Magadance shot a searching glance at his face. “We’ll need to talk alone as soon as we can do it at our leisure.”
“Of course,” he acquiesced, choosing his words with care. “Such private conferences have always been a formal necessity between the Earl of Worminglass and his Master or Mistress of Ritual.”
Nodding thoughtfully, she said, “For our immediate present, if your lordship will step this way ...” and set their course for the first knot of conversationalists, a group compromising two women and two men.
These promptly spread apart at her approach with Corwin, offering to take them into the circle, and both ladies bestowed on him very flattering smiles, though the younger of the two dropped her gaze almost immediately.
“Your lordship,” said the Mistress of Ritual. “Lady Larghetta Silkiss. M. Elsin Klipspringer. M. Jorum Walker. And Adrian Withycombe, Esquire.”
Lady Larghetta lifted her right hand to chest level, holding it palm down and fingers dangling languidly, in so obvious a gesture that he had little other choice than to kiss her fingers. One rarely encountered women nowadays who preferred this form of salutation, but those who did virtually insisted upon it and evinced signs of being affronted by any man who failed to comply. Her ladyship might be any age between thirty-five and fifty-five, with hair tinted platinum blue and face heavily made up—base and powder to counterfeit an all but alabaster whiteness, lips and cheeks touched with dusky rose, thin black brows, and blue circles daubed with care below as well as above the eyes. She looked a sort of Columbine who fancied herself as Lady Macbeth. Although, of course, at this point Corwin could hardly be sure whether he was perceiving all these people in his own fantasy mode, or something approaching that of the real Moan, or something approaching standard reality, or a blend of unknown proportions. “Your ladyship,” he said. “I am charmed.”
“As am I,” she acknowledged, sighing. He remembered no Lady Larghetta from Click’s list, but there was a Susan Wu Silkiss. “Lady Larghetta” must be a new caller that she had registered only on Hummingbird Hill’s internal databank.
Now M. Klipspringer held out her hand to be shaken in the usual way, at the same time lifting her face for another quick, shy smile. He remembered that she would be approaching thirty, but with her coffee-brown face she might have passed for ten or even fifteen years younger. A timid ingenue, with only the faintest touch of the gamine. No one unacquainted with her name and history would have taken her for a murderess.
“Jorum Walker” must be another name adopted inside the security hotel and left unreregistered with the outside authorities. Lacking the man’s family name, Corwin would have to wait until he had met all the others and hope to process-of-eliminate his way through the list to find who Walker had been in earlier life. He seemed obviously the community drunkard now…and yet the redness if not the bulbousity of the nose could be artificial—assuming that Corwin perceived them in consonance with standard reality—and the slight wobbliness of attitude, the slur in his “Chawmed t’ meetcha,” could be theatrical affectation. If they were not, the completely gray hair naturally tonsuring a rosy bald crown suggested that Walker had little time left before drinking himself into a slightly premature grave.
Adrian Withycombe, like M. Klipspringer but unlike Lady Larghetta and Jorum Walker, Corwin would have recognized easily from his holograms on file in the police record: handsome in profile, with soaring forehead, smoothly triangular nose, and well-proportioned chin; but long and thin almost to the verge of appearing malformed when seen full face. His body matched his head, being long and lean, making him surely the tallest by some centimeters of the entire company; and the need to look up at his face no doubt emphasized the width of his mouth.
“Your lordship,” said he, pressing Corwin’s hand until his rings became all but painful. “Don’t worry about all this decorum. It’s hors d’oeuvres too, just like the food on that preprandial buffet. The real life of the manor goes on where the Wall can’t watch it.”
“Don’t be crude, M. Withycombe,” said Lady Larghetta, giving Corwin time to think of his own reply.
“Thank you, M. Withycombe,” he said at length. “I shall regard your words as a promise.” He bowed to the group and permitted M. Magadance to draw him on.
The second cluster comprised a single woman chatting—one might almost say flirting—with a brace of men. M. Magadance presented them as M.’s Delila Bluehair, Gary Logefeil Logefeil, and John Stock.
M. Bluehair, whose locks were gleaming black and draped, rather than twined, round her head to fall in loose coils over her ears—a coiffure so unlikely that Corwin assumed he must be perceiving its standard reality—licked her carmined lips, said, “Ah! Fresh meat!” and actually stretched out her hand as though to touch his head.
He took a step back, out of her reach.
She laughed and licked her lips once again. “I guess that gave those Wallsnoops something to watch through their little screens, all right,” she remarked.
“You’ll have to overlook Delly’s little foibles, Lord Moan,” said Stock, an impeccably dressed, nondescriptly good-looking fellow probably in his forties or early fifties. “She used to go through a husband a year in the outside world. That’s the reason behind her code name of ‘Bluehair.’”
“There’s a reason for ‘Delila,’ too,” said Logefeil. Then, to the woman, “Control yourself a little longer, girl. He’s still got his appeals to get through. He probably isn’t sterilized yet.”
“So?” she responded. “I am!” She reached toward Corwin again, but Stock deftly slid between them, catching her arm over his shoulder and drawing her close to grind a kiss into her face.
Wondering how far a blush could be incorporated into Lord Moan’s character, Corwin turned quickly to Logefeil, the man he remembered to have killed a child by speeding an automobile at seventy-four k.p.h. through a residential district, and to have spent the last thirty years of his life sending out appeal after appeal to have the ruling changed from murder to manslaughter. Logefeil was in his sixties now and looked older, an aging playboy with white neckscarf tied in elegant folds between beige pullover and finely cleft chin.
“Take it from me, Moan,” said Logefeil. “Keep up the appeals. So long as you keep up your appeals, they can’t cadge you into giving up your manhood.”
“Not your manhood, you old lecher,” said M. Bluehair, turning her head briefly from Stock’s. “Just its misbegotten issue. Even give you wider fields to romp around in, ol’ boy.” With a throaty chuckle, she turned back and made a nip at Stock’s nose.
Corwin recovered himself sufficiently to tell them, “Pray, gentle M.’s, don’t let me detain you any longer from the refreshments table.” Turning away, he felt rather pleased with his presence of mind. One encountered such oldfashioned looseness of speech and public behavior among certain fanciers and fanciers-for-a-holiday, but much more rarely than the reality-perceiving majority often purported to believe. Most fanciers, even those whose own morals were copied from ages of excess, respected their fellows who abided in stricter personal worlds.
“I’d pay those three special attention,” M. Magadance murmured in his ear. “Sorry if it pains you too much, but I’m afraid it can’t be helped.”
He could think of no other reply than a shrug.
“John Stock,” the Mistress of Ritual went on, quietly but not so much so as to rouse anyone’s suspicions, “lives in a world based on the one described by the twentieth-century author Fleming. His code name is Oh-Oh-Nine, or Double Oh Nine, and he’s here because the State callously refused to honor his ‘license to kill.’”
“And M. Bluehair, I take it, is a reverse-gender Bluebeard?”
“Living here on the inheritances she got from three spouses by religious ceremony, two by joint procreational permit, and the gifts her sixth, a common-law partner—the one they finally convicted her for—made her during his
lifetime. Six is her unlucky number. One of those spouses—Church of Freesouls ceremony—was a woman, so we’re all of us fair game for her.”
Corwin nodded. M. Bluehair was the person whom the outside world Names and Prints would still have registered under the name of Ruby Gentry Farnol, the final name being that of her last partner, the one for whose death by poison she had finally been convicted.
Click had assured them that Hilton-Maracott screened all psychopathic and compulsive murderers into a special facility; but in M. Bluehair’s case, one could only wonder whether the corporation had made a mistake. As Corwin recalled, the first two spouses had left her more than enough for a long lifetime of total luxury. Going through four more argued insatiable greed either for wealth or for killing.
The last group consisted of two men only, one Cinnamon and one Chocolate: Chief and medicine man Running Stag Redfern Far Horizon, and M. Paul Of The Light. Both bore themselves with the dignity of the ages.
“Be welcome among us,” said the Native American. “I go by my first name only, Running Stag. The other names are a simple sop to the system laid down by the Great White Parents in Washington.” It was difficult to ascertain whether he uttered the words “Great White Parents” with respect or sarcasm. His black hair fell unbound to his ankles, his fringed tunic to his knees. Across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose he wore a single stripe of white paint.
M. Paul Of The Light—the man who had either almost broken his own neck or fallen victim to Valdez’s Disease, depending upon whose story one believed—was clad in pure, simple white tunic and trousers. Save for a small gold cross on a short chain round his neck, he wore no distinguishing accessories. And needed none. Tall and broad-shouldered, he seemed to exude a power enhanced rather than diminished by the years that had streaked silver into the dark hair combed neatly back from his forehead to just below his ears, with no hint of the wooliness which individuals with sufficiently dark skins frequently purchased from their hairdressers.
Extending his hand, M. Of The Light told Corwin, “Welcome, fellow sinner, to the abode of earthly penitence.”
Chapter
Telling fellow pollies why they might watch a local business for drug dealing wasn’t the kind of message that should be trusted to phonewaves or computer lines. Lestrade took it back to the Nostalgia City station and told Pat Harihoto all about it face to face. He reassured her of his buddyship with the local Inindrucon people, “a good team.”
“A team.” She sighed. “To work as low a population density area as this.”
“Hey, you wouldn’t believe the number of complaints we get from the customers themselves. Fanciers-for-a-holiday complaining about spreading out a few dozen tridols for dud goods. Sometimes wish we could just bump it all over to the Better Business Bureau. Instead of them bumping all their complaints about it over to us.” He shook his head. “Never had any complaints about the Pepper Pot before, though. Too bad. I think Sal’s done a little specialty shopping there herself. ... Well, beats putting in your hours on homicide and child pornography.”
“It beats child pornography,” Lestrade agreed. “As for the statistics on what a comparatively homicide-free era we live in, you couldn’t prove them by my caseload.”
“So slough off once in a while, old girl. Like the rest of us. Be a little less set on always pinning your floater, and maybe they won’t bump all those homicides your way.”
Always pinning her floater. She grinned and bore it, because Pat Harihoto was a friend, but it stung. So she had a reputation? With Adrian Withycombe locked up for life, the Earl of Moan likely to wiggle free—well, that’d be more the court’s fault than hers about Lord Moan.
And Lady knew what was going to happen to Gentian Truemeasure.
“Pat?” she said.
“Yo?”
“Nothing. Just…thanks for all your help.”
“Hey, glad to help out! You’ll do the same for me sometime. Sticking around for the weekend?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Family and I are going up to Panoramaland for the day Sunday. Glad to have you along.”
“Thanks, Pat. I’ll keep it in mind, if I’m still around.”
She had been about to check how open he’d be to letting her borrow a master key on some cooked-up pretext. Maybe if she talked with a few of Heikkinen-Apex’s neighbors herself, she could get real grounds. In absentia police searches were shakable as it was. More than sixty years after the Freddy of Sade case that had gotten the police the right, under certain restricted conditions, to enter and search premises in the occupiers’ absence and without the occupiers’ knowledge, social watchdogs were still on the prowl to pounce on any irregularity, damage, or disruption the pollies might cause, as grounds to blank the privilege.
An in absentia search on insufficient or manufactured ground by a polly who was officially on personal stressrelief time…for high enough stakes, Lestrade was willing to risk obligatory sessions on Dr. Youngdaughter’s couch, but not to risk costing her colleagues the legal right to use their master keys at all.
Not that it’d be easy, she mused on her way to The Elmgrove, to pump up grounds for a legitimate in absentia search of Apex’s place. The only really safe grounds were hard evidence that somebody, preferably a child or an oldster, was being held involuntary prisoner. But an old murder case, closed going on two years ago with the conviction of somebody else for the crime? Wasn’t likely to stop too many watchdogs’ yapping, if they got wind of it. Lestrade might get a few people on her side, but only if she really did prove that one floater had been unjustly incarcerated for another one’s guilt. And how probable was it that Hector Apex would have any such evidence still around any of his properties, anyway?
True to its name, The Elmgrove sat in the middle of a small artificial forest mainly of elms, with some oaks, sycamores, lindens, and a few other varieties mixed in, probably less for the variety than to hedge against losing the entire lot in some new blight they hadn’t yet developed any defense against. Always seemed to be a worse problem with plants whose growth had been hormoned up. These trees looked about forty years old. Twenty or twenty-five was probably closer to the calendar truth. They were only three rows deep around the building, but staggered for maximum privacy. Ferns and domesticated wildflowers grew between, instead of grass. The upkeep might actually be more expensive than for a plain old manicured lawn.
Nothing so twentieth-centuryish as straight streets or sidewalks in this neighborhood. The Elmgrove had its own crescent, with nothing but a winding gravel path through the “woods” from street curb to front door.
The building itself was oval, four stories high. Any higher might hurt the illusion of living in a forest. With half the ground floor given over to entrance foyer and lounge, it had room for seven luxury condominiums, each one no doubt with several views of the central court, where another artificial forest was working its way skyward. As if that weren’t enough, every available stretch of foyer wall was lined with holographic vistas of more elm trees. Recorded birdsongs poured out of hidden speakers.
The only other person in the foyer-lounge area was the bartender, a young woman in green tunic with hood lying back on her shoulders and wide Robin Hood collar. Lestrade’s entrance made her glance up from her book or codex reader. The polly nodded and waved like someone who’d been invited. The bartender smiled, waved back, and returned to her reading. There were advantages to working in statistically safe areas and eras. Though Lestrade sometimes mused about how much high-crime and low-crime environments depended on statistical facts and how much on general social attitudes.
The elevator was an open latticework painted brown and interlaced with vines of silk ivy. Lestrade decided to take the realwood stairs to the third floor.
Four-centimeter sound-soak carpeting everywhere, walls and ceiling as well as floor, eating up every noise except the constantly piped r
ecorded birdsongs. It began to look marvelous that M. Julie Kurandasra had been aware of any of her nearest neighbor’s comings and goings. She must have conjunctioned with him at their doorways.
Two doors, one to each condo, flanked the stairs outlet. No doubt another pair of doors flanked the elevator on the other side. The building’s inner wall was an unbroken expanse of curved sound-soak steelglass, but about all that could be seen through it was the foliage of the courtyard trees. Around the Fourteenth of October it would be a mottle of autumn color, but the second time Kurandasra reported having seen Apex, “between Christmas and Valentine’s,” the bare branches might leave more of the opposite corridor open to view. Unless the management gave this windowall an artificial fronting for the winter.
Everything about The Elmgrove shouted “Realizers live here.” Rich, romantic-tend realizers, but realizers all the same. The floor carpet was patterned to look like forest underfoot. The wall carpet repeated the everlasting trees. On the ceiling—blue sky glimpsed through treetops. Lestrade looked closer. The carpet pile was some of that clear transparent stuff, which meant that the design was on the floor, walls, and ceiling beneath the carpet cover. If it was a projection, it could be changed to reflect the seasons. Technology developed for the space colonies. Only back home on Terra, it constituted energy usage that was usually, by the guiderules, needless waste. If this really was photofilmic projection, Lestrade wondered who had lubricated whose palm to get the special permit.
The condominiums’ “front” doors were probably the ones flanking the elevator. As many people might be climbing stairs nowadays for the exercise or the energy conservation as were riding elevators, but the elevator was still regarded as the main way up and down. After a quick visual inspection of both “back” doors, Apex’s and Kurandasra’s, Lestrade started making the circuit of the corridor.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 169
