The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Airlock number three, the visiting lounge, was slightly less stark and somewhat better furnished, with a white moldfoam couch, a white moldfoam armchair unaccoutered with restraints, two gray aluminum straightback chairs for the guards, and softile over the floor. Aside from all this wealth of furniture being fixed immovably in place, the room was not so very different from many a fancy-class antechamber. True, those who sold furnishings, floor coverings, and wall paint to the Fancy Class usually preferred beiges, browns, tans, cream tones, ivories, and bluish or silvery grays to stark white. Moreover, a comparable cubbyhole in a private fancy-class residence would have had some decoration—some wall hangings or knick-knackery on shelves—in addition to a coffee table with urn and cups or other provisions for refreshment, and some sort of reading matter and game equipment, if only a chess set or pack of cards. Clearly the planners of the Hummingbird Hill visiting lounge meant to discourage visitors, as the planners of the public waiting rooms at police stations meant to discourage waiting by members of the noncriminal public. M. Liberty reported, however, that what there was in airlock number three was good-quality stuff.

  On the whole, Corwin much preferred his own fantasy perception to the sterile white and shadow-reducing illumination M. Liberty had described. Airlock number two was far more dramatic as an antique dungeon, and made his present immobility seem less incongruous. He felt curious as well as eager to behold airlock number three for himself, hoping that his fantasy mode would last long enough.

  And it should prove no more difficult, perhaps even easier, to translate his own world into Lord Moan’s than to do the same with standard reality. His realizer escorts were overly anxious to anticipate trouble there. The trouble might come elsewhere.

  From the moment the guards, Click, and M. Liberty left him here, he had lost all direct communication with the outside world. They had considered this point carefully beforehand and decided that for him to take in any sort of personal phone or other wireless communication device would not only violate the security rules but might put him at greater risk were it to be discovered. Thus, almost his only line to the outside world must be that employed by the other prisoners: written missives smuggled back and forth by the daystaffers and Sunday chaplains.

  These would know who he really was, carry verbal messages for him and even—should it prove necessary, Heaven forefend!—news of him which he himself was unable for any reason to transmit. In addition, he could show this new S.O.S. hand signal to any part of the outer wall, assuming that whatever emergency might arise would allow him to come within view of the monitors. But at night? How well lighted were the wall and the areas immediately beneath it? Some arrangement must have been made, within the illumination guidelines, for night surveillance.

  But with all that, for a large part of his time within, he must be well and truly alone.

  There were within the walls two lines of communication to the outside world, if one considered the guardhouses as belonging to the outside world. In order to facilitate the day-to-day provisioning of his enclosed domain, Warden Warren had in his office a telephone and a small computer, both of them powerable exclusively by plug-in wire or, at need, internal back-up battery, and both lined only to equivalent units in the guardhouses. On receiving the manager’s shopping lists and special requests, as for unanticipated medical needs, the guards used their own additional equipment to relay them to Hilton-Maracott’s city offices.

  But in order to get a message to the guards by this means, Corwin must: a. gain access to the manager’s office, which would presumably be voicelocked and otherwise secured against intrusion when not occupied by its official; b. recognize the keyboard and phone for what they were; and, c. find the pieces usable, which they would not be if M. Warren employed any sort of removable plug, special coded program, or other extraordinary security device seldom resorted to by members of society in the great outside world.

  On the whole, Corwin’s best plan would be to maintain as low a profile as consistent with his assumed character, so as to avoid any dangerous situation, and wait out the pre-arranged three weeks for the alleged visit from his lawyer to confer with him on the strategy for Lord Moan’s initial appeal. The lawyer would actually be M. Liberty, and the reason for her visit to receive his report. Or escort him to freedom, which would be simplicity itself once he was back in the airlocks with her and the guards. He would have but to say the word.

  But how much could he hope to unravel, by keeping a low profile, of the present mystery surrounding M. Adrian Withycombe? Which was his whole, or at least his original and to most of those concerned primary, reason for going in at all. Any such excess of caution as would hamper his investigative usefulness would amount to accepting Hilton-Maracott’s pay under false pretenses. It might even limit the value of the testimony M. Liberty solicited from him, making it of little more depth than such information on the prison’s surface and sunlit life as she could have elicited equally well from the daystaffers, special tutors, and chaplains. And if he hoped to pen a profitable volume of his own about the experience, he ought to have some experience worth penning.

  Although, considering the “hot seat,” he wondered if the tamest three weeks available to a paying guest might not have sensatory detail enough for the purposes of his popular account.

  He was commencing to believe that five minutes would have been more than long enough, not only for some Houdini-esque escape from the chair, but for an excogitation of the second thing to do (after blowing one’s nose and checking one’s person for crawling insects) once at large in airlock number two; when the door made a chirring sound, so soft that he might not have heard it had his senses not been at their tightest pitch.

  Unable to turn his head, he contained his soul in further patience. The Earl of Worminglass might well consider it beneath his dignity to proffer the first greeting.

  It could not have been so many seconds as it seemed before the newcomer said, in a cheerful masculine voice: “Well, your lordship! Just give me two minutes and I’ll have you out of that.”

  Lord Moan would hold any verbal reference to his predicament gauche in the extreme. “Warden Warren P. Parkinson, I presume?” Corwin said, as coolly as his tension, coupled with the alliteration of his words, would permit.

  “Just ‘M. Parkinson.’” Stepping into Corwin’s view, he appeared a portly, fine-looking gentleman of the old school, attired after the fashion of the late eighteenth century. “‘Warden Warren,’” he went on, “is a freak of those Bright Carvers outside. In standard reality, I’m a simple hotel manager.”

  His reference to the guards as Bright Carvers showed that either he was himself a Peake aficionado, or had done some hasty cramming for the sake of his new charge. Corwin hoped the latter. Aloud, he replied, “You might to some extent have defused their rude joke by reregistering your name as ‘Joseph’ or ‘Eustace’ or some such.”

  “They’d still have been titling me ‘Warden.’ Their own perceptional world, you understand.” Parkinson had begun with the head restraint, putting him once again out of Corwin’s sight; but his touch was gentle, even to the younger man’s present state of nerves and perception, and his voice continued jovial: “There’s a touch of the Fancy Class in everybody, even in our hard-bitten ‘realizers’ outside. As for my first name, Warren was my father’s first name before me, and his father’s before him. Why should I give it up just because a few Mud Dwellers take it in vain?”

  “As you say. Even a forename can be an inheritance beyond price.” If we have a son, thought M. Poe, and if we name him Corwin, will he keep that forename as a heritage from his paternal parent as faithfully as did M. Parkinson? Who was a murderer. But with quick hands as well as gentle—Corwin felt his head already free. He resisted the temptation to shake it in celebration of its release. Lord Moan would disdain to acknowledge even by gesture that he had been under physical restraint.

  “I suppose they gave
your lordship their story that I invented, or at least perfected, this little throne?” said Parkinson, throwing Corwin’s own proclivities into war with those of his adopted persona.

  Well, it was not yet too late to modify Lord Moan a little. “They did. Along with a most affecting tale of why it proved necessary.”

  “Oh, yes! The incoming guest who self-destructed as soon as left alone in here.”

  “Who almost self-destructed, in this case.”

  “Oh? Usually it’s an anonymous guest who succeeds.” Having freed Corwin’s hands, the manager moved on to the chest straps. “I’m collecting the accounts for a little book I’ve been putting together in my spare time. Sort of a psychostudy of the Outer Dwellers’ mentality, disguised as a collection of their folklore and anecdotes.”

  “As they told it to me, the guest was M. Paul Jefferson Jefferson, who ... let me see…broke his left instep, cracked one of his elbow bones, and shook his head with force all but sufficient to break his own neck.”

  Parkinson laughed.

  “Do I take it,” said Corwin, “that there was absolutely no truth in the tale?”

  “Just this much: M. Jefferson came down with a bad case of Valdez’s Disease a few hours after he arrived. Picked it up from the courthouse coffee, of course. Three dozen other people came down with it that week. Lawyers, jurors, witnesses, plaintiffs, defendants, even judges. That was why we needed to call in a medical specialist for M. Jefferson.”

  “Thank you for the elucidation. I had been experiencing considerable difficulty in crediting the possibility of individuals breaking their own necks, or even causing themselves whiplash, simply by shaking their heads with the requisite determination.”

  “Well,” said M. Parkinson, “if anyone could do it, I imagine it’d be M. Of The Light. That’s the new final name M. Jefferson is wearing these days.”

  “Is it a part of the ritual? That is, must each incomer adopt a new name?”

  The manager-warden (whoever it was that actually preferred which title) laughed again. “No, no ‘must’ about it. Just as voluntary as anywhere else in the civilized world. We keep up our own names register, to save time.” He loosed the second surcingle, moved around to the front of the chair, and bent to tackle the last restraint: the band about the legs just below the knee.

  Refusing to indulge the archetypical gesture of rubbing his wrists, Corwin lifted his arms to rest on those of the chair. “I can also supply you a number of educational anecdotes concerning attempted escapes en route to this and similar retreats, and the tragedies ensuing therefrom. May I take it that these, too, have been exaggerated, if not outright fabricated?”

  “Probably. I’ll be very much interested to hear them. In fact, if your lordship wouldn’t mind giving me a few notes right now, while it’s all still as fresh as possible in your mind ... There we are!”

  Feeling his legs free, Corwin lowered his feet to the floor and stood as smoothly as he could. “I understand that a reception has been planned according to the prescribed ritual laid down for the homecomings, after prolonged absences, of my noble predecessors the Ninth, Sixteenth, Forty-Second, and Sixty-Fourth Earls and…and the Sixteenth and Fifty-Seventh Countesses.” Rather good corroborative detail! he congratulated himself. And that little catch in the throat before mentioning the countesses, to work in with the image of a recently bereaved widower. But—Oh, Lord!—will I now have to remember the numbers I just assigned to all of them?

  “It’s also laid down that the correct moment for that ceremony to start is the moment of your lordship’s appearance,” M. Parkinson replied neatly. “That gives us a few minutes’ leeway.” He pulled out a memorandum book and small golden pencil, which were actually, no doubt, a pocket computer and rubber-tipped pointer for tabbing its tiny keys. “All I’d ask for right now is the names and some catch phrases to connect each name with the type of escape attempt. Enough to jog your lordship’s memory. You can fill in the details this evening, if you’d be so good as to honor me with your company for an hour or two over a few old cognacs. I’m compiling a motif index, you see. Like Thompson’s and Perlmarker’s for general folklore, though on a more modest scale.”

  “I stand ready to serve the demands of pure scholarship.” Corwin secretly wondered whether he had best “recognize” his Master of Ritual in M. Parkinson at once. But surely the hotel manager would have too many other daily demands on his time to play along that far, and to attempt the identification only to have it denied might be worse than not to make it at all. “I should prefer, however,” he went on aloud, “to serve the demands of scholarship in the next chamber, which I have been given to understand is comparatively comfortable. I weary of these particular immediate surroundings.”

  Chapter

  When Lestrade returned to the Pepper Pot after lunch, she found the notice finally gone and the shop open for business.

  She thought about slipping back to her hotel room for a quick change into the gaudy tunic and bright slippers. She thought about it again and blanked the idea. Peddlers who kept shops didn’t sell realgoods to any new floater on the first or second visit, not without private references and sometimes not even then. Gambling on strangers was strictly street action.

  Then she thought about going back to the Nostalgia City Pollystation and borrowing somebody for a partner. The general public expected pollies to come in pairs. Except for those city neighborhoods where the single, walking “cop on the beat” had been reestablished, originally as much for public relations as anything else, a goal that was getting lost in the shuffle as more and more “cops on the beat” were private citizens who got licenses and sold their services to various civic associations, or even friendly neighborhood volunteers who didn’t bother with the licensing process. Nostalgia City’s strolling beat cops had been Chamber of Commerce employees for the last five years, and even put on costume uniforms.

  The regular police had abandoned uniforms, except for special purposes, back in the 2020s. Uniforms made it too easy for anyone to dress up like a police officer and fool strangers. The idea of the local cop on the beat was that everybody in the neighborhood would get personally acquainted with their local pedestrian-patrol pollies. Of course, the Nostalgia City Chamber of Commerce costume cops and other nonregulars had very limited powers. Legally, they could offer helping hands, break up petty fights, make arrests that were in effect citizens’ arrests, and report everything to the nearest regular police station.

  There was an NCCC strolling cop coming down this street now, got up like a genial keystoner. The last kind of accessory Lestrade wanted to commandeer. Well, maybe not the absolute last. The keystoner might make a better assistant than M. Magnum Hammersmith.

  It was to extricate herself from Hammersmith that she had walked here after that surprise picnic he had set up on the police plaza. She had told him she was going to unwind with a few hours of shopping for clothes. A winning gamble on his reluctance to tag along with her on that kind of excursion. She hadn’t gone back into the station for anything, because Hammersmith might have taken the fancy that she was going to get them that police open sesame for Apex’s condo, no matter what she told him to the contrary. She hadn’t bothered trying to phone the Pepper Pot beforehand because it was just a block off the straightline back to her hotel. Anyway, if the floater was in, why give him any kind of advance warning, even a “Sorry, glitch in the number?” She had fully expected to find the shop still closed. Afternoon openings after funeral trips were unusual. And, if closed for the rest of Friday, probably for the rest of the weekend. She’d been contemplating how she might wangle an open sesame to use on the Pepper Pot tomorrow.

  She tried to work herself back into yesterday’s mood. Before she’d known she was going to have Hammersmith in her hair down here. Before she’d known that the only thing on the shop’s record was the fact that its previous owner had once lived in the same city as Nandra Barlow S
avecash. Before she’d known the shop’s present owner was newly bereaved. Before she’d half decided she was wasting time, her own and Truemeasure’s, detouring to Nostalgia City at all.

  Maybe there was something to be said for department guidelines about stressrelief time, after all.

  Well, the only thing she was accomplishing out here was a flirtation with stage fright. Strange what a difference it could make, working without a partner. Or maybe the difference was working without official sanction, during time that was datatagged “stressleave.” Knowing that any kind of feedback from the interviews back to the department could land her face to face with Doc Youngdaughter.

  She went into the shop.

  And saw why its outer displays consisted of windowboxes between the outside plate glass panes and background opaque screens. Obviously the screens weren’t so much to keep people from looking all the way through the windows as to keep daylight down to a murky minimum. The floor glowed red, and partially veiled a central brown slowstrobe that rotated brownish light dotted with holographic images of bubbles and chopped vegetables throughout the round-walled interior.

  Lestrade had seem similar effects, heard of others. Floating pink elephants and green snakes in bars, airswimming bunnies and teddies for the nursery, erotic images for adult bedrooms and anything at all for movie houses. Their big popularity had been in the 2020s, followed by a semi-survival, semi-revival during her own childhood, when they were found mostly in honeymoon suites, kindergarten exhibits, and leisure lounges. A few libraries here and there still hung onto their floating-image rooms as late as the Seventies; now, you found this kind of thing mainly in cultural-history museum exhibits. Probably only such a town as Nostalgia City would boast a spice-and-seasoning shop designed to make the customers feel as if they were actually at the bottom of a pot of simmering soup.