The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  A blur flashed up over the bottom of the ramp, and there was a dog facing them—or a wildcat?—or a scowling abo on all fours? Or some kind of giant spider? No, dog, had to be a dog…the size of a pony, with cat ears, and the teeth of a shark, and too many legs, and a howl that was almost human, and eyes shooting out red searchlights. Where was all that glare reflecting from?

  “Brain in control,” said Lestrade.

  Click’s brain was in control. He lowered his stunner, aimed, and fired.

  Instead of crumpling, the thing smacked its lips.

  Lestrade ordered him, “Ignore it!” Striding right past the creature, she reached for the stair railing, caught hold of it, and jumpswung down onto the landing.

  The junior sergeant swallowed hard and started edging around the other side of the dogcat werespider. It turned to keep facing him. All at once it lunged and snapped.

  Jumping back, Click found one foot coming down on nothing—over the edge—he grabbed for the railing. Caught it with both hands, heard his stunner clatter on the floor far below, scrabbled up and onto the stairs, breathing hard and with a heartbeat that threatened to shake him off again.

  A six-fingered tentacle reached from somewhere for his wrist.

  He jerked it back. Another tentacle was wriggling up between the metal stairs for his ankle. Leaping to his feet and stamping till the staircase shook, he stared around. Tentacles, claws, taloned hands, snakes with fangs and red eyes…everywhere, reaching for him, hemming him in on all six sides ... The corridor floor was almost touching the top of the stairs now, with the spiderdog poised to spring on him.

  Lestrade was walking straight through it all, hardly glancing at any of it.

  Was a lousy four-point Test difference in reality perception enough to explain her control?

  Sergeant Dave Click shook himself and started after her. His resolution held pretty well for half a dozen steps. The chanting was loud enough now for him to hear the syllables ... in no language he knew, and the smoke was worse than being in an elevator full of sweaty workers puffing real tobacco cigars, but he was managing to ignore the visuals pretty well—

  Until a screaming meemie jumped into his face.

  He landed half on some kind of sofa, still trying to pull black tentacles out of his eyes. He felt them all over his face, but to his fingers they were almost intangible—soft, slithery as shadows, always slipping out of touch. At least the sofa was solid, deep cushions covered in…felt like the same kind of pebbled rubber used on ping-pong paddles.

  He started catching more or less familiar sounds in the chant. “Beelzebub ... Asmodeus ... Sam-hell!” delivered in that clear, high soprano, with long bass grumbles filling in between.

  “Ignore it!” he heard Lestrade say.

  He shook his head. Hard. It bunched into a knot of pain—he wondered if the fall from the stairs had concussed it—but the tentacled thing was gone. He could see again.

  He could see Lestrade at the bottom of the stairs, turned half toward him and half toward what lay beyond: at the far end of the vaulted basement, floor to ceiling, a pair of huge, blazing red eyes, an open mouth with more than a full set of teeth and every one of them a fang, and no other features. The rest of the face was a mass of writhing purple flames. But the eyes rolled and glared, the teeth gnashed and spread apart and gnashed again.

  And all around, lining the basement walls, stacked up a dozen high in wriggling masses, more of the same kind of uglies that had already attacked him twice. Spider things, snake things, squids on human legs, creatures out of Bosch paintings and Corman Nightmare screenshows ... But all of them dwarfed by those giant eyes, that gnashing mouth ...

  He stared around. They were sprouting from the back walls, too, surrounding him ... His stunner lay a couple of meters away across the floor. Left leg protesting from whatever injuries it had caught, hitting concrete while the sofa caught the rest of him, he rolled off and scrambled for the weapon. Don’t let it be broken, oh God, don’t let the fall have snapped it! It was in his hand, he aimed at the nearest spidercat dog, fired—nothing happened.

  “Ignore them!” Lestrade shouted again. “Don’t waste your shots!”

  He twisted his gaze back to her. This time he saw the altar. It was just beneath the eyes and fangs—that was why he hadn’t seen it right away. Draped in black velvet, a pale body on top ... naked woman, long black hair, one leg strangely twisted or wasted ... struggling weakly, as if drugged or tied down…and another figure standing over her, wearing long black robes, huge pentagram medallion, reddish gold hair, green eyes, tilt nose, and a dagger the size of a butcher knife held above her head in both hands.

  The high priestess was Sharon C. Carpenter—Raven was the victim! And Senior Sergeant Lestrade, in her plain tunic and trousers, standing at the foot of the stairs with catdogs and spidercats and weredevils reaching tentacles and talons at her, looked like a lean white candle between her junior partner and the altar.

  Shouting, “Les! Look out!” Click tried to stun the creatures that were grabbing for her. She ignored them and him both.

  “SATAN!” Ending in a shriek, Carpenter lofted her dagger to begin the descent.

  Lestrade shot her. A stunwave straight to the head. Unlike the apparitions, the priestess crumpled and fell.

  “You’ve got to hit back at the ones on your own level,” said Senior Sergeant Lestrade.

  The monsters were shrinking away. There were no other people—no other human coven members. Click could still make out the eyes and mouth on the back wall, but they had frozen and faded, like an afterimage burned in when the high priestess crumpled in the act of summoning the head devil.

  * * * *

  “Never let me start putting all that faith in my rotten hunches again,” said Lestrade.

  “But you were right about the Anathemas being harmless fanciers.”

  “And dead wrong about us not having any reason to check out what was going on in their house. They took her in, thinking they’d found a fellow traveler, thinking she was some adept with great potential, who could help them fight off whatever ‘astral enemies’ were wasting Raven’s leg…and they were right about her potential. What they didn’t know was how much she’d been studying on her own. And in what direction.” Glad to be off duty at last, Lestrade took a drink of her coffee and Drambuie. “M. Skysilver was right, too, when she called it a dangerous religion to playact at.” Dangerous as much because of people like the Carpenters as because of people like Alistair Greeley and Raven Braithwaite Anathema. “When are we going to stop painting this religion and that religion as so evil that the rebels and really sick minds tune in on it and play it down to its worst image?”

  “What were they?” said Click. “Those things she was calling up. You saw them too, didn’t you, Les?”

  “I saw something,” she answered as noncommittally as she could, wondering what shape, exactly, they had taken for her partner. Stereotypical Christian devils in red underwear and pitchforks? Had to have been worse than that, surely, for him to lose control and keep on shooting at them.

  “Were they what killed Alistair?”

  “Dave,” she began, and paused. How could she give him the opinion of one fallen-away Wiccan in such a way that he wouldn’t suspect her background? “Whatever they were, they weren’t physical. We’re physical bodies. Ghosts and things like that, aren’t. They may be able to get to you mentally—emotionally, spiritually, whatever you want to call it—but they can’t hurt you physically. Not unless you let them. It could be that Alistair Anathema let them get to him. I think it’s more likely the autopsy will turn up some kind of poison. Lethal poisons aren’t that hard to get, and Carpenter needed the husband out of the way before she could have a free hand murdering the wife. ... I wonder if we really did Raven any favor, saving her life at that point.”

  “What else could we have done? We’re still polli
es, aren’t we?”

  Lestrade took another drink and nodded. “Still reality-perceivers. And still pollies.”

  CORWIN AND ANGELA

  Corwin Davison Poe was to become perhaps my ultimate favorite of all the characters to have channeled first through my own pen (at least to me, and under that name); his only rivals here would be Rosemary Lestrade and Clement Czarny. (I say, “first through my own pen” in order to exclude such characters as Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd, Sir Kay the Seneschal, and Bart—yes, I mean Bart, not Bret—Maverick.)

  Besides playing greater or lesser roles in most of the R.S.A. novels (both cycles) set in his own generation, Corwin plays his namesake character in the “Computer Wizard of Oz” cycle, figures prominently in my eschatological allegory novel Hellfire, Holy Fire, does a cameo in Inquisitor Dreams, and features in a series of Topsyturvydom G&S rolegames written for the U. of Michigan G&S Society’s Gasbag. It was thus with a sense of surprise that I could find only a single short story about him set in the “serious,” down-to-earth, and hopefully plausible fanciers/realizers framework…and even that one has its fantastic side. Two of the other stories in this section are complete fantasies, unless you believe that alternate universes, including some in which “magic” really works, are scientifically plausible. I have my doubts; and, in any case, I treat fantasy universes as apocrypha in my own output; but they’re a lot of fun for storytelling. The remaining story actually comes from the new and fanciers-free cycle, but I think that something very much like it happened to the fantasy-perceiving Corwin.

  Corwin’s stories are easier than Lestrade’s to arrange chronologically. “The Spider” takes place during Corwin and Angela’s childhood, “The Breaking Point” and “A Predicament in the Belfry” during his college career, and “Autumn Leaf” (written in collaboration with Melody Grandy Keller) following the events of the novel Mayday on the Melon, which I have therefore placed before it in this collection.

  THE SPIDER: AN INCIDENT FROM THE BOYHOOD OF M. CORWIN POE

  Will the spider approach her finger first, or mine? Both rest on its web, at points diametrically opposed. More important, is it the poisonous specimen I perceive or the harmless creature she believes it to be? Of almost equal importance with this last consideration, in how far might our juvenile apprehensions modify whichever case is standard reality? Both of us being fanciers, more officially designated fantasy perceivers, members of what is sometimes vulgarly termed the “fancy class.”

  I pause for a few words of explanation to the hypothetical Pundit or Pundita who sits deciphering this a millennium or two hence, without benefit of corroborative historical documentation, when our twenty-first century (even now in its concluding decades) shall have passed into moss-grown and mystery-shrouded antiquity. Simply stated, fanciers are individuals who reside in their own self-tailored worlds rather than in commonplace standard reality. For one instance, where a reality perceiver, the so-called “realizer,” sees, feels, and tastes a recyclicup of coffee: a fancier might see, feel, and taste a beaker of Samian wine, tankard of ale, bone china dish of tea, bulbous glass of cola, silver goblet of poisoned burgundy, or whatever else best fits that fancier’s own personal perception. In effect, that plastic cup of coffee is, for that fancier, the tankard of ale, dish of tea, glass of cola, et cetera—with one qualification. The mind is strong, and lends the beverage the psychological effects of the liquid perceived, so that a fancier can experience the intoxication of fancied alcoholic spirits where the realizer feels only the stimulation of the actual caffeine. But the body too is strong—or, as some argue, a small curl of the consciousness remains cognizant of reality in most fanciers—so that the ultimate physical effects, the nutritive or destructive results, will always be those of the actual potation, provided they are allowed time to reassert themselves. Fanciers who swallow harmless drink in the belief that it contains deadly poison succumb only if their minds insist upon it before their bodies can regain control.

  In most historical epochs realizers have regarded fanciers en masse as lunatics. But we are not (necessarily) mad—not, at least, in any sense suggestive of incompetence. As a group, we have possibly more intelligence and certainly more imagination than the mass of reality perceivers; and our collective contribution to culture has always been incalculable. This began at last to be recognized during the final years of the twentieth century. When the Great Reform came, about the turn of that century, the Founding Reformers officially guaranteed our equal and legal right to the free and independent pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

  All this while I have left the spider poised between Angela’s finger and my own—poised, that is, in literary context. In fact, it happened thirteen or fourteen years ago (forgive the historical present tense of my opening paragraph), when we hovered between childhood and adolescence, Angela and I and Freddy Carter, in whose basement we played that afternoon, the rest of Freddy’s family being absent on some adult activity.

  To me, it was a cellar of dark shadows and moldering secrets; to Angela, an airy game room awash with squares of sunlight falling through the high half-windows; to Freddy, a basement like any other. My perceptions had hardened early along lines formulated by the Venerable Edgar, my chosen namesake. (On this account, I have sometimes been charged with masochism.) Angela’s perceptions, while still fluid, were settling down to the golden cheer through which she filters the world today. Though all children under the age of thirteen are legally classified as fantasy perceivers, Freddy Carter was a realizer.

  Behold us, then, three young people alone in the house, chiefly engaged in that interplay which provides us so much conversational matter that we can only marvel what society did for small talk when everyone was expected to perceive everything the same: in brief, we were comparing our individual perceptions. Delving into some old chest, carton, or packing-case, I would prod up the stub of a black candle, which Angela would call a little toy Tiffany lamp and Freddy pronounce a penlight with weak power cells; or Freddie would display a supposed antique computer chip encased in crystalplas which seemed to Angela a pretty polished agate and to me a Gold Bug; or Angela would delight over a china bisque cherub which to me appeared a barbaric carven idol and Freddy declared was Grandmother’s plastic Darth Vader doll.

  Freddy wielded a certain power over us, for realizers are more prudent than fanciers in relation to their own standard reality. Yet I think, looking back, that it was a power not unmixed with envy of our gift for imbuing the mundane with a glamour of romance. Where any two of us were in basic agreement, however, it was almost invariably Freddy’s and Angela’s vision against mine: as, for example, they agreed that the rack was a ping-pong table, the iron maiden an old, nonfunctional videogame, the broken lute a tennis racket. I may have begun to chafe a little at being continually outvoted in these cases, the more so as I felt my vote should count double in such places as basements. Angela recognized my claim in principle, but maintained that Freddy’s vote must still outweigh either of ours.

  At length we came to the spiderweb, spun between a water pipe and the arm of a dusty chair. This time we all agreed: it was a spiderweb. Freddy saw it as a blot on the comparatively clean basement, and accordingly caught up a rag to wipe it from existence. We fanciers protested. To both of us it was beautiful: to Angela, because a sunbeam penetrating into this corner pricked it up into glistening silver lace; to me, because it chimed so well with the dungeon surroundings of my personal perception. But our protests did not stay Freddy’s hand so effectively as our simultaneous notice of the spider itself, hitherto half hidden by a trick of sunlight and shadow, sitting in the center of its web.

  (If we do not always sound like twelve-year-olds in the following conversation, bear in mind that it has required a certain amount of reconstruction through the brain and pen of my adult self.)

  Freddy retreated, leaving the front row to Angela and me.

  “Black Widow,” I pronounced, seeing very c
learly the crimson hourglass on the creature’s dusky abdomen.

  “Nonsense!” said Angela. “It’s nothing but a harmless house spider.”

  We looked to Freddy, who shrugged as if for once stymied.

  “Well?” said I. “Which is it?”

  “How do I know?” replied our realizer, peering over our shoulders. “It’s big, it’s brown, and it’s got some kind of stripes, so I don’t think it’s a Black Widow. But spiders are spiders.”

  “I think you should keep it here for a pet,” said Angela. “Spiders eat flies and mosquitoes and things.”

  “What if it doesn’t stay put?” said Freddy. “What if it gets upstairs? It could still be poisonous, even if it isn’t a Black Widow.”

  “It is a Black Widow,” I persisted. “Deadly.”

  “No, they aren’t,” said Angela. “Only for one person in a dozen, and then only if the medics don’t come in time. Healthy adults don’t have a thing to be afraid of,” she added, repeating some school lesson, “even if it were a Black Widow, and it isn’t.”

  “We aren’t adults yet,” said Freddy. (Rare admission for a twelve-year-old!)

  “Not quite,” I mused. “But we’re no longer children, either. And we’re healthy. Which way would the venom treat us?”

  “Besides,” said Angela, “they won’t bite you unless you drive them to it. They’re really gentle, like bees.”

  “How do you know?” said Freddy. “Have you ever tried it?”

  “All right,” said Angela, reaching towards the web, “if it doesn’t hurt me, you have to leave it in peace.”

  I cried out her name, and Freddy said, “You’re crazy.” She smiled at us and touched her fingertip delicately to the web about midway between center and edge. The spider drew up its legs, then unbunched them again, appearing to turn as though in puzzlement at the slight vibration of Angela’s touch.