“What difference did it make? My errand’s hardly gender-related.”
“What difference does it make?” Mrs. Greene was trembling visibly. “The difference between male and female is the very foundation of society! It’s you women out there pretending to be men, wasting your time trying to do men’s work—you’re the ones rotting society at its very roots!”
“Mother—” Mandra tried to interject.
“Eroding family life, corrupting morals, and then you come into the homes of decent, honest wives and mothers trying to make us feel like fools, acting superior, with all your boasting about your jobs, your pert little jokes—”
“Mother!”
“Go to your room, Mandra. And you, you female policeman, get out of my house.”
Lestrade was on her own feet by now, trembling a little herself. “Mrs. Greene. I have the greatest respect for mothers. I envy you. But women have been working equally with men since before the Reform—”
“Realizers’ brainwashing! You—you pert unisexist, you couldn’t possibly understand what it is to be a real woman, to work as a mother, a homemaker, as the Good Lord intended.”
Lestrade hoped she would not have shakes if this ever happened when she was on duty. “Mrs. Greene,” she said as calmly as she could. “Maybe I can’t understand your hard work. But I have the same job frustrations as men in my workline, and I expect the same hospitality you’d give a male polly.” Gripping the bowl of her pipe in her left hand, she reached across the coffee table and put her right fingers around the mug. It was hot, but she held tight and stared back at Greene.
After a moment the homekeeper let loose of the handle and turned away. “Mandra! I told you to go to your room.” She clutched her daughter’s arm and marched her up the stairs. Mandra glanced back once, with what looked like a mix of apology, gratitude, and that anxious guilt again.
Lestrade sat, put two lumps of sweetener into the coffee, stirred it three or four times longer than necessary, and drank it slowly, trying to be amused at the discovery that her hostess used honey-sugar.
According to history—the kind taught in realizers’ colleges, not the idealized brand fanciers preferred studying—women with Mrs. Greene’s attitude had been common until maybe a century ago. Thank the Mother they were not common now! This was the first one Lestrade had run into for years.
Thinking deeper, where had Abigail Greene learned it? Some advanced, in-depth study of the authentic old propaganda printed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? You had to be an honors post-graduate to get into most of those archives. Mrs. Greene must have begun as a very intelligent person.
Lestrade finished her coffee and left, shutting the door loudly behind her. Neither Mrs. Greene nor Mandra had come back to the living room. The senior sergeant returned home more depressed than ever, resolving once again not to run any more work-related errands on her own private time. Ever.
The coffee had been good. Somehow, she thought she might have felt a little less depressed if it had been bad.
Chapter 9
“Dave,” the senior sergeant remarked next morning on the drive to Owlsfane Garber, “how do they know we’re pollies?”
“Huh?” he replied, pulling out of a vague daydream in which he was the Original Four-Wheel Driver (showscreen hero of his own schooldays) making his run through the danger-laced streets of the late twentieth century.
“I wasn’t wearing my badge yesterday. I didn’t even have my stunpen in my belt. Of course, I identified myself to Mrs. Greene, had to show her my I.D. before she let me in. She couldn’t see I was a woman, but she probably saw me in full, old-fashioned copper blue. But how did Mandra know?”
“I wouldn’t mind wearing a uniform,” Click mused. “Never could figure out why the old cops were supposed to be so eager to get into plainclothes. What’s special about dressing like everybody else? Uniforms, now—a little brass of authority. Costumed for your part. It doesn’t take a fancier to recognize pollies in uniform. Too bad they’re strictly for escort and crowd duty nowadays.”
“That anxious look,” Lestrade went on. “She could have been expecting a polly. Why?”
“Who? Oh. Mother or daughter?”
“Daughter. Mandra. Was she expecting police because she knew we’d find her book in Sapperfield’s apartment, or because she’s our anonymous informant? Or both?”
“I’m betting on the book. What was a mean old prof doing with a wholesome young midschool postgrad’s Christmas book, and why did she hint gratitude for keeping it wrapped in front of her mother?” He winked rhetorically.
“Face the road,” said his senior. “Mandra’s gratitude was just my passing impression. It’s a Names and Prints fact that she’s Sheryl Hawthorne’s cousin.”
“And so she could have learned about Sapperfield’s death from Scary Sherry, who could have learned it from M. Cunningham early Saturday morning, before it hit the printouts. And gotten it from him in full, glorious detail.”
“Don’t blank the idea, Dave.”
“I’m not blanking it. Devil’s advocate work is force of habit.” He did not repeat his own theory that Cunningham himself had been best situated to leave the tiplist in the databank. Even when he had pointed that out in the station over coffee, he had refrained from connecting it explicitly with the idea that Lestrade’s M. Anonymous could be their homicide, feeding them a list of red herrings as a smokescreen. “Look,” he went on, “want me to tackle Greene if it needs doing again?”
“You have the qualifications. You’re a man in a man’s workline.”
“Hey! I’m not working junior to any pre-Reformist.”
Lestrade glanced at him with one of her rare grins. “Anyway, I thought I’d try seeing M. Lotus in her school habitat next.”
Chapter 10
They were getting an early start: they walked into Owlsfane Garber at 07:42, mazing through crowded halls to reach the office. The desk aide was young and pretty, so Lestrade stood back and let Click arrange clearance to the princeps’ sanctum. He stretched the process out, lingering at the aide’s desk until Lestrade was halfway to the woodgrain door at the end of the carpeted inner corridor. She thought the door might be real wood, but it swung inward when she stepped on the slight bulge four paces away, too far for a close look.
Princeps Cage stood to greet the police. A short, rounding man with salt and pepper fringe (heavy on the salt) around a polished pink pate, the kind of man a lot of fanciers would see in abbot’s robes. She noticed he was not alone at about the same second the young floater with him stood and greeted her,
“M. Lestrade! M. Click. We meet again.”
“Oh. You, er, know each other?” said Cage.
“Poe.” Coming into the room behind his senior, Click returned the greeting, informally dropping the M. “Corwin Poe!”
“About six months ago,” Lestrade told Princeps Cage. “The business of M. Aelfric Standard.”
“Oh, uh, that case, yes. So you were the investigating officers? Tragic, tragic. Er, we’re not mentioning it today. In light of our own, uh, tragedy here. So then, er, we can skip introductions this morning? In the interests of saving time.”
“Small infinity of worlds, eh, Poe?” Click went on, quoting Al Everymind. “Speaking of which, how are your perceptions coming?”
“I make progress, slowly but unsteadily,” the dark young man reported with enthusiasm. “We estimate my present plateau at approximately twenty percent. Perhaps a fifth of the time I flash into a world more or less my own, while for the rest I seem to perceive roughly four-fifths standard reality sprinkled with various objects as I would prefer them. We have every confidence that after a few more plateaux the recovery may accelerate.”
“Meanwhile, being a realizer seems to agree with you,” Lestrade remarked.
“Oh, you mean my good cheer? No, please don’t accredit reality perception
for that.” He held up his left wrist, slipping the tunic sleeve down to display a wide silver bracelet set with an oval portrait on porcelain.
“One of those new engagement bracelets?” Click whistled softly. “You’ve gone realizer big.”
“These are hardly a mere transient realizers’ fad, M. Click, but the long-due correction of an ancient social imbalance. For generations custom has permitted men the marriage band, but until now we have had no fair equivalent of the engagement diamond.” He tapped the portrait with loving pride. “A true hand-painted miniature. None of your holograms.”
“Uh, it’s getting late,” Princeps Cage put in. “We’ll need to be getting to class in a few minutes, uh, M. Poe. Here, Sergeants, I understand you’re here to ask around among our, er, professors and other staff? Regular procedure? We, uh, have your visitor clearance forms all ready for you here.” He pushed them across his polished woodtop desk. “All ready for your, uh, signatures and thumbprints.”
Lestrade signed first, pulled up the glassine cover and pressed her right thumb on the square of instaprint film.
Click lifted his form and waved it once or twice to air-set the imprinted instafilm. “Well, Poe, making your thumbprint give you any problems this time?”
“Regretting your disappointment, I was not required to sign and thumbprint a clearance. I sit here by school request, as a volunteer resource. We’re in great demand as moderators for the Perennial Debate—those of us who through unhappy accident or some other quirk find ourselves realizers who would prefer fantasy perception, or vice versa, or otherwise under the handicap of mixed perceptions. I wonder, can you think of any more succinct way of expressing all that?”
“I’m, er, taking over the late M. Sapperfield’s homeroom this morning,” Cage explained. “M. Poe was on our schedule for later in the year, so I, er, phoned him from the Rockies and he kindly agreed to come early.”
Lestrade looked around at Cage’s office, even more lushly decorated than the rest of Owlsfane Garber Middle College. “A little unusual, isn’t it, for the princeps to take over a class?”
“Uh, it would be under, er, normal circumstances. Under the present circumstances, it seemed, er, the least I could do for…at such short notice. I wasn’t always princeps, you know.” Cage rubbed his palm over his bald crown as if to polish it further. “Up until, uh, seven years ago I was band director. Happiest years of my life. Most productive. Sometimes I wish ... Well, anyway, it seemed, uh, as good an excuse as any—not to belittle the tragedy, you understand, of course—of getting back to the students for a few days.”
Having calculated possible timetables, Lestrade said casually, “Playing any computer games while you have the perceptions for it, Poe?”
“And risk retarding my eventual recovery?” He shook his head. “On the night I touch a computer knowingly, I shall have admitted despair.”
“Keep the, uh, clearance forms with you,” said Cage. “They’ll serve as your, er, hall passes for the rest of the day. Well, now, M. Poe, we’d better, uh, be going if we’re going to reach Homeroom Six before the bell.”
“If you don’t mind, M. Cage,” said Lestrade, “I’d like just a few words alone with M. Poe.”
“At once? That is, er, couldn’t it wait until the, uh, end of homeroom? Only an hour ...”
“Bird in the hand, sir,” said Click, looking puzzled but playing along with his senior. “Don’t tell me the princeps who used to lead a midschool band can’t keep a homeroom of ten-year-olds in order for five minutes.”
“Er, nine- to thirteen-year-olds, actually. We here at Owlsfane Garber follow the Heimdigger principle of age mixing where possible for, er, optimum social preparation. But—”
“I should be of minimal use to your discussion, M. Cage,” said Poe, regarding Lestrade, “with my curiosity unsatisfied as to what our good sergeants desire of me.”
“We’ll bring him along in five minutes, no more,” Lestrade guaranteed the princeps.
Cage glanced at his bare left wrist, looked harried, and checked the wall clock. “I, er, broke my watch in the Rockies yesterday. Sunday morning trail hike. Well, I’d better be going, then. Five, er, minutes, you said? Uh, feel free to use my office here. Peace.” With a couple of backward glances, he hustled out.
As the door closed them in again, Poe began (right hand curled around his engagement bracelet), “I am flashing into a sable-curtained chamber not unworthy the Inquisition. Exquisite, but pray put me out of my suspense.”
Lestrade took out her notecom. “When, exactly, did M. Cage call you over the weekend? Saturday morning about, say, nine a.m.? Sunday evening after dinner?”
“Saturday afternoon. It must have been three or half past, post meridian. Angela and I had a late lunch and I did not turn my phone chime on for the day until after we had finished our coffee.”
“You’re a late riser, right?” said Click.
“Habitually.”
Lestrade came in again with, “When was the last time you visited Owlsfane Garber?”
“Never, before today. Wait, there was a junior masquerade I attended with a cousin of my friend Jack Point’s—Good Lord, it must have been eight or nine years ago. Of course, the place looked entirely different to me in those happy days.”
“One more question, now we’re alone. Strictly confidential.” She tucked her notecom away on her belt. “You aren’t computer-boarding a little on the sly these nights?”
He looked mildly affronted. “I have not keyed a computer, as such, since I was eight years old. I entered the Venerable Edgar’s world young. I may, of course, have handled a comboard unwittingly up until half a year ago, but I am strenuously avoiding all antique typewriters and other devices even vaguely suspicious during my convalescence.”
“Except phones,” Click remarked.
Poe shrugged and grinned. “Telephones are akin to magic and thereby justifiable. Besides, a realizer—even a realizer for the nonce, as it were, should enjoy a few little modern compensations.”
Lestrade rolled the bowl of her pipe between her fingers. “Well, my instinct believes you. This sanctum still look Inquisitorial?”
“No. Except, perhaps, for that window, but I think it’s been stained glass the entire time?”
“Yes. Steelglass, if they’re following safety guiderules.” Lestrade studied the six-meter crazy quilt of colored fragments which dominated the west wall. “Looks like a design by Gabinny. Maybe even Picasso.”
“That is some small comfort. To me it looks like the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, in a very Gothic style.” Poe sighed. “A school like this must graduate reality perceivers almost exclusively.”
“Reality perceivers?” said Lestrade. “How do you figure that?”
“Look around you, M. Lestrade. How could any young scholar placed in such surroundings as these feel the need to filter the real world through a personalized perception?”
The class bell was audible even in the princeps’ sanctum, though muted to a soft run of chimes. “I wonder if he made it to Homeroom Six,” said Click.
“If I’m cleared,” said Poe, “may I inquire of what?”
“Of making an official statement.” Click winked.
Lestrade explained, “Sometime Saturday morning, M. Anonymous left a tipsheet of candidates for M. Sapperfield’s murderer in the police database. Keyed to my name.”
“Ah! And you thought that I ...” Poe actually laughed. “Oh, no, sergeants, not this time! I know nothing at all about the late, lamented M. Sapperfield, and have not the least intention of wading such undercurrents in advance of you again.”
“Glad to hear it. But there’s one more thing.” Lestrade paused. She disliked feeling awkward. “As long as you’re here. The kid who found the body last Friday evening is in M. Sapperfield’s homeroom. Kid named Cunningham Roberts Cunningham. So you should be seeing him, assuming
he came to school today. Budding realizer, ten years old, midschool sophomore, science-minded. Probably a computer literate at senior or even high-school level.”
“And you think he may be M. Anonymous,” said Poe.
“He could be,” Lestrade admitted for the first time. “If you get a chance to do it discreetly, Poe, warn him off. Warn him that playing amateur detective can be dangerous.”
Chapter 11
Almost everybody in Homeroom Six, except Georgia Woolworth who hardly ever said anything, used to talk about how smooth it’d be to get rid of Old Stickysap. Some of them, like Wally the Big D and Mike “the Microphone,” were still trying to twister up the old junk today, but not too many kids laughed at the jokes anymore, not after Cunningham started filling them in on what the announcement screen didn’t say. Even the ones who still laughed at the old jokes mostly sat dumb when Big D started singing in his voice that was so alto you wondered if it had gone deep already. (He liked to rub his hand over his face like he was checking to see if he should have shaved. Once or twice he’d even told Cunningham he thought he could feel his beard growing. “Yeah,” Cunningham had told him back, “about a millimeter a year.” That seemed like a long time ago.)
Then when Wally D’s chorus of “The Sapper Once Stepped on a Cobra” didn’t get into the air, he looked at Cunningham and said, “It’s the dumps when something great like this happens and the sucker who found the stiff is in the snurd’s own homeroom, acting pious.”
“Wet-blanketing it for everyone,” the Microphone buzzed in. She was another puffy, with her eye make-up and her milk bottles out farther than any other girl’s in the whole senior class. She was the closest thing M. Sapperfield had to a professor’s pet. She claimed she hated it—that was why she loudmouthed against him one of the loudest when he wasn’t around—but when he was around, she battered up to him pretty good. Used to batter up. “Master Cunny Roberts with his special exclusive nosey-casts. What difference does it make how Old Stickysap snuffed it?”
“Be quiet!” Sheryl Hawthorne spoke up. “You shouldn’t ever speak ill of the dead, no matter what.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 34
