forward with a side glance at his senior. She shut her eyes and leaned back, knowing he would not actually venture to shoot fuel in a monitored polcar.

  Novoposhni Restates was a neighborhood of fulltime residences for the well-cushioned and town cottages for the very rich who preferred private accommodations to hotels. In daylight, it was worth the view: small manor-houses on lawns of four to six acres, spread across gently rolling hills like Babushka Lozinski’s patchwork quilt bunched over a rumpled featherbed. Most of the restates were fenced off in wood, stone, decorative plastimesh, outdoor-gilt barbed wire. But the elegant privacy was more polite than practical. Few fences blocked a fair view of the dwellings and landscaping within.

  All this, however, was memory-work right now. On moonless and clouded nights like this, there was little to see aside from lighted windows, occasional glitters when the car lights caught bubbledomes or barb spangles, and lightning bugs, which had made an ecologically farmed comeback since last century when they had almost died out. Lestrade’s grandparents used to talk about omnipresent street lights and big-city nightglow that could whiteout a sky for miles around, but it had been reflectors and glowpaint since before Lestrade could remember, the legacy of a campaign early this century to return the night sky to stargazers.

  The real-iron gates were open to Restate 37NW, “Aquarian Dawn,” so Click drove on in without waiting for acknowledgment. Mary Roberts Executrix, reality perceiver, and Woodstock Cunningham Baez, fantasy perceiver—full names and perceptive persuasions compliments of Names and Prints—lived in a white brick house with two wings semi-circling the patio fountain at the end of the car approach. Most of their windows were dark, but the water column was lighted and playing at about five meters, and the bricks, which seemed to be glazed with a mild phosphorescent finish, bounced back enough light from fountain and car to make the building’s outline partially visible.

  Open gates suggested the family was expecting someone, probably pollies, so Lestrade chafed at not only having to tab the door chime, but wait three minutes. For all his latent love of high-speed transport, her junior partner was the patient one at moments like these. He lounged against the doorpost and remarked, “A little late in the year for a running fountain.”

  “Water’s probably heated. Test it.”

  “Ah, to be rich! Well, Les, think we’ve stumbled on the chance to bust a connection? Better look around to see what they’re taking so much time to hide.”

  “Fancier.”

  He grinned and started getting out his pipe. Just in time, a youngish woman in gray slacks and crimson tunic opened the door.

  “M. Executrix?” said Lestrade.

  The woman shook her head. “Dilly Whitworth. I’m the house manager.”

  “M. Whitworth,” the policewoman amended. She had expected servants in this neighborhood, but it was better to mistake servant for employer than the other way around. “Didn’t you hear your hummer when we came through your front gate?”

  “Oh. It isn’t working. It went out yesterday. The repairer promised to come today, but she never got here.”

  “In that case, M.,” Click said in his handsome-dick style, “you might do better to keep your gates shut and depend on the manual. Or doesn’t that work, either?”

  The house manager had been looking at their badges. “Are you here about ... What happened tonight? Not more than he told us?”

  “Maybe less than he told you, M. Whitworth,” Click reassured her.

  “Very well put, Sergeant,” said Lestrade. Then, turning back to Whitworth, “Routine doublechecking, M. Soonest in, soonest out.”

  She took the hint and led them direct through the circular foyer to a family room. The white brick fireplace was fitted with a light cylinder sending a slow twirl of blues and greens through the room. The effect was supposed to be soothing, but tonight it made Lestrade think of underwater.

  On one side of the fireplace Mary Executrix and her son sat playing a screen game. On the other side Woodstock Baez squnched down and smoked in a nagahide sofa. Lestrade assumed that was who they were, though from the way they were dressed—woman in sober gray slacksuit, man in faded denims and a tunic covered with splotches of bright purple—you would have thought he was the realizer. It happened sometimes in mixed marriages. The reality-perceiving partner costumed the fancier as a memory jog for the rest of the household.

  Baez looked up at the newcomers, pinched out his cigarette and fumbled as if to hide it. How do they always know we’re pollies? Lestrade wondered. The small blue and silver badges might look like anything to a fancier, especially a jellied one.

  Going through the motions, she crossed to the sofa and sniffed. As she expected, he had been smoking plain denatured leaf, the kind approved for most public areas. But to him it was obviously marijuana. He stared up at her with half-glazed but apprehensive eyes.

  “Don’t worry, M. Baez,” she told him. “It was decriminalized back in 2017, remember?” Actually, it hadn’t been. More substances were restricted now than a century ago. But keeping the restrictions was realizers’ responsibility. When evidence had stockpiled that consumed substances produced the immediate psychological effect of what the consumer perceived them to be but only the lasting physiological effect of what they really were, and that while fanciers often perceived relatively harmless substances as drugs or intoxicants but almost never vice versa, fanciers had gained the legal right to zonk themselves as far as they liked.

  Click came up behind his senior, sniffed the air, leaned forward with a grin, and offered his hand to M. Baez. “Nineteen-seventies, right?”

  “Nineteen-sixties,” Baez corrected him dreamily. “Wonderful era. Dawning of the age of ... peace, awareness ...”

  Eventually he might notice Click’s hand long enough to shake it, but he was still holding two fingers in a V when Lestrade turned to the woman and boy. They were standing at their table, waiting, with a king of spades and king of diamonds frozen in the act of fighting out a trick on the gamescreen between them.

  “M. Executrix, M. Cunningham.” Nodding to them, the policewoman pointed at her badge. “Senior Sergeant Lestrade, Regional Police.” She would have gone on with Click’s name, but Executrix spoke first.

  “He will be punished, M. Lestrade.” The mother briefly held her son’s hand. “Severely. But not tonight. I’m sure you understand.”

  Lestrade gentled her voice. “Whatever school and family rules your son may have broken don’t concern us, M. But whenever anyone finds a body, under any conditions, we have to collect all the information we can.”

  “I see.” Executrix sat again.

  “We have to interview witnesses in private, M.”

  “He’s a child, Sergeant.” Settling down harder in her chair, Executrix reached once more for her son’s hand. He put it in hers, but looked at the floor as if a little embarrassed.

  “He’s a witness,” said Lestrade. “Don’t worry, M., a witness. Not a suspect. Even if he were under suspicion, the Privcom Rule of 1999
qualifies us to serve simultaneously as police investigators and civil rights advocates.”

  “Forgive me, but that’s a contradiction in terms. I don’t care what the Privcom Rule of 1999 says or how long it’s been in effect.”

  “M. Executrix, I’m old enough to be his mother. Don’t worry. Just take your husband and your house manager into another room for half an hour. The room next door, if you like.”

  The kid spoke up. “Or we can go up to my room. Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be okay with them.”

  Executrix sighed and stood. “We’ve always taught him to trust and respect pollies,” she murmured to Lestrade.

  “He won’t unlearn it from us, M.” Lady God! Lestrade was thinking, sometimes the realizers are harder to coddle than the fanciers.

  “Is that your junior sergeant over there talking with Woodstock—my dad?” the boy went on, talkative now he had unclamped his vocal cords. “That isn’t really a reefer he’s smoking.”

  “We know it isn’t, M. Cunningham. My junior sergeant is something of a history packer. M. Click!” Lestrade continued, beckoning him. “We’ll do the interview in M. Cunningham’s room.”

  Click nodded, shook hands with Baez, and joined his senior partner as she followed the kid out of the family room back into the foyer.

  “Airshaft or stairs?” Cunningham asked.

  “Stairs, pal,” said Click. “Always take the stairs. Better for young legs.”

  “That’s what everyone tells us kids. I thought maybe you’d rather take the airshaft because you’re realizers. Mom and M. Whitworth always take the airshaft.”

  “Who’s talking about your legs, pal?” Click reached down and ruffled the boy’s hair. “I was talking about my young legs.”

  Half suspecting that her partner was about to suggest racing the boy upstairs and leaving the airshaft to her, Lestrade cleared her throat and said, “Stairs. We’re used to taking stairs whenever possible, M. Cunningham. Police fitness policy.”

  “Sergeant,” the boy acknowledged, almost snapping to attention.