The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “I didn’t know you were here today,” said Cunningham. “I should’ve guessed, huh?”

  “It’s been a hard morning,” she said, and tossed her empty cup to M. Poe. “Get me another one, will you please, M.? Take your time.”

  M. Poe closed the door on his way out. Cunningham wiggled a little in his bagchair and the plastic grains seemed to make more noise than usual. Sergeant Lestrade took a pipe out of her pouch, put it in her mouth, and looked at him.

  “You aren’t really smoking it,” he said.

  “Perceptive of you,” she replied. “A fancier would have tried to dress me down for smoking in school.”

  “Yeah, or else asked for a puff.” Was that snitching? No, because he hadn’t told any names. “I never snuck a puff myself,” he added truthfully.

  “I never did, either.”

  “I bet you never got called to the princeps’ sanctum for anything.”

  “Once,” she said. “Just once.” Her jaw seemed to set. “Not for sneaking a few puffs in the comfort station.”

  He wanted to ask what it was like. She must have been a realizer too, even when she was a kid. She must know exactly. He wondered what she’d done. But he didn’t quite dare spring the question, not when her jaw was tight like that. He tried to think about her as a kid, and all he could picture was her the way she was now, grownup and standing in front of a fat princeps like M. Cage, wagging her pipe at him and making him look short. At last he said, “I bet you’re here to question people, huh?”

  “That’s right. Of course, we can hardly expect to tie everything up in one morning.”

  He looked at the door. M. Poe could have been back with her cola by now. That must have been a signal she passed him, to leave them alone. The boy wiggled again, and his bagchair growled. “M. Lestrade,” he said, trying to make his voice deep and grownup, “you’re here to question me again, too, huh?”

  She sort of tapped the end of her pipe along her lips and kept looking at him.

  His eyes felt like they were watering. He blinked. “Don’t treat me like a kid,” he said. “Please. Don’t start treating me like a kid.”

  She sighed, put her pipe away, and took out her notecom. “All right, M. Cunningham. Have you told anyone besides your parents and homekeeper any details of your experience last Friday night?”

  “Yeah—Yes, M. My whole homeroom—M. Sapperfield’s homeroom. Six. Uh…except for Yance Datsun, he wasn’t there yet, but the other kids told him when he got in.”

  “That was when?”

  “This morning.” Cunningham was surprised. When else?

  “Just had to clarify that, M.” She tabbed it on her notecom. “Did you tell anyone else between Friday night and this morning? Names and times, as exactly as you can remember.”

  “Well, Badger—M. Badderley. I called him Saturday morning early, about oh six hundred.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Name, too?”

  “Name, too.” She looked up from her notecom at him. “M. Cunningham, sometimes we’ve got to snitch. Once in a while it’s more important to spill the right things to the right people.”

  “Oh.” Anyway, it wasn’t really snitching. It was more like telling on himself. “M. Hawthorne. Saturday after breakfast, about ... uh ... oh nine-thirty.”

  “M. Sheryl Hawthorne?”

  “Yes.” After all, she hadn’t done anything, just listened. Well, she had called him first, on their house phone to see if he was home yet, or he wouldn’t have called her back. She knew about the bet, and she was okay for a girl, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it, it was just—once she started asking how he’d done last night, he had to talk about it, tell her enough to shut her up.

  “Anyone else?” said Senior Sergeant Lestrade.

  “No.” He shook his head. “No one. Honest.”

  “All right. Do you know anything about an anonymous list of suspects that showed up in the police databank Saturday morning or early afternoon?”

  “Huh?” That was all he could say.

  “Sometime Saturday, someone entered an anonymous tiplist in our databank, programmed to come out only for my name. Could it have been M. Badderley or M. Hawthorne?”

  “Or me?” So that was why M. Poe sawed about it so much. Senior Sergeant Lestrade must have planned it all out with him! The boy felt too many tears for a few blinks, so he turned his head away from the policewoman. “No. It wasn’t me. I didn’t snitch on anyone. I couldn’t have snitched on anyone. And I’m not a noseycaster. And I don’t think Badger or Sherry did it, either.”

  She sighed loud enough he could hear it. “I didn’t think you did. I had to ask anyway, for the record. Did you mention my name to either M. Badderley or M. Hawthorne?”

  He made an honest effort to remember. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” No, that wasn’t right. He probably had talked about her. She was so ... so golly, even if his mom didn’t think so. “Yeah, maybe. To Badger. Maybe to Sherry—M. Hawthorne, too. That wasn’t like snitching on you, was it?”

  “Of course it wasn’t. But whoever planted that list had to know earlier than about lunchtime Saturday that M. Sapperfield was dead and that I’m investigating. That doesn’t mean you or either of your friends put the tiplist into our databank, not even that one of you was directly responsible for the leak. But there has to be a leak somewhere, and if we don’t find it, we won’t know how reliable the tiplist could be.”

  He felt a little better, now she was explaining things again. He wiped his eyes and turned back. “M. Poe said you never paid any attention to lists like that anyway. He said you blanked ’em because you figured they came from cranks and grudgers.” Cunningham wondered who was on the list, but didn’t ask. His own name couldn’t be on it, or they wouldn’t have thought maybe he’d put it in himself.

  Sergeant Lestrade smiled. “I don’t say M. Poe’s completely off base, but to the best of my knowledge he’s never worked in a police station.”

  “And he’s a fancier, too. Cloudy as a fancier, anyway.”

  “Well,” she said. “I don’t think he’d take that as an insult.”

  “Sergeant ... what do they do to kids before they’re old enough to start taking the Test? I mean, if it ... if it turns out a kid did it, will they put ’em in a fancy-class asylum? Even if they’re realizers, just because they’re not old enough to take the Test and declare?”

  She sighed again. “Fortunately, it doesn’t happen all that often. But there are a couple of youth detention centers where juveniles are held until they’re old enough to take the Test and get shipped off to the asylum or the realizers’ pen.”

  So that risk wasn’t quite so bad, anyway. He took a deep breath. He felt ashamed and scared, sort of whooshy, but sooner or later they’d arrest him anyway, just because of how things looked. Here she was even suspecting him of putting in that tiplist, wasn’t she? So why not get it over with? He wished he had more time to hash it out with himself, but so long as she was here, he’d better hurry or maybe he’d jelly out or maybe she’d leave ... “Sergeant Lestrade,” he began, and then he changed it a little, after all, or maybe it changed itself, coming out: “If I confessed and said I…told you I pushed him in and…and tabbed the button, then you’d have to arrest me right away, wouldn’t you?”

  Chapter 25

  Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade sat for what seemed like an unprofessionally long time and stared at the boy she wouldn’t have minded having for a son. Her first coherent thought seemed to be, Where the hell is that idiot Poe with my drink? What she said was, “Is that a confession, M. Cunningham?”

  “Well ...”

  “False confessions are serious business, M. Like false alarms. Sometimes worse. If nothing else, they waste police time and funds that could have been spent tracking down the real culprit.”

  He shrugged and looked at her
helplessly, blinking again. “Yeah, but ... Well, I guess you’ve gotta take me in now, huh? To check it out and all? I guess you’d be doing it sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t you?”

  This time he wiped the tears without turning his face away from her. Somehow she found that comforting. She rose. “If you’ll excuse me a few moments, M. Cunningham, I want to consult with my associate.”

  She went out into the vending area and closed the door again behind her. It took her a second to spot Poe, lounging in Grove C with the door open and his eyes shut. He was at hand and her actual junior partner was off on his own interviews. She felt just as happy, in this particular case, to take the associate at hand. Standing in the doorway of Grove C, she said Poe’s name.

  “Ah.” He got to his feet and looked around, probably trying to see where Cunningham was. “Did I fail to give you the right amount of time? The suns on these doors are one-way mirrors and I’m given to understand there are listening holes as well, but—”

  “He just confessed,” said the policewoman.

  “What?”

  “The kid just confessed. Or as good as.”

  Poe came forward to the doorway and looked over her shoulder at Grove B, then back to her. “I was about to assure you that he was the last person to suspect of having entered that list. I still cannot believe, based on my own observation—”

  “Not the tiplist.” She shook her head. “The murder. The actual goddamn murder.”

  For a second she thought Poe was going to touch her shoulder. She drew back into the vending area.

  “In so many words?” he said at last.

  She shook her head helplessly. If she were Dave Click, she’d have a sound recording. Being herself, and feeling the way she did about this boy, she’d kept the present interview to com notes. “He said, ‘If I confessed and told you I pushed him in and tabbed the button, then you’d have to run me in, wouldn’t you?’”

  Poe was still holding the little plastic cup she’d handed him. He crushed it absent-mindedly in one hand. No refilling it now, straight to the recycling bin. She thought, too bad you can’t recycle people so easily.

  “He’s terrified of going to the princeps’ sanctum after school today,” said Poe. “He may hope to escape that through an immediate arrest.”

  “He’d rather go to the police station than the princeps’ sanctum?”

  “Quite possibly. He didn’t mention his fears to you? No, perhaps he wouldn’t. Adult that I am, and splendid example of interior decoration that M. Cage’s sanctum indisputably is, it briefly took on a fearsome aspect even for me this morning—an invited adult visitor. Granted, you were responsible for that, after the good princeps had left us. Nevertheless—”

  “You’re a dedicated fancier. That kid is a realizer. Underage, yes, but a reality perceiver all the same. You’re telling me a junior realizer would prefer the police station, detention center, and risk of lock-up for life to half an hour or so in the princeps’ sanctum?”

  “He is also a child,” said Poe. “Children—even junior realizers—live in the present. Asylum or prison may be threats too far in the shadowy future for him truly to feel. But in the more immediate view—this same afternoon, within the next few hours—between the unknown threats of sanctum and station ... Yes, I conceive that in his place I might well prefer the latter. All the more so considering that he adulates you, M. Lestrade.”

  She frowned at him.

  He went on, “Yes, pure hero-worship. It was very obvious in the way he stood to greet you.”

  “Then he’d better learn some guts,” said the policewoman. “He’d better learn to take his medicine like a mensch. Not try to slide out by telling lies and hiding behind false arrest.”

  Leaving Poe, she marched back to Grove B. As soon as she opened the door, the kid stood up again, wiping his eyes hurriedly. She guessed by the redness that he’d been crying the whole time since she stepped out. She wanted to take hold of him, hug the truth out of him. But it was the polly’s time to stay on top. She shut the door, sat with her back to it, and motioned him to sit down again.

  He sat, watching her and sniffing.

  “M. Cunningham,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “What was I just telling you about false confessions?”

  “They ... waste your time. And keep you from finding the real ... uh ... killer. And cost money.”

  “Especially, they keep us from finding the real killer. Blow your nose.”

  He got out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Lestrade’s grandmother used to give her paper handkerchiefs. Real paper handkerchiefs were a luxury item these days, and even rich realizers usually preferred carrying washable cloth to worrying about recycling bins.

  The policewoman unclipped her tapebox, set it on the floor between them, and tabbed it on. “All right, M. Start with your name. Family name, too.”

  He looked down at it. “Cunningham Roberts Cunningham. Hey, you didn’t put the bobber on, did you?”

  She stopped the recording. “Bobbers are toys, M. Cunningham. Lie detectors are a fancy tale. They haven’t invented one yet that detects actual lies, just a lot of gadgets for measuring people’s nerves and acting ability.”

  “Your junior sergeant turned it on.”

  “My junior sergeant likes to play with gadgets.” She backed the tape up and started it again right after the place where he’d given his name. “Straight and simple. Did you have anything to do with M. Sapperfield’s death?”

  He didn’t look up. “No. Except I found him…his body. That’s all.”

  “Why did you hint around to me a few minutes ago that maybe you did?”

  He glanced up at her, then down at the tapebox again. “I ... uh ... I’ve got to go to the princeps’ sanctum after school. I thought maybe ... maybe I could get out of it.”

  She let out a deep sigh. Poe had figured it right, blank him. She reached down and tabbed off the box. “Kid, you understand what you were letting yourself in for?”

  He looked up at her and his eyes widened. “... a memory stim?”

  “Maybe. But probably not. The quickest thing for us would be to shoot you with a truth drug. We’d have to clear it with your parents, but they’d probably jump at the chance to establish your innocence. We’d have you home this evening, too groggy to do your homework, but you’d be back in school tomorrow, and M. Cage could hail you to his sanctum then. At best, you’d postpone it one day and get yourself a nice little police record for false confession. That kind of thing doesn’t look good when you come to take the perception Test. If you aim to register as a reality perceiver, that false confession would cost you about fifty points.”

  “Oh.”

  Besides, she thought at him, if you can’t take one trip into the sanctum when you deserve it ...

  “Sergeant Lestrade,” he said in a hesitant voice, “was it really bad, what I did? Hiding out in school like that? I wasn’t going to hurt anything. I was going to shower and everything before I got in the pool, so I wouldn’t upset M. Pinesweep’s balance or hurt the fish or anything. I went in through the pool area to take a look first, but I was going to go in the dressing room and shower, I wasn’t just going to jump in. Honest. I didn’t even take any food out of the kitchen, I never even got to a profs’ lounge.”

  “Your princeps is the one to hear all that.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess so. But it wasn’t really so bad, was it?”

  “It was stupid, M. Cunningham. You could have jumped into that pool and caught a cramp. You could have fallen on your way down from the skyview and lain there with a broken leg all weekend, and your wristphone in your locker.”

  “Badger knew where I was. If I didn’t get home or call him Saturday.”

  Cautions were for his mother to deliver. And M. Executrix would have done it over the weekend. And what is this, anyway, Le
strade thought, get angry with him for cowardice and then dress him down for daring? Aloud, she said, “Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Take your medicine’?”

  “Yes. It means ... like going to the princeps’ sanctum, huh?”

  “Can you figure out why we call it medicine?”

  He looked from her to the floor several times, but she didn’t prompt him. “Because medicine used to taste bad?” he ventured at last.

  “Because it’s good for you.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  She clipped the tapebox to her belt and stood.

  “Sergeant ... I guess you still have to take me in now. Huh? Just to check it out and make sure?”

  She stared at him. “You want a ride to the police station? You really want to get shot with truth juice?”

  His tunic was polysil, but even polysil eventually wrinkled under sufficient pressure, and he wasn’t exactly ironing the front hem by working it back and forth in his fingers. “I guess I’d better phone my mom and tell her how come I’ll get home late. Because of going to the princeps’ sanctum, I mean.”

  She caught a glimmering. “You want an anchor. An insurance policy. Is that it?”

  “Huh?”

  What psychodocs called the Watershed Blindspot, and vending machine corporations took advantage of to rake in the tridols at travel stations. Come up on a watershed in your life—even if it was nothing more than a long-distance trip on the tube train—and you found yourself unable to visualize anything on the other side. (This has to be the time when the Rockies are going to fall in on the train tunnel and we’ll all be killed.) Your first time in the princeps’ sanctum could count as a watershed, if you were a kid. Sometimes adults coped with it by getting themselves anchors to the future: a new nightgown laid out ready on the bed to wear the night you came home safe from the trip, a business appointment scheduled a few days after the big tennis tournament. Maybe all Cunningham wanted today was an anchor, even if it had to be a less than pleasant one.

  “All right, M.,” she said. “We can run you in if you want. After Princeps Cage is done with you. Satisfactory?”