The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “I was able to get a lot of the preliminaries done by phone. Not all. We’ve still got a hearing at fourteen hundred today, thanks to your braindrained little solo last night.”

  “Heyyy—”

  “And tab off the screen before you come strolling out like a silly innocent.”

  “It don’t tab off, Sarge. Big warning notice, first thing that scrolls onto the screen. Once you makes your choice, you’re stuck with it for the duration. To prevent fights breaking out when there’s more than one poor floater jugged in here.”

  Glancing around again at the stains and graffiti, Lestrade wondered how well that plan worked. And whether it was general policy in this region, or particular to the Range Heights station. For Hammersmith’s benefit, she just grunted and nodded as if it was fairly widespread official practice.

  “Sound don’t adjust louder than a certain decibel level, either,” the private eye was going on. “Suitable for nurseries and convalescents’ bedrooms. Meaning they oughta subtitle everything.”

  “They ought to have subtitled your investigator’s license, M. Hammersmith. In preschool basic. It doesn’t give you the privilege of doing anything us regulars couldn’t get away with. Like breaking and entering without—”

  “Hey, sweetheart! Remember Nostalgia City?”

  “Come on,” she said stiffly. “We’ve got things to do before fourteen hundred.”

  “Dot on the i. First off, collecting my personal property. Had something in my pocket you might be interested to see, if these nice Western lawkeepers were good enough not to confiscate it permanently.”

  They got to the reclaims office by following signs. It had been bought out of pretty much the same catalog as the reclaims office at Lestrade’s home station, except that this one’s window faced a holocard view of Nevada scenery, while the window of the one back home faced the same public cut-through alleyway as the interrogation room window.

  Back home, too, the reclaims office was staffed by volunteers, but out here a regular payroll polly was in charge. Officer J. Daltrey, stungun on her belt, chewing gum in her mouth, and about five kilograms of silver and turquoise jewelry around her person in the form of necklaces, character pins, rings, and belt buckle. For a minute, Lestrade thought she’d had her police name badge set in a fancy mounting, which ought to be against guidelines even in Nevada. But it turned out to be loose character pins of Mickey and Minnie Mouse using the badge as a dance floor, Dixie and Davie Dolphin frolicking right below it. Since every customer brought here was on the way out, the only reason Lestrade could see at first for Officer Daltrey’s stungun was to protect her own personal jewelry collection.

  As the process wore on, it started to appear equally possible that the thing might be necessary to keep irritation-prone customers under control. First Hammersmith got a fullpage form and a liquid pencil to fill it out with. Then, seeming to use the Biblical or “seek and ye shall find” typing system, the reclaims officer keyboarded the information from the form into the desk computer, which chewed it over for a good hundred seconds before releasing the key to one of the blue and silver lockers that lined the wall behind the desk. Moving as slowly as the great-grandparent suspecting a speed trap in a school zone, Daltrey (who had probably never heard a great-grandparent joke; they’d have died out before her time) opened the locker, got out the basket, brought it to the desk, and set it down in front of Hammersmith.

  It contained a simulated fur stole, blue chiffon scarf, brown and white mockfeather pillbox hat, sequined handbag, and other assorted oddments. Lestrade laughed and turned away to memorize the Nevada scenery while Officer Daltry began the process of checking her codes cipher by cipher to find the mistake and get the right key, Hammersmith leaning across the desk to “help” her compare every fill-in space on his form and on the compute screen.

  The next try got them the right locker, and then Hammersmith had to fill out a second form. Only when she had this in hand did Daltrey let him paw through the basket, while she sat down again to transcribe form number two into her databank.

  Hammersmith pawed thoroughly and said, “Hey, sweetheart!”

  “‘Officer’ to you, big boy,” Daltrey replied without looking around.

  “Officer Sweetheart. What gives?”

  “What…gives?”

  “You heard me right. What gives? It ain’t all here.”

  Officer Daltrey got up and stood with the desk and basket between them. “All right, M., let’s hear you describe just what, exactly, you claim’s missing.” She drawled most of her words.

  “Little scrap of paper. Corner of an envelope. Charred. About so big.” He indicated a pinch of air the size of a match folder.

  “What?”

  “Little ... scrap ... of—”

  “No wise cracks, hombre. That word you said right after ‘envelope.’”

  “Huh? Lemme think ... oh, charred. As in burned. Blackened around the edges. As in ‘been through a fire.’ Comprehenday?”

  “Anything on it?”

  “Yeah. A postmark.”

  Daltrey gave an elaborate Nevada shrug. “Why’d anybody want to keep anything like that?”

  “It was a collectible postcode, Officer Sweetheart,” he snapped, meanwhile starting to file his other possessions back on his person. “As whoever dug through my personal property oughta known by its being in a plastic collecting bag. And that ain’t the point, anyway. You confiscate everything off a floater’s person, you’re bound in law to return everything to said floater—everything—in exactly the condition it was in when you loffed it.”

  Lestrade, still standing at the window with her arms folded, remarked, “That’s right, Officer Daltrey.”

  “Yeah,” Hammersmith added. “And there speaks the pride of the Midwest Pollies.”

  The reclaims officer looked at Lestrade.

  “Off duty,” the senior sergeant replied, holding down a sigh. She’d had to identify herself to Officer Waco, of course, and the upfront people would inevitably talk about it some, but she’d hoped to keep it at a minimum. “I can always dig out my badge, if—”

  “I wasn’t here when this stuff came in,” said Daltrey, lofting the wastebasket up onto the desk beside the possessions basket. “But it sounds like something whoever was on duty must have thought was something you just hadn’t gotten around to tossing out. Collecting bag and all.”

  “Yeah? And who was on duty at the time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lestrade interjected, “Just check out the wastebasket first, M. Hammersmith.”

  “Well, look it up,” he went on to the reclaims officer. “I wanta put this bird on report.”

  Daltrey let out something between a sigh and a huff. “What time were you arrested?”

  “Three thirty a.m.”

  Lestrade stepped forward and rattled the wastebasket. Hammersmith took the hint, tilted it over, and started rummaging. The reclaims officer, with another shrug, turned back to her screen.

  “Was oh-three-thirty the time you were apprehended on the scene or the time they actually hauled you in through the station doors?” said Daltrey.

  “The time I got in. And I wasn’t hauled. I walked. Under my own steam. Perfectly vertical and in a perfectly straight line. What difference does it make? And don’t give me any argument about shifts, because if you change shifts at oh four hundred hours around here, it would’ve been either you yourself on duty, Officer Sweetheart, or whoever was on right before you, and we’ve already got your word for it that it wasn’t you.”

  Lestrade muttered at Hammersmith’s ear, “Forget it, M. Just make out a general complaint.”

  “Officer McSwaggart is usually on at that time,” said Daltrey. “But sometimes he gets called away without warning and Officer Jimson or Officer Montana subs, or even Sergeant Two Foxes.”

  “And they do
n’t clock in under their own names, Officer Sweetheart?”

  “Not always. Sometimes it just slips their minds. Out here we don’t much care about the busywork details, M. Hammersmith. Just about getting the job done.”

  Which is why, thought Lestrade, you use two or three paper reclaims forms where we busywork slaves back in the Midwest Region use direct computer dictation and one filing card for signature and fingerprints.

  “Okay, okay!” Hammersmith’s fingers closed around something. He put it in his pocket, scooped the rest of the discardments back into the wastebasket, and set it down on the floor on his side of the desk. “McSwaggart, Jimson, Montana, or Seargeant Two Foxes. Thanks for the memories, Officer Sweetheart, and goodbye.”

  “Not so fast, big boy.” The reclaims officer snapped another sheet of paper at him. “Glad as I’m going to be to see your backside, you’ve still got the ‘everything okay’ form t’ do.”

  He grabbed it so angrily it tore. Daltrey pulled out another copy and set it down on the desk between them. “Reckon you’ve still got the pencil,” she remarked. “This time, you can just leave it with the completed form.”

  Scowling, he fished the pencil out of his pocket, bent, started in on the form, and smacked an oversize X in the “No” box beside “Was everything in order?” On the “Comments” line he scrawled a sentence that Lestrade, watching at his side, found only partially legible, about a “Valuable [something] having been thrown out by [words scrunched up at the edge of the paper].”

  “I’d leave it at that,” she told him in a low voice when they were finally out of the reclaims office and on their way down the corridor. “Or file a general complaint form at most. Your complaint on the last piece of original hardcopy will have to stay on file however long they leave their hardcopies filed, probably six months. Anything that names anybody specifically is going to get tossed right away. A general complaint about officer unknown might just possibly get read first.”

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant Dragon Lady. You don’t think I’m really about to leave any more record of my stay here than they make me leave, do you? I was just trying to spook Officer Sweetheart a little.”

  “I’d have to flunk you at ‘spooking’ her, but you antagonized her to perfection. A trick you’ve given yourself a lot of practice at.”

  He tried to push the door to the public reception room open. It stayed locked. Lestrade pulled out her passdisk, turned it in her fingers, and went on,

  “Let me do all the talking at the front desk, M. Hammersmith. We’ll get out faster. I managed to strike a little comradely rapport with Officer Waco when I came in.”

  He made a grunching sound, but after a second he nodded, grinned, and gave her the old thumb to middle finger sign. And, interestingly enough, let her do all the talking at the front desk, as well as all the filling out of the final habeas corpus form.

  The Reno police had, blessedly, impounded Hammersmith’s rentawreck and injunctioned him against renting another one. When, at last, they were settled in the taxi and the p.i. had finished making his obligatory pass at Conchita, Lestrade muttered, “All right, M., let’s see that collector’s item that was worth all the fuss back there.”

  He dug it carefully out of his billfold and put it in her hand. One charred corner of a plain correspondence envelope, more black than white, franked instead of stamped. Hammersmith was dead in the right that no polly or polly’s helper ever had any business throwing away any piece of confiscated personal property whatever, but in this case the decision had been understandable, no matter how unjustified.

  “You oughta see that hacienda, Lady Les,” said the private eye. “Swimming pools, bowling lanes, air-conditioned basement tennis court, extensive wine cellar, and love den got up like some mountain cabin. I dug that little goody out of the fireplace. Which burns real logs. Wish I’d had more time to sift the ashes, but turned out our boy has a housesitter. The same honcho, I’d guess, who stuck this in the fireplace for him. Sufficiently enlightened, like they say, to recognize it as something to destroy yesterday, but not sufficiently enlightened to understand why, or else he’d have stirred the embers around a little more, made good and sure of burning it all.”

  “I see what you mean,” Lestrade replied, with another look at the postcode. The postcode of Hilton-Maracott’s apartment complex for Hummingbird Hill guards and daystaffers.

  Chapter

  At one point during the dawn twilight, Corwin woke for several minutes, his back and shoulders throbbing fiercely in spite of the painaway caplet he had been given at the door to his suite. Actually he had been given three, each in its own recyclable pillbox, with a caution not to take them all at once. Deciding that it had been long enough since the first one, he popped the second caplet into his mouth and swallowed it with half a glassful of minted water from his bedside carafe.

  One difference, perhaps the chief difference, between real and fancied pain was that the merely fanciful faded with comparative rapidity, while the real left tedious aches and aftereffects to linger for hours, even days. At present, he was still suffering from a blend of the real and the fancied. Even though he had never managed to reattain reality after the arrival of his purgators—and he would hardly be astonished if it had taken the better part of an hour to lay on those nineteen lashes—surely they had been applied with the promised leathern strop. Surely it could not have been, in standard reality, the plumbata-weighted scourge of ancient Rome. His wounds must be simple welts, and not the scabbed gouges he could still feel over his back and glimpse on his shoulders. Had there been actual flaying or bleeding, the same hands that pilfered painblankers from the hospital supplies and rubbed him down with desensitizing antiseptic would also have swathed him in bandages, if only to keep stains from the satin bedclothes.

  Or would they worry about sheets and pillowcases and such?

  The laundry staff were fellow inmates…a shoplifter of diamond jewelry, as he seemed to recall from Click’s lists, and…he forgot what the other was, but the shoplifter, at least, would eventually be released, to tell the outside world of such matters as heavy bloodstains on the bedding and other laundered material.

  But on the other hand, everyone here must suspect, if not know, something of what went on. The rapid dwindling of certain medical supplies, the absence of locks on key facilities—those of the basement closet were designed to keep waiting purgatants in, and then, he theorized, only if the purgatants were willing to be so kept in ... M. Liberty or any other investigator ought to be able to gather hints enough for quite a story. Yet Corwin could remember seeing nothing of the sort. Was there some conspiracy of honorable silence? Or were there, in fact, numerous accounts available, if one only glanced in the right directions? Clandestine accounts, perhaps, with small circulations in minor subcultures; the heyday of Blackwood sensationalism seemed sometimes to be very long gone indeed. He began to wonder whether his ordeal would prove financially worth the pain. It might depend almost entirely upon how popular a crusade M. Liberty could make of it.

  The scabs were already quite hard and apparently starting to shrink, which gave him further grounds for hope that they were in fact simple welts caused by a plain leather strop. Plumbata scars would distress Angela. Locating his black silk nightshirt in the closet, hung there by whatever domestic had unpacked his suitcase upon its delivery yesterday afternoon, he shrugged into it before settling back in bed, gingerly, on his right side. Simple welts they might be, but scabbed gouges they would seem to him until they faded in fact or until his perceptional mode changed.

  Suppose he were to try changing it once more at will? That had worked at least once last night—a thought he had clung to as best he could while the lashes fell. It might have worked twice or thrice; but certain points of chronology were already blurred, and he was extremely uncertain whether that tumble backwards into the pit had taken place in the actual closet before they came to fetch him, or
had been part of his dreams on first falling asleep afterward in this very bed. There had been rats in the pit, and they had started chewing him alive; but there seemed to have been still more disgusting, horrifying, and painful things there also, though he could not quite catch any exact memories of them, and may well never have glimpsed them clearly even at the time, either because that was the nature of nightmare or because the Venerable Edgar had left the terrors of that pit so completely to his readers’ imagination. Either way, most psychomystiqualists would say that whatever had happened came ultimately from Corwin’s own brain, so perhaps he was better contented not to recollect it in perfect detail. He saw quite enough of his own shadow side as it was.

  If it had happened in the actual waiting room, then he must have succeeded in flipping back to fantasy mode, made the experiment, “perished in the pit”—i.e., fallen at last into a short sleep or faint—and on awakening, found himself in or brought himself back to reality perception. He seemed to have a relatively clear memory of again perceiving the closet as it really was in the moment just before his purgators came for him, and of beholding his own world flood back in an instant as the door opened. Except that this time the Angel of the Odd had seemed to be on the ceiling holding a lantern in one hand and the end of the pendulum in the other. A curious juxtaposition of Edgarian elements, so it may all have been a true dream after the flogging rather than before.

  It was also conceivable that he had finally fallen asleep for a while there in the closet while waiting, in spite of nervous anticipation. His sleep deficit could hardly have been stopgapped by the hour’s nap he had tried to snatch yesterday afternoon between returning from his tour under M. Magadance’s guidance, and dressing for dinner. Even now, wakeful though he might fallaciously feel at this moment of early morning, he understood himself to remain badly in need of slumber.

  To attempt another exercise just now in changing mode at will might lessen his immediate chances for that much-needed slumber. His stripes were probably still fresh enough to prove almost equally uncomfortable in either mode, not to mention the damage to his precarious peace of mind were he to pop back into standard reality and find them thickly scabbed in fact.