The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Every Thursday evening eight or nine of us used to gather for Dungeon Chess. We were a mixed group—both sexes, various ages, reality perceivers and fantasy perceivers—but Kelly was the only rich one. She hosted the group once, in ’75, and never again. Swank surroundings corkscrewed too many of the members.

  In honor of the Tricentennial we programmed a scenario based on the Original American Revolution, and liked it so well we were still at it three years later. Most of the other players traded off their roles from week to week as a tickle on me, but Kelly always played her same character (at least, I think she did): Dolly Revere, a female cross between Paul Revere and Nathan Hale. I always saw her in powdered wig and beauty patch.

  On the night it happened, all of us except Danton Darnay, who was knocked out with a full sixteen-symptom cold, had met at Zach Wu’s place about 19:00, as usual, played five hours and put the game on holding pattern about midnight. Kelly left right away with Signy Tordisdatter. I went home within five minutes, and so did “Arnold Benedict.” Arnold was their favorite floating role, and I hadn’t guessed who played him that session. Everybody else was settling down for a gabchurn with Zach.

  An hour and a half later, Arnold came scratching at my door. Even before he started telling me about it, I could see the blood on his jacket.

  He hadn’t planned to kill her, just knock her out, steal her bank card, get her thumbprint on remoldak, and suck out the maximum withdrawal before morning. But he hadn’t ever knocked anyone out before, only seen it in plays and screenshows. The first blow just stunned her. He panicked, hit again, and went on hitting. When she finally lay quiet, she was dead with her head bashed bloody, and he felt like mush. He came to me because he had to drain it off onto somebody.

  What do you do when one of your friends tells you he’s murdered another one? Even casual friends ... who’ve been casual friends for years. The law of the land says you do your citizen’s duty and report it as soon as you can. But when it actually happens, your loyalties twist around with shock and grief and self-preservation. He just killed one friend, why not another? I may have urged him aloud to give himself up, and been scared by the way he took the advice.

  I didn’t ask him who he really was. I’m not sure I could think clearly enough to decide whether I wanted to know.

  Maybe after he left, if I’d had a personal phone, or felt less like a priest-confessor, or even if my statement could have been useful…but when I found myself cramming things into my old artcase about 20:00 or 21:00, I still didn’t know if I intended to go to the police or try to leave town.

  Whatever the weather had been like that day, it was sleeting now, cold late-autumn sleet. I tabbed off the light and looked out the window. A pair of headlight beams came sliding around the corner, gilding the sleet-slants as they sliced on down to the black macapave. I put on my coat, wrapped my sticky old rainsheet around it, went down the four flights of stairs, and found two pollies in the lower hallway.

  “M. Gervase Nemo?” said one.

  I knew they were there about what had happened to Kelly, felt too numb just then to wonder how they’d connected me with it. I nodded and went with them, packed and ready.

  For everything but people and sometimes what they’re wearing, my perceptions are very standard. If it weren’t for people, I could probably register as a realizer. The older polly looked to me like the pictures of Javert in our old school edition of Les Miserables, and the younger like Captain Ho Ming Choy from the popular screenshow; but I could have told them the style of their car, the texture of its frayed upholstery, the colors of the street lights and the neocirculesque architecture of the police station as accurately as they perceived it all themselves, if they’d asked. They did not ask anything until we reached the interrogation room.

  It isn’t a frightening room in itself, just wearying. Three walls are padded with willow green polyfoam, pretty faded and gouged or peeling in several places. The ceiling is a bank of softlights. Canned music by composers like Swansdown and Mellifont flows in continuously, slow and pianissimo. The floor is covered with beige tuft-carpet, fairly unstained since it’s a strictly no-eating, no-drinking, no-smoking area for everybody. The only furnishings are a three-legged stool, a recorder, and a recliner chair, the last in a half-lit alcove at the back where the questioners take turns resting from time to time. The room’s worst feature is the fourth wall—a curtainless sheet of steelglass looking out on the public alley. Not many people go by, especially at night, but anyone who does can look in and be satisfied that the Privcom Rule of 1999 is still in full effect. This is how they can justify the degradation of privacy.

  The officer who looked like Javert told me to sit down. He pointed to the three-legged stool but I sat on the floor instead, with my back to the glass wall, and they didn’t make me change.

  Then he asked why I killed M. Hewlett.

  All I could say was, “You think I killed her?”

  They had found a painter’s cleaning rag near her body. For the past year or two I’d been using a distinctive color scheme, primarily ochres and iron oxide reds, those being the least expensive pigments, subtly varied with rose madder, and contrasted with squeezes from the large tube of moondust blue that was Kelly’s secret-Santa exchange gift to me Christmas before last. I’d sold only two panels this year, one to Kelly and the other to a rich fancy-class tourist on safari through the low-rent district, but I’d been able to show my work around often enough and get it hung in enough places for the police to trace my rag by the colors.

  I remembered how the Thursday before poor Kelly’s murder, when we crowded into my place for our game, two fellow Chessites had borrowed rags. That evening’s Arnold complained he was sitting in drafts until I gave him a rag to wrap his throat. Later, after we broke up, Signy Tordisdatter came back saying the wind had turned more than it felt like from indoors, and she seemed to have forgotten a handkerchief. I wash my rags to use them again, but since I mix in only a few drops of Grumaway with the soap and water, a lot of pigment stays in. They used to joke that I might have better luck stretching my rags after four or five washes and selling them as nostalgic abstracts.

  The police had found some of the killer’s clothes, too: a jacket stuffed in the trash compactor at the end of my street (like all public compactors in the low-rent districts, it works only about half the time), trousers a couple of blocks away in a pactor that wasn’t scheduled to compact till Saturday, one sock a few streets in the other direction—all thirdhand stuff, all with splotches of Kelly’s blood. (Blood’s as individual as a set of fingerprints, or even more so. Blood even shows your whole life history, down to every bout of flu.)

  For a long time I just sat and let their repetitions wash back and forth above my head. They talked a lot about my psychomystique as shown by my subject matter and color schemes. So far they’d seen only three of my panels: Kelly’s—they seemed to ignore the subject matter of that one, blue roses on a Marscape—and the two would-be potboilers I turned out a year ago for hanging on loan at Madame Neumonde’s Kama Sutra Club in return for a commission if they ever sold from off her walls. Those were the pictures I’d bought the rose madder for.

  The pollies made a lot out of my using caveman and bloodlike colors so heavily, side by side with moondust blue that has an icy, haunting, other-world quality like the distilled essence of life on an asteroid colony. I guess they’d never priced traditional paints, or hadn’t found out about the expensive blue being a gift. Senior Sergeant Jones, the one who looked like Javert, wanted to fill out an application for giving me a truth-juice injection. The one who still looked like Captain Ho Ming Choy, even after I learned his name was Click, said the forms were too complicated and permission would probably be denied without a confession or a little more evidence, mind drugs being so dangerous with psychomystiques like mine, and that if they used anything it should be the lie detector. M. Jones said that they didn’t need to ask wh
ether I’d done it, they were just curious to know why.

  After the first shock they’d dropped on me—and it was pretty twiddling, after all, beside what Arnold had dropped the night before—it hardly seemed to matter much if they sorted it out or not. I must have been groggy on top of everything else. I probably hadn’t had any good sleep since the night before last, and if I had any reason for not talking, besides feeling too tired to answer questions, I guess I hoped they would give me some kind of drug and then I might get to take my turn relaxing in the recliner chair. I didn’t think about being cooperative or uncooperative. I just didn’t care.

  Finally M. Jones thrust the rag at me. Through the plastic police sack, I could see it had been tied into a bag, with the cord still tight around the gathered edges. The bag end had torn open, and bloodstains, hairs—even what could have been a little piece of scalp—were smeared over the washing-out paint blotches.

  “We scraped up most of what you filled it with, too,” said M. Jones, and threw down a second plastic sack, heavy with little stones and crumbs of scrap metal.

  So Arnold hadn’t just dropped my rag after trying to wipe blood or something, and left it behind in confusion. He’d used it for the actual weapon. When I stopped choking, I said, “He never told me that!”

  If I’d had any sense of guarding Arnold’s confession like a priest, that finished it, and I told them about his visit, and about the two friends who’d each borrowed a rag from me the week before.

  “Even if that’s true,” said M. Jones, who didn’t seem to believe it, “it still makes you an accessory after the fact. Bucking to turn state’s evidence?”

  “I probably don’t qualify,” I told him. “I’m a Gargiulo doppelganger-perceptive syndromatic.”

  “A doppler!” said M. Jones. “Not only a fancier, but a blamed doppler!” He sounded disgusted, but I expected that. He turned to M. Click and went on, “I don’t care if Lestrade is on stress-relief from homicide! She belongs on this case.”

  They took me to a private cell, with a cot I could stretch out on, a curtain I could pull closed on the outside window, and a one-way mirror over the barred wall to disguise the constant liability to observation. “A doppler,” M. Jones repeated on his way out, “and trying to be an artist. No wonder you’re starving.”

  I get a lot of that, too. It isn’t only respectable to be any other kind of fancier, sometimes it’s outright prestigious to perceive windmills as giants. Other fantasy perceivers have had virtually full and equal legal rights along with their share of social and other advantages for almost a century, ever since the Great Reform. But admit to being any variety of doppelganger perceptive and even other fanciers tend to treat you like a mush-head. Someone like me has the worst of both worlds. In everything else, I’m stuck with beige mundanity. I can’t even perceive a Little Mac rabbitburger as the old-fashioned peppergrind I’d rather be eating. But because of my Gargiulo syndrome I have more handicaps than a five-year-old.

  At least I didn’t see any more of M. Jones, so far as I know. Next morning after breakfast (which they slipped through a slot in the one-way mirror, very medieval, though the food was fine), a single officer carrying a briefcase came in and said, “Good morning, M. Nemo. I’m Senior Sergeant Lestrade. I understand you’re an artist.”

  I mentioned Enid Black, who admitted to having the Polidori syndrome, and then I started naming all the other great artists who they now think may have been doppelganger perceptives before the condition was recognized.

  M. Lestrade cut me off with, “No argument. Do you do portraits from life?”

  I said no. (I used to, but it can be a good way to alienate friends and clients.)

  “But you do people,” M. Lestrade went on. “I got in a visit to your apartment on my way here. All those pictures are yours, aren’t they? I didn’t know it was possible to get faces that convincing without using models.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “I have to get all my fancyscapes from my conscious imagination, too.”

  “But you must’ve had to learn by copying live faces the way you saw them?”

  I finally admitted that I do use models: printed pictures, screenplayers, sometimes I even sketch friends surreptitiously and never tell them they’re in a finished painting.

  “Good,” said the senior sergeant, giving me the briefcase, which turned out to be a police artist’s kit. “Do a quick portrait of me.”

  I tried to explain, “I’m no good at seeing people the way they see themselves in the mirror.”

  “I’m a realizer, M. Nemo,” M. Lestrade replied, making it sound more like a complaint than the usual boast. “I can see myself as I really am in the mirror, and it doesn’t much interest me. What interests me is how fanciers see me.”

  I thought I remembered hearing M. Jones feminine-pronoun M. Lestrade, but she still looked to me like a pudgy little man with heavy jowls, grizzled muttonchop whiskers, and an unloaded brier pipe. Maybe it would have made a difference if I’d known right away that the R. on her badge stood for Rosemary. “I’m afraid you aren’t going to like it, M.,” I said.

  “I’m not your chum and I’m not your customer,” she replied. “And you aren’t going to like things in general if you don’t draw me the way you see me.”

  So I did, in a ten-minute study. She took it, looked at it, and her lips stretched between a frown and a grin.

  “I see you aren’t a Baker Street Scholar,” she remarked. “You’ve gotten this particular perception from screenshows and the Three Funny Inspectors comic strip. The slapstick Bumbling Watson but much more so.”

  I tried to apologize, but she cut me short, saying, “Doyle described his original, literary-version Lestrade as a ‘little, sallow, lean, rat-faced, sly-looking, beady-eyed imbecile.’ The Three Funny Inspectors version is almost genial by comparison. And yes, I’ve heard the suggestions for re-registering my final name to Friday or Cribb or Ho. You must be able to draw faces from memory, if you can use your friends as models without their suspecting it.”

  “Faces I’ve seen long enough or often enough,” I confessed.

  “Good. Do me a few portraits of Arnold Benedict, and then if you want to go on drawing, go wherever your mindset leads you.”

  She left the police artist’s kit with me, and when someone outside protested that all pointed objects were against the rules, I overheard her snap, “He’s isn’t going to open a vein with a licklead pencil. He was packed and on his way somewhere when they picked him up last night, wasn’t he? That’s not a suicidal reaction.”

  Later that morning they moved me to a courtesy holding-cell, still plain and colorless but on almost the comfort level of a lower-middle hotel, with double opaque instead of one-way mirror over the sliding bars. They let me take the kit along. I forced myself to do Arnold’s face front-view and profile, then turned a sheet sideways and started a pastoral fancyscape with gnomoids to try and get my mind off things.

  Half an hour before lunch M. Lestrade came back, collected my drawings of Arnold, and made me sketch her again. Except for carrying a meerschaum pipe in place of a brier, she looked exactly the same. I wanted to soften it a little this time, but didn’t quite dare. I felt relieved when she chuckled at it.

  About 15:00 she chimed again—courtesy holding-cells even have doorchimes—and announced her name, then came in followed by someone else who was carrying a plyplast folder. They weren’t wearing badges.

  “Well,” they both said, almost together, “which of us is Lestrade?”

  “You are, M.,” I answered right away, pointing politely.

  She put her empty pipe in her mouth and sucked air through it. The other polly said, “How do you know?”

  I took another look at them both and wasn’t sure how I knew, except that M. Lestrade was clear and her sidekick was the kind of blur you see in screensims of shortsightedness. “First one in?” I guess
ed, understanding I might be wrong.

  She sighed. “Our slip. All right, then, can you recognize who my friend is?”

  I squinted harder, and his features took on a slightly Oriental cast, like Captain Ho Ming Choy. I looked in my memory for that one’s name and said, “Sergeant Click?”

  They asked me why I thought that. I explained. M. Lestrade turned to M. Click and said, “Better get your bloodlines traced, Dave. You might find a few Mongol genes mixed in with the Cossack somewhere. Maybe about the time of Genghis Khan.” Then back to me, “M. Nemo, it’s possible that something in your subpsych has better recognitive powers than your surfpsych knows.” She took the folder, opened it, spread out my two sketches of her and went on, “For instance, this second one is Sergeant Click. He came in wearing my badge and giving you my name, and you draw almost identical faces.”

  “Doesn’t look any more like me than it does like my senior sarge,” said M. Click.

  “But he was carrying his own meerschaum,” she went on, pointing, “and that’s what you drew, not my brier. You even added a curl of smoke. In standard fact, he wasn’t smoking at the time—it’s verboten in the cells—but he burns tobacco where permitted. I never put anything in my pipes except flavoring extracts.”

  “I perceive other things very accurately,” I replied. “Everything except people and sometimes their clothes. M. Lestrade, if I could see a photo or holo of you ... I’d know what you really look like.”

  “On the surface,” she said. “Well, it’s all part of our species’ identification game.” She pulled one or two more breaths through her pipe and asked if seeing her photo would affect the next portrait I drew of her.

  I explained how maybe it would and maybe not. Zach Wu never could fool me again when he played Arnold Benedict after I’d seen his photo, old and cheap though it was, but Toussant Crabtree could, and you’d have thought Toussant’s real face would be the more impressive, with its sort of gracefully crooked nose and the scar above his left eyebrow.