The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  I perceived this room exactly the same in fantasy as in reality mode. Angela was fortunate never to perceive its reality at all, her brain calmly translating her sensory impressions into a far more cheerful and sensible decor in ivory, gold, and jade. M. Greenleaf naturally perceived it as it was, but tacitly accepted it as my choice of venue. M. Rampal spoke twice or thrice of the shadows and stillnesses of a deep forest glade by starlight; but whether this was her actual perception of the room itself, or only the image it suggested to her conscious awareness, I cannot say.

  All in all, it was a reasonably festive dining experience, for which Angela deserves the highest praise: although the Musician of the Spheres, while rarely initiating a topic, can converse knowledgeably on a broad spectrum of subjects when other parties broach them; and I think that we two gentlemen kept up our side creditably despite our preoccupation. The cuisine was excellent enough to apologize for the interior decoration.

  Over spumoni and coffee, Angela injected the table talk with such of the late Claude von Wissering’s ideas as suited our present purpose. Not only did we resurrect these old notions, we went so far as to shore them up with new authorities of our own invention. After a few moments, it was going somewhat as follows:

  * * * *

  M. Rampal: But haven’t von Wissering’s experiments been discredited?

  Angela: Oh, not all of them. I read a few weeks ago that only last year Dr. A. Brothers Sister repeated some of them with beautiful results.

  Myself: So did Dr. Al Ararat, whose handbook on the technique I have scanned. It involves mesmerism—

  Angela: “Mesmerism” is what my Pundit insists on calling what most of us still call hypnotism.

  M. Greenleaf: I think that Claude von Wissering wrote something about the possibility of seeing through another person’s eyes, but I have never read anything by Sister or Ararat.

  * * * *

  In that last remark, he spoke with perfect accuracy.

  I explained that von Wissering had maintained not only the possibility of shared personal perceptions, but the occasional spontaneous occurrence of the phenomenon in dreamlife. He claimed to have recreated such sharings, sometimes among as many as five participants, by means of hypnotism (which I insist on calling “mesmerism”). After twenty or thirty years of being scoffed at by the scientific community, his work—or so Angela and I maintained—was being currently re-examined by such bold souls as Drs. Sister and Ararat, who reported notable successes with similar experiments to those described by von Wissering.

  “But do you think such things are possible?” M. Rampal inquired of the table in general.

  “There are more things in heaven and earth,” I murmured with a self-deprecatory shrug.

  “In other words,” said Angela, “why not? And Poe here is really very good at hypnotizing people, even if he does insist on calling it ‘mesmerizing.’” This was perhaps the most outrageous untruth of the evening, considering how often she has teased me in private with my lack of ability to mesmerize so much as a goldfish.

  “Without further information,” said M. Greenleaf, still playing his part, “I think I would have to vote with the scientific scoffers.”

  “Do I understand,” said the Musician of the Spheres, “that under hypnosis someone can perceive anything as someone else perceives it?”

  “Exactly, they say,” Angela assured her.

  “It sounds like poppycock to me,” said M. Greenleaf.

  M. Rampal gazed at him and said tranquilly, “I was going to suggest that we try it.”

  This was a stroke of luck for us, saving Angela’s having to make the suggestion.

  M. Greenleaf sighed. “Here, now, and with M. Poe for our hypnotist?”

  “Unless anyone else here present has sufficient acquaintance with the mesmeric passes, et cetera,” I said to keep up appearances. “I confess I should feel more interested in the experiment as subject than as controller.”

  “Oh, no!” quipped Angela. “The rest of us wouldn’t want to visit your personal world, dear boy.”

  “Very well,” said the sorcerer. “What shall we do?”

  “First,” Angela replied, “finish our spumoni, or it’ll melt.”

  We finished our spumoni and a round or two of coffee, while I described what we should do, remarked that it was usually supposed to work best with a large mirror, and gave a show of delight at the discovery that we already had one in the room. By about a quarter to nine, or 20:45 hours, we were ready to begin.

  We arranged three chairs before the mirror, two in a front row and the third between and behind. The two ladies took the front seats, M. Greenleaf the back one. The exact arrangement had cost Angela and me some thought ahead of time. I should have preferred getting the two musicians in the front chairs; but holding out for that grouping, comparatively artificial as it would have looked under the circumstances—especially with M. Greenleaf so noticeably the tallest—might have awakened M. Rampal to a suspicion that this was not the spontaneous quasi-parlor game we wished it to seem.

  Once they were settled, I tabbed down the room’s already-dim lights, all except for the two immediately flanking the mirror, which I brightened. The final effect was to make the images that floated in the mirror’s no-glare glass appear more real than the seeming void of our shadowy background.

  Still moving with deliberate slowness, I stationed myself behind and between M. Greenleaf and Angela, brought out my small, antique pocket watch, and extended my arm so that the shining golden focal point dangled between the mirrored images of the two musicians. Instructing them all to star straight ahead at the reflection, I began to swing my watch in the time-honored if overtheatrical tradition, droning the typical phrases about sleepiness.

  The otherworldly visitor dropped his eyelids almost too soon for realism; after all, the whole purpose was not to mesmerize anyone in earnest, which I gravely misdoubt I could have done in any case, but only to persuade M. Rampal of the plausibility and therefore the accuracy of her own experience. Angela, however, entered so fully into the spirit of the thing that she actually tried to let herself go under, and by the time she gave up the attempt and closed her eyes, I felt in danger of accidentally mesmerizing myself.

  As for the Musician of the Spheres, her eyelids fell sometime between M. Greenleaf’s and Angela’s. Wishing I had been watching at the critical moment, the better to guess whether she seemed to feel herself in a true state of altered awareness or was merely tolerating the charade, I gave them their next instructions:

  On the count of one, their minds would merge just deeply enough for the accurate sharing of perceptions.

  On the count of two, they would open their eyes, and all would behold the mirror images according to Angela’s perceptions.

  On the count of three, all would perceive them according to Ariella’s. (Von Wissering advised that all such experiments be carried out on a first-name basis only.)

  On the count of four, according to Zim’s.

  On the count of five, all would reclose their eyes for a moment of readjustment.

  Last, at the word, “Awaken,” all would do so, with no further obligation whatsoever, but with perfect recollection of everything they had experienced while in the trance.

  I saw the sorcerer’s lips twitch slightly. For the rest, they sat breathing quietly but otherwise as still as the statuary around us. It began to cost me considerable effort to hold the proceedings to their slow and stately pace.

  “One,” I said, and counted ten indrawings of breath—M. Greenleaf’s, not my own, which I judged less trustworthy at this point.

  “Two.”

  It was astounding how well we all looked in Angela’s world. She, of course, to my eyes had long been beauty’s perfection; but I could scarcely believe the Adonis my own reflection became. It was the more perplexing when I recollected that this was not, after
all, Angela’s true perception, but rather Zim Greenleaf’s glamour of illusion, and that he achieved it not by “reading” our minds, but by working upon the mirror as upon a canvas and somehow attuning our brains to see his handiwork exactly—as he had done for me in his hospital room, at that time using himself instead of the mirror image.

  As for the two musicians, in “Angela’s world” he made them both humanesque, gorgeously and genially enhanced versions of themselves, but with unequivocally green hair and greenish casts to their skin.

  I was later to learn that he had conjectured Angela’s perception of the world from pieces of her conversation, and put it together with remarkable projection; she saw so little difference between her own world and his version of it as to raise in her the momentary fear that his magic was failing. For myself, unwholesomely fascinated by the mirror Corwin, I had even more difficulty in maintaining the proper pace of the count.

  “Three.”

  This was the signal for the supposed reflection of Ariella’s world, so my understanding had been that Zim would do nothing to it. I was therefore surprised when his features—and his alone—reformed, after a moment of melting effect, not into what I would have seen in the normal course, but into what I had seen that time he told me to look at him through my spectacles. How could he be sure, from Ariella’s mere description, exactly how she perceived him in every detail?

  He later told me he had seized the chance to give Angela the same glimpse of him that I had had, and cleared our eyes alone to receive the image, leaving Ariella’s free to see this, as she would have seen any reflection of him, according to her own perception.

  Angela played her “hypnotized” role to perfection. Her eyes never turned, and only their slight widening, accompanied by one quicker intake of breath, told me she saw what I saw. Both Zim and Ariella continued motionless and seemingly unmoved. As the mesmerist, I allowed myself the freedom to flick my glance from the reflection to the man, whom I found as normal in appearance as his image was, for the moment, outre’. Experiencing a sensation akin to vertigo, I counted his breaths, attempting to synchronize my own with them, and at the tenth one I said:

  “Four!”

  Again it seemed as though some school of invisible fish roiled the mirror from behind; and in that melting, I beheld a sort of demi-transfer between the faces of the sorcerer and the Musician of the Spheres. His physiognomy smoothed once more into the human—indeed, into more fully human than I had seen it even upon my first glimpse of him: nose shorter, chin rounder, cheeks and forehead broader, brows and lashes brown, hair flaxen, skin suffused with a bronze-pink glow—while Ariella’s features took on the vegetable. Her nose became the twig, her eyes the blossoms. Her hair and brows were the verdant green of early summer, her neck a sturdy, graceful stalk, her cheeks downy with delicate moss.

  I can find no words to make it sound anything but grotesque. It was in fact hauntingly beautiful. Circumstances might force him to wring her heart, but at least he could, and did, do it as gently as possible, with the greatest compliment he could pay to her own perception of her nature.

  He did not, you see, need to reproduce her likeness as she actually perceived it herself, because this image was supposedly of his perception. He needed only to persuade her that he, too, perceived her nature as vegetable. The exact details might differ as easily as such details differ in the perceptions of “redblood” humans—as, for example, Angela’s perception of my personal appearance differs from how I myself view it in mirror or holograph.

  I could not be sure, but I thought that, as certain flowers turn to follow the sun, so the blossoms which were her reflected eyes turned, very slightly, for a better look at his thoroughly humanized reflection. By the time I had counted nine more breaths, I feared that drops of dew were forming in those blossoms.

  I forced myself to count one breath more and then pronounced the word, “Five!” They obediently closed their eyes, Ariella’s seeming to draw in upon themselves with a circular motion, like flowers closing for the night. That was the last I was ever to see of the remarkable vision, as immediately thereafter Zim ended his conjury and all of them, reflections as well as originals, appeared to me as they had at the outset.

  This time I counted only three of M. Greenleaf’s breaths before judging it appropriate to say: “Awaken.” They did so, only Angela thinking to give the tiny headshake associated with coming out of a mesmeric trance.

  The Musician of the Spheres pivoted slowly in her chair to look at M. Greenleaf. So gradual was her movement that it could scarcely be watched but, as I went about the room rebrightening the lights, each time I glanced back at her, she was perceptibly farther around, until at last the two musicians faced each other.

  Then and only then did she say, quite softly, “Do you truly perceive yourself as one of the redblood strain?”

  “It seems,” he replied, “that the experiment was successful.”

  She shook her head and whispered, “Then where will you find another like you?”

  After that she stood and took from one of her deep pockets a sheet of gossamer paper. I was near enough again by now to see that it was a printout of her procreational permit.

  To describe what she did next may make it sound an angry or scornful gesture. It was very far from that. As she enacted it, it emanated bittersweet tenderness and profound respect. Very calmly and evenly, she tore the document into sixteenths, gathering the fragments into the cupped palm of one hand. She then turned her arm to spill them out in a trickle at M. Greenleaf’s feet.

  As they fluttered down, I swear that their reflections in the mirror behind looked exactly like tiny autumn leaves. Angela saw this too. And yet it must have been a trick of our own perceptions, for M. Greenleaf was no longer working his magic.

  “Give the Strings one tour,” said the Musician of the Spheres. “It is all I ask. If ever I ask for anything more, give me one of those bits of dry leaf.” Her voice never faltered. If she felt the drop that rolled down her cheek, she must have considered it dew.

  What she tore had been only a printout, the actual permit remaining safe in the national computer bank. But she meant her gesture to be as final as it looked. He gave her that one tour with her ensemble, and never had occasion to hand her back a single torn fragment in reply to a request for something more.

  His replacement in the group, chosen and trained by himself, is not only a superb artist in his own right, but as near a look-alike as possible. Nevertheless, I have read that the recordings of that first tour of the Etheric Strings still outsell all the later ones by five to three.

  They do not outsell Ariella Celeste Rampal’s subsequent solo recordings. Knowing the story, Angela and I are unqualified to judge; but critics and connoisseurs who cannot know it seem to concur that the playing of the Musician of the Spheres has become even richer and deeper than ever since that year. They usually credit this to her experiences in heading an ensemble.

  * * * *

  Not quite a year later, M. Greenleaf graciously invited Angela and me to see him off to his home dimension. Although we have it on his wizardly authority that he meant to shut the portal fast behind him, and that no native of a world so practically magic-less as ours could reopen it or any similar dimensional portal from our side, it might be as well not to reveal its whereabouts. I am not sure that Angela and I could find the place again by ourselves in any case. Suffice it to say that it was near the top of a hill in pleasant, semi-wooded country. The year was just balanced between late summer and early autumn, the day fair and pleasantly cool for the season.

  Being enceinte with our second child, who was to emerge Thomas Garvey Poe, Angela had opted for the longer but gentler way up the slope. As M. Greenleaf and I waited for her at the rocky outcropping, like a miniature cliff, that concealed his portal, he said:

  “I have given Ariella my tour with her ensemble, which gave me an excellent chanc
e to study quite a bit of your world. I have also given her my harp. It will be easy enough to replace in my world, but here it seems to be proving as difficult as a Stradivarius to copy exactly. I have given Kenneth more than enough samples of me over the months, for all the good it will do his research. I have given Angela a shawl embroidered with likenesses of some of my own world’s flowers. What can I give you, Corwin?”

  “In a sense,” said I, “you have given me Frostflower.”

  “I merely gave you a scrap of news about her.”

  “And you gave me a chance to indulge my craving for the dramatic. You could have disentangled yourself from M. Rampal, and from your medical bills as well, simply by going home at once.”

  “That would have been cruel and callous. And it would have cost me my chance to study your world.”

  “Or by explaining to her in your own words that you perceived yourself as redblood human and therefore genetically incompatible with her.”

  “That would have been the lie direct. I am of vegetable origin, and could nevertheless be compatible with a ‘redblood’ of my own world. The truly insurmountable obstacle lay in the difference of our worlds, and I could not have told her about that. Your way permitted me to get the meat of my message across to her without uttering an actual untruth. Besides,” he added with a smile, “you would have been a little disappointed not to do it, wouldn’t you?”