The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  The door gave a soft popping sound. Her eyes open at once, she pushed through, stunpen in hand and partner at her shoulder. Around the curved mosaic that had screened the office from their view. The office was shut up and dark. Down the halls to the aquanatorium area, clippersole shoes virtually silent on the spongy sound-soak. Good an omen as any that surprise was the better plan of attack.

  They reached the door to the boys’ dressing room. It was locked.

  The long fireguard strip, regulation equipment to keep infernos from spreading, was tight in place. The only things that would make it slide down and lock were the automatic heat trigger and keys issued only to princeps and maintenance engineer. Once locked, not even the engineer’s central control could easily unlock it, only those two keys.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Click muttered.

  “We won’t, not through sound-soak and fireguard.” Lestrade led the race around to the ’natorium doors. They were immovable, firebolted from inside.

  Click turned his stunpen to the emergency key end. “I can cut through into the boys’ room faster.” Obviously, since that fireguard was on their side.

  “Go for it. Don’t wait for me.” Every fireguard was on its own individual control. Guiderules. “There’s a chance he forgot the girls’ door.” While her partner sprinted back to the boys’ room door, she headed on around. No waiting for polite clearance at the mikebox this time.

  He had forgotten the girls’ dressing room. Or else not taken time to come all the way around. Maybe the ancient taboo was still strong, even to a murderer. She took the footbath in one touchdown, careless of wetness, cautious only of the splashing sound. So long as he’d also forgotten the girls’ door to the pool area—

  He had! She pushed through and stood in full view of the ’natorium. They were there, all right, on the other side of the pool, near the control for the steelglass cover. They hadn’t seen her yet. Cunningham was too busy flailing fists and legs, Cage too busy throwing him into the pool. The boy hit the water screaming.

  Lestrade had her stunner up and pointed. Right after the splash she said, very calm, “Don’t do it, M. Cage. A stun isn’t fatal, but the aftereffects can be unpleasant.”

  He stared at her—a realizer gone berserk—and bent to the control anyway. Still very calm, she blasted before he could touch the button. In that instant, she could have blasted him with a shotgun just as calmly. Like all stunshocks, it came out smooth, silent, and invisible, caught him square and toppled him into the water.

  She left him for Click and Pinesweep to fish out. They were just getting in through the boys’ dressing room. Pinesweep would have heard them over the phone line and come with his fireguard key ready. Stunner returned to belt, she was down at the side of the pool reaching out both hands for Cunningham, who came swimming his heart out, reaching her as fast as he could. Good swimmer, she thought. Future Olympic material. He caught her hands and hauled himself out, sobbing.

  Then they had their arms around each other and she didn’t know which of them was hugging harder.

  * * * *

  Epilog

  * * * *

  “We had an appointment,” said Senior Sergeant Lestrade. “I knew he’d keep it, so when he didn’t, I knew something was wrong. It was really as simple as that.”

  They sat rehashing it with a small, select party at 37NW Novoposhni Restates: just Cunningham and his family, the two police sergeants, and Corwin Poe with his fiancee Angela Garvey.

  “But when I saw her intuition start into overdrive,” said Click, “I knew it was time to stand back and follow. Her intuition can be fireworks.”

  “Yeah!” said Cunningham.

  The senior sergeant basked a little, playing with her pipe. “Intuition’s a useful tool, once your reason is trained to recognize when it should let instinct take the lead. Of course, the pointers were there right along. Like the watch crystal. M. Cage cracked it on something at the poolside when he was scrabbling for the button Friday night. The crystal didn’t fall off until he reached the hallway outside his office, where M. Dutois found it Monday morning. But M. Cage never noticed the damage till later, when he was on his way by fast needletrain to that conference in the Rockies. Then he was afraid the crystal had fallen somewhere in the pool area, so he threw the rest of the watch into the handiest mountain chasm. There was also the atmosphere he had charged his sanctum with. M. Poe sensed it for a moment, but not until after the princeps himself had left.”

  “So I ascribed it to my own returning fantasy perception, coupled with lingering misgivings about you,” Poe added contentedly.

  “M. Badderley sensed it, too. Probably M. Dutois as well. Even my hard-headed partner with his almost perfect reality Test score. In fact, granted M. Cage’s psychopattern these last five years, probably every kid with any fantasy perceiving tendency at all, which means most kids anywhere, have sensed something in that sanctum.”

  “That’s why they told all those stories!” said Cunningham.

  Poe smiled. “Or at least one reason they told many of them.”

  “But I’m a reality perceiver,” the boy went on, “so I didn’t notice anything really suspicious till I heard him lying on the phone. Except shadows and stuff, but they were natural.”

  “Fanciers,” said Woodstock Baez, turning his supposed reefer in his fingers, “often see reality at a depth realizers never suspect.”

  “Weren’t you taking a chance?” asked M. Whitworth, the house manager, who sat with the family because employer-servant social distinctions were alien to the world of Woodstock Baez. “M. Pinesweep still could have been the murderer, couldn’t he?”

  Lestrade shook her head and let Click field that one.

  “We blanked him for that role as soon as we found out first hand how he felt about his ecosystems,” said the junior sergeant. “M. Pinesweep would never have polluted his aquanatorium. He’d have killed Sapperfield somewhere else.”

  “But why did M. Cage do it?” said Angela Garvey, for whom believing evil of almost anybody required a near heroic effort of imagination.

  Lestrade replied, “He had at least as much reason to hate M. Sapperfield as anyone else had, and more than several. He should never have been kicked upstairs. By all accounts, he was a reasonably good band director. He hated the job of princeps, maintained his authority by becoming a sort of underworld-type kingpin to the student body, sensed that something had gone wrong with his psyche but couldn’t bring himself to give up the higher status and pay once he had it, so spent five years resenting M. Sapperfield more and more bitterly for making him a type of Frankenstein’s monster. That Friday evening he went to the belowpool lounge for a few minutes before leaving to catch his subtrain. He glimpsed someone lingering above, dropping pebbles at the ’natorium specimens. So he went upstairs, and when he found his old nemesis, all the resentment boiled up. The crime itself was spur of the moment, the hardest kind of case for us to crack without good prints or other lab evidence.”

  “He’d probably have gotten away with it,” said Click, “if he hadn’t panicked and thought there’d been a witness.”

  Mary Executrix said, “But he should have known that if Cunningham had actually witnessed it, he would already have told you.”

  “He had spent the weekend dancing on the point of a needle,” said Poe. “When by Monday afternoon the blow had neither fallen nor had the police shown any sign of suspecting him in particular, he must have grown steadily more anxious to retain his margin of safety. Or perhaps he feared blackmail at some future date, when the witness would be grown.”

  “More likely he was afraid Cunningham would remember something if we shot him with memstim or truth juice,” said Click.

  “I’m not so sure he would have gotten away with it,” said Lestrade. “We’d have come to him sooner or later, in course of checking all possibilities. We should have suspected hi
m sooner, except for his position and our anonymous tiplist. The tipster was another student.” (Chances were that Cunningham and his mother, if no one else present, could guess who, but the pollies kept Mandra’s name out of it and the rest of the company respected the unknown’s privacy.) “This student entered the suspects’ names in good faith, and several of them actually looked like strong leads, though one or two were fairly obvious long-shots from the outset. However, it would take a very exceptional student to suspect a princeps. Even more than profs, maintenance engineers, and grownups in general, princeps are more like demigods than people—strange, exalted beings of whom it’s hard to imagine they have any existence or emotions away from their official spheres. Sometimes it’s even a little hard for us grownups to suspect authority figures, at least when they’re personal strangers to us. So between our anonymous false leads and M. Cage’s mantle of authority, it might have taken a while before we checked what time he arrived at his conference in the Rockies.”

  Cunningham covered a yawn. His mother had permitted him a small glass of wine with the company, and now, at 22:00, it would be hard for any kid whose sleep had been less than tranquil for several nights not to start getting exhausted with adult conversation.

  M. Whitworth nodded at the boy. “Speaking of time.”

  Mary Executrix rose. “Ready to try it again, son?”

  “Aw, Mom, not yet. We didn’t ask her yet.”

  “You’re right, Cunningham,” said Woodstock. “Ask her, Mary. It’s not my subculture.”

  Executrix turned to Lestrade. “Sergeant, there’s an old custom. Godmothers. As Woodstock says, he hasn’t encountered them in his subculture, and I don’t belong to one of the churches that still require them.” She smiled quickly. “So the position of Cunningham’s godmother is still open, and if you’d be interested ... We’d have lost him if it hadn’t been for you,” she added in a low voice.

  “M. Executrix, I’d be honored.”

  * * * *

  In the end, because of the trouble with nightmares and because he had an excused absence tomorrow, they let Cunningham stay up until he dozed off on the couch with his head on Woodstock’s knee. Corwin and Angela had departed, Dave was enjoying a game of screen tricks with Dilly Whitworth, and Mary Executrix entrusted Lestrade with carrying the boy upstairs.

  He woke as she was tucking him in by the glow of a nightlight shaped like Halley’s Comet. “Mom?”

  “Lestrade here.”

  “Godmom.” His hand groped up. Taking it in hers, she sat down on the bed beside him. “Do you ever have nightmares?” he went on. “About—about your cases and stuff.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I bet you’ve had a lot of real bad cases? A lot of squeaky escapes?”

  “A few.” She squeezed his hand. “You go on living, and eventually they pale out and fade away.”

  “You don’t think it’ll happen to Dame Elfreda, do you? What happened to Princeps Cage?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m sure it won’t. They’re two completely different types, and Dame Elfreda is fully aware that as a fancier she can’t serve as acting princeps for longer than six months. Besides, if it happened to authority figures as a general thing, we’d have suspected M. Cage a lot sooner.”

  “We’ve still got to take on Big D, too,” said Cunningham. “Because he’s still mad at Badger for telling Sergeant Click about the bet. We hope the Postgrad Court’ll allow us to fight him two to one, Albuquerque Rules. Because he’s so much bigger. And because it was serious business. Don’t tell Mom. She’d get worried.”

  “You’ll do fine. The Big D is a bully, but he’s wide open about it. We had one just like him in my old midschool, and she turned out okay. Two years ago she was named Railsplitter of the Year.”

  Cunningham giggled. “Thanks. Uh, where’s Herman?”

  Her glance fell on the toy woolly mammoth lying between bed and nightlight. It looked something like a Herman, and it was within her reach when she bent down to retrieve it. “This Herman?”

  “Yeah. ... It’s all right, isn’t it?”

  “M. Cunningham, I slept with a purple panda named Wanda until I was twenty-three years old.”

  He grinned. “Thanks. You don’t have to em me anymore. Not now you’re my godmom.”

  She sat resisting the temptation to smooth his hair over his forehead with her free hand. About the time she thought he had finally fallen asleep still holding tight, he sighed drowsily, loosened his grip, and said, “You can go now, Godmom. If you want. I can make it by myself.”

  “I know you can,” she told him. “Godson, I know you can.”

  * * * *

  When Corwin Poe paid his subsequent visit to the school a few weeks later, he found the atmosphere in the princeps’ sanctum quite changed. Now, he saw the Gabinny stained glass window as lovers in a woodland glade.

  “I never dreamed, when first I came to Owlsfane Garber as a slip of a girl,” Dame Elfreda confided, “that someday I would serve as princeps, even for part of a term. I hope, if nothing else, I can bequeath to the next princeps a functioning Student All-Thing. The students have one now, you know, underground and unofficial. It just oversaw a case involving some aftermath of the last unpleasantness, quite successfully, they tell me. Poor M. Cage frowned on all such activities, but M. Schoolcraft, his predecessor, had laid down plans to grant it official recognition. I wonder if we could arrange to have M. Schoolcraft come out of retirement and take the reins back for a year or two?”

  * * * *

  Slamkowski and Harrigan had allowed Badderley and Cunningham two to one against Dutois, Albuquerque Rules. Nobody ended up permanently scarred. Dame Elfreda had understood correctly.

  NOTES.

  General. In my twenties or thirties, I read about a parlor game that had purportedly been popular a generation or two earlier: when a group had gathered in somebody’s living room, one of its members would enter with the made-up report that so-and-so (a person known to everyone in the group but not that evening personally present) had just been murdered. The person playing detective would begin questioning everyone else; and by the account I read, it was uncanny how often, even with everyone making their answers up on the spot, the process would overwhelmingly point to one of them in particular as the murderer. When I sat down to write The Monday after Murder (working title: Cunningham), which may have been inspired by a vague dream about a boy in a school, I thought I’d play a similar game with myself: provide the situation and a selection of suspects, and investigate it along with my detectives. The only thing I knew from the outset was that my juvenile hero was no more guilty than either the investigating pollies or Corwin Poe. My memory says that sure enough, the speed with which I saw who must have done it, astonished even me.

  * * * *

  The computer situation. I was extrapolating from what I could see of it as it was in 1983. Our present reality beggars my extrapolations; but the same can be said of the works of more attentive SF giants than I, even some of the genre’s ghods. Retyping my early work, I decided to appeal to the alternative timeline theory rather than attempt the massive effort of bringing the last third of their 21st century technologically into extrapolative line with the first decade and a half of ours. Indeed, things may in some sense retrograde; as of June 2014, I should not feel surprised if the malware and computer virus problems were to end by destroying the Internet as we know and love it.

  * * * *

  Phex. In my own school era and locale, we talked about “Phys-Ed,” pronounced “fizz-ED.” A few years later and a few hundred miles farther north, I found everyone around me talking about “Phy-Ed,” pronounced “FIE-ed.” To my ears, “FIE-ed” has so awkward and lumpish a sound that I could not bring myself to use it, and opted for “Phex” as a not totally improbable future contraction.

  * * * *

  “The Sapper Once Ste
pped on a Cobra.” The children’s song I had in mind seems far more obscure than I had supposed: a quick Internet search (March 8, 2014), of the kind that turns up favorite after childhood favorite which I had previously thought quite obscure, fails to hit this anything recognizable as this one. I read it in a Sunday supplement magazine article long decades ago: it described various comically horrible fates befalling “my uncle.” The article’s author suggested various protagonal victims whom children fond of their uncles might substitute, among them “Nikita,” which dates the piece to the Khrushchev era. Many stanzas were given, one of them beginning, “My uncle once stepped on a cobra.” The second line, which I can’t quite remember, describes his apology. “His politeness so tickled the cobra/That it weeps every day on his grave.”

  * * * *

  Corwin Poe’s engagement bracelet. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, I happened to learn of a movement introducing engagement rings for men. This was welcome news to me. As far as I know, it had never been heard of in 1983.

  * * * *

  Door locks. In 1983, the kind using plastic cards as keys may already have been appearing here and there, but I had not yet made their close acquaintance.

  * * * *

  Peking Peace Day. As far as I know, the more correct version of the city’s Chinese name hadn’t yet come into widespread use or awareness when I wrote this novel. The change to “Beijing” would have been easy enough; but I liked the alternate timeline effect as well as the alliteration of the old name.

  * * * *

  By modern SFWA word-count definitions, “Who Mourns for Silverstairs?” probably counts as a “novelette” or even “novella.” But having grown up with older definitions than mere word counts, I think of “Silverstairs” as a long short story. Had I not wanted to use “Variety’s Name” as a bridge, I might well have placed “Silverstairs” before The Monday after Murder, since its events come at the beginning of Rosemary Lestrade’s career, long Dave Click’s time with the force.