Actually, that part of his brain reminded him which remained aware of the standard reality-perceivers’ view on matters, it would be life imprisonment in some elegant dungeon for homicidal fanciers. All he could ask of the gods to-night was to help him elude his pursuers long enough to reason out whether the long drop would not, in truth, be preferable.
* * * *
Every other night, things were—well, not exactly A-1, but at least A-3 or you might say B-1 for Pat Carstairs in the airship. Thanks to his daytime experience, he knew what Cygnus was really like. And most nights, the fancy-class passengers were all safe in their gondola below and only the realizing crew was around up in the hull.
Tonight there was a fancier loose somewhere, and things were downright trolly. If Pat could go on keeping his secret tonight, he’d deserve the Purple Heart. Too bad nobody would ever know. That was the trouble with keeping secrets. you couldn’t brag about doing it without defeating the purpose.
Patrick Carruthers Carstairs was a werefancier.
Nobody knew about it, not Captain Denne, not the Names and Prints Registry, not the Standard Testing Bureau, not even Pat’s father and mother, though he thought his sister Peg might just possibly suspect. She was the one who had steered him to the essay in Esoteric Psychomystiques, back when he was in middle college. Werefancyism qualified as esoteric, all right. It and its yang, wererealism, together affected less than one percent of the fantasy-perceiving population, fewer people than the various forms of dopplerism all total.
So Pat was careful to take his standard perception tests during the Bureau’s daylight hours. If he’d been a wererealizer, he’d have been careful to take them one of the three nights a week the Bureau’s Cincinnati branch stayed open till 2330.
By day, his reality perception was a solid 97.48 percent, enough to put him in the bracket that needed legal retesting only once every five years to stay reality-registered. At sunset, the percentage started dropping. At night, he guessed he was about ninety percent fancier. Not just nights of the full moon, either. Every night.
Staying in very brightly lit places could stave it off sometimes, and for years between late preteenage and his Classic Twenty-fifth he used to spend a lot of evenings at indoor sports arenas, night school, and clockround shopping arcades. But when he hit his quarter-century mark, he had decided that kind of thing was kidstuff. During the day he could memorize all he needed to know about the real world to keep his secret. Hadn’t he even fooled that SS major tonight?
She really looked SS to him, too, like something straight out of old screenshows or Hezerbody’s Nightmare Alternate Histories.
That was one of the glitchiest parts. Pat didn’t even know for sure what his “own” fantasy world was, or would have been if he’d let it develop the way most fancytend kids did, either at random subconscious or with conscious-preference programming. He seemed to pick up a lot from any fanciers who happened to be around. He’d talked about it once, under a fake name, with a Purdue psych student who was taking off-the-street profiles for some course. Together they’d diagnosed it as springing from Pat’s continual childhood struggles to blank his fantasy perception. Since his parents were pretty liberal floaters who probably wouldn’t have minded a fancier in the family, he guessed that some of the nightmares he remembered having as a kid had actually been his own world tuning itself in, and it was so awful that that was the real reason he’d started blanking it in the first place.
Now, at age twenty plus nine, he seemed to glimpse his own night world, if and so far as it was his own, like a background by Dali or Gabinny. He knew those two artists’ names because he’d recognized their landscapes like places where he’d been before. When he was surrounded by clockround realizers, the background stayed vague. But when there were fanciers nearby, they started accessorizing it with bits and pieces of their worlds. He wasn’t sure if it was only power of suggestion or if he really was radaring up their brainwaves. But watching that group whammy-spin a few hours ago had been pretty doggone squoozadelic for Pat C. Carstairs.
So what was a simple little werefancier, just trying to get through life without letting on about his perceptional twist, doing working for a company like NTC? That made most of its profit out of fanciers, quasi-fanciers, and folks pretending to be fanciers during their vacation time.
Well, this job still beat any of his earlier groundside worklines by half a lightyear. It had the vistas of skyscraper window-washing without the big-city noise and psychic confusion; the satisfaction of building maintenance without the hassle of dealing with suppliers and repair specialists—NTC dealt with the suppliers, and Pat was one of the specialists himself now—and the camaraderie of powerline upkeep and of his eighteen months in the Army, without the danger of electrocution or the military regimentation. It also had travel, variety, and free panoramas of sky, sea, and landscape, just like the NTC recruiter had promised. It paid better, too. And that NTC recruiter had been one wow of a good-looking lady, even if she’d only been after him for his A-1 balance, lack of acrophobia, and sure touch with mechanical gadgetry. Besides, in the general pattern, as a member of the airship crew, he was surrounded by as solid a bunch of reality perceivers as you could find almost anywhere. Tonight was the first time in three crossings he had come within touching distance of a passenger.
Chasing the highwayman wasn’t as bad as guarding the whammiers had been. Two hours ago, Pat hadn’t been able to tell if the main passenger lounge wanted to be a greenhouse, an old Roman temple, a cave, or what. And he didn’t know the passenger areas so well as the rest of the ship anyway. Up here in the hull, now, he had just the one fancier’s vibes to contend with besides his own, he knew the ship’s upper regions thoroughly, and the one fulltime fancier wasn’t anywhere in sight and ought to be sober by now wherever he was.
On the other hand, whenever Pat saw the rest of the search party—all spread out as they were on the catwalks and branchwalks and ladders—Old Woman Denne, First Hat Flier, and Jojo Nkima looked like horses walking upright, Baff Braniff looked like some kind of ugly ape, and Catstep looked like a cat. That last was okay. Catstep always looked like a big humanoid cat to Pat Carstairs at night. And there was something slightly kongish about Baff Braniff at the best of times. But nobody—that is, no people—had ever looked like horses before. And weren’t there intelligent, talking horses somewhere in Gulliver’s Travels?
Pat had had a good standard education, stuck all together with the fancytend kids and everyone else through the primaries and midschool, then channeled off with the junior realizers to concentrate on practical studies. So he had no more than any standard realizer’s knowledge of lit. Everybody knew about Gulliver’s Lilliputians, and wasn’t there also a land of giants where Gulliver was like a little Lilliputian himself? Pat had heard about the talking horses in that university overview course where the prof was clumped-up on the theory that Gulliver ranked with Don Quixote and Baron Munchausen as one of the proto-fanciers of classical fiction. But the Flying Island must be part of advanced fancy-class curriculum. All Pat knew about it was what he’d picked up since they caught Tolliver stowing away up here.
The gas cells, at least those in the distance, looked like they could be giants’ fingers, and if the airship’s resident gremlins came into Pat’s view, as they came some nights, tonight they’d probably look like Lilliputians. He wasn’t sure what the heck the gremlins really were. No rats or mice or visible insects aboard NTC airships! Not with the Company’s own regular pest control treatments. Stray birds, maybe. They might be able to fly in through open windows in the main gondola, though how they snuck up from there into the hull ... Or maybe gremlins themselves were real, not just old folktales. Maybe they were even on the NTC payroll. There might be a few gremlin genes in Catstep, the way she could shinny along the branchwalks and up the axials.
Only, from the little that Pat recalled, the Lilliputians and giants and talking horses all ha
d their own lands, and probably none of them belonged on the Flying Island. So seeing giants’ fingers and talking horses had to be power of suggestion, brought on just by knowing a Gulliver’s Travels fancier was up here somewhere.
But Tolliver himself wouldn’t be seeing Lilliputians and horses and giants’ fingers in his Flying Island, would he? Maybe when he was whammied, but he wouldn’t still be whammied now. Nobody else was. Assuming he’d ever really been whammied. He’d already skipped out of the lounge before the major brought them down—Pat and Baff, Jojo and Catstep—otherwise, there might have been odd’s plenty of horses and Lilliputians in that lounge for Pat C. Carstairs, along with the goblins, half-naked Greek ladies, people with heart-shaped bodies and diamond-shaped heads, and stalactites dripping from the ceiling.
A lot of those trappings had naturally remained after the whammy wore off, because fanciers were still fanciers even when they were sober. But at least the lounge had settled down into no worse than ...
Pat blinked. The gas cells weren’t giants’ fingers any longer. They were…houses? Crazy, jerrybuilt houses, walls leaning out and angles all off.
Not only that, but they seemed to be built on downslopes. As if the ship’s interior had become a huge bowl with—Pat blinked again—a lake down there at the bottom, right below him. More little lakes, too. Three all total, counting the first one, cloverleafed around some kind of big cylindrical mechanism in the middle, like a screw in a cage. Maybe a fourth lake on the other side of the cylinder, just its edges visible from here.
Trying to figure out what parts of the ship had turned into the lakes and cylinder, he glanced up. He knew the airship’s skin had to be in place. Any accident big enough to tear away the overhead, and his shipmates wouldn’t still be worried about catching one kwaddled fancier. But darned if it didn’t look like constellations up there! The Dippers, the crooked “W” of Cassiopeia ...
Crr ... rammy! Yeah, good word for it, crammy. Whatever Pat’s own night-time world might look like, it should’ve left the roof on. He looked down again, glad he never suffered from vertigo ...
And tensed, understanding all at once that if this was what Gulliver’s Flying Island looked like, he couldn’t have picked it up just by power of suggestion. It had to be the brain radar theory. And that had to mean—
“Captain!” he muttered into his wristphone. “I think he’s somewhere in my sector.”
The gray mare who was here and now the Old Woman, standing fifty meters aft on the tourists’ observation platform to direct operations, looked around and up at him. She lifted her left front hoof and spoke into her own wristphone. “Definite traces, M. Carstairs, or just a hunch?”
Blammit, he couldn’t explain without giving away his secret, and he wasn’t about to do that. It’d have taken too long anyway. “A noise,” he lied.
“Check it out.”
“Can you send Catstep or Nkima over to back me up, sir?”
“M. Carstairs, everybody’s hearing noises. When you catch a definite eyeline, keep in the shadows and call me again.”
An eyeline. He had that, all right. More like an eyeweb, all around. But not of Tolliver himself. In fact, it might help serve as protective coloration for Tolliver.
But, okay, he’d check ...
* * * *
One of the climenoles was closing in. A young man, broad across the shoulders, certainly in the first pride of his strength. What had drawn him, ’twas impossible to say. Sure, Jemmy thought, I have made no noise to turn him down this path!
All else being equal, and themselves on solid ground, the highwayman would have welcomed the contest. Here, with no where to make any lasting escape, when his defeat would mean immediate capture and his victory a postponement at best and at worst the fall and death of a guiltless adversary, on this narrow footpath, which was no meet place for dueling—as he had proved at the time of his first capture—Jeremy Tolliver saw the moment of decision thrust upon him.
* * * *
That wasn’t an eyeline—but a definite earline, anyway! A shuffly sound. Pat jerked his flashbeam at it. The fool fancier had just slung himself over the guardrail and hung there by both hands. Shouting “Hey!” Pat lunged forward, caught one ruffled wrist. Tolliver tried to slap at him with the other hand. The guardrail bent, and they both went over.
Was the floater still whammied? Passengers weren’t supposed to know about the safety netting. Pat stretched out so as to hit it right…and landed in water.
They had fallen into one of the lakes on Gulliver’s Flying Island, and since Tolliver perceived it that way, so, just now, did Pat Carstairs.
Well, all Pat had to do was backfloat, knowing it was really dry plastisteel netting that held him up. Near him, Tolliver was trying to swim to shore. Hadn’t broken anything, then. One reason passengers weren’t told about this netting was to discourage unauthorized trampoline parties. People who didn’t know how to fall could break arms or legs or necks by hitting it wrong. Another reason was knotted up with the nostalgia factor, since the old zeps hadn’t had these safety nets and it really had been possible, back then, to fall straight off the catwalks through the ship’s lower skin to the planet below.
Maybe Tolliver had discovered the net while he was sneaking around stowing away. Or maybe he’d forgotten that this dad-blatted lake of his wasn’t real. In that case, he should have remembered how good—or bad—a swimmer he was. He acted like he was going under, gasping and choking and thrusting up one arm.
Pat “swam” over to him—actually sort of hauled himself on the stiff seaweed that he knew was the netweave—and held his head above the actually nonexistent water, meanwhile yelling into his wristphone and hoping that, if the others noticed his little pantomime of holding up a drowner, he could pass it off as just playing along with what anybody could tell at a glance was Tolliver’s personal fantasy.
Chapter 20
“The means by which this happily-timed confession was extorted, although efficient, were simple indeed.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Thou Art the Man.”
* * * *
Corwin writhed again, seeking in vain to ease his cramped posture. No such trifling rearrangement of limbs and muscles as was possible in the available space gave much comfort for longer than approximately fifteen seconds. He had begun to time the intervals by the “hippopotamus-one, hippopotamus- two” counting system, priding himself whenever he was able to remain utterly motionless for two full minutes or longer. “Hippo-one hundred sixty-nine” was his record so far, and he had actually begin to hope that the party whom Obersturmbannfuehrerin von Cruewell anticipated would not arrive before he had achieved a full three minutes.
Suppose that the hypothetical assassin or assassins never materialized? How long would von Cruewell wait? Until morning light? Which she would be unable to see. Nor might it be much more obvious to him. He believed her windowall panel was closed, which meant that, with the cabin’s interior light turned up as it was, any filtered daylight must be bright indeed to grow noticeable. He felt as though an entire day might have crawled past already. But no: each cabin was wired for mealchimes and emergency communications. And no breakfast chime had sounded. Therefore, they were still in this present night of sturm und drang.
He envied the obersturmbannfuehrerin. Half lying across her bed, she had the appearance, if not the actuality, of some measure of relaxation. Her limbs had freedom, her muscles room to twitch. Had she fallen asleep in fact? He had not heard her snore, but there were many people who seldom if ever snored. Angela seemed to be one, himself perhaps another. Moreover, had he not heard somewhere that nobody snored except when lying face upward? ...
What chiefly worried him was that he had begun to slip into such mental gambits as those he had employed, in desperation, that terrible night last year of his burial alive, when, unable to be sure of rescue, he had either lost or found his grip on sanit
y—depending upon how one regarded perceptional modes—and become a sometime realizer.
Now he had lost his hippopotamus count. Tempted to test von Cruewell’s wakefulness or lack thereof with a soft call, he instead realigned himself again, as best he could; wrestled down the illusion of being in a Little Ease cell; and began a new mental enumeration of slowly passing seconds.
... hippopotamus forty-three—was that a click at the door? He tensed, and promptly felt a sharp cramp tighten the calf muscles of his left leg. Tension heaped on tension. He stifled any sound of pain, but had no room for even attempting to ease the charley horse.
The light in the stateroom increased a degree. Corwin bated his breath. He devoutly hoped to avoid risking Angela’s safety, and would not have been able in any case to move his right hand to the phone on his left wrist without jarring the wardrobe door; but he much doubted that a freak of fantasy perception could account for the increased light. Someone in the doorway must have turned the dial a few millimeters. Why? To see whether it would bring any reaction? Had whoever it might be forgotten von Cruewell’s sightlessness? Or come to doubt it? Doubting it could sometimes prove very easy.
Now came footfalls, which might have been those of a moderately heavy human being walking with trained lightness of step across the deep-pile carpet. Unless they were wholly imaginary. He remembered suffering similar delusions while buried alive. Yes, that could account even for the light. The obersturmbannfuehrerin never stirred, never altered the pattern of her quiet breathing, as he could just see it by the scarcely perceptible rise and fall of her shoulders.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 88
