The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Here.” M. Liberty produced an alternate card case, in Italian tooled leather. “Well faked Names and Prints registration card for Elegius Stanley Moan, with your prints, blood type, and so on substituted for his. Along with the most sentimental-looking holos on public record of his late wife and their friends. I’ll tell you who they are on the drive. A couple of the holos even have your image spliced in where his used to be.”

  “Lissy dug out the holos,” said Click. “I took care of the registration card. You don’t carry any holos, M. Poe?” he added, flipping through Corwin’s own card case.

  “I prefer oldfashioned flat photographs. I had thought, as Lord Ele—... But it’s as well that we went through this business now. It might have been awkward to forget at the gates and be faced with the problem of discarding or concealing my own identification once inside.” He had almost corrected M. Liberty’s “elegy-us” pronunciation and mentioned that he had thought to adopt the stance of eschewing such tokens as photos and holographs. This must have seemed doubly rude acknowledgment for her labor.

  “Rosary ...” said Click, pouring it out of its small silk purse. “Too miniature to have much weapon value. Ordinarily, it’d be permitted. But do you want to carry it inside? Lord Moan’s registered religion is something he calls ‘Panmorianism,’ apparently one of those single-believer creeds.”

  “As to that,” said Corwin, “a single-believer creed can adopt any appurtenances it desires.” The onyx and pearl rosary, like the pencil case, had been with him since third grade, the one a gift from his parents, the other from his sister Raddy, nine years his senior. “Still, why risk it inside? You might just slip it into that overnight case, there beside the desk. The one containing such of my personal things as are to be sent directly back to my own home. The pencil case as well, if you would.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” M. Liberty offered. Click handed her the rosary and pencil case, returned the handkerchief and small round tin of lip balm to Corwin, and scooped all the other items into the larger, open suitcase.

  “I should like the books as soon as convenient,” said Corwin. “Especially those by Peake.” He regretted that the volume of verse was an exquisitely thin quarto rather than a miniature edition suitable for riding in one of his pockets.

  “We’ll get this kit to Hummingbird Hill by midafternoon.” Click snapped the suitcase lid shut. “Even if it rushes us a little. Usually the ingoers slip us about fifty tridols for a rushcheck—one of the few harmless little bits of bribery that nobody hollers ‘corruption’ about. Not even Lissy here.”

  “You have taken charge of my folding money, M. Click.” Corwin returned the two permitted items to his left inside lapel pocket. “Do I understand that coins, as opposed to paper currency, are allowed inside? And pocket knives?”

  “Yep,” the policeman affirmed. “If they started forbidding pocket knives, where’d it stop? Table knives? Nail files and scissors? Envelope slitters? And then they’d have to go after strings and cords, any kind of breakable glass ... Pretty krantzy to live your life in luxury without any of those little amenities.”

  “As for the coins,” said M. Liberty, “if they didn’t allow them, the inmates would find something else to use as pocket money. Cigarettes, hard candies, playing cards, cosmetic cases, even bottle caps. Civilized people insist on having some exchange medium they can carry around and use for day-to-day trade. That’s why the effort to abolish all coined and printed currency and impose computer credit lines for all money transactions failed so spectacularly back in the Twenty-twenties.”

  “I register curiosity, in that case, as to why bills are not permitted also, at least in the lower denominations. They must be as easy as envelope correspondence to smuggle in and out.”

  “Not printed as they are with scan-sensitive ink,” the reporter replied. “I won’t be surprised if you find a whole, happy counterfeit circulation inside, though.”

  “Scan-sensitive ink? I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Used to be one of the things they taught you about money back in middle college,” said Click.

  “Ah, the minutiae that slip one’s memory! Well, I suppose that further procrastination serves no useful purpose.” Seeing the policeman bring out a set of handcuffs, Corwin extended his wrists.

  “In back, your lordship,” said Click.

  “In back?” Corwin turned, but added, “Then what is the logic of allowing me even a handkerchief?”

  “The handkerchief-and-personal-medicine rule antedates the cuffs-in-back rule by quite a few years,” Click explained. “Latter came into being only after Carver Jones Bloodflower half strangled one of his guards and dern near got at the key to open the door with his hands cuffed in front. Polcar was doing between fifty and sixty KPH when he started his move, on the New Appalachian Highway to Misty Ridge Security.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” cried M. Liberty. “Don’t cuff him yet, Dave. It’s a ninety-minute-plus ride, and once they’re on, they’re on until he’s inside.”

  Corwin eyed the policeman curiously. “You do not yourself carry the key, Sergeant Click? Allow me to guess. Some desperado in the not too distant past, although presumably before M. Bloodflower’s exploit, contrived to wrest or almost to wrest the handcuff key from the police guard.”

  Click nodded. “Kelly Alvarado Green. On the way from the polcar to the Tropical Moon Security ferry. Actually wrestled a guard into the water and drowned him getting that key.”

  “And then Kelly drowned, too,” added the reporter. “When stungunned by the other police officer while still in the ocean, trying to use the key.”

  “So now it’s up to the warden to unlock the cuffs.” Click jingled them inquiringly.

  “My difficulty here,” Corwin mused, rubbing his chin, “is that I shall be going into a society all of whose members have experienced it. And—unlike…body searches—it’s an ordeal which most of them may feel little reluctance to discuss. There might be some limit to the sensations we should leave to my imagination. No matter how fertile, it may conceivably fail of consonance with their experiences.”

  M. Liberty said, “Polcars have a depressed armwell in the middle of the back seat, with a bar to hook the cuffs to. We’re going in a Hilmar limo, with solid cushions across the back. Your hands and arms would get very numb.”

  “Mmm. Had you not led me, M. Click, to believe that we would be using a police car?”

  Click grinned apologetically. “I tried to get one. Too short notice. Actually, I’m doing this whirl on stressleave time, myself.”

  “Although it seems curious,” Corwin went on, “that the hotel corporation has no special security limousine of its own. It seems to have a plethora of security hotels.”

  “Widely scattered,” said M. Liberty. “It’s more convenient for them to let the police handle that leg of transportation. Paying rental comparable to Rent-a-Van’s, so that it doesn’t come out of the public Lottery monies. The short-notice situation Dave ran up against is unusual.” Her tone—which M. Click ignored—implied that he was somehow at fault.

  “Well?” The junior sergeant jingled the cuffs again.

  “Are they metallic?” Corwin inquired.

  “Nup. Isomer steelplas with adjustable hardrubber cushions, and a connecting bar instead of links.”

  “Yet I see them glint metallically, and hear them jingle chainlike. Selective fantasy perception, apparently.” Corwin sighed. These moments of mixed perceptional modes could be quite confusing. “Well…an hour and a half? ... I think perhaps, under the circumstances, we had as well waive the cuffs at present, for the sake of my circulation. It shall simply have to be beneath Lord Moan’s dignity to describe any part of the last miles. I have noticed, by the way, in your anecdotes of such journeys, a rather disturbing thread of determination not to live in famously luxurious cloisterdom.”

  “Bloodflower and Gre
en must not have believed the brochures,” said Click. “Anyway, they were flambos who might just have been trying last-minute getaways on general principle. And Ruby Gantry was a smalltime lifer who didn’t have the money to stay as a paying guest longer than a couple of nights. She was going in direct from court to interview for a job in the security’s laundry. Her case also inspired the guiderule that all prisonbirds who apply for jobs in security hotels have to serve at least six months of their sentences in state pens first.”

  “Farley Evans Kipper, on the other hand,” said M. Liberty, “was being transferred, at his own request, from one Hilton-Maracott security hotel to another, after serving three years in the first one.”

  “Kipper,” Corwin repeated. “The one who blew himself up?”

  The reporter nodded.

  Chapter

  The Nostalgia City Pepper Pot had still been closed, with the family funeral notice on the door and no signs of life inside, front or back, at 09:00 Friday. Lestrade spent the morning at the Nostalgia City police station, digging through computer records at Pat Harihoto’s terminal and using his access number. If any official snoop wondered why Pat would suddenly have spent several hours calling up data seemingly unconnected with his own caseload, they’d confess that his visitor was the one who wanted it, but not that she was the one who had done the digging. She couldn’t afford the added time on her stress-hour record, not if she wanted to go on avoiding Doc Youngdaughter. But Pat wouldn’t be in trouble for it. Spending a little of your own paid time looking up data for a colleague counted as legitimate work-effort.

  Just to be on the safe side, she kept her fingers out of the Withycombe case. As officially closed business, that’d have to wait for what she could do on her home unit or with general access codes at public terminals. And news files. Dave Click’s latest romantic interest was a reporter, wasn’t she? But for now, Lestrade stuck to Moan-Truemeasure relevancy, which was still current, if just barely. Besides, starting with further checks on James Hovreson Brown’s Pepper Pot made it Nostalgia City local, and could look like Harihoto’s own concern, with no need for any official explanations at all.

  Brown had owned the Pepper Pot last Labor Day weekend, but not for very long. He had bought it from one Linda Hansen Handsome, registered fantasy perceiver, the month before, finalizing the deal on August 26. There was no record of the shop’s having been closed a single business day during the change of ownership. But neither was there any record of the “Grand Opening” that almost always marked such a change, sometimes a month or two after the fact.

  More often than not, however, “Grand Openings” counted as promotion and advertising. So they didn’t have to be registered with any governmental body. They came under the Private Enterprise Clause of the Reformed Constitution. And even when they were registered for the public record, as a voluntary thing for the sake of a little additional free advertising and the possible benefit of future local historians, the register might decide to enter the notice under a time or space limit automatic wipe. Public databanks had only so many storage kilobytes. Any record of a few days’ closing might have gone similarly unregistered or automatically blanked.

  Local libraries, news morgues, and commerce bureaus might have that kind of information on storage chips. You had to visit their buildings and insert the chips, or have the librarians insert them, in the limited-function (read and printout only) chip readers. Other than to delight some eager-to-serve librarian, or impress James H. Brown with the extent of police knowledge, Lestrade saw little reason for that kind of overdigging. It looked fairly obvious that the Pepper Pot remained the same kind of business under Brown that it had been under Handsome, shop’s name and all.

  An easy check on the direct police line to Names and Prints revealed that James Hovreson Brown had been born Jimmy Hovreson Schneider thirty-eight years ago to Cunegonde Hovreson Erlandsdatter and Fernando Schneider Bughunter. Obviously indulgent parents. Jimmy had gone through yearly name changes on or about his birthday, February 4, from age five to age fourteen, the usual spray of kids’ heroes’ first and final names that most kids wanted and most parents, when they permitted them at all, kept as unreregistered, in-the-family changes only. At eighteen, he had gone back officially to James Hovreson Schneider, but six years later dropped the Schneider in favor of Brown. A registered realizer from age thirteen, he had never pulled a lower score than eight-five percent on the standard Test.

  Despite her registered fantasy perception, Linda Hansen Handsome had a much more stable name record than Brown’s. She had been Linda Hansen Hansen until age nineteen, when she became Linda Hansen Fortinger for two years, afterward settling down as Linda Hansen Handsome, where she had been ever since—fifteen years. Her parents, like Brown’s, were both registered reality perceivers. It was possible that she had registered as a fancier in order to avoid ever having to take the Test. A few people had testphobia, or whatever the technical term was.

  (Might Hector Heikkinen Apex have testphobia? Or just the whim to keep in fancy-class fashion?)

  One thing that wasn’t easy nowadays, thank the goddess of progress, was changing your identity. Everybody’s full set of fingerprints—and toeprints though the latter were rarely needed—went into the Registry databank right along with the family name and record of first and final names. By legal guiderule, every transaction involving more than a thousand tridols, even in installment payments, got checked automatically with both the thumbprints of all parties involved. People could vanish into Derelictville by never indulging in large business transactions, staying out of any other fingerprinting situations, and not registering their present names. But to adopt a new identity that could live in style, you had to bribe some rubber surgeon for a retread job on both palms and both soles. Not only was it a long, uncomfortable process, even with 21st-century medicine, but it also left at least one witness already proven bribable, by the mere fact of doing it in the first place, as well as a gap in the fictitious new personality’s previous life files. A few floaters had done it, with patience, trimillions, and enough computer wizardry to bypass the public-record safeguards and program in new files. Lestrade couldn’t find any hint that either Brown or Handsome had ever done it, or had ever had any reason to.

  The only potential lead, if you could call it one, she could tease out of the computer data was that between 2079 and 2081 Handsome’s mailing address had been a P.O. box in Reno, Nevada. Same postal code that took in the neighborhood of one known home base that Nandra Barlow Savecash, who was a suspected link in the illegal wholesaling of controlled substances, had been using from 2075 to the present.

  No court-admissible evidence that Handsome and Savecash had ever been introduced.

  Chapter

  The wall was too vast to become the House of Usher, but it ought, at least, to have registered upon Corwin’s optics as the fortifications of Toledo or some other medieval walled city of rough-hewn gray stone mortared together and dashed, perhaps, with patches of green moss. Or it might have been an early modern edifice of red-brown brick, rough or glazed. In any case, there should have been ivy, spreading like a dark and delicate tracework of arteries.

  Instead, it appeared to him as a construction of solid steelmold, pebble-surfaced so that instead of flashing, it gave off only a pleasant glimmer when viewed from a distance, resolving into an undulating sheen as one was brought nearer. There were no watchtowers. Although he was aware that electronic seeing-eye screens liberally embedded in the wall’s inner surface and tuned to receivers in the numerous guardhouses encircling the fortress obviated any need for watchtowers, he ought to have seen them anyway, had his fantasy perception been fully operational.

  “I should appreciate a description of that outer wall, M. Liberty,” said he. “If you please. It was left tactfully undescribed in Hilton-Maracott’s brochure.”

  “Stay in character, your lordship,” said Click, who sat at his other elbow.


  “In my studied opinion, I was.”

  “Unh-unh. The real Moan’s as snooty as they come. He wouldn’t request a description, assuming he’d even want one. He’d demand it.”

  “Oh, for jennifer’s sake, Dave!” said the reporter, sitting forward to address Click. “All that the unfortunates in there know about Lord Moan is the bare synopsis of his trial. Let M. Poe play the part however he finds it easiest!” Sitting back again on the airfoam seat cushions, she went on to Corwin, “That wall, M. Poe—I should say, Lord Moan—is two meters thick of packed stone sheathed on each side and along the top with half a meter of asteroid-alloy steel. Its height is twenty meters, and it’s set in below ground level to the tune of twenty meters deep. Running all the way through, top to bottom, are the rods and wires that electrify it, thirty rods to the square meter, in randomized patterns. Videyes set along the inner wall provide the guards with screen images of everything they can monitor, which obviously includes only activity near the wall. Hilmar is scrupulous about protecting its guests’ privacy in the rest of the hotel complex. All seams on both sides of the outer wall are melded perfectly smooth. The only way in and out is the airlocks bulge.”

  “An engineering marvel,” Corwin commented. “Even for this century.”

  “Why not?” she replied. “Humanity’s had enough experience with such high-priority constructions as prisons.”

  Click whistled a few notes. Too few for Corwin immediately to name the tune.

  “But its appearance?” the prisoner-for-the-nonce persisted.

  “Oh.” She described the wall as it presented itself to her highly reality-perceptive eyes.

  He nodded regretfully. “Even as I see it, too. I had anticipated some shift into fantasy mode at this critical juncture.”

  “For my purposes,” said M. Liberty, “I’d just as soon you stayed a realizer your whole time in there. Besides, I’d think it’d save you a step. Go into fantasy mode and you’ll have to compensate for standard reality before going on to translate anything you talk about into Lord Moan’s version.”