It came from Mother Teresa Memorial Hospital in Clinton, and the caller was quick to inform me, in tones of professional urgency, that M. Zim Greenleaf had been admitted that day in a state of unconsciousness, due to the fractured skull he had sustained in an automotive smashup, and that he lay at that moment undergoing emergency surgery; but the initial prognosis was favorable.
“One moment,” said I. “I rejoice that M. Greenleaf’s injury can and is being mended, but how the deuce does it concern me?”
“Yours is the only name on his In Case of Emergency card, M. Poe. That is, if your family name is Davison? Corwin Davison Poe?”
“It is,” I owned. “But I know no Zim Greenleaf. Unless ... Stop! Has he lately reregistered his name?”
“Not so far as we can tell,” she replied.
Angela, who was naturally listening along with me, asked, “Do they at least know his family name?”
“Presumably, M., it’s Greenleaf,” said the hospital liaison, the merest shade of impatience creeping into her efficiency. “We can’t find him in the North American Names and Prints Register at all.”
“What?” I exclaimed.
Angela was thoughtfully repeating, “Zim Greenleaf Greenleaf.”
The caller continued, “We can order a search run through the other registers of the world, but we naturally thought that the party listed on his Emergency card ...”
“Can you at least wave us a holo?” Angela asked.
“Not of emergency-room patients, M. Not when we have no pre-crisis holograms of them. It’s a strict policy guiderule. The best we could send you at this time would be a computer reconstruction of his face without injuries, and since you’re both registered fanciers—”
“It might prove very useful,” I cut in—testily, I fear. I occasionally weary of this widespread attitude that none of us fantasy perceivers can distinguish one face from another. “Neither of us is so far gone but that we have been known to perceive computer-recreated portraits as accurately as holograms.”
Sounding unconvinced, she resumed, “If it helps you at all, every hair on his body is dyed green.”
“What?” cried Angela. “Every hair? No—sorry—I don’t think we know anyone like that, do we, Poe?”
“Not to the best of my recollection,” I said firmly. “Not well enough, at any rate, to be listed on any such individual’s Emergency card. No, M., it sounds very much as though this M. Zim G. Greenleaf has drawn my name out of a hat in hopes that I will, without question, pay his medical bills for him. I have heard of such diddles, and do not appreciate the dubious honor.”
“Very well,” the caller responded with a scarcely audible sigh. “Sorry to have bothered you, M.’s.”
Even as the telephone unit went silent, Angela mused, “Zim Greenleaf ... Sounds like a character for one of Ozzie’s Dungeon Chess games, doesn’t it?”
That naturally threw the matter into a somewhat different light. We spoke of asking for the computerized portrait after all, but both of us understood that if we failed to recognize it we should still be unable to rest easy without seeing M. Greenleaf in person, so that we would end by making the trip in any event. And as Angela pointed out, a fractured skull is difficult to feign, especially when one lies unconscious in a hospital, and to sustain such an injury on purpose seemed an extreme method of defrauding a stranger.
Therefore, while I dressed, which for some reason invariably takes me longer than it does Angela, she phoned the hospital back to tell them simply that we had found one conceivable link between ourselves and M. Greenleaf, in the form of a possible mutual friend who was unhandily incommunicado that week at a literary convention.
We hopped aboard the next needletrain and within a few hours were stepping into the lobby of Mother Teresa Memorial Hospital, where they raked us in with remarkably eager arms, ushering us to the presence of no less a medical light than Dr. Kenneth Levissohn Pasteur.
This forced me to redouble my hope that M. Greenleaf’s claim on me would prove a demonstrable fraud, rather than that I might end by having to pay even a fraction of the fees which so notable a specialist as Dr. Pasteur must command, not to mention his numerous attendant physicians, paramedics, nurses, and research assistants.
What room they received us in, we cannot say for sure. Angela perceived it as a sunny studio, I as a torture chamber—rather to my surprise, since I rarely perceive such places in this aspect unless I happen to be the patient. Perhaps it was the row of backlit scans above one workledge: those ghostly, X-rayed shadows of human skulls and other assorted bones seen from various angles.
M. Greenleaf, it developed, had fractured his right femur as well as the left frontal lobe of his skull; but both injuries were relatively uncomplicated, hardly grounds for either the attentions of a Pasteur or the apparent inclusion of a mere Emergency card name and his spouse as consultants in the case.
“He’s out of danger, no worry about that,” the great doctor assured us. “A fairly routine patch-up, a few days’ hospital rest, and he’ll be all set to go home. That is, if we’re willing to let him out of our hands.”
“What?” I ejaculated. “Not a criminal, is he?”
“Not as far as we know,” came the reply. “But as far as we know, he might just as well have appeared on the face of the earth six months ago. No records of any kind on him older than half a year in any official-access North American database. No records at all of him in either the R.S.A. or World Council Names and Prints Registers, and nothing in any of the searches yet reported from other countries.”
“I had not thought,” said I, still fretting over the criminal possibility, “that so total a cloaking of oneself from official records was possible in our age.”
“We wouldn’t have thought so, either,” the physician replied. “Especially for a floater like our mystery man Greenleaf. For one thing, if he dyes his hair, it’s with no dye our analyzers have yet been able to recognize, let alone identify, as any known artificial coloring.” He put into Angela’s fingers a long, thin lock of silky hair.
“Oh, how lovely!” was her judgment. “And how much like ... like fresh cornsilk! Except for being green and finer.”
To me, it appeared white and flecked with blood at the roots, where I correctly guessed it to have been shaved off preliminary to surgery. The reality-perceiving medics, however, had pronounced it green; and Angela’s perception can be rather closely akin to standard reality in matters not touching directly on her own tastes and preferences. I uncased my spectacles, which sometimes assist me in changing my perceptional mode at will, and flipped them on long enough for a closer scrutiny of the hair, which now seemed to take on the hues of spring needles at the tips of evergreens.
“All the way through each hair, and right down to the roots,” said Dr. Pasteur. “If it is some kind of permanent dye, he must have put it on almost immediately before the accident. And worked it down to the follicles without leaving any stains on his scalp.”
“Well,” I observed, re-encasing my spectacles, “we live in an age of chemical marvels. He may have been testing something new.”
“The color of his hair,” said Dr. Pasteur, “is just half of it. Maybe not even the strangest half. Look here.” He tapped one of the scans.
Stepping nearer, we followed his pointing finger. “What is it?” said Angela.
He favored us with a frown as faint as it was brief. “Oh, yes! Fanciers, right? I guess it must look like a pirate flag or something to you folks.”
“It looks to us,” said I, “like a medical scan of a remarkably dolichocephalic human skull. Scans are a type of photograph, and both of us see photographs and holographs quite accurately. Being unschooled in the medical sciences, however, we remain as inexpert as any reality-perceiving laity at interpreting medical scans.”
He clucked his tongue once—a milder reproof than I probably deserved for
my piece of snappishness at the winner of a Nobel prize in medicine—and ran his fingertip along the image of mouth and jawline, explaining, “Well, these little specks ... see them?…are tooth buds. M. Greenleaf is growing himself a third set of teeth!”
I respectacled my ocular orbs whilst pondering my next remark. At no such loss, Angela was saying, “Isn’t that unusual?”
“In humans,” said our mentor, “very. This is the first actual, bona fide case that has ever come my way.” He rubbed his palms together briskly.
I cleared my throat and inquired in my best confidential tone—or the best I could muster at that moment, “Do such six-month-old records as you have discovered on him include any documentation relative to medical insurance?”
“Not a byte,” the great doctor replied, still rubbing his palms, as if costs were of no consequence.
“Because,” I tried to explain, “it’s one thing to help a friend meet unavoidable medical expenses—though I can hardly believe we could have forgotten or overlooked a friend with green hair and a third set of teeth—”
“He may not be aware of the teeth yet himself,” said Dr. Pasteur. “It’d depend on when he last got dental X-rays, and his teeth show no signs of any dental work. Or any need for it, beyond a little wearing.”
“Nevertheless,” I pressed on, “if it’s a case of funding research, I am hardly in a financial position—”
“Love us,” he cried, “is that what’s worrying you? Don’t give it another thought. I shouldn’t have any trouble at all finding a foundation or corporation eager to fund my research on a specimen like M. Greenleaf, and as for the accident expenses, he’s already got somebody begging to pay them. Ariella Celeste Rampal, no less—the Musician of the Spheres herself.”
“Ariella!” cried Angela. We had been privileged to make the artist’s acquaintance on a social basis a few years earlier; and Angela is quickly on a first-name basis with virtually everyone.
It appeared that M. Rampal had been in the automobile with M. Greenleaf at the time of the crash, but sustained only minor contusions and abrasions. No sooner was he safe in a deluxe private room than she had planted herself in a chair at his bedside. She would not, however, or could not, provide the hospital people any further information as to M. Greenleaf’s past and provenance than the small, scant shreds they could dig for themselves from the computerized records. Our presence, Angela’s and mine, had been hailed solely for any light we might possibly be able to cast on the longheaded man with green hair and a new set of adult teeth growing in.
In my relief, I felt even less curiosity than etiquette allows as to the exact relationship between the mysterious M. Greenleaf and the woman who has been called the “heavenly harpist.” I should perhaps assure you, however, that what has been publicly reported of M. Ariella Celeste’s personal perceptional world is quite accurate: she truly perceives herself as a vegetable humanoid—a “vegeton,” in the parlance she prefers—sensing the world and her own emotions as she conceives pertinent to that condition.
Not a few critics, questioning how a presumably emotionless vegetable creature could produce such exquisite interpretations of composers as diverse as Bach and Thunderstone, have postulated that her vegetonism is a mere public pose. It is not. If they—the critics—had discrimination to perceive it, all the emotional charge of her interpretations quivers beneath the surface of the music, becoming all things to all listeners. Even as her own emotions must lie so deeply suppressed as to be beyond even their owner’s recognition. Her attitude, at least in such small-group social situations as we have shared with her, perfectly matches her seeming aloofness on the concert stage. Her private life is surely just as cool, just as pure.
On some level she must be aware that her perception is but a personal fantasy of the world, as the mental hygienists assure us we are all of us aware, every fancier capable of interacting with the world on a level which society judges “functionally sane.” But in the Musician of the Spheres, that standard awareness must lie buried even more deeply than in most of us.
M. Greenleaf’s head injury had been such that little conversation was possible that afternoon, as he continued to waver in and out of consciousness, more often out than in, following surgery. We were let into his room, but only for a look.
On our entrance, the heavenly harpist rose from her chair at the patient’s bedside.
“Ariella!” said Angela, going to her. The musician stood passive, but opened her arms and allowed the other woman to give her a comforting embrace.
A beautiful lady is the Musician of the Spheres. Having seen her from reality as well as from fantasy mode, I can testify to the accuracy of the general opinion. Of medium height but with a slender physique and willowy grace that make her seem taller, she bows so far to the reality-perceiving majority of the population as to trust her wardrobers for sheathlike yet flowing garments embroidered in leafy patterns, and her coiffurist for adding to her long, palely lustrous tresses a delicate green tint that, echoing the natural color of her eyes, curiously enhances the heartlike shape of her face and Buddha-calm piquancy of her features.
“Do I know you, M.’s?” she inquired quietly as Angela released her.
“Why, of course you do!” replied my bride. “The honeymooners—remember?—aboard Cygnus a few years ago.”
“Ah, yes.” The musician turned to me. “And you are the one whose name is on his Emergency card. Why is that?”
“M. Rampal,” I answered, “I have no idea.” Looking at the unconscious man, both Angela and I found it evident that we had never set eyes on him before in our lives.
The afternoon was cloudy, and the opaque panels over the windows cast the room into twilight; but there was sufficient illumination to make out quite a bit. M. Greenleaf’s head was, if anything, even more dolichocephalic than I had gathered from the scan of his skull; his face long and thin in the extreme; his nose reminiscent of Cyrano’s in length, and somewhat pointed, yet having a certain sweeping regularity of shape which made it a sort of grace note to his person. His chin harmonized with the nose. What the bandages let us see of his brow soared to such a noble grandeur that what any brainspace his cranium lacked in width it must have more than gained in loftiness. His hair, as much of it as the surgeon’s razor had spared, lay combed neatly down the right side of his face, its ends almost touching his collarbones. His right ear, where it peeked through the strands, bore the suggestion of an elvish peak; but this I put down to the influence of my own lurking fantasy perception. His lower face was cleanshaven, but his eyebrows and lashes were the same color as his hair. The eyes themselves, which opened once, momentarily, only to close again without focusing as, still under the influence of recent trauma, surgery, and anesthesia, he slumbered on, were of a surprising blue. His frame, as nearly as I could determine by examining its outline beneath the bedclothes, easily exceeded two meters in height and seemed of a gaunt yet graceful spareness consonant with his head and face.
Comparing notes later, Angela and I found that we had both seen him as I have just described. And, with no previous knowledge save his name and the medical scans to predispose us to so remarkable an apparition, we guessed that this first impression must have been reasonably accurate.
“He was driving,” the musician told us with no discernible emotion. “A squirrel jumped into the road. He swerved to avoid it, and our car went off the road into an oak. One of its limbs popped in at the open window and struck his head. It seems that he had had very little driving experience. I thought the old roads in Turkey Run State Park would be safe practice for him.”
“But he’ll be all right,” Angela reassured her. “Dr. Kenneth Pasteur himself says so!”
“Of course he will be all right,” the musician replied, calmly as ever. “He is a vegeton, is he not?”
I fell back upon the old platitude: “If you and he both perceive it so.”
“
I am sure that he does,” she replied. “But he says nothing about himself. And sometimes he hints that he perceives me as redblood flesh. It is ironic. The first fellow vegeton I have ever met whom I could have wished being named with me on a procreational permit, and he does not perceive it so.” She ran the tip of one slender forefinger lovingly—not quite down his profile—but through the air a few millimeters above his skin. When she reached the bridge of his nose, her finger soared up to etch an outline entirely different from that seen by Angela and me: an outline suggestive of some invisible twig or small branch. The action repeated itself, to a lesser degree, when her finger reached his chin.
Then she turned her famous green eyes full upon me, limpid as brimming pools but otherwise tranquil as ever. “He must think highly of you, M. Poe, to have named you on his card. Perhaps you can make him understand that we two are a perfect match.”
Which made me feel rather less comfortable than when I had feared a simple risk of having to pay a stranger’s medical expenses.
* * * *
There being little more that we could accomplish at the hospital that day, we returned to the Brown County Hilmar, where I indulged fond daydreams of M. Greenleaf himself answering all questions when fully awake, as well as working out his own relationship with the Musician of the Spheres, thus enabling Angela and me to slip quietly out of the situation. But upon telephoning Mother Teresa’s next day, and finding that our putative assistance was still desired, we dutifully boarded the needletrain and soon found ourselves once again in Dr. Kenneth Pasteur’s august presence.
“Just do your best,” said the great doctor. “That’s all we ask. Our green man acts friendly, but he won’t tell us a doggone thing about himself, and he won’t give us permission to run any tests beyond what’s absolutely necessary to finish treating his injuries. When we asked what brand hair coloring he used, he just smiled. When we told him about his new teeth growing in, all he said was, ‘Lucky me.’ Not even as if it was anything to be surprised about. I tell you, this floater has us completely stumped. And on top of it, his bones seem to be knitting so fast we may have to discharge him before we can even begin getting unstumped. For my own sake, I wish you good luck!”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 91
