The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  In brief, he eventually accepted.

  Because he thought she had nothing on her mind except music and business, he saw nothing else in the smile she bestowed on him as they shook hands on the bargain. Because in her world vegetons never show emotion, she was unaware of her smile, and her perception transformed his answering smile into a trick of the light.

  For a month and a half he rehearsed with them, just two afternoons a week. The rest of them met oftener and longer, yet so fine was his skill, or so trusting his perception, or so unconsciously delicate M. Rampal’s skill in choosing for personality as well as musicianship, that none of them seemed to resent him.

  His own harp, with its indefinably otherworldly tuning and tones, produced a sound, harmonious with theirs, of which the Musician of the Spheres intended to take full advantage; but not in every number. At her request, he added three more instruments to his repertoire: concert harp, dulcimer, and zither. Since she provided all these instruments and he found them easy to pick up, he had no objection to playing them for her.

  The entire group was naturally on the perpetual lookout for two more players to complete their leader’s goal number of nine. Whenever they heard of a likely candidate, they investigated. If word of such candidates reached them no other way, as many of them as had the time would travel at random about the continent—Ariella Rampal’s goal was an entirely North American membership, for the maximum convenience in meeting for rehearsal.

  This was how she had found Zim Greenleaf, only half an hour by needletrain from the village she calls her home garden. Only she, of course, could recruit a new member on the spot, one to one, without the rest of the group agreeing ahead of time. Any member could, however, recommend a candidate.

  In the secret knowledge that his time in our world was limited, M. Greenleaf felt a special responsibility to spy out native talent capable of refilling his vacated chair. This was why he agreed to accompany Ariella Celeste on a talent search to Bloomington, Indiana; this and her promise that, after spending the Friday at Indiana University’s School of Music, they would spend the Saturday and Sunday collecting botanical specimens in some of the state parks and nature preserves. Her influence with the university officials, coupled with the expertise M. Greenleaf demonstrated in person to the head of the School of Botany, procured him the necessary permits for such collecting.

  It had been in the old, candlelit dining room of the Turkey Run Inn that Sunday evening, as they sat, still in their woodsy clothes, with fugitive burrs hiding about the bottoms of their trouser legs, bits of humus and dry leaf impacted between the treads of their hiking boots, and his specimen bags with their stuffing of nuts and acorns, seeds and fungi, even roots and bulbs, tucked safely between their feet underneath the table, that she brought forth the idea that had been germinating within her since her first sight of him in the candlelit coffee-house:

  “Zim Greenleaf, we could cross-fertilize a genius, you and I.”

  He needed a moment to let the implications sink in, and another to compose his thoughts for a reply. “Ariella,” he said at last, “I am honored by your interest, but I must warn you—I am only visiting. I cannot offer you love, only friendship.”

  She nodded, perfectly undisturbed. “So it is with our vegetable race.”

  He had already had considerable daily exposure to our basic modern persuasions of reality-perceiving majority and fantasy-perceiving minority. Indeed, it was to the presence and social influence of us fanciers that he owed his ability to pass through our world in his green-haired, long-robed appearance and evoke no more comment than etiquette sanctions. Had his chief study been psychology, he must surely have understood within weeks of his arrival that fanciers actually do perceive the world around them and everything in it according to their personal worlds, as generally reflected by fantasy scores on the Standard Perception Test. But, never having taken that Test himself, he had somehow managed to assume, as though on a more or less subconscious level, that all “sane” fantasy perceivers were merely elaborate masqueraders playing out personal fantasies. He had based his observations largely on those “fanciers for a holiday” who costume themselves and caricature what they conceive to be our ways; he took borderline fanciers and true fanciers with reliable wardrobe suppliers to be much of a type with the holiday species; and those deepest-dyed members of our class, who live quietly in plain garments and surroundings because we have no need for stage dressing, struck his casual notice as realizers. Never until now had he understood, not only the actuality of fantasy perception in general, but the depth of Ariella Celeste Rampal’s in particular.

  “Ariella,” he asked gently, “how do you perceive me?”

  “As you are,” she responded. “A tall vegeton, slender and supple. Your hair is grass, your eyes, blue blossoms. Your ears are leaves, your nose and chin, branching twigs. Your fingers are tendrils, long and strong and pale green. You are a thing of forest beauty. And you are evergreen, like me, unwithering in winter.”

  “Anything else?” he had asked in growing uneasiness.

  Leaning across the table, she had covered his tendril fingers with her own. “You are a stamen. I am a pistil, and we vegetons do not need bees.”

  He had not meant to crash their rented automobile next morning in avoiding the squirrel; but, as M. Rampal had already told Angela and me, he was new to driving our kind of motor vehicle. Moreover, he had been somewhat preoccupied. He had been trying to think how to word his resignation from the Etheric Strings, just when the ensemble had seemed ready to think about scheduling tour dates.

  “Now you see,” he finished telling me, “why I cannot accept anything else from Ariella.”

  I said, very cautiously, “I hesitate to suggest this, and if it rubs against your own personal code of conduct, I beg you to consider it unsuggested. But she may, after all, be satisfied with the equivalent of bees. As I recall, her fantasy perception has been publicized as being in the high nineties; and with the right procreational permit, artificial insemination has long been both legal and socially acceptable.”

  “I will not,” he said wearily, “father a child—by whatever means—and then abandon it. That would be unfair to the child and its mother. And to spend twenty or forty years raising it and then leave without seeing what finally happens to it, or even to wait around a century or so and watch it die, would be unfair to me. But even if I were willing to do any such thing, there would still be a problem.” Eying me closely, he added at a seeming tangent, “Which are you, realizer or fancier?”

  I confessed, “A bit more of both than even a perfectly fifty-fifty test score would signal. By preference and natural psychomystical development, a fantasy perceiver; but a number of years ago I underwent an involuntary ordeal sufficiently harrowing that it twisted my whole outlook and made of me a realizer perforce. Even with treatment, I was some while in getting back so much as flashes of my former perceptional world, and to this day I fluctuate between the two modes.”

  He nodded. “Now I remember: Frostflower mentioned that you were a fancier, although she never quite understood exactly what you meant by it. Neither did I, even living among you, until last Sunday evening. Tell me, Corwin Poe, why would you—or Ariella—or anybody else ever wish to perceive your world any otherwise than the way it really is?”

  “Perhaps,” I answered respectfully, “because about a century ago our scientists and philosophers decided that nobody was perceiving it exactly as it ‘really’ is, anyway. But libraries have been written on the topic since fantasy perception came to be recognized as a legally sane condition, so I fear that I cannot answer you more fully in a few words, or even a few hours.”

  “Then I must take your word for it,” said he. “Is that an eyeglasses case you keep tapping on the side of your finger?”

  “Ah ... yes,” said I, a little surprised at finding it in my hands. “My spectacles. Or, rather, planos—simple window glass.
A mere prop, really: a costume accessory. But I sometimes find them helpful on the rare occasions when I wish to achieve reality mode.”

  “What mode are you in now?”

  “Reality.”

  “Even without the spectacles?” he asked.

  “My condition was several years old before we hit on the idea of costume spectacles as an aid to help control it.”

  “Might I ask you,” said he, “to turn your head, put your spectacles on, and then look back at me through them?”

  For no other reason than to be polite, I turned my head and slipped my planos into place. Then, turning my gaze back upon him,

  “Good heaven!” I cried, starting from my chair.

  For there he lay, looking exactly similar to Ariella Rampal’s description of her vision of him: nose like a branching twig or, perhaps, a sweeping length of stem; chin like another; grassy hair through which peeked, on the unbandaged side, the tip of one large green leaf where the ear should be; mossy cheeks; a small blue flower in either eyesocket; and long-tendrilled hands lying limp atop the bedclothes.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding, “I see you see it.” Watching his mouth form the words was akin to watching a snapdragon open and close.

  “But ...” I stammered, “... No! This is some illusion!” I snatched the spectacles from off my nose. He became himself once more. I put them on again, and again he was the stuff of vegetation myth. “Pure delusion,” I insisted. “Of course! My mind has somehow tuned in M. Rampal’s perception of you as you repeated it to me only moments ago.”

  He shook his head, causing a slight rustling sound. “It is not. Not on your part. But I find it ironic that she, in her delusion, sees me more truly than any reality perceiver.”

  Sitting again, I inquired with as much sangfroid as I could muster, “And is this your natural appearance in your own native world?”

  “No. It does, however, reflect my true composition, my actual nature. My make-up, if you like. Of course you see why any such cross-pollination as Ariella wants is out of the question.”

  “Of course,” I murmured. “Indisputably.” So as to stop staring at him, I removed my spectacles once more and put them away for good.

  “She is red-blooded animal flesh,” he went on, “no matter what she may think she is. In my own world, with its magic, something might have been possible. Here ... I would not risk leaving even a single spliced gene. You may have your human genetic material fairly well mapped and catalogued, but we could not be sure that mine corresponds.”

  Hastily I agreed that, for the child’s own sake, as well as its mother’s and perhaps the safety of our very world, no such experiment should be attempted. “But if we are so devoid of magic in this dimension,” I added, “how could you do what you just did?”

  “I gave some thought to the way you begged earlier to reserve judgment on the question. You have nothing here that I would have recognized as magic in any useful, practical sense. For instance—” He broke off and closed his eyes for a moment before resuming, “Can you have any idea what it is like to lie here in your ‘hospital,’ knowing myself to be surrounded by suffering beings whom I could heal in minutes, using my own magic in my own world, but whom I cannot help here, where I am almost as helpless as they are themselves?” Opening his eyes, he went on again more pragmatically, “Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of mental energy in your atmosphere. I take it that this is the sort of thing you people have called ‘espersensitivity,’ ‘mysticism,’ ‘the astral plane,’ and so on. You may as well call it ‘magic,’ too, if you like. Juggling it a little between us in this room was no more for me than a basic card trick is for one of your sleight-of-hand artists.”

  I began to glimpse a way of clipping this Gordian love-knot; but before we could discuss it further, the two ladies had returned, M. Rampal to root herself again at the bedside, Angela to pluck me gently away.

  Dr. Pasteur was waiting for me. “Well?” he demanded. “Any luck?”

  “Uh ... none. I fear that at this juncture I can only suggest that you make the best use of all the data you can legitimately gather from having him as a patient here,” I answered, comprehending with a shock how different were all our concerns in this affair—Dr. Kenneth Pasteur’s scientific, mine financial, M. Rampal’s procreative, M. Greenleaf’s the reverse—and how for the last hour I had given little thought to my own interests and none at all to Dr. Pasteur’s, concentrating almost exclusively on what I would term, even considering the vegetable natures (actual or perceived) of the two involved, the romantic problem.

  Of us all, Angela was the only one who might be called disinterested, though it was not for that reason alone I confided the entire story to her as soon as we were back in our hotel room.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, “I hope next time he’ll let me see him like that! But are you sure it wasn’t all just some psychoperceptional freak?”

  “I am sure of nothing,” I admitted. “Nevertheless, I hardly see what else we can do but play the cards as their pips appear to us.”

  “Poor Ariella!” she sighed, and I knew she was thinking of our own daughter, Ginger. “But if that’s his world, we’ll just have to do the best we can.”

  Together we began to map out a strategy. We judged that it would work best when M. Greenleaf was free of his bandages; but having promised to return quickly, we did so the next day.

  It was well that we did, for hardly was I alone with him again before he told me:

  “I have been thinking how I might use this esper-magic of your world to show Ariella her true nature.”

  “Discard that thought!” I begged him in alarm. “It could destroy her.”

  He looked at me with quirked brow.

  I explained, “To be deprived, abruptly and finally, of a cherished perceptional world has been known to push a fancier over the brink from legal sanity into total madness. I can speak from personal experience, and I was relatively fortunate. Being one of that majority of fanciers who remain ever aware on a more or less conscious level that personal perception differs from standard reality, I never fell all the way into legal insanity upon the loss of my perceptional world. But that loss was intensely traumatic nonetheless. M. Rampal’s world centers not so much in how she perceives her environment, as in how she perceives herself; and any subconscious awareness of the truth seems, by all tokens, to be buried very deeply indeed. To her, such a blow might be utter disaster.”

  He sighed. “Do you have any other suggestions?”

  I outlined the plan Angela and I had laid out.

  “It involves trickery,” he said with some distaste.

  “Think of it,” I suggested, “as therapeutic playacting. In the spirit of charity.”

  That did not immediately allay his scruples, but at length he was persuaded. “And in return for your help?” he asked finally.

  I had my answered prepared. “Dr. Pasteur is confident of research funding. If you could bring yourself to reach some arrangement with him—let him have a few such samples and tests as cause you the least inconvenience—in return for a full settlement of your medical bills, I would be in your debt.”

  “It would waste his time to study me. I am a passing visitor, not enough like anything else in your world to make his study any use to all of you.”

  “By that argument,” I pointed out, “what application can your studies of our world have in yours?”

  “Yes, but he does not know and would probably never believe that I am an interdimensional traveler, and if he did believe it, I might become famous and sought-after, which is precisely what I do not want.”

  “He will need years of studying his data before even venturing to suggest the theory that you might be from another world. I presume that by then you will be long returned to it. Meanwhile, he’ll be happy. And it is a guiderule of our scientists never to draw general conclusions from a sin
gle specimen, so no data you supply him can do our world any harm.” Seeing his expression still skeptical, I added, “Besides, embarrassing as it is to confess this, the Davison family fortune is no longer what it was when M.’s Frostflower and Thorn visited me.”

  At that he laughed and agreed to see what he could do.

  This breakthrough came none too soon for the good doctor, seeing that M. Greenleaf’s injuries were healing at least twice as fast as any ordinary human’s of our own world. In fact, he would probably have left the hospital that same afternoon, if he had not at once fulfilled his part of our bargain by negotiating with Dr. Pasteur for a specified number of tests and samples in return for full payment of all his hospital and other medical expenses.

  * * * *

  By that Saturday evening, Zim Greenleaf was free temporarily of laboratory attentions and permanently of bandages, his brow bearing only the faintest trace of a scar, which I suspected he allowed to remain for the sake of appearances. Angela and I invited him and M. Rampal to a small celebration dinner, just the four of us, in a private dining room of Clinton, Indiana’s Venetian Palace Ristorante.

  Designed for reality perceivers in a heavily gothic mood, the room was a marvel of opulence bordering on pure bad taste. For instance, it was entirely hung about with burgundy-colored velvet, punctuated wherever possible by fern stands and occasional tables of white marblesim, most of them having caryatid bases, and each one supporting either a large fern or some piece of statuary copied, nicks and all, from antique originals. The carpeting was fully five centimeters deep, but patterned to resemble a tile floor, while from the ceiling flowered a chandelier not so much oversized as pretentious.

  By drawing certain of the velvet curtains back or forward, the chamber could be enlarged for parties of up to a dozen, and its apparent shape changed from rectangular to triangular, octagonal, or anything in between. We had ordered it in a smallish, comparatively cozy square, but with the draperies on the wall opposite the door pulled far enough back to add an alcove, its back wall covered with a large, wide, full-length mirror. The management had offered us considerable argument about this mirror. When they used the alcove effect, they usually put in a holograph to make the wall appear to be a window overlooking the Grand Canal; and mirrors in a dining room, the manager protested, constituted deplorable taste. But Angela and I held our ground, so there at last the mirror hung, as though watching us.