The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Gazing at the giant airship’s iridescent hull framed between azure sky and motley autumn foliage, Angela remarked—inspired, perhaps, by their luncheon honeydew—”It looks like a great, tight-skinned silver melon.”

  After a moment, Corwin proposed, “Change one word. Call it a taut silver melon. ‘Mellonta Tauta’: a pun the Venerable Edgar himself must surely have appreciated on the title of his airship fantasy. ‘These things are in the future.’”

  That was how they came to nickname the Nostalgic Transport Corporation’s airship Cygnus their “Taut Melon,” and more or less fated themselves to spend part of their honeymoon the following spring aboard it .

  Chapter 1

  “A hundred years ago, people took it as a truism that dirigibles were a thing of the past, surviving only in the Goodyear Blimp. ... They interpreted the 1937 crash of the Hindenburg as proof positive that lighter-than-air ships were unsafe for passenger service. A generation earlier, the sinking of the Titanic hadn’t stopped travel by ocean liner, and two generations later the crash of the Chicago DC-10 hardly dimpled jumbo jet traffic. The Titanic went down on her maiden voyage; the Hindenburg had logged 62 safe flights before his fatal sixty-third. Nobody survived the Chicago DC-10; better than a third of those aboard came out of the Hindenburg alive. But the Twentieth was the century of illogic.

  “It was also the century of speed, ready and eager to blank the smoothest transportation ever invented in favor of the fastest. The politics of the Last Great War—then called ‘World War One’ (‘WWI’ for short), ‘the Interwar Period,’ and ‘World War Two’ (‘WWII’)—helped deflate dirigibles sooner, but eventually the century’s infatuation with speed almost smothered out passenger ships and even railroad trains as well. Noise, speed, and power—sonic booms for the masses and revving engines for individual ‘easy riders’—macho against the environment. Those were the watchwords of our grandparents and their grandparents. Not your grandparents or mine, of course. Everybody else’s.

  “Now that we’re entering the last quarter of the Twenty-first, the century of sanity and tranquility, with a maximum legal open-highway speed of 60 kilometers an hour, when even reality perceivers are reserving sonic planes and needle trains for emergency or professional trips, while for pleasure travel they go to steamships, pufferbellies, and windwagons, the great lighter-then-airship, like the windjammer, the conestoga, and the one-horse open sleigh, has made its re-emergence.”

  —Al Everymind, It All Started with Flying Carpets,

  Ann Arbor: Semi-Scholastic Press, 2d ed., © 2075

  Angela and Corwin timed it so as to spend their first three nights on the ground (in a manner of speaking) in the Minas Tirith Eyrie of the Nostalgia City, Indiana, Dammler-Hilton. It was an unexpected suite for honeymooners; but her particular species of fantasy perception could bedeck any interior in dimity and flowered chintz, while the actual furnishings helped ease his unpredictably recurrent transitions into the world of standard reality.

  A grim episode the previous year had turned him—temporarily, he hoped—into a realizer; and while the percentage of his time spent in his chosen fantasy world seemed to increase month by month, relapses remained frequent and unpredictable. In his psychomystically convalescent condition, he enjoyed the props designed primarily for reality perceivers in a make-believe mood. The smooth, simple monochromes of true fancy-class decor made bumpier the contrasts between his world and standard reality.

  During the Decade of Reform procreation permits had replaced civil marriage licenses, so that for the better part of a century, despite periodic reactionary movements, matrimony had persisted exclusively as a social and religious tradition. In this state, it now flourished. Society as a whole had been in one of its more puritanical moods since the early 2030s. But married women changed their final names only if they chose—to fit the anachronisms of their fantasy worlds, for instance, or to underscore their sensual respectability.

  Angela and Corwin felt no pressing need to underscore their respectability. Fancy-class though they were, their personal codes were nearly the equal of what that hardline evangelist Brother von Hofer preached to the public—although they never listened to Brother von Hofer and, perhaps because they were fancy-class, never went about flaunting their morality.

  Nevertheless, in signing the hotel register as M. Garvey and M. Poe, beside their thumbprints on the instafilm squares, they didn’t resist the temptation to let their left hands, each with its new gold wedding band, linger ostentatiously on the marbeline registration desk.

  * * * *

  Everyone from public service printouts to pre-Cana counselors to Al Everymind warned newlyweds about the dangers of too long an isolation at the outset. So on the evening of the second day Corwin and Angela conscientiously emerged to take dinner in the Crow’s Nest Restaurant, then spend an hour or two socializing in the Venusburg Lounge. It was in the latter that they met Dr. Ilna Junge, Grafin von Cruewell, Obersturmbannfuehrerin SS, with Valkyrie, the huge German Shepherd in seeing-eye harness who deigned to lie beside her armchair.

  Angela saw Dr. Junge as a dignified woman of uncertain age, dressed in azure jodhpurs and crimson Cossack tunic after the flamboyant mishmatch fashion of the 2020s. Her hair looked blond and bobbed, her face classically beautiful behind the dark glasses. Angela was extremely hazy on the history of the Last Great War.

  “So in two days you journey on the NTC Cygnus,” said Dr. Ilna, sipping what looked to Angela like a slow fizz. “I also. The flight should prove interesting, nein? More especially if that rumor is true that our flight is to be graced by their divinities Juno and Jove Olympian.”

  “Oh, I hope so!” said Angela. “It’d be such fun to see them in person.”

  “If nothing else, it should serve to relieve the promised tedium of the flight.” Sliding Angela a wink, Corwin meshed his fingers with hers and murmured, “‘Will nobody contrive a more expeditious mode of travel than the balloon?’”

  “Was?” Dr. Ilna said in German.

  “Your indulgence, Frau Doktor,” he replied. “I was quoting the Venerable Edgar Poe.”

  Dr. Ilna raised her glass as if toasting them. “But I think that honeymooners do not anticipate the infamous ennui of travel by the zeppelin. And for us others, also, that problem has been solved.”

  “Oh? How?” asked Angela, interested even though she could never remember suffering boredom, except during algenometry class, since about age eleven.

  “You have not heard of the plants? The secret entertainers whom the Nostalgic Transport Corporation pays to mix in disguise among their true passengers.”

  “Plants?” Angela smiled at and discarded a mental image of human-sized coleus and azalea strolling aboard, leaf in leaf.

  “I have heard rumors,” Corwin remarked. “But there would hardly be many of these secret entertainers per flight.”

  “Sometimes one, sometimes two,” said Dr. Ilna. “Sometimes in masquerade as a pair of lovers. All the world loves the spectacle of young people in love. Is it not so?”

  Corwin was quicker than Angela at repartee. “Oh, I scarcely think they’ll be masquerading as lovers on our flight, Frau Doktor.” Under the circumstances, he spoke very smoothly. “The Corporation would be paying for a superfluity.”

  “Deft, Herr Poe.” Smiling, she lifted her glass and drank, then turned her head in Angela’s direction. “And to you also I drink, Frau Poe.”

  “Just Angela,” the bride reminded her.

  The older woman seemed to stiffen a little. “Frau Garvey, if you will,” she said as if in condescension. “Outside of the Webelsburg, I do not use the first name to anyone except my little Leibstandarte.” She rubbed the dog’s neck. “Me, for quickness you may call me Dr. Junge, or ‘Frau Doktor’ as Herr Poe already puts it; or Obersturmbannfuehrerin—that is, if you will, Major; or Grafin—which is in English ‘Countess’—von Cruewell.”


  “Not Countess!” Angela exclaimed. “Dr. Ilna?—Dr. Junge,” she corrected herself when the other woman frowned at being first-named even with her title. “I thought you introduced your dog as Valkyrie?” she hurried on.

  The dog lifted her head, ears pricked forward, and looked around at Angela.

  “Or doesn’t she like being first-named, either?” The bride leaned forward and stroked the animal. “Is ‘Leibstandarte’ her title, then? Her rank?”

  “Jawohl. Mein Leibstandarte. That is, my bodyguard.” Dr. Junge bent over to pat Valkyrie. Her fingers met Angela’s on the dog’s head. “Ah?” she observed with a sudden smile. “My little Leibstandarte likes you, nicht wahr? That is gut for you, sehr gut.”

  Corwin leaned forward and extended one hand to join in the game. Valkyrie twitched back her ears and gave a low growl. He retreated at once.

  “Everyone, she does not like,” said Dr. Junge. “Most persons she mistrusts for a very long time. But she knows her name, whoever speaks it. Hein, mein Valkyrie? So it is better sometimes not to speak it.”

  Corwin said, “That might make matters awkward should the conversation turn to Norse mythology or Wagnerian opera.”

  “The world is wide, Herr Poe. One can always find other matters about which to converse.” Dr. Junge gave Valkyrie a few final pats, and the dog lay down again with a wary snort. “Why not Countess?” the woman went on, harking back to Angela’s earlier protest.

  “Because the last countess we knew,” Angela explained, “was a rather unpleasant person.”

  “Ah? How so?”

  After a short if awkward silence, Corwin took up the explanation. “Why, for one thing, she kept a private torture chamber. I was never privileged to visit it, but I’m informed it featured murals of a highly artistic order.”

  “Private torture chambers are verboten in all states of the modern world, nein?”

  “In the sense I assume you to mean,” he replied, “they are outlawed everywhere except Kendorfoland and the New Helver asteroid colonies. I imagine the constitutions of those states include no specific articles on the subject largely in order to provide social-conscience groups material for their perennial protests.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that that countess never actually hurt anyone in her silly chamber,” Angela put in, “though she probably pretended to.”

  “When the so-called torture chambers are nonfunctionally equipped,” Corwin went on, “at least within the provisions of the ‘consenting adult’ guidelines, and can be shown to accord with the homeowner’s personal world, they fall into the category of stage setting and as such can be legally tolerated.”

  “They would not be tolerated in the New Germany,” Dr. Junge said dispassionately.

  “My dear Frau Doktor,” he argued with equal calm, “in our Reformed American States the rights of all citizens, reality perceivers and fantasy perceivers alike, to set their own home stages and furnish their recreational lounges however they choose, consistently with the rights of their neighbors, has been guaranteed by decision of the Private Affairs Branch of the Trilateral Supreme Court, New Jersey versus De Torqueville, C.E. 2036. Two years later, the Revived Mandan Nation versus the State of Montana decision went even further in allowing certain practices, under certain controlled conditions, again citing the ‘consenting adult’ laws of the late twentieth century, even though critics and adherents alike argued that the contexts were different and distinct. The question remains sufficiently complicated that our countess might have been able to squeak by legally with certain pieces of functional equipment, provided she could produce signed and fingerprinted documents from all co-participants, and prove no permanent effects beyond any considered desirable by the wearer—e.g., pierced ears, or skin tattoos applied by pre-laserdye techniques.”

  “Ik,” said Angela.

  Dr. Junge smiled and replenished her drink from a crystal bubble-bottle on the polished cherrywood end table. “You have informed yourself very well in these matters, mein herr.”

  “And the joke,” said Angela, taking his hand again, “is that you couldn’t ask for a kinder, gentler companion.”

  “Ah, that comes of suffering.” He returned her soft squeeze, then went on to Dr. Junge, “I still perceive medical swish injectors as old-fashioned hypodermic needles.”

  “I congratulate you, Herr Poe. You are one of a minority that dwindles year by year.”

  * * * *

  The honeymooners returned to their Minas Tirith Eyrie via the ferris lift, a leisurely outside elevator. As the licensed lights of Nostalgia City spread out below them against the black night landscape, Angela thought of Dr. Ilna Junge and asked, “Did you see her dark glasses?”

  “The obersturmbannfuehrerin’s?” Corwin enjoyed long words. “Yes.”

  “What did she look like to you?”

  “Curiously enough, aside from those glasses, like a monkish inquisitor.” He also enjoyed doublethink about monks. Being Catholic himself, he had used to consider now and then, like Angela and most other Catholic children, joining some cloistered order when he grew up; but that never stopped him from adopting, when it seemed cozier in context, the garbled gothic-romance version of dark doings in sinister monasteries. “Perhaps more specifically,” he qualified his description of Dr. Junge, “like a master in the order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence.”

  “The whole time?” Angela teased gently, snuggling up closer to him on the soft cushions of the elevator car’s sofa seat. “Didn’t you suffer even one little lapse into reality perception?”

  “Oh, that.” He tucked his arm more tightly around her shoulder. “Several, as a matter of fact. One that lasted for seven minutes together. During such interludes, I beheld Obersturmbannfuehrerin von Cruewell in mildly accessorized costume: khaki tunic and breeches, a black band with white swastika on her right arm, black Maltese cross at her throat, and ‘SS’ studs on her collar. I needed three reality lapses to recognize these last as the letter ‘S’ doubled. At first they appeared more nearly to resemble stylized streaks of lightning.”

  “Well, it isn’t your era. In fact,” Angela mused, “the Last Great War isn’t very many people’s era. I wonder who got Dr. Ilna’s accessories for her.”

  “Best call her Dr. Junge. Even in your private ruminations. In order to avoid first-naming her in conversation. I wonder what, precisely, ‘SS’ stands for in this context.”

  “‘Secret Service,’ isn’t it?”

  “If so, it seems a convenient coincidence that the initials should be the same in both German and English.”

  “It’s probably such a jawbreaker in German, Pundit, that even you wouldn’t be able to roll it off your tongue. Not without ten or twenty minutes’ practice, anyway.” They had started nicknaming each other “Pundit” and “Pundita” after the characters in Edgar Poe’s balloon-travel story. She rested her head on his shoulders. “Were her breeches jodhpurs?”

  “They were.”

  “Good. That’s the way I saw them, too. Bright azure instead of khaki, but jodhpurs all the same. Like muttonchop sleeves for the legs.” Angela sighed in pure contentment. Happy as she was to be fancier through and through, she nevertheless always felt a small chill of pleasure on learning that she perceived some detail the same way realizers perceived it.

  * * * *

  Left alone, Ilna Junge von Cruewell, the She-Wolf of the SS, poured herself another two shots of cold tea from her silver pocket flask and sparked it with fizz from the seltzer bottle. Through long experience of weights, angles, balances, capacities, gurgles, and timing, she brought the level of her drink to within a lip’s brush of the rim. In eleven years, even without using the trick of one finger at the edge, she had never overfilled a glass or cup.

  At need, when somebody else was pouring, she could swallow remarkable amounts of real alcohol without serious impairment to her faculties; but her own
flask always held strong tea. With this she had plied more fanciers than one into the false intoxication they could achieve on any libation they merely believed alcoholic, but she always preferred her own brain to be perfectly clear. She had come to enjoy the taste of cold tea with various mixers. Chuckling, she sat back; crossed her legs, affectionately brushing the toe of her right boot along Valkyrie’s fur; and sipped her drink.

  In spite of her maternal bloodline, her own fantasy-perceiving tendencies had shown at a mere 12.627 percent on her last Standard Test. High enough, coupled with her family background, that she had no difficulty understanding the fancy-class mind; but easily low enough that she herself could register as a reality perceiver. And then, how favorably her recognitive and character-analytical skills compared with those of high-scoring fanciers who saw what they wanted to see, or of dull realizers who had near-perfect standard perception but cloddish imagination!

  Valkyrie sat up, laying her head against Ilna’s thigh. The She-Wolf of the SS fondled her dog’s ears and felt a better glow than mere alcohol could have given. In this century, simple sightlessness was no longer considered the handicap it had once been called in Ilna von Cruewell’s workline.

  So now she had met two more who would share this week’s ride through the clouds to the City of Onion Spires, Yamboli. Two more presences to classify, examine, and tabulate. The young bride was one of those cheery optimists who saw evil in nobody, “unpleasantness” in very few, and danger in little short of an actual inferno. Such persons scarcely understood it when their flesh was cut, unless they noticed the blood. Her groom, on the other hand, was by his own admission a spontaneous pain producer—depending on other aspects of temperament, either the easiest or the most challenging type of fancier with whom to deal.

  The Obersturmbannfuehrerin’s hand strayed from her dog’s ears to her own breast pocket, from which she extracted a steelglass tube ten centimeters long by two in diameter. Tenderly she shook it, smiling at the little thumps as what it contained wiggled very slightly from side to side. The She-Wolf did not think of herself as sadistic, but the psychological aspects of this toy’s application always interested her. In that respect she was a true daughter of the Thousand-Year Reich (continually reminding herself that as a political empire it had long ceased to exist outside 12.627 percent of her own mindset and the imaginations of those few fanciers whose personal worlds resembled hers).