The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  She started swimming out from underneath them. Someone was holding her back, someone was putting kisses on the back of her neck. It wasn’t Corwin, so she tried to slap. Her hand was caught, held fast, twisted—

  And Angela’s world shredded into something full of thorns and shadows. She shut her eyes, pulled harder, and screamed.

  * * * *

  Being the one sane individual in an orgy of frenzied lunatics was far from Corwin Poe’s ideal of a happy nightmare, especially when Angela was among the lunatics. Save for the fact that this asylum of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether was in flight over the Atlantic Ocean with a storm approaching, he could have cursed von Cruewell for not staying long enough to help him get his bride to safety. Juno Olympian clinging to him amorously, and Jove beating him back with one arm while pawing at Angela with the other ... And all these additional bodies in the writhing knot—the highwayman, one of the ship’s officers, even poor, plump Oziah Gillikin, who still grinned and chuckled while absorbing many of the blows Jove aimed at Corwin ... At last the young husband attempted a call for assistance: “Is anyone here capable of reasoning?”

  Miz Ming came over. “Clutter, clutter, clutter,” she observed, shaking her head, and made as if to roll them all away together. Instead, predictably, someone pulled her down in her turn into the human maelstrom.

  “One moment!” Dr. Caduceus called. She sounded calm, and for a moment Corwin nourished hope—until he caught a clear view of her and saw that she was carefully cutting away a strip of wall upholstery between window and ceiling.

  “No!” he shouted, contemplating the harm a crazed doctor could wreak with a dinner knife upon entangled limbs and bodies. “We’re all right! Don’t—”

  Something bounded over them like a wild creature fearing a pack of hounds in pursuit. He had just seen that it was the Firebird when she reached the lounge wall beside the harp-playing musician, turned back, and once more began her leaps toward the stateroom corridor and promenade deck. But this time, as she passed above them, Jove thrashed out and caught her ankle. Down she came, so that Corwin feared for her bones—but meanwhile seized his chance to pull away.

  He gained freedom for his own limbs, but Angela was still somewhere in—good God, there were more than half a dozen in the Laocoonian mass about her, and she was screaming!

  With the strength of desperation, he braced his legs and prised, plucked, and hauled individuals away by main force. Happily, they did not seem to have the fabled strength of madness. The dancer came away eagerly, helping him extricate her with almost as much cooperation as if she had been rational. Once free, she shook herself and returned to her bounding. Oziah and the stewardess clung together giggling, but once Corwin managed to start their momentum the Ozophile’s weight helped roll them both clear. Flier had gone utterly limp and offered no resistance.

  The knot was halved. But its remaining members held together all the more stubbornly, with Angela in the middle. Once again she screamed. Now he could see how Jove clutched at the back of her neck, pulling her hair to his lips.

  Feeling maddened himself, kicking furiously at Tolliver’s arm as it hooked round his leg trying to tug him in again, Corwin yanked the Olympian into a sitting position and dealt a hard shove to his chest. The old man rolled away at last to one side, and Corwin was able to pull Angela partly free, despite the groping arms of Tolliver and Juno, who seemed less intent on holding Hebe than on snaring Ganymede. Then someone—Jove—came back on him with a cry of rage.

  Jove Olympian had gray hair and sinking cheeks, but there was nothing flaccid about the elbow that clamped beneath Corwin’s chin, the arm that held him fast round the waist, or the knee that commenced grinding into the small of his back. Between anger and long hours of well-publicized sporting exercise, Jove needed no induced frenzy to lend him strength. Corwin abandoned any delicacy about fighting an old man. After the first furious moment of straining against the onslaught, striving to collect his thoughts, he fell limp for the space of a few heartbeats, to take his opponent offguard, then threw himself forward with a wriggling dodge.

  No doubt it would have been ludicrous, judged as some trick of martial arts, but it worked well enough that Corwin could pull free and regain his feet. Jove, standing on knees, wheeled to face him, glared up for an instant, and lunged for his legs. Corwin jumped back. The Olympian moved forward after him. Fury leaped almost palpable from Jove’s eyes, the grinding of his teeth was actually audible, one thin trickle of blood appeared to bisect his forehead and another branched down from the corner of his mouth. To complete the grotesquerie, he continued his pursuit all the while on his knees, as if he had forgotten the purpose of his feet, which trailed behind him, one sandal dragging by a single strap, the other lost completely.

  Breathing hard, Corwin retreated step by step, forcing himself to hold his speed to the rate of Jove’s advance, trying to close his ears to Angela’s sobbing, until he had almost reached the stateroom corridor. At the last second, just in time to avoid being blocked into the narrow passage, he sprang to one side and ran around the four or five crazed sufferers whom he found in his way, back to Angela. Happily, no one else had been sucked back into the tangle—it remained Angela, Juno, and Tolliver—and Angela had dragged herself a little farther from the other two. They lay on her left leg, but without taking any apparent notice of her.

  Corwin pulled her up at last, held her close, and glanced around, prepared to retreat to the bridge if Jove still blocked the stateroom passage.

  Jove had gotten to his feet and was coming at them again.

  And all this while M. Celeste played her harp in strains at once wild and decorous, Bacchic and Apollonian, like that mad divinity of the Lovecraft mythos.

  Half supporting, half carrying Angela, Corwin started to circle. In the middle of the lounge, Jove sprang. The younger man met him with a sudden right-arm thrust to the stomach.

  The Olympian staggered back and fell doubling over onto one of the couches. But within a second he stood upright once more, pointing one arm at the newlyweds, waving the other at the dark windowall behind him, and screaming something that sounded like an ancient Hellenic curse.

  Lightning flashed. For what seemed many seconds, the old Olympian stood etched—white toga, gray hair, pallid skin marked with purple blood—against the sky blackened with night and storm, marble-streaked with one crooked fork of painful brilliance. Then fell the thundercrash, enveloping the airship in its reverberations.

  So abnormally strained and heightened were Corwin’s senses by now, despite his sobriety and continuing reality perception, that this first thunderbolt of the storm seemed hardly coincidental. As the notes of M. Celeste’s harp grew audible again, he staggered with Angela down the stateroom corridor, bearing her at last to the haven of their own suite. Even as he closed and locked the sound-soak door on the tumult without, he experienced an involuntary shudder, as though he had indeed been cursed by an angry god.

  Chapter 10

  “For a few years in the late 20th century, the time-hallowed codex book looked like an endangered species, thanks to microprint readers .... But proto-fanciers weren’t the only folks who cherished a fondness for the oldstyle medium, and about the same time the Reformed Constitution was setting guidelines for the rights and privileges of fantasy perceivers, the Great Books Publishing Group, Shandra Ontano, and Rhett Sorensen were racing to patent proto-versions of today’s codex readers. Ontano copped hers first, with a unit about the size of one of the first regular microreader machines—a volume that people of that era called ‘coffee-table’ size and scholarly bibliophiles still call ‘folio’—large folio at that. Sorensen and GBPG managed to squeak their own patents through with a combination of minor differences and smaller sizes, but even the smallest—GBPG’s—was as cumbersome as the old bibliophilic ‘quarto.’ Nevertheless, the benefits to libraries, schools, travelers, publishers, warehousers, forests, and even b
ooksellers was immediate and incalculable. ...

  “Henceforth every home could have a book library extensive as the British Museum Reading Room’s, storable in one or two filing cabinets, with half a dozen codex readers. The student’s staggering armload of textbooks could be carried home in a billfold, for use in the family’s readers. Even people who read books faster than Atramentacia Scribbler and I can write them could pack a year’s supply along anywhere in one corner of a carry-on suitcase. Just insert the chosen text into a compatible codex reader (in the early decades, every company produced different microtext formats, from chips and tiny disks to beads and even strips)—and presto! the text appeared on the blank pages, to be read exactly like an old-fashioned book. Pictures, even in color, appeared equally well.

  “A few diehards, groping for complaint material, protested that book design suffered from the interchangeability of texts with covers, and that short texts left blank pages at the end of a volume while overlong texts required changing chips, occasionally in midsentence. There had been similar species of complaints during the Gutenberg switch from handcopied to pressprinted books. ...

  “In fact, of course, the printed codex book is still being published in collectors’ small-run editions that don’t endanger our lumber reserves—but it might have died out completely without the codex reader to help the Fancy Class keep alive the habit of turning pages. ...

  “Modern codex readers come in all sizes from ‘Elephant Folio’ to ‘Big Little Book,’ in all page textures from ‘glossy’ to simulated handmade paper, and in all covers from library buckram and mock-leather to stiff paper and cellowrap. Almost the only standardized feature is the textchip niche, whether located in spinepocket or in one of the covers. Codex readers usable only with one publisher’s microtexts are much rarer than 19th-century print books in today’s mathomshops; even the scrolls, clay tablets, and other novelty readers put out for exotic-frame fanciers are adaptable to every modern publisher’s textchips.”

  —Al Everymind, The Book and Its Many

  Avatars. (Ann Arbor: Semi-Scholastic Press, ©2066)

  * * * *

  “The NTC airship has a library fine as any aboard its ocean liners or continental tour trains, the authentic flavor designed for optimum enjoyment by realizers and fanciers alike. Two real shelves, one holding hardback and the other paperback size volumes, carry enough codex readers for every passenger to be reading at the same time, while the lover of screens can find a multipurpose small terminal, ready for booktexts, screenshows, gaming, or such limited-computer functions as letter writing and business or hobby mathematical calculation, concealed behind the original oil painting by Evandi or Carpello, which flips down so that its back becomes the top of a simulated woodgrain desk. Because of the weight factor, printout paper is limited and there’s an additional charge for each printout sheet, even in personal letters. You won’t have to show the letter—just tell one of the stewards how many sheets you have in that sealed envelope. The steward will trust you. Airship passengers are an honest bunch.

  “Holographs of shelved books, covering most of the wall space, give even 100% reality perceivers the sense of a true old-fashioned private library. Every title shown on the holographic spines will be found in textchip behind that particular flipdown panel. Of course, many times more textchips can be stored than holographic spines pictured, and a catalog volume is ever handy to direct the browser to the additional selections. A screenshow fire in holographic fireplace adds the authentic Old Library coziness, even radiating adjustable electroglow and woodsmoke scent. Or the firescreen can be slid up from floorlevel to eyelevel and turned into an aquarium with screenshow of tropical fish. The aluminum and airfoam armchair is upholstered in real crushed velvet, and both of the folding straight chairs are simulated woodgrain.”

  —Al Everymind, Flying in a Cloud

  (NTC travel brochure;

  corporate undated copyright)

  * * * *

  Angela had gone almost completely limp. Loosening but not removing her clothes, Corwin put her to bed, tucked the light airfeather blanket up around her, and sat beside her for fully half an hour, attempting to fathom the evening’s events.

  That some opiate or other behavior-altering substance had been administered to the group was obvious, most likely in the soup. Surely this could not have been part of the planned entertainment!

  Judging from some of the behavior exhibited, this drug would appear to have hallucinogenic properties. Hallucinogens, legal or illegal, attracted more reality than fantasy perceivers, for healthy fanciers needed no such artificial stimulants for the imagination. Such comparatively few fanciers as took them came primarily from the ranks of the fabulously rich and the woefully impoverished: those who had grown bored with trying to calculate their wealth and those who had grown discouraged with trying to adapt their desired worlds to their actual squalor.

  Corwin and Angela were rich in that they had never known what it was to do without some desired luxury for lack of money to buy it; but they were not so rich that they could afford to negotiate the purchase of the First International Bank of Trade and Commerce, the Little Mac Rabbitburger empire, or even one of the Oldest Surviving Disneylands. Insofar as the Fancy Class could be subdivided, they were solidly upper middle on the Heimdigger Wealth Index Scale, Leisure Income Adjustment Version. Moreover, they both came of families with a morality orientation that approached middle-class conservative on the Universal Council of Churches Guideline Graph, Standard Reality Version. Of course, Corwin had dabbled in fantasies based on the works of Bosch, De Quincey, Capchild, and others; but never, so far as he knew, with actual opiate substances, only with such props as baking soda and the agaricus campestris or common cultivated salad mushroom. He had even refused his physician’s kindly offer to prescribe limited dosages of mescaline as a possible aid in restoring him to full fantasy perception, though he had twice or thrice colored the caps of his salad mushrooms with red food dye.

  In the illegal purchase and consumption of forbidden substances, he was an innocent. And his bride’s innocence surpassed his own: she rarely even consumed true liquor harder than sherry, table wine, or the postprandial cordial! He hoped, devoutly hoped, that this single involuntary dose of some unknown opiate would not in any way impair her health or spirits. If he never told her, if she never learned what had happened…but that was too much to ask. It had struck so many that there must be discussion about it, probably some official investigation into which they would all be drawn.

  He thought of his appointment with the obersturmbannfuehrerin—that is, of the meeting to which she had in effect commanded him. She held no official authority over him, nor did he much like her. Indeed, distasteful as it was to admit the self-knowledge, she and her dog caused him a certain degree of apprehension. And he did not want to leave Angela.

  But Angela had sunk into a healthy-seeming slumber within ten minutes of being tucked in, and had been resting peacefully in that condition for more than a quarter of an hour. Oblivious alike to the thundercrashes that from time to time penetrated the sound-soak of their apartment and to the stormy gusts that occasionally caused even so stable an aircraft as the Melon to lunge or sway, she appeared to smile but never fluttered her eyelids whenever he stroked her forehead preparatory to replacing the cool, moistened cloth across her temples.

  The sound-soaking that failed to block out the worst of the thunder nevertheless effectively muffled all noise from other parts of the airship. For all Corwin knew, everyone aboard, save he and von Cruewell alone, might be under the influence, and the great Melon flying unguided—or worse than unguided—through the storm. Nor, when he recollected the impressions and fears that had lately assailed him in the main lounge, could he take a solemn oath that he himself was totally unaffected. He had, after all, taken one taste of the soup.

  The obersturmbannfuehrerin, however, had appeared confident of her ability to deal with
the situation. If anyone this side of the bridge could provide help, reassurance, or reliable information tonight, it was Dr. Junge; and an uncongenial ally was preferable to no ally at all.

  The door to the passage locked only from the inside. The door to the bathroom locked from both sides, but once through it, he would be able to lock it only from the outside. He would have paid a hundred thousand tridols—and more—for old-fashioned locks with turning keys. And yet perhaps he would not, for if Angela should awake rational and find herself locked in alone ...

  After tabbing a note to her on the personal memoscreen, he made doubly sure that the passage door was locked, went out the other door, and locked that from the bathroom side. At least no one would be able to get in casually from the stateroom corridor, and Angela would not be able to get out and injure herself by accident in the bath. The pool was drained; but while this eliminated the danger of drowning, it increased the peril of an accidental fall. The outer bathroom door could not be locked from the corridor side, for safety under normal conditions. Such debacles as tonight’s had never, presumably, been foreseen by the airship’s designers.

  As he stepped into the corridor, the noise of orgy dashed again at his ears. He glanced toward the lounge. Most of it was hidden from him, and he from it, by the passageway’s tunneling effect; but within his line of sight Jove was grappling with Tolliver and one other person. Hoping to remain unseen, Corwin slipped into the library.

  Von Cruewell was sitting in the armchair near the windowall, her fingers steepled, legs crossed, and dog reclining at her side. “Is it you, Herr Poe?” she said.

  “It is.”

  “Sehr gut. Now you will shut the door.”

  “I would prefer to leave it open, so that we—I—will be able to see anyone who may enter the bath or try the door to the Honeymoon Suite.”

  “I did not make a request, Herr Poe. I made a command.”