The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Again von Cruewell turned her face toward him. “It is true that this lounge, the promenade deck, and the stateroom corridor were filled with whammied people, but—mein Gott!”

  “Do not blaspheme,” said Jove.

  “And you,” Denne told him, “god or not, keep quiet unless you’ve got something to say that’s to the point. That goes for everybody!”

  “And it is true,” von Cruewell went on, “that at that moment Valkyrie was instructed to sniff out Herr Poe. Nevertheless, most of the whammied persons were very active, dancing and singing and ... other things.” Her pause sounded deliberate rather than confused. “I believe that Valkyrie would have paused and given me a signal if she found a wet and quiet body lying beside the bath.”

  “What a pity,” said Firebird Petrovka, “that we cannot question the dog.”

  Belladonna Jones Ribald gave a sob. “Will you shut up about the dog?”

  “No,” said von Cruewell. “We will leave the question of Herr Tolliver and talk now about my poor Valkyrie.”

  “When I say so!” Denne exclaimed. It got everybody’s attention back again. But the captain stared into von Cruewell’s dark glasses for maybe fifteen seconds before remembering there was no way she was going to make the blind woman look away first. “All right,” she told the group, “I say so. What about your dog, Major?” Denne had a general report from the four crew members von Cruewell had recruited—the only witnesses both sober and sighted—but it might be interesting to hear who von Cruewell herself blamed, and why. Besides, it shifted the limelight off Poe for a while.

  “My Valkyrie was stabbed with a dinner knife—”

  “Mine!” sobbed the Ribald. “All right, all right, it was despicable, and I’m scum, but I thought—she looked like a goblin wolf leaping for my throat!”

  Noticing how the Dungeon Chessite’s highblown language had toned down under pressure, the captain remarked, “In your world, M. Ribald, you wouldn’t have had to be whammied in order to perceive a guide dog as a wolf or worse, would you?”

  “I’ve confessed it!” Jones Ribald shouted. “It was me! I did it! God! Now leave me alone, can’t you?”

  Both priests shushed in to comfort her, and for once Jove Olympian refrained from answering to the call of “God!” But to Denne’s surprise—and probably everyone else’s—it was the bereaved blind woman who spoke up aloud in the Chessite’s defense.

  “Ja, leave her alone. Valkyrie has seemed like a wolf to other people besides those who live in their worlds of mythology and fairy tale. To mein Herr Poe, for instance. She has been a fearsome wolf to him, also. Yet he did not stab her, and Fraulein the Ribald did not stab for the reason that she lives in a world of orcs and goblin wolves, but because of the whammy.”

  “I’m going to pay,” Jones Ribald moaned. “I’ve already sworn to pay.”

  From behind Denne, First Hat Flier said, “How can you put a price on a dog like that?”

  “She cannot,” said von Cruewell. “Not if Valkyrie dies. But if Valkyrie lives, there will be medical costs, and these Fraulein the Ribald can pay.”

  Denne asked, “Then the dog is still alive?”

  Doc Caduceus replied, “Barely, Captain. I’m not much of a herriot—people are my specialty—and the sober crew had just about enough first-aid skill to help the major keep her alive till I sobered up. I think the blade missed the vital organs, but who knows what kind of foreign bodies it had on it from dinner and afterwards? But I cleaned her up and bandaged her, and if we can keep her alive till we land and find a real vet, I’d say she has some chance.”

  “She lies in our stateroom,” said von Cruewell, “hers and mine, fighting for her life. You can put out a call, Captain Denne. An SOS, a mayday. If there is an ocean ship near enough, with a good veterinarian—what you call a ‘herriot’—aboard, and if the weather is calm, we can lower her in the basket, as we brought Herr and Frau Gott up to us from New Olympus.”

  “Mmmm,” said the captain. In effect, von Cruewell had just given her an order, in an ordering tone of voice, and it went against the grain all the more because it was so reasonable in itself that refusing it would make Denne look like coldsox. But if it worked, von Cruewell would probably go down with her dog, and they’d both be out of the captain’s duffel. “Well, Major, you’ve got a lot of ‘ifs’ there, but we’ll give it a try. Officer Airborne, get on it.”

  The second hat saluted and headed for the radio shack, Denne and Flier moving out of the doorway to let him squeeze past. He looked relieved to be getting out of the lounge this easily.

  “And you, Offizier Flier,” von Cruewell went on, “you who ask what price can be put on such a dog as Valkyrie, you are very fortunate. You were in the group that swamped her. You, and Herr Gillikin, and our steward and our waiter, as well as Fraulein the Ribald. Five of you, by the accounts of our four sober crew people, and each of you roystering as loudly as the next. Ja, you must thank the fraulein for confessing. If she had not, any of you might be suspected of swinging that knife.”

  “I might be a little careful about swinging suspicions around if I were you, Obersturmbannfuehrerin,” said the captain. “Jeremy Tolliver’s family name was Epstein.”

  Maybe a fifth of those present picked up the connection right away, and von Cruewell didn’t act like one of them. “Was?” she said. “You have definite information which we do not, mein Kapitan?”

  “Oh, dear Lord God!” the whisper came from Mother Jackson. “Epstein! Jewish! The Holocaust!”

  That jogged more memories. Somebody on the larboard side gasped. Glancing over, Denne decided it must have been Poe. He looked a little shakier than before; Garvey and Gillikin still looked puzzled. En route to settling down in their own private worlds, fanciers usually got a good education in history, and then tended to blank whatever they didn’t care about keeping in their own little day-to-day databases.

  “Holocaust?” said the bride. “That was when the Old Testament chosen people made a burnt offering, wasn’t it?”

  “Like our own enlightened worshippers in the old days,” said Jove.

  Martha Hines Lightouch stood up and shouted, “Be quiet! You’re babbling!”

  “Hines!” said the captain.

  But the cook was out of control. Pointing whole-arm at von Cruewell, she cried, “My own mother’s name was Rosen! She was descended from a survivor—who had seen all the rest of his family butchered in Auschwitz! And people like this—this ‘Major von Cruewell’—they make a game out of it!”

  That was enlightening. Captain Denne knew her crew’s and passengers’ family names, but not any farther back than the present generation. She nodded to Flier, who put his hands on the cook’s shoulders and pressed her gently-but-firmly back down into her chair, where she slumped with her face in her hands.

  “The German death camps,” said Windsong. “Second Act of the Last Great War. Millions of people executed for being—what was the word?—’untermenschen.’ ‘Less than human.’ About half of them Jews, maybe two thirds. Many of the others Pagans, Catholics, Gypsies, Free-thinkers, any sympathizers who dared speak out against it. The worst persecution since the witch-burnings.”

  “Oh, dear!” said Angela Garvey. The way she said it, it didn’t sound trite or inadequate.

  Von Cruewell laughed. “Old lies! False propaganda spread by Der Fuehrer’s enemies. I am surprised that anyone still believes it. Who do you think settled the Jews in Israel, if not our glorious Fuehrer?”

  Vasilisa Petrovka said, “Now tell us that wheels are square.”

  At almost the same time Mother Jackson said, “That was why the court sentenced the Last Nuremburg Seven as late as 2045, two for being children and five grandchildren of Nazi death camp personnel.”

  “No,” said Poe, his voice sounding hollowish, “the obersturmbannfuehrerin may believe what she says. I think that several histori
ans do.”

  “So what did you decide to do, Obersturmbannfuehrerin von Cruewell?” the captain demanded. “Pitch Epstein out and let him swim to Palestine?” Denne was less concerned with laying charges than with regaining control of the situation, but putting their accounts together and minimizing the chances that Poe was lying or suffering from faulty perceptions, von Cruewell had had the best opportunity for stuffing Tolliver out the bathroom window. The expressions on people’s faces as they stared at the SS woman suggested that several of them had seen that fact, too. Especially Poe.

  “So,” von Cruewell replied as if she could see them all staring at her. “Because of this lie that some of you seem still to believe, that Der Fuehrer solved the Jewish problem by exterminating the Jews instead of by giving them back their own land and exporting them all there, I am supposed to have learned Herr Tolliver’s carefully guarded family name and executed him sofort for daring to mingle with this already very much mingled company. Do you think that the mere society of Jews outrages me? Or that I feared the genetic harm he could do in four days among this very highly moral society?”

  Mother Jackson said, “Whammy orgies offer quite a few chances for corrupting racial purity.”

  “Meine herren und meine Frauen. I did not know until the rest of you heard it just now that Herr Tolliver’s mother was an Epstein. How could I have learned this earlier than you? Persons who hide their family names very seldom babble them, even in drink. It appears that our Kapitan knows all of our family names. I do not, but I rejoice that I make no secret of my own full name: Doktor Ilna Junge Junge, Grafin von Cruewell, Obersturmbannfuehrerin SS.”

  “Yes,” said Juno, “our captain knows all our family names, and dares make free with them.”

  Denne cleared her throat. “That’s right, I know your names. They come to us from Names and Prints right along with your fingerprints and ticket security clearances, whether you like it or not. Behave yourselves, and I’ll keep everybody’s family names to myself.”

  Juno snorted.

  Von Cruewell said, “Herr Tolliver presented himself as a stowaway. Stowaways do not usually buy tickets.”

  “I had a check run on his prints when I screened down to make sure that neither his sword nor Ribald’s had hurt anyone when they fell down through the bottom of the ship. I would’ve had to order a check through Names and Prints and the Central Police Computer anyway. You don’t think I’d have allowed you to vote on whether or not to keep a dangerous character on board with you? Jeremy Epstein Tolliver was a harmless noddy.”

  Vasilisa Petrovka said, “You should have run a check on Major von Cruewell.”

  “I bound you, Fraulein Ballerina, because in your whammied madness you risked injuring yourself. But when, mein Kapitan, would I have learned that Herr Tolliver was an Epstein? If I found him drowned, I would have had no reason to execute him, and if I found him sufficiently alive and awake to tell me his secret family name, he would have fought me and Valkyrie.”

  “For a blind person,” said the captain, “you can fight pretty well.”

  “Jawohl, in close quarters. The bath chamber would have given Herr Tolliver more space to maneuver around me than he enjoyed on the catwalk, and when whammy does not bring torpor, it lends strength. With Valkyrie, ja, we might have won, but Herr Poe would have heard the struggle.”

  Poe nodded. “Yes, something of that I imagine I would have heard. In justice, I must also point out that M. Petrovka and I are both still alive.”

  “What the heck,” said Denne, “does that have to do with the price of eggs in Poughkeepsie?”

  “Yes,” said Petrovka, turning her almost expressionless face toward Poe. “Explain your statement.”

  “If I remember the ramifications of the word—and it did not come into currency until a century after my own chosen era—in the obersturmbannfuehrerin’s world both M. Petrovka and I must classify as untermenschen, albeit of the Slavic rather than the Hebraic variety. M. Petrovka for her final name and I ... Well, I’m not entirely sure why, but I have clear evidence that Dr. Junge perceives me also as Russian, and guilty in addition of wedding a blond and blue-eyed—”

  “And of course Major von Cruewell knew that,” said Captain Denne.

  “Jawohl,” von Cruewell replied calmly. “Herr Windsong described M. Garvey to me on the first morning. I know what all of you look like to the perceptions of realizers.”

  “But ...” said the bride.

  Windsong nodded to her. “Cheer up, Angel! You’re too short and round-headed for the dictionary definition of pure ‘Aryan’ in the major’s sense.”

  “I’m glad! I don’t want to be Aryan, not if that’s the kind of person old what’s-his-name?—Der Phew-roar—was trying to breed.”

  Denne’s wristphone had started chiming. She tabbed the call over to her first hat, who retired up the passage to take it. “Your point, Herr Poe?” the captain demanded, not that she couldn’t see it for herself, but that it seemed like good discipline to make him follow through by spelling it out.

  “Is this,” he replied. “The motive you seem eager to assign the obersturmbannfuehrerin for disposing of M. Tolliver would have applied at least equally to me, and in some measure to M. Petrovka. Moreover, as we can testify, Dr. Junge had the opportunity and no doubt the means in both our cases. Yet we live. Indeed, she even showed solicitude for M. Petrovka’s well-being—”

  “I am not untermenschen,” said the ballerina. “I am Art.”

  Flier was tapping Captain Denne on the shoulder. She slapped his hand away.

  “And Art,” Petrovka was going on, “does not appreciate being bound and fettered.”

  “Taped, Fraulein,” von Cruewell corrected her. “And if I had not taped you when I did, you might have been bandaged even more inconveniently now.”

  “Captain,” the first officer was murmuring, “you’d better—”

  “All right, ffellowes, all right,” she muttered. Then, louder: “You aren’t dismissed yet, people! None of you. Just sit tight and keep quiet.” She took two steps back into the passage with Flier, fully aware that the passengers weren’t going to keep quiet.

  They didn’t, any more than a classroom of schoolkids when teacher steps out, however briefly. When Denne stepped into the lounge again a few minutes later, almost all of them seemed to be talking at one decibel level or another, except von Cruewell, who stood listening with a supercilious expression; the plant woman, who was pulling sad, stray notes out of the harp; and the dancer, who sat doing her best impression of an icicle. The Olympians were talking loudly, Steward Stewart trying to quiet them with glasses of something Denne hoped was plain soda, Miz Ming and Gofer Garson trying to see to all the other passengers, and everybody else making consolatory noises to whoever was nearest. Doc Caduceus looked as if she was considering an injection of something for the cook.

  “All right, people, shut up and pay attention!” said the captain. “One of my crew has just been found knocked out cold at her station in one of the engine gondolas. Just when—that is, how long ago—the crewman who found her can’t say.”

  “Ah!” von Cruewell cut in. “By the harmless noddy I am supposed to have murdered.”

  “That remains to be seen!”

  “Pardon me, Captain,” said Braniff, “but Carstairs, Nkima, Catstep and me made sure that none of these other folk got out of the passenger areas. Everybody else except Tolliver is accounted for—”

  “What about our ‘Major’ von Cruewell herself?” Denne replied. “It could have happened while the rest of us here present were whammied.”

  “Do you think, mein Kapitan, that I would leave Valkyrie wounded as long as no one else was sober to nurse her?”

  “It could have happened before your dog was injured.”

  “We watched all the windows and hatches in here, Captain,” said Catstep. “Top priority. None of the
se people—including Major von Cruewell—got up into the ship, not while we were watching.”

  “It is possible, I think,” said von Cruewell, “that one could have gone up through the ceiling hatch in the promenade deck, while these four pairs of eagle eyes were watching the lounge. But that someone could have both gone up and returned again to this room without any of these four seeing, that is very unlikely. So it was either the elusive Herr Tolliver, mein Kapitan, or it was one of your other crew members.”

  “But will the poor woman be all right?” exclaimed Angela Garvey.

  “Probably,” said the captain. “Doc C., come along. It’s Goodwrench, and she needs you right now more than any of these other people do. All the rest of you, go to your staterooms and lock yourselves in. Stewart, Blossom, Garson, Lightouch, to your own quarters. Carstairs, Braniff, Nkima, Catstep—” Well, von Cruewell had judged them the cream of the crew—”you come with Officer Flier and me. You’ll be helping track down our party or parties unknown, but maybe armed and obviously dangerous.”

  “Captain Denne,” said Oziah Gillikin, “wouldn’t it be safer for us all to stay together here in—”

  “You’ve been watching too many screenshows, M. Gillikin. Everybody go to your staterooms and lock yourselves in until further notice! Further notice from me or one of my officers, not from any unauthorized person.”

  That would’ve been all the ship needed right now, all these fanciers—and the few reality perceivers not much better—sitting around together fermenting themselves into another welter.

  Chapter 17

  “The other six staterooms (aside from the VIP and Honeymoon Suites) are as authentic as compatible with modern comfort—and vice versa. The true, miniaturized, roughing-in feel of early 20th century travel has been as faithfully retained in the staterooms of NTC Cygnus as in NTC’s Pullman Railroad Sleeping Roomettes. Only a few square feet have been added to the original floor plans of the Graf Zeppelin cabins, to accommodate the private washbasins and cinerary commodes required by modern health guidelines. A folding screen is also provided, stored between the commode and wardrobe cabinets, to facilitate privacy when two passengers share the stateroom. A dressing table has also been added along the length of wall opposite the bed, but can be hidden with a sliding panel for passengers desiring the true old-fashioned flavor in all its romantic inconvenience. An authentically styled desktable beneath the window, an equally old-fashioned sofa that makes up into long, comfortable bunk beds—the upper with a high, strong, but soft guardnetting against the very unlikely event of air turbulence heavy enough to shake the ship—and two canvas-backed and -seated folding chairs complete the furniture. Whether traveling alone or with a roommate, here is a cabin you will equally love leaving and returning to.”