The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Sergeant Click took Danton away. M. Lestrade sighed heavily and started putting my sketches back in her folder.

  “Sergeant,” I said, “I didn’t see any differences, except for Danton’s cold. I guessed Signy by a phrase she likes to use, and Toussant by elimination. Did I really draw ...”

  She shook her head. “Including that one this afternoon, you drew four identical Arnolds, M., except for the cold symptoms on one. Only one. Those cold symptoms don’t show up on your earlier sketch of him as he appeared to you the night it happened. As I said, cold symptoms can be faked or faked over to a certain extent. No obvious correlations with the studies you made me of your friends as you see them when they’re playing themselves, either. Not even M. Crabtree’s scar.”

  “Then how did you know?” I think a lot of awe must have come out in my voice, but she shrugged it right off.

  “It wasn’t any brilliant Holmsian piece of deduction,” she said, sounding tired and disgusted. “It was just a sordid old-fashioned columbo trick to bluff out a confession. I figured the last person it would be was the one who had actually played Arnold Benedict in the game session earlier that same evening. Besides, while M. Crabtree could have stolen one of your rags, we didn’t know that he had. It would have been a risk, with so many people in such a small room. And I guessed it wasn’t M. Tordisdatter, because she had made a private thing of borrowing the rag, and the idea that borrowing a rag was at least partly to help set up an alibi fit nice and snug into the rest of the pattern as I perceived it. Besides, her being the one who walked M. Hewlett partway home didn’t fit too easily with the idea of careful planning to avoid suspicion. And then, when would she have put on those old coveralls worn during the assault to discard in case of bloodstains, traces of struggle, et cetera? Of course, I could have been wrong. I’m more impressed with how you were able to identify them all just now. But I agreed to sit in on this case on condition that if I couldn’t get results in twenty-four stress-hours I could go off it again and back to extortion for the rest of my ninety days’ relief. I could still be wrong. It might have been a hysteric confession. Now it’s up to my coms and cohs to find corroborative evidence, apply for truth drugs—no trouble clearing that, once you’ve got a confession. But I’ll stay in and keep sifting the follow-up myself. Because I promise you this, M. Nemo: we may just be bumbling keystoners who don’t always get the right floater, but we never lock the wrong one away, not if pollies like me can help it.”

  She closed the folder and stood looking into space for a moment, then shook her head, put her pipe between her lips, and said, “Come on. I’d like another look at that new fancyscape you’re doing.”

  I’ve never seen Danton again. I didn’t have to appear at the trial. I don’t think they even used my taped deposition; when M. Lestrade says, “A good lawyer would rather have an honest doppler as witness ...” she’s using her own definition of “good.” But he was guilty, all right. Someday I may get up courage to visit him in the Lower Wabash Regional Lifers Institute.

  I opted for a private hearing and sentencing, just the judge, M. Lestrade, and me. It was over in an hour, with the minimum allowable sentence: three years’ probation and a thousand tridols in recompense to Kelly’s family, interest-free. And guaranteed employment at convict wages for as long as I need the work to help make the payments, or until my paintings take off. Now I can even afford a nice selection of psychomystically safe pigments.

  I still chum a little with Zach Wu and some of the others, not with Toussant any more, though Signy and I reach out feelers to each other now and then.

  I’ve never yet seen a camera image of M. Lestrade. She prefers buying another pencil portrait every so often, with the promise of showing me her holo if and when my perceptions ever come reasonably close to the reality. She also commissions pictures for gifts sometimes. She bought the fancyscape with gnomoids for herself.

  LOVE AND DEATH IN THE ASTEROID BELT

  The first thing I saw when I went into Rigo’s bedroom was my sister’s first name glowing at me from a computer-graphics star map. Asteroid map, I corrected myself on second glance. Yes, that was how Amerigo Astrove was making his tribillions: by mining asteroids. And how he was taking his relaxation: by mining Marissas. Work and play together on the same screen. It looked like the omen I scarcely needed.

  “Always working, Rigo?” I said. “Even in your bedroom?”

  He looked up from the bar, where he was pouring himself a snifter of his famous century-old Courvoisier. “It’s what makes Astrove my treasure trove,” he said. “Drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “A drink of history, Talasia. These drops were distilled before the turn of the century. Before the World Council of States, before the frenzy of the Twenty-twenties, even before the Reformed Constitution. Back in the time of Reagan’s Star Wars.” He poured some into a second snifter and brought it across the room toward me, leaving no footprints. The carpeting’s deep pile sprang up again from beneath his houseslippers.

  “Do you also consider it ‘working,’ I said, “what you did to Marissa?”

  He held the brandy out to me. Ignoring it, I sat in one of the overstuffed armchairs and folded my hands in my lap. He set the snifter he’d meant for me on one of the chair’s broad arms, raised his own glass to his lips, and took a long sip.

  At length he said, “I thought that was the way your sister wanted it. Her world is oldfashioned, bodice-ripping romance, isn’t it?”

  “Oldfashioned, yes. Bodice-ripping, no.”

  “Oh, really not?” Raising one eyebrow as if he were posing for a book promo, he held his right elbow in his left hand, lightly, his snifter within graceful reach of his mouth. “Gone with the Wind, Royal Foxfire, Ecstasy Unawares? Isn’t that last the one she borrowed her names from? ‘Marissa Delacroix’?”

  “What you did to her, Amerigo Molinar Astrove, was rape. Not romance. Rape.”

  He shrugged and took another sip. “Why did she refuse to press charges?”

  “She was afraid she might have to get an emergency procreation permit. You know how sticky they can be about granting one in a case of rape—”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

  “And how she feels about abortion—”

  “I really wasn’t aware of that, either,” said he. “But I believe there are fairly reliable tests.”

  “She was afraid to believe them. Yes, Rigo, you cracked her psychomystique that thoroughly.” I half wished that there had been a pregnancy. It would have been evidence. She had been hysterical until too late for us to get a clear picture of what had happened and rush her to the hospital for the other kinds of evidence. Although the pollies had told me frankly that even with such evidence, it was at least ninety to ten against our getting a conviction from a jury, and seventy to thirty from a panel of judges. Amerigo Molinar Astrove of Astrove Starmetals being who he was, and Marissa Smith Delacroix being a fantasy perceiver.

  Even now, I could see the bitter set of Sergeant Lestrade’s thin lips as she agreed to the odds against us. “A scandal it’s still like that in this century,” she had said.

  “It isn’t like that for reality perceivers,” her partner had put in. Too crisp a young floater by half.

  “It shouldn’t be like that for anyone,” Lestrade had snapped. “There are some good judges. No way to make sure you get them. Damn.” Not many people still use such words as “damn” nowadays.

  I jerked my mind back to the present. Rigo had gone off to the comfort room without excusing himself, taking his brandy snifter with him. While he was gone, I got the plastiseal out of my pocket and tipped its contents into the brandy he’s insisted on giving me. Four of Marissa’s prescription sleeping caplets, ground to a powder that dissolved almost at once upon my swirling the glass around.

  He came back in time to catch me still swirling it. “Mm-hmm,” he remarked with
a knowing little nod. “Good, nee pravda lee?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I replied, trying to look annoyed as I set it down on the occasional table beside my chair.

  “Don’t put on a middleclass act, Talasia,” he said. “We both know your taste for the finer things in life.”

  “Do we?” I said. “Well, we both know yours, don’t we?” With that, I got up, carried my glass over, and emptied it into his. I stood at his back to do this, reaching round his elbow.

  He never moved until I had finished. Then he turned. I pushed his arm away and stepped out of his reach.

  I think that move actually surprised him, but he took it calmly, no doubt as part of some elaborate pregame ceremony I was indulging to postpone the moment of embrace.

  “From your lips to mine, Tally?” He took a sip. “‘How sweeter than the honey be kisses secondhand from thee.’”

  “Did you get that from an old Lavular Lights song?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Jon Benson the New Cavalier, actually.” Sipping again, he went on, “You see, dear one, there is romance in my soul. Look here.”

  He crossed to his computer and tapped the screen. “‘Marissa.’ This little beauty didn’t used to wear that caller, just a soup of letters and digits. But claiming it for Astrove Starmetals gives me the right to name it anything I like. Marissa.” Still sipping, he gazed at it a few moments and added, “Probably more tons of highgrade ore in that little beauty ...”

  “And you’re going to immortalize my sister’s name by giving it to an asteroid that you intend to riddle with holes and leave a mined-out wreck floating in space. How appropriate!”

  “Not floating. Orbiting. My lord,” he said pleasantly, “here we are, nearing the end of the twenty-first century, and our schools churn out people as ignorant of basic cosmic facts as if we were still in the Middle Ages.”

  “Unless your mining operations throw the little beauty out of her orbit,” I suggested, as he drank again. His tongue must have known the flavor of every quark of his old brandy. I’m sure he could detect something added this time. Perhaps he assumed I had slipped him an aphrodisiac. As if he needed one.

  “All I have to do,” he resumed, gesturing at the keyboard, “is tab this key, add one of my special corporate codes, round it off with the ‘disseminate’ command, and my new little beauty of an asteroid becomes ‘Marissa’ in every starmap in every database everywhere, forever.”

  “‘Forever,’” I added, “being as long as our particular gastric bubble of civilization lasts.” I doubt he heard the satire. He was tabbing away at his keyboard, frowning as his fingers hit the wrong keys now and then.

  At last he tabbed for a printout and stood back to sip his brandy and watch the paper slot feed out a hardcopy of the screen image.

  “How about it, Tally?” he asked, picking up the printout and flicking it face-up onto the bed. The nearest asteroid to “Marissa” now wore the label, “Talasia.” He went on, “Shall we hold off on the ‘disseminate’ command until it’s earned your name?”

  “If ‘we’ do,” I told him, “you may have to wait quite a while.”

  Not long after that the sleepers began taking effect. I’d watched them work on Marissa often enough. Rigo hadn’t finished the dose I’d mixed him, but he’d drunk enough. There were maybe five minutes when he wasn’t quite asleep, but much too far gone to fight back, even if he’d wanted to. I doubt he did, because by then his famous brains couldn’t have been sharp enough to guess what I was doing.

  I put on plastic gloves, started pouring century-old brandy into him, and kept on pouring until I had him dead drunk. Literally. Used as he was to the stuff, it took a great deal; but eventually I managed it.

  Shooting or stabbing would have been a better method in the classical tradition that calls revenge incomplete unless the target understands what’s happening. But any such understanding is over within seconds, unless it carries on into whatever afterlife may be waiting, in which case Rigo could figure it out posthumously. The way I did it permitted me to believe that I did it less to get revenge than to protect other young women. Marissa hadn’t been the first and wouldn’t have been the last. Besides, my method seemed to offer me a better chance of getting away with it.

  The only thing in the room that I had hand-touched before putting on my gloves was my own brandy snifter. Still wearing the gloves, I washed it, dried it, and put it away. I left the brandy bottles, one of them lying flat, on the floor near Rigo’s dangling hand.

  He had sprawled on top of the printout, so I left it there. What could it prove? The police already knew about his “romantic” connection with our family. I left the screen tabbed on, too. Rigo looked almost as if he had fallen asleep watching it.

  No one had seen me come in, and no one saw me go. I had chosen one of Rigo’s “open house to female friends” evenings, when he preferred his household staff to be elsewhere. I left his “engaged” light on at the doorway. A few of his “female friends” might react to that as to an additional invitation, but most of them would politely turn away, so the chances were that nobody would find him before morning. That thought filled me with warm satisfaction. Amerigo Molinar Astrove, R.I.L.—Rest In Loneliness!

  I stripped my gloves off as soon as I was outside, but didn’t recycle them until I reached home. I didn’t want to risk a public recycler going downtime before swallowing them completely.

  It took nineteen hours and some-odd minutes before the police came chiming at my door. I was moderately surprised. I’d somehow expected them either much earlier or, if I was very fortunate, not at all.

  I was dressing for dinner when they came. I threw on a wraparound and received them, one earring off and one earring on, in the north lounge. I felt quite calm. There seemed to be less than half the guilt I had braced myself to experience. If anything, I was afraid of reacting with too much calm, especially when I saw whom the police had sent: Sergeant Lestrade and her satellite Click again, the same team we had dealt with in the matter of Marissa’s victimization. I supposed they had been chosen as already knowing the family.

  “Good evening,” I greeted them. “Can I offer you a mock sherry?”

  Click made a quick face and Lestrade said, “Thanks, maybe later. M. Magadance, do we understand correctly that your sister is off the continent?”

  “That’s right. A world cruise with Aunt Lucille. To help get the bad taste out of her mouth, so to speak. They left last Saturday and should be back in six months or so, unless they decide to stay a little while longer somewhere or other. Were you hoping to enlist her as a witness for some other poor woman?” I asked. “I’m sorry she can’t help you, but, really, if she couldn’t have won her own case against him, I don’t see how her testimony could help anybody else. Will mine do, or would it count as hearsay? Unless the idea is to help get him off, of course, in which case I’m very glad we can’t help you. If you don’t mind, I believe that I’ll have a sherry. A real sherry.”

  “On top of whatever you’ve already had?” said M. Click.

  “I had coffee at sixteen hundred, Junior Sergeant,” I told him. “Nothing else since lunch. Except water, straight from the icetap. If I strike you as a bit hypermental, even the very best people get that way when pollies come calling and there’s nothing to suggest it’s purely social. Not even as well as we got to know one another a few months ago, thanks to your not being able to help Marissa. Or haven’t you ever noticed how people start acting in your presence?”

  “Dave,” said Senior Sergeant Lestrade. She sounded like someone calling a puppy to heel. Then she asked me, “M. Magadance, do you know about Amerigo Astrove?”

  “Obviously not,” I replied. “I’d have guessed that you just got another rape complaint about him, because the only other news we expect from that particular quarter is that he’s about to make another fortune, and pollies don’t usually come around with tha
t kind of news. Unless he’s cut somebody else’s throat doing it, maybe.”

  “He’s dead,” said Lestrade.

  I hesitated, trying to remember exactly how I’d made up my mind to react. Finally I said, “Good. I’m getting my sherry now.”

  “Aren’t you curious about the how?” said Junior Sergeant Click.

  “I assume there was something ripe about it, or you wouldn’t have dropped round to bring me the news. You’d have let me find out for myself, however people usually find out about these things when they’re still a little young for following the public obits as a matter of course and not all that close to the family. What Rigo did to my sister hardly cemented any firm bond between our two families. But since you’re here, you’re obviously going to tell me all about it, whether I want to know or not. If I can’t offer you mock sherry, how about coffee?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Click replied before his superior could blank the offer. Plopping down on the nearest couch, he hooked one ankle up across the opposite knee and cocked his head at us expectantly, one eye on his senior sergeant and the other on me.

  We have never kept autoservs in any of our guest lounges or dining rooms. Tray service is much more tasteful, even if the servants simply fill the pots and carafes at the kitchen autoserv. On my way to pour my sherry, I chimed for Annette.

  Lestrade said, “In nontechnical jargon, the late M. Astrove seems to have died from drinking himself under the table.”

  “How sad!” I remarked. “Though it sounds like a pleasant death. What was his poison?”

  “Old Courvoisier,” said Click. “Yeah, he went out in style.”

  “Drinking history,” I said. “As he called it when he used it on my sister. If you remember. Well, well! There ought to be a nice epitaph there somewhere. Was anyone with him at the time?”

  “We don’t know,” Lestrade replied. “His houseman tells us it was one of his regular evenings for entertaining friends.”