The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

“The waiting game. It isn’t just for men. Keiko Ko-Ko is playing it with Clement Czarny—waiting for him to break up with April. Or maybe I ought to say ‘get over’ April, since she doesn’t ... That is, if he’s playing the waiting game with April.”

  Cagey gave me an admiring nod. “One more reason you’re invaluable to me, Sergeant. You’re right, but I’d never have figured anything like that out for myself. Never was any good at understanding the mating rites of my own species. Well, I’d say little Keiko has a pretty decent chance, if she’s already gotten him to the stage of telling her his secrets—Hello!” she broke off.

  A cloaked figure was standing just outside the door. Because of the cloak, which he probably didn’t need for warmth at that hour of the day, and which, in fact, he wore off the shoulders, I didn’t recognize him until he turned.

  “Mendoza, isn’t it?” Cagey said softly. “Waiting for us, maybe? Well, well, well! Let’s check this out.”

  It was Mendoza, and he apparently had been waiting for us. “Ah! Mesdames,” he greeted us, opening the door as we reached it.

  “Just out of curiosity, senor,” said Cagey, “why French instead of Spanish?”

  “Simply harking back to that antique era when French was the international tongue. Would you prefer senoras? Or ‘ladies’?”

  “We’d prefer ‘Lieutenant’ and ‘Sergeant,’” she told him. “Or ‘Officers,’ or even just plain ‘M.’s.’ What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

  “Consider yourselves so addressed.” He released the door, letting it swing back into place behind us. “Would you believe I’ve been on your trail?”

  “I’d believe you capable of saying so to flatter us,” Cagey remarked.

  “Yes, I don’t blame you for feeling skeptical. I’m surprised at myself for such un-Chorus-teristic behavior as meddling in the action.”

  Without even a polite groan at the pun, Cagey said, “Define ‘the action.’”

  “You define it. You’re the people who came around asking questions. I simply thought you might be interested in a little additional data.”

  “That you didn’t feel free to give us earlier?”

  “In the house of the Purple Rose?” He shook his head. “No. I’m all grown up, Lieutenant. I no longer take all that fraternity secrecy business seriously. But some of the young ones do. Shall we walk?”

  “To someplace we can talk?” I asked.

  “I’d prefer strolling around the open campus pointing out local landmarks,” he replied.

  We started strolling.

  IX

  (308 Thelwell Hall to Greektown)

  Keiko checked out “Sunvale” on the CSN datamorgue bank, scanned what that index word brought her about Cagey Warrington Thursday, and then sat drumming her fingers and thinking about the visit.

  She didn’t like it. Sure, Clement had been in the lurch since Solly’s death. Naturally. Who wouldn’t be, to have a best same-gender buddy get it like that? And, God, just a week ago tonight! It seemed a lot longer. Funeral just last Tuesday, closed casket, little holo of him on top for visitation purposes ... Lord God What’s-Your-Name! But shouldn’t Clement have given it at least a couple of weeks longer in the Rose house, maybe even a month? Yeah, of course he’d been seeing Solly everywhere. She’d tried to tell him: when you lose that good a friend, you see ’m everywhere wherever you are, because you’re carrying ’m around with you. It isn’t the place connections so much as the personal ones.

  But then, she hadn’t lived under the same roof as Solly since their frosh year, first in the dorm and then in the Purple Rose house. If you could call singles rooming in Amy Thelwell Residence Hall “under the same roof.” Whether you could or not, she’d feel a lot happier if Clement was back under it with her.

  She’d sometimes felt almost more jealous of ol’ Solly than of April. Why not? As long as Clement thought about little Keiko as just one of the boys—she had no illusions about why he took her whenever he needed a date for anything, it was because she was “safe”—in his perception she wasn’t ever going to endanger his quiet amour for the Greenhill—didn’t that make little Keiko his second-best same-gender friend after Solly? But poor old Solly! What a way to find yourself first best ...

  None of which meant a damn thing if ... if maybe Clement had tumbled to whatever was wrong in the Purple Rose?

  Hold on, Cake-o my girl, just whoa there a nanosecond, you don’t know for a certain fact that there’s anything wrong in the Rose. Just that you don’t like the place and you really don’t like a couple of the floaters in same. Just that you seemed to get bad vibes the couple of times you got let into the first-floor front rooms as Clement’s guest. It could all be your own overactive imagination. Your twelve percent fantasy perception with an old-fashioned gothic flavor dashed in from Ruddigore or The Pirates of Penzance. Just your jealousy of any darn Greek house that cut into the time your vampire could have spent buddying around with you as an Independent.

  That wasn’t fair, either. He’d already started making friends with Solly before either of them joined the Rose. Even before Solly pledged. For a few weeks that frosh September, they’d all three been study buddies together.

  A memory flicked out at her of herself, Clement, and Solly sitting together in the Hodag Hog the first or second week, eating hot dogs and drinking near beer and trying to talk grown-up, only there was only just so far Clement would let them go with dirty jokes. What would things have been like if they’d all three stayed Independent? If those doggone fratties hadn’t gobbled up Solly and Clement both?

  Why shouldn’t she start being jealous of the Fairsquare, too? Clement had apparently told his Faculty Poppa about leaving the house.

  Unless ... For a moment, the cold fingers slipped under her guard and chopped her heart.

  No! They wouldn’t do anything like that! Not again, not so soon after the last time! She’d see him at Our Lady again this evening, the way she did almost every Saturday, and they’d go over to the Hog or the Viking to eat, and he’d tell her all about it then, why he’d moved. The way he told her about so many things. Almost everything, she liked to think. Maybe it’d be even more now, with Solly—

  Holy Mary! she hated herself for thoughts like that. But wasn’t it just the plain truth? Whenever anybody died, relationships got shuffled around, had to get shuffled around to fill the hole, and if it came out to your own advantage, was that so bad? Was it really all that sinful to be happy about any good that might happen to come out of it, as long as you were sorry about the bad it began with?

  Someday she’d have to use that for a talk-out with Clement. When Solly’s death was far enough behind them so he wouldn’t make the connection.

  Anyway, he’d probably find himself some new best same-gender buddy who really was the same gender and a fellow Pi Rho as well. Mendoza? Ia, probably not. Too old, too much beyond all the mere undergrads. That newest sprat, maybe. Val Saladin.

  If the Rose were still a unisex frat, as she’d heard it was back in the ’20s, before the country went moral again and the Pies had to split into the Rose and the Sighs, she might have joined along with Clement, just to get herself into a good jockeying position. ...

  Solly. Damn! It would’ve been one thing if he’d transferred to another university or something, but ... Nobody should ever die like that, burned to a stick of smoking black toast in a car wreck. Let alone dear old Solly Goldfein ...

  If that really was how he died. If it hadn’t been even worse ...

  Nah! No way! They couldn’t have! If they ever had to begin with ... But Solly hadn’t been a raw new pledge ...

  But he had been romancing April Greenhill. The way Tony Tallpines had been doing a year ago. The way Clement would like to be doing any time.

  Funny, how much alike those words sounded, “Nah” and “Yah.” And how much “ie”—”no”—sounded like that g
ood old American “yeah”—”yes.” “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no.’” Okay, but how?

  She swung back to her screen, resolutely called up the Paleozoic timeline, and put it into Quiz mode, determined to get the names and order of the periods memorized this afternoon.

  Cambrian. Ordovician. They wouldn’t dare try it again this soon. There was already enough talk about the Tallpines-Goldfein coincidence, and look how long ago it had been for Tony.

  Ordovician. Silurian. Devonian. Besides, Clement had come home safe from being pledged. And look how long he’d lived in that house!

  Devonian. Mississippian. Cambrian. So had Solly lived there a long time. Longer than Clement, in fact. And Clement wasn’t there now. And hadn’t told April where he was going, or the Fairsquare, or any of his fratty brothers. Not even Mendoza.

  Cambrian. Ordovician. Or so they said.

  Mississippian. Pennsylvanian. Permian. Cambrian. Ordovician. Angrily, she jabbed the screen off again, stood up, put her coinpurse in one pocket and her minicom in the other, thought about a jacket, remembered that Cagey Thursday and her sidekick hadn’t been wearing any, and walked out, shutting the door on her room with a soft, firm click.

  As she walked, alternate scenarios charged through her head: herself stamping right up openly into the Pi Rho house by the front door, herself sneaking around to the basement stormdoors, herself in the sister house licking some Purple Sigh’s hand for admittance into the downstairs front of the gothic monster next door ...

  Stamping in openly without an invitation and demanding where they had him might relieve her feelings…for about ten seconds, and then the nearest fratty—it wouldn’t even take a Spuds Struwwelpeter—would pick her up and carry her out bodily, all forty-six kilograms of her, and that would be that, except that she’d be madder than ever, with no constructive way to focus it, and they’d be on the watch for her. And then, if they really didn’t know where he was ... And he still might just have packed up and cleared out and be planning to tell her all about it this evening.

  Sneaking around to the back had quite a bit going for it, but what if the basement doors were locked from the inside? She didn’t know the second thing about housebreaking. She might break a window, but that’d make noise and probably land her with a bill for damages on top of everything else. Worth it if something nasty really was going on, but not if she was just building a fancy-class drama out of nothing. No, save that kind of stuff for if and when you know it’s necessary, and meanwhile leave it for the Greek gunzhos in their little-kiddy phases. She might try the kitchen door, and she thought there were some other doors on the ground floor, if they weren’t locked; but the house was going to have fratties rattling around in it, making themselves snacks in the kitchen and so on, even on the weekend before New Constitution Day. Come to that, on a day like today, there were going to be fratties rattling around outside the house, too. She’d probably have about as much chance of sneaking as far as the back or basement doors unseen as of sneaking through the guardray net around the Mona Lisa. Especially since the Rose knew her by sight. Batory’s good study buddy, who doesn’t even like us as a collective noun, what’s she doing here today?

  It looked like sidling up to a Sigh. Gackly thought. But once inside legitimately, she could maybe watch out for residents better, sneak around into the forbidden regions more successfully, than if she’d tried to break in.

  Yah, well, first she’d take a good scenic view around the place and then she’d decide which plan to pursue. Meanwhile, she started running a mental review of the Sigh sisters, trying to think of one she knew well enough to wangle a casual invite through, but didn’t like well enough to worry about the risk of landing her in hotsauce with her sorority.

  As soon as Keiko rounded the last curve, she had to wipe out the plan of sneaking in through a back door. In both the Pi Rho lawn and the Omega Upsilon lawn “next door”—not a very close next door, thanks to the size of both yards, but close enough for a sharp-eyed snoop to zero in on suspicious activity—people were out raking leaves, or jumping in and rescattering the piles somebody had just raked. And there were also people playing games on the sportslawn between the two Pi houses.

  If she were a Greek herself, trying to break in through a back door could pass as some kind of stunt. But she was too well known in this curve of Greektown. And the Purple people were too uptight about the sacrosecrecy of their bloody basement.

  Even from a distance, she could recognize the hulk who had just been rolling in a fellow fratty’s leaf pile as the Struwwelpeter. Were the Fletcher and the Stallion around home this afternoon, too? Was the very tiny offchance that Clement might be in trouble worth the risk of rubbing up against either of those two gunzhos?

  Yes.

  Struwwie caught sight of her, shouted, “Keep the pace!” and waved as she strode on past. She openly waved back, even shouted a return greeting: “Yo! Football hero!”

  The little fratty who had been standing with the rake looked her way and waved, though without opening his mouth. Recognizing Val Saladin, she returned his wave, too. Then she pushed on and cut into the sportslawn with a sudden right turn.

  There was a group playing tag football, a group playing astrodisk, and a group playing—she thought—some kind of minigolf or croquet or lawn billiards. Nobody shouted at her to clear her uninvited, unGreek presence off their private playing field, so she walked to within a few meters of the nearest football tag goal before pausing to consider the three game options.

  Astrodisk had been invented as a Caucus Race kind of game, the poker of lawnsports, that anyone could drop into or out of anytime. No teams, just partners, and solo players trying to grab somebody else’s partner. The “same” astrodisk game could go on all day—all night, too, on a lighted field—and have a completely different set of players when it finally ended. Keiko had gotten good enough at astrodisk that she didn’t really like cutting into a game solo unless it was with good buddies or really good players. The bunch beyond the footballers on this lawn looked more like silly players than good ones. They even had two disks the same color. Still, it was a better possibility than the minigolf type game, which was probably as complicated as contract bridge.

  On the other hand, it’d feel good to get into a hard tag football scrimmage. Unfortunately, with Greek people she didn’t think it’d be too shrewd for her to dive right in regardless of sides, the way she sometimes did with the rough-and-tumble footballers around the dorms. She’d just hang around a few minutes, eying the crunch for some sorority girl she knew well enough to contact, or maybe—if she was right in counting nine players in all, they’d eventually ask her in for whichever team was one short ...

  “Hi there! Kokyo!”

  Only a very few people had ever called her Kokyo, to rhyme with Tokyo, and the shout hadn’t come from the football players. Looking beyond them, she saw a tall, long-haired blond in a pale orange sleeveless tunic over pale purple longsleeves and slacks waving to her. Keiko couldn’t quite see her face, but she knew just one person who could choose exactly the right shades of pale purple and pale orange to look good together. “Yo, Teddy!” she called back.

  Teddy—alias Theda Jones Hari—wound herself almost a hundred and eighty degrees back and snapped around to send an astrodisk soaring clear over the footballers’ playing space at Keiko.

  With a sidewise spring, Keiko caught the disk and in the same motion sent it back over the lawn to Theda. Deciding to consider herself invited, she followed up by cutting across the football area at a jog, neatly sidestepping the scrimmagers, to join the diskers.

  Theda Hari had stuck it out in Thelwell Hall her frosh year, tried an apartment the first semester of her soph, and then finally pledged and joined the Pi Psi as a second-semester sophomore. She seemed to be a rare type, someone who was actually chummier toward old acquaintances after going Greek than before. Keiko remembered
her from Thelwell Hall as one of those cool, aloofish masks, somebody who bestowed silly nicknames on other people while insisting that they always call her “Theda” or “M. Hari”; but at last spring’s sendoff dance, and again at the welcoming whirl a month ago—Keiko’s first “date” of the new school year with Clement—Theda had been all smiles and little kindnesses, and insisted that “Kokyo” call her “Teddy.”

  Hard to believe a sorority had done it, especially the Purple Sigh. Keiko theorized that Theda had coincidentally gone through some other enlightening step in her life. Not that Keiko was in any position for heavy theorizing about this particular schoolmate. Turning into a model of social-occasion chumminess hadn’t led Theda Hari to seek her out as a heart-to-heart intimate, and those two big dance affairs, one sponsored by the university and the other by the Greek houses, had formed the Independent’s only “sustained” contacts with her since their frosh year. But a contact was a contact, and she spent the next ten minutes of her life partnering Theda as if they were lifelong buddies.

  It was Theda who cried their time out, though Keiko had been watching for a good chance to do the same. Catching the disk once more and lowering it to her side, Theda jogged over, held it out to Keiko, and said, “I’ve been playing since lunch. Think I’d better go in for a liquid break. Want to take over?”

  “Unh-unh. Rather go in and share the break with you.”

  “Great!” Theda turned and sent their disk soaring above the field at random. Two of the guys who had been most persistent in trying to intercept it almost collided as they both ran after it. Theda and Keiko slapped palms and cut off the sportslawn toward the Pi Psi house together.

  A trip apiece to the comfort station (which had a real, old-fashioned, turn-of-the-century flush toilet, and Elvis knew what the sorority had to pay extra for the water septic system, even up here in the underpopulated land of lakes), and then they settled down for a snack in the Pi Psi company room. Iced tea and celery sticks with cheese spread. Watching Theda, Keiko asked, “Do all you sorority women put your spread on the outside of your celery?”