The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  The guest waved his hand again. “No, I believe I can manage this, M. Cage.” He shut his eyes a moment, then looked back at the homeroom circle. “Eyewitness testimony, M.’s, is very often totally unreliable, even from the lips of high-scoring realizers. The more individuals present at any scene—even should they all be registered reality perceivers—the more different versions you will hear of what actually happened. Memories change and fade, particularly when prodded. People began to understand this long ago in their daily lives, but not in legal contexts, where juries continued to free the guilty and condemn the innocent on the evidence of testimony that clever lawyers prodded eyewitnesses into believing they remembered. The present guiderules took effect only a few years ago, and most courtroom dramas, including those of Al Everymind, are still based on the classic patterns of fifty to three hundred years ago. There was a long interval when reality perceivers were almost always allowed as eyewitnesses, fantasy perceivers almost never; but now the standard criteria are how well witnesses were previously acquainted with the other parties involved, and how long and closely they observed the action under trial. We fanciers may not see our friends, relations, and enemies as they appear in realizers’ standard mirrors, but most of us see them consistently with our own perceptions. Fanciers recognize people they know far more surely and accurately than realizers later recognize strangers glimpsed once or twice. There are a few dopplers, of course, who see the same individual as more than one person, or vice versa. But for the most part, nowadays fanciers are admitted or constrained as eyewitnesses on a very equal footing with reality perceivers.”

  Mike the Microphone went through the form, with a smug glance at Cunningham because she tabbed so politely, and asked, “How do you know so much about it, M. Poe?”

  “Recent personal experience, M.” He sort of grinned. “And I acknowledge that jurors, of whichever persuasion, seem by and large to lend more credence to the testimony of realizers than of fanciers.”

  “Your question bordered on rude manners, Donaha,” said the princeps. “Not to say poor taste. I think, er, we’d better close the subject, M. Poe. We should never have, uh, skirted so near it today.”

  Cunningham was glad someone else besides him got caught down for bad manners. But he noticed M. Cage didn’t tell the Microphone to report to his sanctum after school.

  The boy managed to keep his mouth shut and his thumb off his tab for the rest of homeroom. It felt so long until the 08:55:00 bell that he started to wonder if fantasy perceiving carried over into how fast or slow time went for you. The words that kept beating through his head like he’d never heard them before were “borderline fanciers.”

  Chapter 14

  At 08:43 Lestrade left her junior in the computer lab and headed for the girls’ dressing room. Even at that, she must have outstripped M. Esther Rivers. She waited a good three minutes before the mikebox acknowledged her pressure on the admittance tab.

  “M. Rivers?” she replied to the give-message chime. “Senior Sergeant Lestrade, Regional Police. Female. May I come in.” She made it a statement.

  After a second, the voice at the other end said, “Cleared, Sergeant. Please take off your shoes and socks and step through the footbath inside the door.”

  The clearance snap sounded, and Lestrade went in. She didn’t trust footbaths. They always felt alive to her, as if the hardiest micros were breeding and spreading in the latest germicides. They also stained, which was one reason she no longer wore skin sheers. But to keep relations smooth and speedy, she hitched up her trousers, stripped her feet, stuffed the socks into her clippersole shoes, and carried them one-handed as she waded through. She went on barefoot into the tiled mysteries of molded semiplast benches, noiseless lockers, and marblesim shower stalls.

  M. Rivers, already in swim suit and wet skin, stood before the mirror, rubbing a smoothmitt over her shaved head. “I was out of here by eleven fifteen hours Friday, and I haven’t been back until half an hour ago. I’m scheduled for oh nine hundred to eleven hundred at Owlsfane Garber, thirteen to sixteen hundred at Tomeo Yamikazu High, every day Monday dash Friday. In practice, it’s more like oh eight thirty-three to eleven fifteen and twelve thirty to sixteen thirty, and I’m also assigned to evening and weekend meets at City College, so I’m actually working a lot more than my thirty hours a week, if you want to figure it out. I eat breakfast between here and Tomoe Yamikazu. I don’t have time for lunch.”

  “You’ve heard some details about M. Sapperfield’s passing,” Lestrade observed.

  “Paolo told me. M. Pinesweep. We were together Friday night from eighteen hundred hours on. And then I spent Saturday evening with him, after he’d spent three more hours than his weekly schedule cleaning up behind you pollies. “

  “Sorry we left so much for him to clean up. Our Photolab team is usually tidier.”

  M. Rivers let her shell crack a few millimeters. “It wasn’t entirely your trail. It was the body having been in the aquanatorium so long. Fully clothed, too. Any time anyone falls in, even for a second, without properly showering, M. Pinesweep has to run five different tests and readjust all levels and balances.”

  Lestrade fished. “From what we’ve heard about the late M. Sapperfield, he would have been delighted to cause M. Pinesweep so much extra work.”

  “Why M. Pinesweep? And that was an unprivate thing to say.”

  “Sorry. We’re semi-authorized to say unprivate things once in a while, during investigations. But I shouldn’t have hinted M. Pinesweep in particular. We’re putting together the impression that the deceased enjoyed discomforting fellow mortals in general.”

  “Well, he never gave me any trouble, so I had nothing against him. Nothing at all.”

  “And you have no idea what he might have been doing in the aquanatorium area last Friday after school hours?”

  “I hardly even knew the man. I doubt I’d have recognized him on the sidewalk. Maybe he just came in to watch the fishies and relax. Aquanatoriums. Thank the Powers Tomoe Yamikazu has an old-fashioned chlorine pool.”

  “Apparently he couldn’t swim.”

  “Because he was wearing a life jacket?” Rivers looked around with something like a smile. “Paolo told me why we have one life jacket missing. Hope you can grill it for evidence and get it back to us soon. Just because this is a rich kids’ school doesn’t mean we can afford to get ripped off.”

  Lestrade cleared her throat. “I meant that the underside observation room would have been a safer place for a non-swimmer to relax by watching the marine life. Probably provide a better view as well.”

  The swimming coach shrugged. “Unless he suffered from a phobia of leaky dams in enclosed places, whatever the eight- or ten-syllable word for it might be.” She gave her head a final stroke and turned to put the smoothmitt away. “Sergeant, in a very few minutes a small crowd of squealing midschoolers are going to be jamming their over-disciplined little bods in here, bursting to cut loose for five minutes before I march them out to that blasted ’natorium.”

  “Thanks for the warning. By the way, M., there was a longish delay between my tabbing for clearance and your response.”

  “I was taking my shower. Sergeant ...” Rivers paused as if groping unsuccessfully for Lestrade’s name. “Am I under suspicion?”

  “You weren’t, especially, M. Rivers,” the policewoman replied, with an emotion between satisfaction and fair play, “until you started snapping out answers as if you had everything rehearsed.”

  “Oh.” The instructor hung a whistle around her neck and glanced at the clock. “If you don’t hurry, Sergeant, they may catch you at the footbath.”

  They did—a torrent of nine- to eleven-year-olds who had Lestrade splashed to the waist before they looked high enough to see her badge, after which they shoved past her with all the greater haste, stuttering apologies and quasi-hushing their excitement. She let them pass without comment.
As Rivers had hinted, tightly disciplined midschoolers needed to snatch boisterous moments where and when they could.

  The corridors and students’ comfort stations would be crowded for five minutes. Lestrade turned into the first professorial lounge she noticed.

  It had one occupant, a tall young man puffing a cigarette as he stood beside the coffeemaker. He jerked around at her entrance, looked at her, and said, “Staff only.”

  She turned to give him a better view of her badge. “Police, M.”

  He exhaled a fresh cloud of smoke with the faintly cinnamon smell of denatured weed, but before he could question police privilege, she had moved on to the inner door bearing the old symbol of circle on inverted triangle.

  Some things never changed. For a century or more, trousers had been general wear for everyone except a few fanciers, and in the fancy class maybe a fifth of the men joined two-fifths of the women in affecting skirts. But on comfort station doors a skirt still meant “Women,” two straight vertical lines “Men.”

  There had been some attempt thirty years ago to replace them with still more ancient alchemical symbols, but too many people—especially realizers—considered cross for female and arrow for male too suggestive. Hardly logical, when the whole purpose of double comfort facilities was so often ignored—not much the realizers could do about that, with so many fanciers perceiving certain individual females as males and vice versa—but society didn’t always run on logic.

  Take stains and clothing. Every time the fabric synthesizers came out with something new in the stain-resistant or ready-wash mode, the chemists came out with some new germicide, food additive, or whatever to stain it after all. Just like the age-old contest between locksmiths and lockpicks, or failsafers and embezzlers. Or police and privacy-righters.

  Chapter 15

  Some days M. Sapperfield had wanted his homeroom to stand at attention while he went out first, most days he told them to file out exactly three paces apart while he sat on his platform watching them like a relay satellite for any pushing, whispering, or getting too close, tabbing down names for discipline next schoolday. But he always drilled them to stand up the minute the bell chimed. So Cunningham did it automatically today. Then he saw everyone else was still sitting. Princeps Cage must have told them, sometime when he wasn’t listening, to stay seated in their consoles while he and the guest went out first. Cunningham sat back down quick and hoped that maybe the princeps hadn’t been looking. He couldn’t afford any more detract marks today. Being especially careful, he waited until all the other kids were out, even the froshies, and finally left last of all.

  The princeps was still standing there just outside the door, a little to the left, talking to M. Poe. Cunningham turned right. He’d have to joggle it to reach his lab taking the long way around, but that was better than going right past Princeps Cage.

  He was halfway down the hall when an adult came up beside him and said, “M. Cunningham?”

  He looked up, to be sure who it was. Yeah, he could guess what the resource guest wanted. “I’m sorry I was so rude to you, M. Poe. Please don’t hold it against our school. Resource guests are very valuable to our learning process.”

  “Please do not—what’s the phrase?—snap formulas at me, M.” The grownup grinned. “You are far from rude. You are stimulating, and I’d like to beg the favor of a little conversation without anyone listening in who might mistake stimulation for ill manners. When’s your recess?”

  “We don’t have recesses in Middle College. But I’ve got a pass to get out of Phex at ten hundred hours.”

  “Excellent. I’ll code a grove for us. You do have groves here?”

  “Oh, sure. But can you ...”

  “Oh, I’m not print illiterate, M. Cunningham. I cannot program, but I imagine I can tab letters onto the screen. And present circumstances would seem to warrant this bending of my customary caution. Shall we code it ‘Holmes and Watson’?”

  “Uh ... Look, I’ve got to hurry or I’ll be late.” The half-break warning chimed and Cunningham jumped into a joggle, as fast as the hall traffic allowed—kids started moving pretty fast after the warning. He only looked back once, at the corner. M. Poe was strolling along at one side, out of the rush. He didn’t look insulted or anything, so that was a relief. Cunningham tried to pass a grin, but he had to hurry on before he could tell if M. Poe received it. He also thought he saw Princeps Cage still standing back near the door of Homeroom Six, but that was too far away to be sure and the boy didn’t have time for a good look.

  Mom had cleared him the pass because his Monday morning Phex was swimming. He’d been thinking maybe he should try to go anyway—he couldn’t scare away from ’natoriums all the rest of his life. But he was watching Holmes and Watson screenshows at home—getting a jump on when they’d get a few of the really old ones in Primeschool Senior classes—so he knew there was a Lestrade in some of the Holmes and Watson stories, not just in the Three Phunny Inspectors comic strip with Clouseau and Marchpane.

  Chapter 16

  Lestrade rinsed the footbath splotches down to a muted green shadow, wrung her trousers and tunic out, and tossed them beneath the blowdrier. She put them back on still damp, but unwrinkled and static-free. Silkrester was practical that way. Also, it would finish drying quickly, and meanwhile look no different damp than dry. Nevertheless, she emerged feeling secretly more like a traditional lestrade than a disguised tracy.

  Two more people had come into the lounge. A thin young woman gulping pastry, and a plump older one sitting quietly on the couch, her lap full of embroidery.

  The first fellow was charged and waiting. “This lounge is neutral territory, M. Policewoman. It’s guaranteed in our contracts. Twenty meters down the hall you’ll find some student groves.”

  “And students don’t have contracts to guarantee their own neutral territory.” Lestrade had planned a speedy return to the computer lab for her partner, but now she sat on one of the high snack-bar stools and looked at the irate young prof.

  “This lounge,” he repeated, frowning back, “is absolutely reserved for—”

  “Here now, Thane Eric,” said the embroiderer. “This warrior has the right of it. The law of hospitality is older and weightier than a few school regulations.”

  Thane Eric turned to her. “But it’s a Norman, Dame Elfreda.”

  The embroiderer glanced at Lestrade and returned to her needlework. “Sa, sa? Even if it were the Conqueror himself, we must give truce and hospitality to all who claim it beneath our roof.”

  Eric shrugged. “As you will, Dame Elfreda.” His attitude toward the older prof seemed to be affectionate respect, with little or none of the smugness reality perceivers often directed against fantasy-perceiving fellow workers. (And, be fair, vice versa.)

  Lestrade left the snack bar and crossed to the couch. “Dame Elfreda Swanneck?”

  “You have my name, good guest. No doubt but it’s known in the country hereabout.” Dame Elfreda paused with her needle in midstitch. She wore a floor-length white tunic, and her predominantly silver hair hung in a braid over one shoulder, its end brushing her ankle.

  “My name is Rosemary Lestrade. Regional Police.”

  “Ah.” The older woman finished pulling her needle through. “We thank you for your name, though it be indeed a French one. Thou see’st, Thane Eric, our guest is honorable. No visitor meaning mischief would give his name so readily beneath our roof-tree.”

  “You can’t trust Normans, Dame. Remember Duke William’s tricks beneath his own roof-tree.”

  “Oh, Eric!” said the thin young woman, speaking for the first time.

  “All right,” he grumbled. “But the police shouldn’t come bothering us here. Not in our private lounges on our break time.”

  Lestrade took a few steps toward him. “Sorry, M., but I find it difficult to regard your private professorial lounges as more sacro
sanct than your homes. And the late M. Sapperfield probably interpreted his own contract as giving him a tacit guarantee to walk anywhere around his place of work without needing to guard his back.”

  Eric stiffened still more. “I spent last Friday evening logged into a screen meeting of my applied physics association. Before that I ate an early dinner at Jinny Wu’s, halfway across town.”

  “So you seem more worried about being blamed for M. Sapperfield’s demise than about the idea that whoever was responsible is still at large to strike again.” Lestrade unclipped her notecom. “Could I have your full name now, Thane Eric, or would you prefer I dropped in on you later somewhere else? Say, your classroom?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said the young woman. “He’s Eric Fermi, I’m Allegra Adagio. I suppose that’s all you need for now.”

  “We’ll want your prints, M. Adagio,” Lestrade replied more gently, “but that can wait.” She tabbed in their names. “Physics professor and music director?”

  “Vocal music only,” Adagio clarified.

  “Dame Allegra,” Swanneck said pleasantly, “is ale mulled for our guest and our own cheer?”

  Adagio got up and started filling mugs with hot coffee. “Mulled ale,” she informed Lestrade in an undertone. “I’ll bring it to you.”

  Lestrade went back and sat in a plastimesh airchair beside the couch. She would have liked to interview Swanneck in private, but an anonymous tip was not sufficient grounds to insist on it, and the present chance seemed too opportune to pass up. “Beautiful embroidery, Dame Elfreda.”

  “Thank you. Ah! We thank thee, Dame Allegra,” Swanneck added as Adagio came offering her one of two mugs. “But remember: guests are always served first.”

  Exaggerating her flourish just a little, the music prof presented Lestrade with the first mug. Swanneck then accepted the second, lifted it to the guest, and said, “Wassail.”

  Lestrade’s mind blanked. The only response she could think of was, “Skol.”

  “Drink-hail,” Swanneck corrected her mildly, took a sip, and leaned forward across her needlework to murmur with a wink, “I know we aren’t ‘really’ drinking ale from brimming horns, M. And I’m aware the world has seen a little new history since the Year of Our Lord Ten Eighty-five. But they humor me, the young ones, and I enjoy it.” Sitting straight, she used one hand to spread a length of embroidered cloth over her lap, showing it off better. It was a grandiose piece of work, completely covering her long skirt and bunching in folds on the couch; and it was worth complimenting—reminiscent of the Bayeux Tapestry, but crammed with a background of coils done in tiny stitches of riotous color.