The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  No doubt this same uncertainty—not as to what had been said yesterday evening, but as to what it meant—would have preoccupied him even had the lounge’s time-consuming facilities been better fitted to their ostensible purpose. He lost count of the number of times he studied the showscreen’s two samples of pioneer animation—an early Max Fleischer and the famous first appearance of Mickey Mouse—without gleaning any deeper insight than renewed speculation about what might have been had this technique been invented a few centuries earlier. What might William Blake have done with it, or Hieronymus Bosch?

  It was almost half past one, and he was crunching more sodanuts, watching yet again the gyrations of Steamboat Willie, and wondering how much his uncomfortably extended reality mode might owe to the state of his nerves, when Senior Sergeant Lestrade and her partner made their entrance at last, coming to him in the public lounge in order, he supposed, to preclude his coming to them in the limited-admittance regions.

  “Expanding your curriculum, I see,” said M. Click. “They said you’ve been waiting for us like a martyr since ten-thirty hours.”

  “‘Like a martyr’ is an apt simile for one at the mercy of this waiting room, though I confess some surprise that you admit it. I had hoped, M. Lestrade,” he continued, turning from the junior to the senior partner, “to invite you to lunch.”

  “Sorry, M. Poe, I’d have enjoyed it. But we’ve eaten—”

  “At Java Billy’s,” said Click. “I could eat again.”

  “Java Billy’s seaweed scramble,” M. Lestrade reminded him, “has guaranteed five-star nutritional value, besides as many calories as you can afford till coffee break.” To Corwin, she went on, “We’ll have to make it some other time. In a couple of weeks, maybe. Bounce a letter over to me and save yourself another martyr’s wait. Give Angela my best.”

  The senior sergeant appeared to be in a good mood, which augured well; but while her dismissal did not astonish, it disappointed him. “Sergeant,” he said, “if you cannot brief me over lunch, you must do it here. For what, precisely, have I volunteered?”

  “Nothing, M. Poe. Absolutely nothing.”

  “Yesterday evening at dinner. Come, Sergeant, I may have been a trifle more in my cups than strictly desirable, but I retain a very clear recollection of our exchange, and Angela corroborates the same.”

  “Sayo!” exclaimed Click. “This sounds interesting! Now I wish we had made it a double date.”

  “‘Sayo’?” Corwin repeated.

  “My partner,” M. Lestrade explained, “likes to keep up with the freshest slang. That one is probably all of three weeks old.”

  “Ah! I comprehend. Very well, to resume my former subject—”

  “You sensed that M. Hammersmith was trying to box me into pulling strings for him that I wasn’t about to pull, and you helped me stalemate him. I’m very grateful, M. Poe. In fact, I’d like to treat you and Angela to a dinner, as soon as the pressure’s off—”

  “Better stab her to a date right now,” Click advised. “Our Senior Sergeant Lestrade never lets herself get out from under pressure.”

  “Nevertheless,” Corwin persisted, “you lost little time in agreeing that I was to serve as your undercover agent—”

  “Zow!” Click interjected, or some such syllable. “Fill me in, Les!”

  After an annoyed glance at her partner, the policewoman told Corwin, “I played along for the benefit of M. Hammersmith. I wouldn’t have if I’d thought you might take it seriously.”

  “Very well, what is it that I have not volunteered for? Sergeant Lestrade, you cannot expect us to curb our curiosity at this juncture!”

  She sighed. “No, I guess I can’t. All right, M. Poe ... Briefly, it appears that someone may be trying to murder one of the inmates at Hummingbird Hill. M. Hammersmith got a line on the situation somehow and wanted to go in, presumably disguised as another inmate, and investigate in person.”

  “But surely that would be work for the regular police?”

  “Unh-unh.” Click shook his head. “Us regulars are budgeted for just so many stress-hours, and they’ve all got to go into protecting honest citizens. Right, Senior Sergeant?”

  “Do you mean there are no officials, no wardens or guards ... Hummingbird Hill is a prison facility, is it not?”

  “A ‘security hotel,’ as the corporations like to call ’em,” said Click. “Holy shoalies, the ignorance of the law-abiding public!”

  “State and federal pens have wardens and inside guards,” M. Lestrade explained. “Hummingbird Hill is a private facility, financed by the ‘guests.’ Instead of a warden, it has a ‘manager.’ Who is chosen from among the inmates, if any of them have the right managerial skills. The only guards are on the outer wall. Most of the operating staff consists of poorer prisoners who would otherwise be working out their sentences in state facilities. The rest of the staff clocks in daily after sunrise and out before sunset. If anything happened to one of the daystaffers, we’d have grounds to go in with the regular police. But as for the convicts, once they’re inside a private security hotel, so long as they let the daystaff alone and stay away from the outer wall, they can do whatever they like and, officially, nobody cares. Except the hotel corporation, which stands to lose paying customers. If they tear up the inside property, that’s the corporation’s headache. If they murder one another, they’re murderers anyway. That’s how they got themselves into the place to begin with, except for such of the clockround staff as are serving limited sentences, and they knew the risk when they applied for jobs in a private pen.”

  “I ... see,” said Corwin. “Good heavens! Why have the dramatic possibilities been so little bruited about?”

  “To keep rich floaters from murdering to get inside,” Click replied flippantly. “It costs a galaxy to finish out your life in one of the big corporations’ security hotels, but they say the luxury matches the cost. Magnum Hammersmith probably wanted to sample the soft life for himself.”

  “Or to collect a fee commensurate with the service and its risks,” Corwin meditated aloud. “An inmate who can afford residence within the walls of such an establishment could no doubt pay munificently to go on living.”

  “Except that the inmate allegedly at risk isn’t the one who smuggled out a call for help,” said the policewoman.

  “Another did it on the endangered one’s behalf? So friendships still flourish, even amongst convicted murderers! But I think that M. Hammersmith went on to volunteer some comment to the effect that you had a particularly good opportunity just at present to spirit in an undercover agent?”

  “M. Hammersmith has an exaggerated idea about security hotel information-flow control,” said M. Lestrade.

  “But ‘just at present’? Surely if he meant to masquerade as some lesser offender applying for a position on the clockround staff ...”

  “The Moan case!” said Click. “He wants to go in as Lord Elegy Moan, get the full paying-guest treatment and let Withycombe or Magadance or the corporation card the bill.”

  Corwin attempted rapidly to memorize the three names, only one of which chimed an immediate tone. “Lord Moan? Ah, the murder case which came to trial ... what was it, two weeks ago? Yes, of course!”

  “Sayo!” Click agreed. “All we have to do is contact Hilmar about what ‘news’ to feed the prison newscom—”

  “Forget it, Junior Sergeant Click!” said the senior sergeant.

  “Lord Elegius Moan ...” Corwin repeated slowly, pronouncing the first name as he remembered the soundcaster to have done, “elegy” followed by “us.”

  “El-uh-JIYE-us,” said M. Lestrade. “Accent on the long ‘eye.’ That’s the way he says it himself. The newscasters got it wrong, or else they’re trying out their power to change pronunciation again.”

  “The seventy-somethingth Earl of Worminglass,” Corwin went on. “But this is all the more fortu
itous! Granted that in all probability no other literary world resembles that of Gormenghast, surely the Venerable Edgar’s vision more nearly approaches Peake’s than do most. Thus, who better to impersonate Lord Moan—”

  “Forget it, M. Poe!” the policewoman repeated, in much the same tones she had just employed to admonish her junior partner. “You’re an innocent, and I’m not letting you into a company of convicted murderers.”

  Smothering resentment at being called an innocent, he inquired, “Not even to save another innocent?”

  “What?” said M. Lestrade.

  “M. Withycombe ... Adalard? Aidan? Adrian? I think I remember the case now. There was some doubt as to his guilt, was there not?”

  “What makes you think that?” M. Lestrade said, strangely cold.

  “I more or less followed it at the time, as much as was made available for public consumption.” Occasionally he regretted the freewheeling old days described in history and literature, the accounts verified by glimpses in cinema from the early days of movie-making, when reporters prowled virtually unmuzzled and newspapers not only detailed sensational trials down to the prosecutor’s last sneeze, but actually ran photographs of the defendants. No longer, in this enlightened era of the Privacy Amendments, need any accused party hold a hand between face and flashing cameras, even on the very courthouse steps. One brief line in the Miscellaneous Notices to the effect that “So-and-so’s trial begins today,” and at the trial’s end, if the verdict was “Guilty,” a concise account of the salient evidence and, perhaps, a single photo, approved by the family and entered almost in memoriam to one buried alive. If the verdict was “Not Guilty,” the entire post-trial account had to be approved by the acquitted before it could legally be entered in any newscomp base. “If my memory serves,” Corwin went on, “and it may still be groggy from its reawakening in this matter, a bedridden bachelor uncle worth, at a conservative estimate, some two to three hundred trimillions, was smothered like Desdemona with a pillow—I have never entirely understood how one can prove foul play in such a case—and the ‘Guilty’ verdict owed less to the actual evidence than to the jury’s interpretation of same and to the fact that M. Withycombe, as the elder of two siblings, was the victim’s principal heir. And as for my alleged innocence,” he interjected at last, “I have myself been under suspicion—your own—in a murder case.”

  “No more so than everyone else in the house was, M. Poe,” she replied. “If you ever thought we were looking harder at you, that was your own perceptive fault. As for Withycombe, two juries—both the original and the first-appeal one—interpreted the evidence the same way, and his letting it drop after one appeal pretty well amounts to a confession. So thank you again for helping me defuse M. Hammersmith, and give my best to your wife. I’ll get in touch with you two Monday or Tuesday about fixing that dinner date.”

  She turned and quit the waiting room.

  “Don’t worry,” said M. Click, lingering. “I’ll hold her to that last.” Then, with a wink, he whispered, “My coffee break. Meet you at fifteen-thirty across the street at Marchpane’s.”

  * * * *

  Corwin’s own perceptional world returned shortly after M. Click’s invitation, enabling him to see the police station, on his way out, as a Bureau de Police bustling with uniformed gendarmes; the taxi he hailed as a horse-drawn hansom; the Cafe’ du Monde’s tastefully bland interior as done in velvets and bargello; and his luncheon as an omelette ‘a la Reine accompanied by a passable /Sauterne/. [Mousseux? Chambertin?] [I planned to make final decision after a bit of research—Author.]

  Angela was radiant. She always struck him as radiant, whatever his perceptional mode. The sundial’s constant gnomon round which his shadowy spirit moved. But this noontime she shone exceptionally luminous—her morning mission had been crowned with unambiguous success. They cracked a bottle of snow-chilled Perrier to celebrate; it seemed pink champagne to both of them, but the waiter assured them it was innocent mineral water, nothing more. That, as Angela happily remarked, was one of the advantages of being a fancier.

  “And now,” she demanded, “what’s your news?”

  “It appears that M. Lestrade merely accepted our spontaneous assistance in order to prevent M. Hammersmith from tackling the job, little intending that I should actually do so myself.”

  “I thought so. Otherwise I’d have been worried. Did she even tell you what kind of job it was?”

  “Preserving the life of a guest in a security hotel.” He explained the situation. When he finished, she said calmly,

  “Then Sergeant Lestrade was very sensible to keep you out of it.”

  “Her partner, however, held out some hope.”

  “Dave Click? Oh, he was only joking you along!”

  “You think so?” The idea had already crossed Corwin’s mind. “Nonetheless, I shall not be the one to break our appointment this afternoon.”

  “You aren’t actually thinking of trying to go in after all?” For the first time, she sounded apprehensive.

  “Why not? I have my amateur investigator’s permit.”

  “Of course, we both have. But we only got them for souvenirs of the ‘Melon.’ didn’t we? We of all people ought to have learned better than to go skipping into dangerous situations on purpose!”

  He countered with another question. “Suppose it’s a daughter? I should like a daughter,” he added wistfully.

  “And she’d like a father!” Setting down her knife and fork, Angela extended her hand over the table in order to give him a teasing nudge. “Shall I ask for one of those tests, after all?”

  “By no means!” The test for learning an infant’s gender almost as soon as its engenderment had been much in vogue for a few years following its invention and again, briefly, in the 2030s. But it had proved too much like being told the outcome before reading the book or seeing the show; most people, in most generations, found that they preferred happy anticipation to premature revelation.

  * * * *

  At three fifteen (antique round clockface time), Angela insisting on coming along, they entered Marchpane’s and settled in a corner booth. When they waiter came, she ordered lemonade, he coffee. They had it by nineteen minutes after the hour; catering largely to police workers on their rest breaks, the establishment cultivated speedy service.

  The young couple sipped and waited, watching the door. “From this side,” Angela remarked, “we see Inspector Marchpane’s back. It’s very clever, but I wonder why they painted him going out instead of coming in.”

  “I’d have guessed him to be standing in the doorway welcoming customers.”

  “You did see him? I thought so—you grinned back.”

  “Did I? Well, Marchpane’s a merry soul, with all his faults.”

  “But that means you must be back in reality mode, Poe, if you saw Inspector Marchpane there!”

  Corwin smiled. “Yes, I seem to have been a realizer for most of today. No doubt at this hour it’s the anxiety of whether or not M. Click is up to another of his amiable bits of jocularity.”

  “We’ll give him till three forty. That’s an extra ten minutes. Not a moment longer. But maybe this time you just flashed into reality mode to enjoy Marchpane’s. Is it really as cozy and cheerful as it looks to me?”

  “Very nearly, I should think, apart from the grave and harried expressions, presumably carried over from work, on the faces of several patrons. It is amusing that where the clientele wear plainclothes, the waiters are all costumed as Keystone Cops.”

  She chuckled. “Do you know, most of the time I still see pollies uniformed the way they used to be when I was just a toddler, before they all went into permanent plainclothes. They used to wear blue with a lot of bright orange trim. It makes things very bright in here. Why did they all go to plainclothes?”

  “One more instance of the way in which we fantasy perceivers, though call
ed a minority, leaven the world about us.” He noticed a smug tone in his voice, and tried to modify it. “We may surmise, of course, that the officially stated reason was along the lines of ‘better public relations.’ But I believe they actually went into plainclothes, Pundita, some years before either of us were born.”

  “Except for things like crowd control, isn’t it?” She laughed. “Maybe patrolling street crossings for kindergartners was still considered mob control when I was a toddler!”

  Or maybe as a child she had confused volunteer crossing guards, some of whom could be seen to this day wearing cast-off police uniform tunics, with regular pollies.

  “Am I really drinking lemonade?” she went on curiously. “It looks and tastes more like a lime fizz.”

  “I think we may rest assured that you are drinking real lemonade, as I am drinking real coffee. Pollies are, after all, realizers. I believe it’s among the job requirements.” He took another sip from his cup. “A good deal better than the so-called coffee dispensed from the station’s slotpay machines, which would be enough to explain this establishment’s popularity with the police, even if the brew were not served up in real ...” He checked the obverse side of the saucer. “... Sentara Ware.”

  “You mean they’d come even if this place were called ... oh, Fagin’s or Ace Chang’s, and Marchpane might not have anything to do with it?”

  They beguiled a bit more time in reviewing the checkered history of Inspector Marchpane. If their pooled memory served, he had originally come into being sometime during the 2020s as a character in children’s screengames, an occasionally malicious and always unreliable bit of deadweight that one hoped to enlist on the side of one’s opponent. The police of that era had sent up a howl of protest: they had problems enough commanding public respect in an age of gleeful lawlessness. The matter might even have come to court. In any case, the brilliant reanimator Disney Forbes Inkbrush, taking advantage of the publicity, had picked up Marchpane as a character for his screenshows, thus enshrining him, along with Donald Duck, Aarnie Aardvark, Elmer Fudd, and Pussy Willow, as a fixed star in popular American culture.