The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  The only other person in the Pepper Pot was a young woman in an orange tunic and a sheath skirt tapering until it fit so tightly from the lower thighs down that it had to be made of ultrastretch, or the wearer wouldn’t have been able to walk. It was difficult to be sure in the beefsoupy light, but her hair seemed to be dyed green. Probably a clerk but conceivably a customer, she was either searching or tidying the displays, always bending gracefully at the knees in order to reach the lower shelves, and humming the Gourmands’ Chorus from Starkle Mornaham.

  Shop etiquette recommended letting the customer who didn’t ask for help browse five to ten minutes before offering any. Lestrade browsed, carefully not glancing at her watch oftener than once or twice, for about twenty minutes. She went so far as to bring a few jars and cardboard shakers up, set them on the counter, browse a little longer, then take them back from the counter and return them to their display places as if she had changed her mind.

  At last, the second time she worked this ploy, while she was tucking a packet of ground tomato seeds back into its pocket in the plastifoam representation of a cut tomato half a meter across, the orangeclad young woman stopped humming and approached her. That coiffure was green, all right, but more likely a wig than a colored rinse.

  “Can I help you find anything, M.?” the clerk asked as politely as if she’d stepped up fifteen minutes ago.

  “Nan says you can,” Lestrade replied, sotto voce even though they seemed to be alone among the floating holographs.

  “Nan? Oh—Nancy Childs?”

  Lestrade shook her head. “Nandra. I came to save cash on barley.”

  “Barley? Right over here. We have petit, medium, giant grain, and mixed sizes, all in either pearl or brown. We also have several preseasoned brands, and here—something brand new—confetti barley, at a special introductory price. All the colors guaranteed safe.”

  New? the policewoman thought. They were making confetti barley cakes back when I was a kid. Come to think of it, though, I don’t think I’ve seen one since I was a kid. Surprised they’re trying to bring the knucklefeed back. Aloud, she said, “All right, maybe I haven’t used the latest catchphrase. I haven’t seen Nan for two or three months. But both of those were good within this last year.”

  If the Pepper Pot was outletting for Nandra Barlow Savecash, and if this clerk was in on it, she’d know that Lestrade was bluffing. But she might not recognize the bluff as anything a polly would try. If the police had so much as one solid, proven Savecash password, they might have enough to bring her in. All they had was some cutesy wordplays tossed around the bullhorns as possible Savecash phrases.

  Lestrade was hoping the clerk might reason that even though an undercover polly or Inindrucon agent wouldn’t blow away cover by giving an obviously phony password, a real addict, eager for a nightcap, might try it just for the sake of self-identification as a customer for the stuff.

  The clerk blinked. Between her get-up and the lighting, it was difficult to be sure. But she might be as young as the middle teens. Lady God, thought the policewoman, don’t let her be mixed up in the mind-eroding business already!

  “I think maybe,” said the clerk, “I’d better go get the boss.”

  “Chime the boss,” Lestrade told her as if making a suggestion.

  “What?”

  “Why not just tab your boss’s number? No personal phones?”

  “Oh! Well, you see, sometimes he’s ... Oh, well, why not try it?” She unclipped a little plastic Bug Bunny from her belt and thumbed its left foot. What would they make personal phones out of next? “Only sometimes he’s concentrating so hard on the computerwork that he turns his chime off,” the clerk finished her sentence at last.

  “Funny way to manage a business.”

  “Well, I guess I shouldn’t have said turns it off, exactly. It’s more like shutting his mind into internal only, so he doesn’t really hear the phone. Or mistakes it for program beeps.” The clerk punched Bugs Bunny’s toe again.

  “All right,” a man’s voice said through Bugs Bunny’s unmoving mouth.

  “M. Brown, we ... uh ... need you out here.”

  “Well, what about?” M. Brown sounded annoyed.

  The clerk glanced at Lestrade, flashed a nervous grin, and looked back at her bunnyphone. “A customer, M., asking to see you. A ... A friend of somebody named Nandra.”

  “All right, Gloria, I’ll be right out.”

  The young woman sighed and returned the phone to her belt. “M. Brown will be right out,” she told Lestrade with a smile that looked less nervous, but still a little shaky. The policewoman would have liked to know if she’d wanted to warn Brown that they had somebody out front dropping alleged Nandra Savecash passwords, of if she was just nervous about breaking some of her boss’s guidelines about bringing all manager-needed situations to him for a quick explanation out of the customers’ hearing.

  True to his word, M. Brown was right out. A butterfly-looking little man whose face would probably have been improved by spectacles. But with enough of the managerial type about him to inject some effect of normalcy into the lightshow soup. He had on conservative centycheck pullover and matching trousers, with a light-colored scarf wrapped up around his neck as if he were either making a concession to style or nursing a sore throat, and he wore the current badge of an executive—a combination personal phone-minicomscreen-digiwatch on a five-centimeter black band round his left wrist.

  “Do I understand, M.,” he commenced, “that you’ve been bandying about the name ‘Nandra’?”

  “Come on, M. Brown, don’t be coy,” Lestrade replied. “Get in touch with her personal databank, if you don’t want to take my word for it. Ask for the credit line on Moby Jill.” She was compounding her bluff, but most of the known and recently apprehended dealers had somebody in the credit files going by the caller of “Moby” Something.

  “I see.” He frowned. “I see. Yes, I may begin to see. And first, M., would you mind if I asked your…ah ... perceptional persuasion?”

  “Realizer. Ninety-three percent.” The reason he’d asked was obvious. If she’d replied, “Fancier,” he could have felt free to sell her anything and call it whatever she wanted. But why that “... ah ...”? Society hadn’t been shy about perceptional persuasions for the better part of a century. One of the few personal questions most people felt free to ask new acquaintances.

  “Ninety-three percent…ah ... you wouldn’t be offended if I asked the data for a quick check with Names and Prints?”

  “Not offended, no. But I wouldn’t be cooperative, either.”

  “No. No, I understand that. On the other hand ... Do you have our names, or simply the shop’s name?”

  “You’re M. Brown, and your associate is Gloria.”

  He sighed. “But you wouldn’t have come expecting to find someone named…ah ... Linda, by any chance?”

  “I came to find someone named M. James Brown.” Lestrade had considered “mistaking” the green-haired clerk for Linda Handsome, and discarded the ploy. A friend of Nandra’s who didn’t know about the shop’s changing owners a year ago would have been suspect automatically. Also have given Brown too easy an out. Always assuming ...

  “Well,” he said, “I could have understood it if you’d been looking for Linda. We had quite a few friends asking for her the first few months after we opened here. But I can’t understand M.…ah ... Nandra’s giving you my name. No, it must be either a mistake or some misguided idea of a joke.”

  “Do you run a business to make sales or laugh at jokes?” said Lestrade. “Look, I was told you carried the best in southern Indiana, but if you don’t want to make your usual outrageous markup, I can take my business someplace else.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, M. I think maybe you’d better do that. Before we…ah…call the police.”

  “You’d actually call the pollies?”


  “Yes. Yes, under the…ah…circumstances, I would have to. If you don’t go at once.”

  “But if I go, then you won’t call them?”

  “If you go at once, I won’t have to.”

  “It doesn’t matter to you where I get what I want, so long as it isn’t from you?”

  “M.…ah ... M., we operate a clean business here. Yes, whatever it may have been once upon a time, the Pepper Pot is a clean business now.”

  “Even too clean to give a stranger in town directions to somebody more willing to make a few dozen tridols?” Lady! thought the policewoman, I’m playing this like a fancy-class private dick.

  Brown replied, “Didn’t you…ah ... imply that you already knew of alternative sources in this area?”

  Lestrade thought about pulling out her badge and stungun, reading him his rights, and watching the clerk’s reactions. But Brown looked like someone who’d be ready and eager to cry entrapment and police irregularity. Being here without a partner and on what was officially her own personal time, she decided the risk wasn’t quite worth it. Not just yet.

  She nodded, said, “I’ll have to ask Nandra how many visits it takes before you’re willing to accept a new customer’s creditline,” and left.

  The Nostalgia City pollies had missed a bet by failing to watch the Pepper Pot. Its present owner might be running a clean business himself, but he knew or suspected that his predecessor had run a tainted one, and, knowing this much, he had not only failed to report it, but now acted willing to go on failing to report any reality-perceiving customers who came looking for illegal substances. It would have been enough to take him in for a visit to the NCPD interrogation room, if nothing else. It might be worth pumping him for no other reason than that he recognized Nandra Savecash, at least by first name, as being mixed up in the traffic.

  Lestrade would pass the word to Pat Harihoto right away. And to Inindrucon, if she could locate any of its agents in the area. They were a little less guiderule boxed than the regular police, a little freer from fear of irregularity charges. An International Independent Drugtraffic Controller, if there were any close enough, might be able to get results within the next few days.

  How long could Lestrade afford to wait for the data? Until Truemeasure’s case came to trial would give them up to six months, depending on how long Truemeasure’s lawyer could stall. But it’d be best to have it in time to wiggle into Lord Moan’s trial, which could easily go to the jury before the end of this coming week. The policewoman actually considered checking the directory for local private eyes.

  Chapter

  “Gentlesouls,” said M. Parkinson, “let me present you to his lordship, Elegius Moan, the Seventy-First Earl of Worminglass.”

  Somewhat to Corwin’s surprise, they applauded much as any other score of people would have done for some celebrity or honored guest. Bowing in return, carefully stiff, he made a hasty mental count. Eleven in the front semi-circle, four standing at a respectful distance behind. They would be all the paying guests—four women and seven men, not including Parkinson at his shoulder—and four members of the staff, probably three men and one woman, though he could not be entirely sure of the genders of at least two of them. He was still in fantasy mode. Not that even a fulltime reality perceiver could always tell at first or second glance, not after a century or thereabout of the unisex look coming recurrently into fashion.

  One lady stepped forward from the semi-circle and approached him to within almost arm’s length. She wore an elaborately shaggy overtunic of some coarsely woven scarlet stuff that recurrently shed strands of itself over the landscape, and in the crook of her left arm she bore three quarto volumes. All of which led him to fear that the selection of a Master of Ritual had been taken away from him.

  Extending her right hand, she confirmed his fears. “Your lordship, I, Magadance, Mistress of the Moan Ritual and personal adviser to your lordship, offer you the formal greetings of this memorable day.” All this had been delivered loudly enough for the ears of the entire assemblage. Lowering her voice to a confidential tone, she added, “Does your lordship perceive this estate as your own Worminglass?”

  He returned the nod.

  Raising her voice again, she said, “This glorious day of his lordship’s eagerly and anxiously awaited homecoming.” Turning back toward the semi-circle, she slipped one quarto beneath either arm, held the third open in both hands, slowly raised it as high as she could without dropping the other tomes, and proclaimed: “As it is laid out in the rituals for the homecoming of the—”

  “Ninth, Sixteenth, Forty-Second, and Sixty-Sixth Earls,” Parkinson told her in a hasty undertone. Oh, Lord! thought Corwin, I will have to remember!

  “Ninth, Sixteenth, Forty-Second, and Sixty-Sixth Earls,” Magadance repeated, “at the sound of the slapping together of the leaves of hallowed lore, let the for-once-unrestrained revelry begin.”

  She closed the book with an audible snap. The four servitors moved to take up positions behind the refreshments table, where they began ladling cups of punch and cutting two large cakes or molds into thin slices. The semi-circle broke up into several small groups and started diligent choruses of conversation, but held back from the table as though, despite the instruction to be “unrestrained,” they still waited for the guest of honor or, rather, homecoming principal, to help himself first.

  A wizened little man in white suit, white beard, and yellow straw hat came hobbling forward on an ivory cane. “Well, boy?” said he. “Well, well, well? Come on and get the unrestrained bacchanals going! It’s only hors d’oeuvres for now, but the quicker we eat ’em up, the quicker we can get to the real orgy, eh? Back where the Wall can’t watch us.” He added a giggle that demonstrated why such sounds had been orthographized as “he, he, he!” His eyes swam behind a pair of the thickest spectacles Corwin had ever beheld.

  About to presume aloud that he had been accosted by Dr. Macumber—on grounds of the man’s age—Corwin remembered his role and looked coolly to M. Magadance for an introduction.

  “Your lordship,” she said smoothly, “let me present Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber.”

  “‘Mad,’ they used to call me,” the old man said with such obvious relish that Corwin thought it only polite to reply,

  “They still do, sir. Your reputation has, if anything, grown among the Outer Dwellers over the years.”

  “Immortality, eh? Of sorts.” Dr. Macumber nodded. “Don’t know what I’ll do with it in the Hereafter, if any, but still comes pretty dam’ handy here below ... or above, as the case may be. Just between us, boy, I’ve been living here on Hilmar’s charity ever since I turned eighty-eight. Be another cause celebre if they tried turning me into some cheap state pen now, at my advanced age, eh? Get all the Elders’ Rights people up in arms. Grandchildren of the same folks who were howling to bring back the death penalty just for me exclusive, fifty years ago.” Another giggle. “Just you stick around long enough, boy, and they’ll do anything to keep you happy. Wouldn’t fry me now even if what’s-the-devil’s-name did bluster in new death penalty legislation.”

  Parkinson said pleasantly, “Anything to please you except letting you out, old man.”

  “Wouldn’t go out, sir! Not now. He, he, he! Still call me ‘mad,’ do they? No madder than anybody else here. Nor over there Outside, either! Maybe just as mad as the rest of you, I’ll give ’em that, but not crazy enough to want to go outside again. Not after half a century. Well, Maggy, hurry up and introduce the rest of us and bounce ’em on over to the hors d’oeuvres. Don’t let the old man eat all alone.” Nodding and giggling, he turned and hobbled briskly to the table.

  “Your lordship will have to excuse Dr. Macumber,” said M. Magadance. “He conceives that his age gives him certain social privileges.”

  “In a sense,” Corwin replied, “it does.” Magadance’s scarlet burlap, the thickness of Dr. Macumber’s
spectacles…he wondered whether he had slipped into selective reality perception, or into a personal world accessorized according to Mervyn Peake.

  “He’s kept up with medical developments, though,” said M. Parkinson. “Still calls for all the professional publications they’ll feed our computer.”

  “Perhaps we should also remind your lordship,” said M. Magadance, “that Dr. Macumber is a registered reality perceiver.”

  Corwin replied, “I shall make further allowances for that fact.”

  “Well,” said M. Parkinson, “I think, with your lordship’s permission, I’ll go along and keep the old man company with the caviar aspic.”

  Was it Corwin’s imagination, or did he hear M. Magadance breathe a soft sigh as of relief when the manager-warden proceeded to the table, leaving them alone for the moment?

  “I think we have nothing to fear from Dr. Macumber,” she told Corwin in a very low voice. “But you’ll want to pay close attention to some of these other victims on the altar of the great divinity Justice.”

  The same phrase she had used in her letter to Senior Sergeant Lestrade. Did she expect him to recognize it? And if so, how react?

  “She is a divinity,” he remarked, with a glance at the groaning board, “who appears to fatten her victims well.”

  “Interesting. You identify Justice as a goddess. But then, you’re another of Sergeant Lestrade’s offerings, aren’t you?”

  He remembered in time that Lestrade and her partner had been the real Lord Moan’s arresting officers. “Lestrade, that Acreblade? I am. I was, however, harking back to the antique personification of the goddess with her blindfold and scales.”