The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Leaning forward, he reached out and raised his right forefinger to the razor-honed lower edge of the pendulum. It gave him an almost electrical jolt of pain and, jerking his hand back, he beheld a line of crimson beadlets welling from the pad of his finger. Sucking it, he even tasted the blood. All of which demonstrated nothing save the depth of his fantasy mode. Changing it at will would be triumph indeed.

  He returned his palm to the rim of the pit, balancing heel on the edge and fingers in the air; closed his eyes; and concentrated. At length he strained his fingers down and back until they seemed to grip the perpendicular wall of the pit. He concentrated again. For what seemed an interminable time, nothing happened.

  Then the pit wall swung up, slowly at first but gaining momentum, pushing his fingers until they felt as much on a level with the heel of his hand as they must actually have been all along.

  He unclosed his eyes. It still looked as though his fingers were dangling over nothingness. He stared at them with the fixity of a contemplative gazing at a rose. For what seemed another eternity the only effect was that the color of the black void appeared now to lighten, now to deepen again, now to be aswim with infinitesimally tiny worms in constant, writtling motion.

  Then something popped—a sort of subliminal pop, but likened to the flooding instant when a dream becomes lucid—and he was in reality mode.

  He had thought the floor might be smooth concrete sloping down gently to a central, grate-covered drain. It was in fact quite level and completely covered with weatherwear carpeting. There were, however, four metal cuffs on chains held by fixed stakes arranged like the points of a rectangle laid out in the center of the larger rectangle formed by the closet’s own four walls. Could his perception have manufactured the pit out of some lingering psychomystical emanations concentrated in that area? And what on earth would his perception have made of the situation had they staked him out between those stakes to wait, rather than leaving him the freedom of his limbs, perhaps in deference to the restraints he had already undergone that day coming into the hotel grounds?

  Yet staking out might be done only at the purgatant’s own request. The pendulum proved to be a swing—an uncomfortable-looking one, with a metal rod three centimeters in diameter for a seat—but apparently a seating alternative to the floor. The cut on his fingertip had vanished without a trace. The draped figure of Death in the far corner was a curtained alcove containing, to Corwin’s gratification, a cinerary toilet. The book was an old edition of Foxe’s martyrology. The walls were cool to the touch and lined with sound-soak panels, beige and innocent of ornament. All the lightglow came from the ceiling. The corners were almost perfect right angles.

  He tried the swing. It was so high that his toes could barely find purchase on the floor, and when he got it in motion, the chains complained unsettlingly. Then for a few moments he turned the pages of Foxe’s monumental opus. It was illustrated with a profusion of quaint old woodcuts, but tonight he found that it lacked its usual fascination and served only to increase his gratitude that Lord Moan’s first purgation was to be a simple beating. He was no flagellant. Whips as such had never greatly interested him. But as the prospect loomed nearer, it looked blessedly uncomplicated and bearable in comparison with the more exquisite excruciations.

  * * * *

  On the way from dining room to basement, Withycombe had asked, “Is there anything to which your lordship might have any particularly marked aversion?”

  “So that you can apply it?”

  “Good heavens, no! How long do you think we could keep up an active membership if we played Orwellian pranks like that on one another?”

  Which sounded logical enough to be true; but Corwin continued wary. “I don’t know. Being an earl, I had never given the subject much thought. I should like several days—say eight or nine—to consider. Perhaps with the assistance of a catalogue, if you have such a thing available.”

  “I’ll see to the catalogue,” said John Stock. “Meanwhile, Brother Of The Light, I think we can go ahead with the strop.”

  “It is the usual first purgation,” Of The Light intoned. “Any number of lashes between ten and forty less one, laid across the shoulders and upper back, or occasionally the chest.”

  “Or the buttocks,” Stock added. “Delila asked for a simple spanking.”

  “M. Bluehair?” Corwin remembered how M. Magadance had named her as one who never participated.

  Stock chuckled. “Fifteen smacks with the strop, short and sweet across that beautiful—”

  “Brother John!” Of The Light cut in, adding some admonition about the risk of worldly shamelessness choking all the good seeds they were striving to plant in his soul, while Corwin wondered how to check this question of M. Bluehair’s participation in Purgatory Club activities.

  Happily, he got the answer without needing to ask the question. Having allowed Of The Light’s tirade to roll to its conclusion, Double Oh Nine added simply, “I wonder why she never came back.”

  Withycombe suggested that she might have perceived the leather strop as something outre’, to which Stock responded, “Have you ever been able to think of anything at all that might even possibly strike that lady as objectionably outre’?” It had the sound of a debate often repeated and which might have gone into more explicit detail but for Of The Light’s presence. As it was, it branched into a commentary on Jorum Walker, who had also, by Stock’s account, given purgation a single try, but perceived the strop as something that probably owed as much to delirium tremens as to normal fantasy perception—he never afterward revealed exactly what, and never tried another purgation, but at the time he had screamed about spotted snakes, completely lost his dignity, and begged for a chance to change his mind, at least about the number of lashes. Which last-minute backsliding was never allowed.

  But by now they had reached the waiting room, and it was time to exact from “Brother Earl” a statement as to how many lashes between ten and thirty-nine they should administer tonight. Flinching from the maximum, yet not liking to appear a coward before this trio who to all appearances thrived, each for his own reasons, on as much as the club offered, he answered, “To request the famous forty lashes less one might appear presumptuous n my part, noblesse oblige or not. Shall we make it twenty less one?”

  They had agreed so genially, just prior to locking him in, that he wondered if he couldn’t have gotten away with naming fifteen, or even eleven. Assuming that they were indeed going to honor his limitation. In any event, it was stated and immutable, so at the very least he was about to receive nineteen lashes of the strop.

  Had the Foxe book not been in the waiting room since before Corwin’s arrival, he might have suspected it of being John Stock’s whimsical idea of the promised catalogue.

  On the whole, the closet in its standard reality was a great deal more monotonous and less comfortable than the public waiting room at Senior Sergeant Lestrade’s police station. He began to regret not having tested what his imagination might make of a tumble into the pit while he still perceived it. Whatever its terrors, they might make the actual razor strop seem almost pleasant in comparison. There ought to be ample time remaining for another experiment or two in changing his perceptional mode at will.

  First, however, he would be well advised to prepare a Worminglassy description of this drab chamber, in case they asked. Foxe’s text must, of course, remain the same. Print and print equivalents being shared constants in virtually everyone’s perceptional worlds, to mention the volume as one of Moanish ritual would mark him as approaching the fancy-class definition of insanity. Unless he claimed never to have opened it nor so much as scanned its title. The swing, he thought, could remain a swing. Call it a trapeze. The walls ... ought they to be chipping plaster, peeling wallpaper, ancient masonry thickly encrusted with fungoid growths of a semi-luminous nature, or perhaps packed earth slowly crumbling beneath the long and patient proddings o
f a million tree roots? ...

  Chapter

  Rosemary Lestrade had no difficulty waking in the dark, but she had a few seconds of confusion remembering where she was. She should have been in a hotel room—Alpha Arms, Reno—but nobody was supposed to have her room phone number. She’d changed rooms to make sure of that, just before retiring. Anybody she wouldn’t have minded knowing her new room number already had her personal phone number. And it was the room phone chiming.

  Had to be the front desk, then, and that meant emergency. Front desks didn’t chime guests at 04:23 for any other reason.

  She punched the accept-call tab.

  “Senior Sergeant R. Lestrade?”

  She thought she was very happy that those oldfashioned visiscreen phones, a few of which had still been around when she was a kid, were virtually extinct now that the hearing-impaired had gone almost exclusively to home computers for their telephone purposes. “Hammersmith?” she said.

  “Dot on the i, Sarge.”

  “Dammit, M. Hammersmith, how the—how did you get this number?”

  “Hey, don’t go down and get somebody to punch the poor desk clerk out! She sounded like a looker. The guiderule says, ‘One phone call and any others that might be needed to reach the party originally intended.’”

  “You’re in police custody.”

  “Dot on the i again, Mrs. Sherlock.”

  “Don’t ‘Mrs.’ me anything! You might as well have waited till daylight. I think I’m going to let Reno feed you breakfast anyway. What was it, drunk and disorderly?” No, she thought as soon as she said it, since when did Nevada ever file anyone for D and D?

  “Missed it that time, Sarge. But know what? You were right about a stakeout on the Apex minispread. Solid on the tab.”

  She shut her eyes. Pure reflex. The only light in the room was from the glowing clockface. “M. Hammersmith,” she said with the utmost care, “I doubt that the police of any district on the continent would have hauled you into custody for sitting alone in a parked car. Unless you had it parked in somebody’s kitchen.”

  “Yeah, well, how about I let you talk it out with them down here at the Range Heights station?”

  “Fine. But don’t wait breakfast.” She tabbed off, killing the connection with one faint, echoing ping.

  * * * *

  The Western Region numbered its police stations as guiderules directed, but named them, too, in letters four times larger than the numbers. Reno’s Range Heights station was in the outskirts between the city proper and the rich floaters’ suburb where Apex had his minispread.

  An adobe’ facade with those dark, squarecut beam ends bristling out near the flat roof, the Range Heights station looked like something a fancier might perceive in an Old Southwest setting. A sleepy, dusty hoosegow dozing in the sun, which was striking it with sunrise glow when Lestrade’s taxi pulled up. Much as she’d wanted to let Hammersmith cool his heels in the custody of Reno police indefinitely, investigative instinct wouldn’t let her. Too bad. Surely leaving him in a Nevada hoosegow when she moved on to wherever Savecash’s trail led her next would have shaken him out of her life better than any putdown she could ever hope to deliver face to face. Investigative instinct was a ruthless dictator.

  “Wait,” Lestrade reminded the taxi driver, Conchita.

  “Si, senora, I wait,” the young woman returned with a grin, hopping out to open the rider’s door. “Always here they say ‘wait.’ Nobody likes it, eh? to be finished at police station and then have to wait for taxi. I wait in park over there, beneath trees, doze in shade, play few chips maybe. I wait forty, forty-five minutes before it cost you more than eef I go now an’ you ’ave to call ’nother cab come all the way out here.”

  Laying it on a little thick with the Old Mexican accent, wasn’t she? Especially since, in spite of the serape’ and miniature sombrero, she looked like an Asian-Caucasian blend with a dash of Black. Reno must attract a lot of thirty percent fanciers. “I’m asking you to wait,” Lestrade said as she got out, “because I like the way you drive. Easy and safe.”

  Conchita’s eyes widened, and she gave one short, fast nod.

  The policewoman walked on into the station and up to the front desk, which looked more like something salvaged from an auction of saloon furniture than something purchased from the regular police suppliers. “Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade,” she told the desk officer, pressing her right fingertips on his printcomp screen. “Senior Sergeant, Midwest Region.”

  He played with his desk computer for a few minutes and then said, “Right! Here to collect Magnum Strzinski Hammersmith?” He made it sound as if she’d answered a quiz question correctly and Hammersmith was the prize.

  “Alias the Albatross,” she remarked.

  He shook his head. “No akas listed, M. How do you spell that? Alba-what?”

  Most fanciers would have caught the allusion. She kept forgetting that the average realizer had a much smaller databank of literary references. “Just joking, M. Waco,” she explained, reading his name badge. “Reference to a late eighteenth-century poem. Sailor shoots an albatross—a sea bird—and has to wear its body around his neck as a punishment.”

  “Sounds like something out of ... Hey, wait a minute! Yeah, I remember. They mention it in one of the Home Planet docudramas about the oceans. By a proto-ecologist named ... let’s see ... Coalridge?” That’s the way he pronounced it, Coalridge.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Lestrade agreed with a straight face, wondering whether it was his own mnemonic-device slippage or the Home Planet narrator’s mistake. “Samuel Taylor Coalridge. Where are you storing M. Hammersmith?”

  “Back waiting room.” Officer Waco grinned and handed her a red plastic passdisk. “Through that door and turn left when the corridor splits. Quite a character, isn’t he?”

  “You should be glad to get him off your hands.”

  “Fact I can’t understand is how come his p.i. license checks out okay. You floaters back east just give private snoop permits to anybody that asks?”

  “We make a distinction between p.i. licenses and private snoop permits. Yes, just about anybody who asks can get a private snoop permit, which amounts to a general liability waiver in return for official permission to play Miss Marple as long as it doesn’t interfere with any regular police procedure. A p.i. license lets the possessor demand payment for investigative services rendered, and usually we’re a little fussier about handing them out. Which is M. Hammersmith’s?”

  “Let me check,” said Waco, who had listened as if he’d never heard of any such distinction. Maybe Nevadans didn’t need permits for private snooping. At least he’d apparently caught the Miss Marple allusion, probably thanks to screenshows. “Yeah, it’s a regular p.i. license, all right.”

  “Then you’re right. Somebody must have slipped, giving him one.” Saluting the desk officer, who to her relief had been pretty decent, she proceeded to the door, opened it by pressing her passdisk down on the thumbprint lock, and headed for the back waiting room.

  Maybe she should have left Hammersmith to sweat it out in a cell. But curiosity, combined with the thought that it might be preferable to deal with Nevada pollies as much as possible over the phonewaves, had undone her, and she had given a custody pledge by telephone, reconfirmed via the hotel’s computer link with the Reno Central municipal computer.

  The back waiting room, most of which Lestrade could see through the steelglass door, looked less comfortable than the average cell, anyway. Lawn carpet, visibly thin and stiff, in coffee color. All the furniture plastimolded into the coffee-colored rubberplas wallboards when they were poured. Half-light coming down in a more or less uniform glow from tea-colored ceiling. One wall had an inset screen with a vertical keyboard beneath it, just dark brown squares with the letters and symbols on them, the clumsiest, crankiest kind to tab. The opposite wall had an inset refreshment dispenser.
Coffee, tea, or ice water recyclo cups, and cellopaks of peanuts or kelp chips, all for the pressing of a few more marked keysquares on the wall beneath the dispensing niche. She wondered how often it worked.

  In spite of the room’s obvious relative newness and the guiderule that everybody waiting in it had not yet been officially released and therefore shouldn’t have any personal possessions except the clothes being worn, one handkerchief, and essential personal medicines, the place had already started gathering its scars. Stains everywhere, that would have shown a lot more obvious if the whole room had been some other base color. Grease blotches of clear lip balm, traces of grafitti in lipstick and eyebrow pencil, graffiti of a more permanent nature carved in with fingernails or something sharp the searchers had missed in a garment. Lestrade had once watched a customer in hold use his false teeth for the purpose. The “unbreakable” showscreen had a huge chip that distorted part of the picture.

  To his credit, Hammersmith was a model customer, sitting quietly in one of the moldform seats, sipping coffee out of a recyclo cup and watching Lily Marlene Maxwell’s blond bombshell beauty slide around the distorting chip on the screen.

  “Don’t they have The Maltese Falcon, M. Hammersmith?” Speaking into the voicebox beside the door, she had the satisfaction of seeing him jump.

  He recovered at once, grinned, and made a fullarm wave for her to come in. She pressed her passdisk on the thumbprint space and watched the door roll into the wall, letting out Hammersmith’s reply:

  “Falcon? Just the musical version. Not even the canning with Ginger Astaire and Fred Rogers. Some remake with a couple of cheap imitators. Yap about cruel and unusual! What took you so long, anyway, Dragon Lady?”