The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Not even Juno spoke again until after von Cruewell had disappeared with her dog into their own stateroom, the first off the lounge on the starboard side. Conversation remained hushed at the other table also.

  At last, when their stateroom door had closed on woman and dog, M. Tolliver broke the silence. “Aye, ’tis as well she wants no more of her soup, for the half on it’s sloshed out of her bowl.”

  The whole table had been jolted, one candle knocked over—not extinguished, seeing that it was a cell-powered electric light—and several dollops of wine and water sluiced out of glasses onto the tablecloth; but no other damage done, and not much soup splashed out of the other bowls. As Garson, Stewart, and Miz Ming bustled forward to set things right again, Corwin remarked a bit shakily that he was willing to entertain any observation concerning what he might have done to annoy the dog this time.

  “Probably wasn’t you at all, Dr. Poe,” said Oziah Gillikin. “I think the dog was just trying for a taste of soup.”

  “For the desire, We cannot hold her to blame,” said Juno, who had already taken another spoonful. “Only for the rude and wild manner of attempting to satisfy it. Swallow some, Ganymede. It’ll soon give you warmth and strength again.”

  Wondering if she perceived it as that famous home remedy, chicken soup, he stirred it again. Conscious of Juno’s watchful eye, he glanced at the stateroom corridor and saw Dr. Junge’s door opening. Inspired, he raised a spoonful halfway to his mouth before lowering it again and saying, as if he had only that instant noticed, “But I believe the obersturmbannfuehrerin is on her way back to us already.”

  The ruse worked until von Cruewell had once again taken her seat, at which time Juno instructed M. Garson to “Fill up Dr. Junge’s bowl, boy, since she’s rejoined Our party in time to finish this course, after all.”

  “Do not,” said von Cruewell, and the waiter did not.

  Juno eyed the obersturmbannfuehrerin, looked ready to tell her something, refrained, and turned back to M. Garson. “Then give Our Ganymede another ladleful. You filled his bowl only to half the first time, and it must be cold by now.”

  “No—I’d really prefer you didn’t,” Corwin interjected. Grown reckless in desperation, he added, “I find that it contains a substance to which I am allergic.”

  “Oh, what a pity!” said Angela. “What time will we be getting into that friendly little thunderstorm, M. Flier?”

  Thus neatly did she ease over his polite lie. Data on known food allergies were given to the computer when making travel arrangements, as when entering most good restaurants, so that had Corwin truly been served something to which he was allergic, it would have meant a glitch in need of investigation; for the moment, everyone pretended to have forgotten this, and First Officer Flier responded smoothly to Angela’s question:

  “Between twenty-two thirty and twenty-three hundred hours. That is, between ten thirty and eleven o’clock p.m. At just about the right time for a nightcap.”

  Mother Jackson asked, “Isn’t it courting danger to fly through a storm of any size on purpose?”

  “The King and Father of Gods,” said Juno, ‘is Lord and Master over all storms.”

  Mother Jackson made a wry face but refrained from further comment. It was von Cruewell who prevented a pause in the conversation.

  “Under a competent commander,” she said as though Juno had not spoken, “the zeppelin, which is one of Germany’s gifts to the world, is the safest of all aircraft in fair weather and in storms.”

  “And Captain Denne is certainly a competent commander,” M. Flier assured the company. “Her watch officers don’t lag far behind, either.”

  “With a trustworthy aide to read the gauges and report to me the view,” said the obersturmbannfuehrerin, “I also could command this zeppelin, even through a storm. What is in simple iguanice soup, M. Poe, to which you have an allergy?”

  “Iguanice? Is it really?” said Angela. “It’s mock turtle to me. I’ve never been able to taste real iguanice for what it is. Maybe if I concentrate, now that I know, I’ll be able to sample it tonight.”

  Corwin thought, I should counsel you to enjoy your ignorance, my love.

  “Gumbo to me,” said Oziah Gillikin.

  “True turtle to me,” said Tolliver, “and this e’en though I was present at its steamy birth.”

  “By My gracious dispensation,” said Juno, “let it be whatever each desires.”

  Mother Jackson and M. Flier verified that it was indeed iguanice. “Mine, too,” said Winterset Windsong. “Or, I guess you’d say, mine’s ‘mock iguanice’—without the iguana meat. How did our good chef manage that?”

  Tolliver, having helped in the kitchen, explained, “Our good Mistress Lightouch e’en boiled and strained the iguana meat in its own separate saucepan, the while blending two stews of the vegetables and spices and all else, the one in the general pot and the other in the small vegetarian pan. At the last, she emptied the iguana, well mushed in its own broth, into the general pot, keeping that for yourself and our dear Spherish musician innocent of any the least smack of flesh, rendered thick instead with but a touch of arrowroot.”

  Corwin wondered if the vegetarian version might prove less nauseating.

  All this time the obersturmbannfuehrerin sat with her head turned toward him. Caught between his reflection in her dark glasses and the bowl of unpalatable soup before him, he decided to confess and—he hoped—be done with it.

  “Mine is less a true physiological allergy,” he admitted, “than an emotional one. An unconquerable gustatory distaste.”

  “A strong will,” said von Cruewell, “does not know the word ‘unconquerable.’”

  “You’ll pardon the observation,” he argued recklessly, “but I should have thought that iguanice was anachronistic to your era.”

  “I live in the present, Herr Poe,” she replied with her usual calm. “In this second century of the Thousand Year Reich. And in the sense of taste I have excellent reality perception. That is the reason I do not eat the soup.”

  Corwin was sorely tempted to stretch mannerliness still further by remarking that it seemed unfair in her to badger him when she shared the same distaste. To his relief, M. Windsong’s voice, loud and jocular, drifted over from the other table, asking Jove Olympian whether they could look forward to a grand battle of thunderbolts between him and Mighty Thor. Jove responded in still more stentorian tones that Thor and all those other Scandinavian warts were mere puny upstarts and pretenders.

  The madre muttered something about little children playing at being gods, the obersturmbannfuehrerin observed that they at the other table sounded like persons who have drunk their wine too fast, and the talk happily moved away from the subject of iguanice.

  M. Garson had taken the bowls away without comment, served and cleared the fish, and brought the main course—solid, staple roast beef, thick-cut and medium rare—when Corwin again found himself at the center of the conversation. This time the twist that put him there began at the other table. In answer to some pleasantry from Jove, which made Tolliver chuckle while the rest of Juno’s party pretended deafness, Belladonna the Ribald said loudly, “Aye, and Your Olympian Majesty knows just exactly where you can shove your blasted thunderbolts!”

  “Where?” Angela inquired of her own table.

  “Don’t ask,” said the madre.

  “Poor Mistress Belladonna!” murmured Tolliver. “I greatly fear me that yon pretty lass still grieves out of measure for her lost sword. Methinks ye three have formed a game of Dungeon Chess,” he went on to Angela, Corwin, and Oziah Gillikin. “Mayhap an invitation to join in your sport would cheer the soul of our fair Mistress Belladonna.”

  Oziah shook his head. “I don’t think it’d be her dish of pudding. M. Poe—we’ve made him ‘Dr.’ Poe in the game—is trying to conquer the Land of Oz. Mainly, I think, to see what kind of ‘in
teresting’ punishments he can tease Ozma, Glinda, and the Wizard into giving him whenever they beat him.”

  “You play to lose, Herr Poe?” said von Cruewell, again turning her face in his direction.

  He could have wished that the Ozophile had been less open. “On the contrary, I play to win, with that intensity of effort found only in foredoomed villains.”

  “I’m not sure I follow that, M. Poe,” said the first officer.

  “He just means,” Angela explained, “that the heroes don’t have to worry, because the author arranges it all for them, so the villains have to work harder.”

  “And hence stand in need of more inner fortitude and determination,” Corwin added. “Games and theatricals being removed from life, the villains’ roles therein are generally the more interesting to play.”

  “Never remark it to our Mistress Belladonna that Dungeon Chess is removed from life!” Tolliver said with a laugh.

  “Except that you are playing for the forfeits,” Oziah persisted, directing his comments alternately to Corwin and the table at large. “He keeps making suggestions about what we should do with him—I’m playing the Wizard—whenever we’re on top. Dr. Poe, you remind me of Lord Nerle in another of Baum’s books, The Enchanted Island of Yew. Nerle’s quest was traveling around the world looking for someone to torture him, so he could see what it was like.”

  Tolliver barked another laugh. “Thy Lord Nerle was indeed an innocent in innocent lands if he couldn’t find the right house to buy a pleasant little of that—saving thy presence, Mother Frances.”

  Putting on a patient smile, the madre glanced, not at Tolliver, but at Corwin.

  He sighed. Would he have to go on explaining it throughout his entire life? “I am not a masochist.”

  “You admit to being a spontaneous pain producer,” said von Cruewell.

  “The terms are far from synonymous. I might even venture to call them antonyms.”

  Dr. Junge tilted her head slightly to one side. “I think that few students of the human psychomystique would call them so.”

  “Good heavens!” he exclaimed, a bit desperate. “If I were a masochist, I’d have eaten the soup!”

  Mother Jackson came to his aid. “We’re skirting close to private concerns, Major von Cruewell. Has anyone read Atramentacia Scribbler’s latest novel?”

  “Which one is her latest?” said Angela.

  Von Cruewell’s face had turned toward the madre. “I would not object to baring my own psychomystique in public, Mother Frances.”

  “I think We should find that very boring,” said Juno, reasserting her position. “As We have found most of this dinner’s table talk boring, shallow, and unworthy Our attention. Come, Ganymede, sing for Us!”

  “With pleasure, Your Olympian Majesty,” he temporized, “when dinner is done.”

  “Now!” said Her Olympian Majesty.

  “Allow me,” Tolliver put in. “Here’s a song, ma’am, called the Hanging Song, with which I am tolerably well acquainted, for that ’tis popularly sung at public executions:

  “‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me,

  And will thy favors never greater be—’”

  “Oh, how sad!” cried Angela. “Make him stop, Your Majesty.”

  “It’s a wholesome moral ditty,” said Mother Jackson. “Let him go on.” And to Corwin’s astonishment, she started crooning a bit of the Revived Ancient Mass as if in accompaniment to Tolliver’s Hanging Song. The peculiar combination seemed to please Her Olympian Majesty, for she began to tap her spoon against her water glass more or less in rhythm with the singers.

  “Music!” said Oziah. “The perfect fuel for balloons and Ozoplanes! Just the thing to hold us up!” Pulling his napkin from his lap, he began knotting its four corners round his fork.

  Angela went into a fit of giggling. “Take care of yourself!” she chortled at her husband. “Something’s going to happen!” Then, to his horror, she snatched up two bread and butter plates—scattering the rolls—tried to fit the plates to the neck of the nearest wine decanter, and flung the whole ensemble into the air.

  Its loose components smashed down on the table, knocking several blossoms out of the centerpiece, overturning a candlestick, and splashing the diners with wine. Tolliver and Mother Jackson went on singing, Juno laughed, and M. Flier dashed the wine on his face as though it were aftershave lotion. The obersturmbannfuehrerin sat motionless. So did Corwin. In shock.

  “Not high enough!” Oziah told Angela. “You just didn’t launch it from high enough, Tolly—” her role in their Oz game was Tollydiggle—”Like this. Watch! Oz, Oz and away!” Standing on a chair, which wobbled beneath his weight, he dropped his fork-and-napkin parachute. Only three ends were tied. The fourth flapped loose as the fork clattered down into the gravy boat.

  “Silence, all of you!” Juno Olympian cried imperiously, standing and hurling her plate, food and all, like a discus through the air to the far side of the lounge.

  Laughing uncontrollably, First Officer Flier overturned his water goblet on his own head. “Honors to you, M.! Honors to you!” he shouted, waving at Her Olympian Majesty. “Everyone who’s going, get in the showers before the storm strikes!”

  From the obersturmbannfuehrerin’s stateroom came the sounds of Valkyrie barking and pawing at the door. Nearer at hand, the diners at Jove Olympian’s table seemed unperturbed by the shenanigans at Juno’s, being deep in similar antics of their own. Even the waiter and stewards looked about to plunge into the sudden debauchery.

  “Herr Poe,” said the blind woman, “I have not heard your voice for some moments.”

  “No,” he answered weakly.

  “What is going on?”

  He forced himself to gaze around. “M. Gillikin is juggling napkins. M. Flier is trying to juggle handfuls of water. Mother Jackson and M. Tolliver are playing patty-cake as they sing. M. Juno is dancing. So is the Firebird—M. Petrovka—she’s just disappeared down the stateroom corridor. Dr. Caduceus appears to be vivisecting the centerpiece. M. the Ribald and M. Jove ...” Married man though he was, Corwin blushed and quickly looked elsewhere. “M. Celeste is kissing the lounge harp. M. Windsong is standing on his head. Our waiter—M. Garson—is rearranging the chairs with more apparent concentration than purpose. Miz Ming is beating—no, fluffing—cushions. Captain Denne and Officer Airborne are splashing wine at each other across several paces. Some of the crashes you hear are caused by M. Stewart, who has begun to clear the other table. And my wife is ...” His voice broke. Angela was fingerpainting on the tablecloth with gravy and mashed potatoes.

  Above the tumult von Cruewell shouted calmly, “And you, Herr Poe? Are you still in your right mind?”

  “I…believe so. The alternative is that I alone am hallucinating.” An alternative he might well have preferred.

  “I talk with you. I am still in my right mind. In that we seem to be alone.”

  “I very much fear that we are.”

  The obersturmbannfuehrerin stood. “You will come with me to the bridge. We must be sure that those who presently fly this zeppelin are in their right minds.”

  “My wife—”

  “You will come with me, Herr Poe. At once. If your little Frau is not in her right mind, you must leave her so that she does not hinder us.”

  He saw von Cruewell’s point, but if the madness had spread to the watch officer and crew, the airship should already be lunging; and he could never leave Angela in this condition in a room filled with frenzied lunatics. “I will show you to the corridor that leads to the bridge,” he said, rising. “If you wish, I can join you there after I have seen to my wife.”

  Angela was still comparatively quiet, fingerpainting the tablecloth. Juno and Tolliver were whirling round and round in each other’s arms, he bawling about Fortune his foe and she chanting Greek syllables. Mother Jackson was lightly tappi
ng the soles of M. Windsong’s feet as if they were drumheads, he laughing in rhythm with it. Oziah and Flier had turned to the manufacture of model airships from napkins and drinking glasses.

  “If you do not come with me now,” said von Cruewell, “you will not join me on the bridge. You will meet with me later in the library, and we will talk there. As the only two unaffected passengers.”

  He nodded, then, remembering her sightlessness, repeated his assent aloud. Averting his gaze from Jove and M. the Ribald, and narrowly skirting collision with Juno and Tolliver, as well as with Officer Airborne—who was wheeling about the tables in search, presumably, of more wine, Corwin brought von Cruewell to the short passage with the galley to port, radio shack to starboard, and bridge straight ahead. The galley door was open, and from within came thumps, crashes, and the chef’s voice uplifted in a garbled version of “Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder.” The doors to the radio shack and bridge were closed, which lent them a staid and sober aspect. But they were soundproofed, so God knew what the obersturmbannfuehrerin might find behind them. “Straight down the corridor,” he told her. “The galley door is open—the chef sounds afflicted.”

  “I hear her.”

  “The other doors are closed. Good luck.”

  “The library,” she reminded him. “In half an hour. If I am not yet there, you will wait for me.”

  Chapter 8

  “How very safe, commodious, manageable, and in every respect convenient are our modern balloons!”

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “Mellonta Tauta”

  On the bridge, Third Officer Candace Siroonian Altocumulus rechecked all gauges and took another sip of coffee.

  Given the chance, she could bring Cygnus through this little storm as safely as the Old Woman. She would never be given the chance. When the storm hit—”unexpectedly”—two hours before the passengers had been forewarned for it—Captain Gage Denne would come bounding to the rescue. All part of the scenario. NTC preferred “Experience Saves the Day” to “Understudy Becomes Star” every time.