The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Unless I had slipped directly into a Moanish world myself, which I had half expected after my late hours last night of intensive cramming.” Corwin stifled a yawn. He had spent all of three hours between his sheets—from five to eight a.m.—and estimated that he had accumulated perhaps three quarters of an hour of sleep during that interval. Strangely enough, what slumber he had snatched had been free from actual nightmare, though not from somewhat disquieting states of visionary consciousness. “Moreover,” he assured the reporter (and himself), “there are certain similarities between Gormenghast—I ought to say Worminglass, as being the Earl of Moan’s estate—and the Venerable Edgar’s more Gothic worlds. Crumbling masonry, for example.”

  Click interjected: “You won’t find that wall crumbling.”

  “And even if there were not, unless there is someone else within who resides in Gormenghast—”

  “There isn’t,” said Click. “All of them listed their perceptional worlds before going inside.”

  “Personal worlds have occasionally been known to change.” Corwin tried mentally to review the stated perceptional frames of his soon-to-be fellow inmates. He could remember none that seemed very likely to shift in a Moanish direction. “But even so, the distinction between Gormenghast in the time of its seventy-seventh earl and Worminglass in the time of its seventy-first should allow me a certain latitude for any necessary bluffing.”

  The limousine pulled to a stop where the road ended in a graveled carpark approximately the length of a football field from the wall, which here presented a seemingly unbroken surface, innocent of any hint of portal, gate, or airlocks bulge. There was, however, on the imaginary diagonal line between the parking lot and the wall, one of the numerous outlying guardhouses, dwarfed beneath the looming fortification when seen from a distance, but resolving at closer hand into a neat, no-nonsense brick edifice the size of a traditional lakeside “roughing it” cabin for a vacationing family of four.

  M. Liberty opened the car door on her side. Click held Corwin’s upper arm and waited for the driver to come around and open his door for him. “Excuse Lissy’s informality,” he said. “In an actual polcar situation, we’d wait till the last minute before unhitching your cuffs from the security bar. Then we’d all ease out together, in a cozy threesome, each of us pollies keeping one of our hands tight on your biceps and the other snug around the grips of our stunguns.”

  “I see.” Corwin pushed his hands between the seat cushions and the small of his back.

  M. Liberty quit the limousine and slammed her door seconds before the driver opened Click’s. The two men slid out, Corwin striving to keep his hands behind him. “I wonder,” he remarked, “that you don’t simply stun your prisoners at once and spare yourselves all these precautionary measures.”

  “Stunning’s a lot more serious than they make it look in the screenshows, your lordship. If we did it to anybody without ‘just, immediate, and desperate cause,’ we’d have the Personal Dignities watchdogs down on us faster than you can blink. Right, Lissy?”

  “At the speed of light,” she agreed. “Speaking as one of those watchdogs. For starts, a single stun destroys as many brain cells as half a dozen bouts of drinking yourself into a stupor.”

  “Then pray don’t stun me!”

  “Don’t give us any just, immediate, and desperate cause,” the policeman said jocularly. “Here, I think maybe it’s time for these.” He snapped the handcuffs on at last.

  M. Liberty rolled up her eyes. “It could have waited until we were at the airlocks. What if he stumbles on the way? That terrain looks rough.”

  “Supposed to be rough,” said Click. “Not enough to present any real hazard if you take it slow. Just enough to discourage ‘Dancing in the Tall Grass.’” He whistled a few bars of the popular ditty of that name.

  “It would seem a superfluous precaution,” Corwin observed, regarding the expanse of wild grasses and weeds, already knee high, between the carpark and the prison. “In light of that formidably constructed wall.”

  “In at least ninety percent of all cases,” said M. Liberty, “most of these precautions are superfluous.”

  “It’s that other ten percent,” Click agreed with good humor. “The Bloodflowers, Greens, and Kippers. Come here and take his lordship’s other arm, Lissy. Joe,” he went on to the driver, “you can play the polly who walks three paces behind. Your lordship will understand that Joe has a stunner out and pointed at your back. In a real situation, we’d have a fourth polly walking in front.”

  “I am taking assiduous note of all these details,” said Corwin. He also noted that the Hilton-Maracott Corporation must save a little on landscape upkeep costs here outside the wall. Assuming the accuracy of the brochure, it might be a minimal saving in comparison with the upkeep work inside…but then, that work was done by convict labor.

  “Escapees could, of course, lie down and hide in this grass,” opined M. Liberty. “Especially in late summer when it gets really overgrown.”

  “Not from heat-sensitive scans, they couldn’t hide,” Click returned. “a tab to the right button in any of the guardhouses, and this whole stretch falls beneath an electronic hairnet of sensors and invisible shocklines. Not that they’ve ever had occasion to test it in a real jailbreak.”

  “I can well believe that.” Corwin studied the wall, contemplated the labor it would cost to attempt tunneling beneath its foundation.

  “Ouch!” said Joe, the limousine driver. “Drat it, something bit me. Look, this is stupid. I’m going to wait back in the car.”

  “There,” murmured Click, “speaks a true, no-nonsense realizer. No doubt his chip case is full of docs on how to repair engines and solve cube roots.”

  “He has a point,” said M. Liberty. “I’d hate to run a race over this ground.”

  Corwin felt a secret satisfaction at no longer sensing a gun at his back which had never in fact been there.

  Eventually the three of them reached the guardhouse. A tall, androgynous-looking guard in tunic of hunters’ pink and dark blue trousers appeared on the stoop to greet them.

  “Hoy-yo, Sandy!” Click hailed this personage.

  “Clicker, you old sack of sparrow biscuit. What the cruddy heck did you cuff him for already? We wanted to shake hands with him. Yo, Lissy!”

  “Lash me with a shoelace,” the policeman replied, stepping onto the round meter of concrete that surrounded the two broad steps leading up to the door. “Your lordship, may I present Sandy Randolph. Sandy, his lordship the Earl of Moan, a.k.a. M. Corwin Davison Poe.”

  “If you won’t interpret it the wrong way,” Corwin offered, relishing the guard’s reference to shaking hands, “I could offer you my hand by turning around. Otherwise, I fear it must await my re-emergence.”

  “Turn around and let me do it now,” M. Randolph replied with a throaty chuckle.

  The voice began to sound more contralto than tenor; and by a certain attitude in the bearing, Corwin decided the guard was more likely of the feminine persuasion than the masculine. He regretted his offer, but could hardly retract it, so turned, extending his hands as far as possible from his body. His right fingers and palm met a cool, firm grasp that, despite the awkward angle, so skillfully avoided any other contact that he wondered whether M. Randolph had ever shaken cuffed hands belonging to parties not slated for eventual re-emergence.

  The guard went on to shake M. Liberty’s hand—from the proper perspective—and deliver a friendly slap to Click’s upper arm as Corwin again faced the door. These polite ceremonials achieved, they all filed inside.

  Until he noticed the two closed doors, one bolted, on the wall facing the entrance, Corwin’s impression was that the guardhouse comprised a single room, with banks of built-in monitor screens, communication equipment, and other controls along the walls on either side, an extremely spartan-looking couch and coffee table opposite the front doo
r, and a very basic kitchenette extending a little out from the nearest wall, so that anyone opening any unit—refrigerator, microwave, dishwasher, or cabinet—could still command a good sidewise view of the door. Of reading matter there seemed to be none, nor entertainment screens, nor electronic games; but there was a nonelectronic gameboard set up on the coffee table beside the steaming traydinner and plastibulb of cola. From the shape of the pieces, Corwin thought the game was either Knightsbridge or Castlelea, those nearly identical new versions of simplified chess. An ideal pastime, no doubt, to engage only half of any player’s attention.

  “You’re alone here?” he inquired. “That is—a single guard per watch suffices?”

  “Affirmative,” M. Randolph replied, cheerfully accenting the first syllable with an “aa” sound. “We synch our biorhythms through the master computer, catch? That way each of us is on duty at optimum alert, and one pair of eyes at optimum alert’s worth three pairs at fuzzout. By the way, my family name’s Astergilt. Cassandra Astergilt Randolph the Fourth. Hadn’t been for that little stocks snafu of ’Sixty-nine, I could have afforded to share the easy life inside—assuming there was anybody I wanted to murder—instead of just watching as much of it as I can tune in on my screens here.”

  Corwin was caught offguard. Her breezy candor fell too far outside the polite reticence to which he was accustomed. Unable to think what to say, he was relieved when M. Liberty remarked,

  “I’d have expected the shuttlecar to be here waiting for us.”

  “It is.” M. Randolph stamped her right foot twice. “We scrapped the old wall shuttle system not quite a year and a half ago. You can still see the tracks—more than it would’ve been worth to pry ’em out—but the old car’s in Chicago’s Museum of S. and I. The Smithsonian already had the old wall-shuttle car from Indian Bluffs.” She turned to Corwin. “You’ll be—far as they know—the first paying guest to use our new underground minineedle. Ought to give you a certain instant status. Of course, they’ve heard about it from the daystaffers and the two or three clockround help who’ve gone in since we started using it. But I’d still be prepared to answer questions about it, M.—I mean, your lordship of Worminglass.”

  “Three,” said M. Liberty.

  “Yo?”

  “Three new members of the fulltime staff have gone in during the past nineteen months.”

  “Fred Greenthumbs from Attica,” said Corwin, “serving…fifteen years? for assault and battery resulting in broken bones, hired here as gardener. Altus Stradavi from Indianapolis, serving forty years for marketing illegal substances, hired as assistant groundskeeper. And…and ...” He closed his eyes.

  “Cram course,” he heard Click explaining. “Lacking anything else to go on, we figured that the floaters who applied after Withycombe went in would be the first members of the hired staff to sharpstare at.”

  “And Fuzzy Delavan, from Pennsylvania State,” Corwin finished triumphantly. “Seven years for armed robbery with…an unloaded gun, but I think she struck somebody with it? Hired as manager of the pet shop.”

  “Great memory!” applauded M. Randolph. “Not only a gentleman and a hero, but a scholar, too.”

  “Thank you.” By now keenly regretting not having waited until the very last moment to offer his wrists for the cuffs, Corwin cherished every reminder that he was not in fact a criminal and would eventually issue forth again into the world.

  “Stradavi would have gone in before you had the mini-needletrain going,” Click remarked. “Hard to believe it’s been more than a year and a half since I drew escort duty out here.”

  “Well, floater, even with the clockround staffers, we don’t get that much traffic out this way, do we?”

  While the policeman and guard bantered, the reporter had been tabbing busily on her pocket memocom. “Would you have the exact date you started using the minineedle, Sandy?”

  “Not in my head. I can dig it out of the com memory for you in a couple of nanoseconds.”

  “Perhaps on your return here?” Corwin suggested. “We must be keeping M. Randolph from her repast.”

  “Love a chipmunk, I can always slap it back in the micro,” said the guard. “What we’re doing is keeping your lordship from a real meal. Chef Powers tells us the paying guests always order up a grand welcome feast for every new addition to their coternity.”

  “Understandable,” said M. Liberty. “They get so few new faces.”

  “They also use any excuse for a party. M. Powers says they celebrate holidays in there you never heard of out here. At least one every week.” M. Randolph crossed to the bolted door in the wall behind the couch. “Saint Edmond Dantes’ Day, Chillon Day, the Annual Lynching in Effigy of Brother von Hofer, something they call Chrysalis Day that involves finding a cocoon somewhere on the grounds in the fall, building a little shrine around it, and having a big picnic when the butterfly comes out.”

  “All of which sounds,” Corwin observed, “as though it ought to work in admirably with my adoptive perceptional world. By the way, I perceive a heavy oaken bolt across that door, bound in iron.”

  “Actually, it’s steelplas with three embedded steel rods, and an outer mesh of copper wire so it can be electrified at a touch of the right tab. But it’s a bolt, all right,” the guard explained, shooting it back. “Still one of the surest ways to make sure a door stays shut, even in this century. One of the last arguments con the minineedle system was that it could bring your hypothetical escapees up into a guardhouse when, say, the guard’s in the comfort station. Not much chance of that with a beaut of a bolt like this.”

  Nodding, Corwin glanced around the guardhouse. The rest of its interior still looked as it had before, but when his gaze returned to the door that M. Randolph was swinging open, it had become a massively thick construction of oak overgrown with moss. His ears even caught a highly unlikely shriele as of rusted hinges.

  He looked at Click, who gave him an innocent grin. It would have been in the policeman’s character to provide such a sound effect; on the other hand, a working fantasy perception could manufacture sounds, scents, and certain tactile effects out of nothing but their perceived suitability. The reporter’s face registered no annoyance. Gazing back into the open doorway, Corwin beheld the dark and uneven walls of a passage cut through ancient rock, encrusted with patches of leprous niter.

  Ah, well! he thought. Last year I should have taken this as a very hopeful symptom of recovery, rather than a mere tantalizing glitch.

  M. Randolph tapped a jeweled icon that until a moment ago had been one more of the chamber’s neat electronic control plates in color-coded plastic. At that tap, bracket-held torches blossomed forth into fire all along the descending stone stairway. An effect better suited to a world of necromancy and fairy tale than to that of either the Venerable Edgar or the Venerable Mervyn; but there were occasions when fantasy perception could but do its best with the material of standard reality.

  “I am confident,” said Corwin, “that these stairs are smooth, well treaded, and safe. Nonetheless, I perceive them as somewhat uneven and having a slimy glister. And since I cannot hold the rail ...”

  Click took one of his upper arms, M. Liberty the other. M. Randolph, whose tunic and trousers had taken on the appearance of a monkish robe, led the way to the bottom of the stairs, where a sleek silver-gray capsule trimmed in gilt, just sufficiently wide for a single seat across and sufficiently long for three such seats in a row front-to-back, waited in the torchlight, its soft gleam contrasting curiously with the rough-hewn and nitrous surroundings.

  M. Randolph slapped this capsule’s crystalline dome. “Well, M.—your lordship, what does your perception make of our little Kobby here?”

  “Kobby?”

  “Code name. We’re packers for code names around here. For an e.g., I’m about to phone every guardhouse between here and the gate by code name and tell ’em who’s coming thr
ough. Otherwise Kobby would just stop and sit beneath each house until somebody up above tabbed the right button.”

  “Impressive,” Click approved. “But I think I’d have her stopping and sitting midway between every two guardhouses.”

  “Then how would we know which of them to fly reinforcements to? Anyway, while Kobby was stopped, her exterior would automatically take on enough electrical icing to keep you from much wanting to lift her bubbledome.” M. Randolph raised her arm and tapped the ornate, unmonkish silver bracelet that was obviously her wristphone. “Nightshade to—”

  “If you please,” Corwin said quickly, “I’d rather not possess any information you would hesitate to furnish the real Lord Moan. A simple matter of prudence,” he added as the guard glanced at him.

  Her bracelet said, “Feldspar to Nightshade? Come in, why don’t you?”

  She grinned and told it, “Nightshade to Feldspar. Will continue transmission in about four nanoseconds. Stand by.” She swung open the car’s dome. “Your lordship never did finish saying how Kobby looks to you.”

  “Much as I imagine her standard reality must be, although probably with a smidgen more of gilt trim. You see, while the contrast with dank and dripping catacombs is rather unexpected, the Venerable Edgar penned more pieces of a science-fictional nature than is generally remembered to his credit. So, happily, did the Venerable Mervyn, at least in the final volume of his great trilogy. It offers me a certain happy perceptional latitude.”

  Click asked, “No back bar for the handcuffs?”

  “Buried deep in the back cushions, Clicker,” M. Randolph replied. “A newstyle Ketcham loop. You’ll have to dig for it. Most of the traffic Kobby serves is daystaffers, chaplains, and the occasional—very occasional—visitor or special medic.”

  They assisted Corwin into the middle seat, where, for the sake of authenticity, Click managed, after some seconds, to attach his cuffs to the Ketcham loop, which was so deeply embedded as to pull the prisoner’s hands almost completely into the back cushions. Aside from this, it was a comfortable seat, wide, soft, and upholstered—to Corwin’s present perception—in wine-red velvet plush. After a brief debate, M. Liberty took the back seat and Click settled into the front one, which was turned to face them both. M. Randolph lowered the dome over the passenger compartment and waved them off left-handed, already speaking again into the bracelet on her right wrist.