The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Then save it for when we’ve got more time to kill.” Gruesome thought, being stuck someplace with Magnum Hammersmith when they had time to kill. For now, time was slipping along fast enough. Conchita had come in from parking her cab and was already tabbing buttons on her own menu, two tables down on the other side of the conveyer belt.

  “Hotcha!” said Hammersmith, lifting a covered dish off the belt as it came past him. “How’d you let your food get by, Dragon Lady? My tribulations that fascinating?”

  He lifted the cover with a flourish. Scrambled eggs and ham hash looked up at him.

  “Put it back, M. Hammersmith,” said Lestrade, wondering whether or not to hold back a laugh. Partly of relief. She hadn’t been watching, so it could have been her own order. “I tabbed for pancakes. Next time glance at the number before you grab.”

  “Lousy kitchen made a mistake. I ordered eggs, but with fried broc on the side—”

  “Look at the number, Hammersmith,” she repeated. “It’s in the cover handle. And cover it up and put it back on the belt before it gets cold.”

  He replaced the thermal cover over the plate and looked at the large number card stuck between the metal loops of the cover handle. “Oh,” he commented, and returned the dish to the belt.

  Lestrade looked at the fine print on the packet of powdered honey ‘n’ spices. It said fortibalanced with minimum morning requirements of all the essential breakfast v’s ’n’ m’s. Remembering that she hadn’t tabbed for any fruit, she tore the corner and stirred the sweetstuff into her coffee. “All right,” she said. “Reno’s got you cold on breaking and entering. Maybe even burglary, if Vego tries making as much out of that burned envelope corner as you made back at Range Heights.”

  “He never even saw me grab it. At least, he never acted like he had. Besides, as I recall my legalese, you can’t make burglary, theft, robbery, or petty larceny out of somebody salvaging anything somebody else was obviously getting rid of.”

  “They’d have your word against his. He might claim that he was saving it to kindle the next fire with. I don’t think he’ll try to make a case out of it. Especially if he knows enough to understand that his employer probably wouldn’t want him to call it to the attention of the police. But we can’t rule the chance out completely. And he’s got enough on you anyway with the b. and e. I hope you’ve got some outstanding charges against you back home.”

  “Huh?”

  “Because the quickest way out might be for me to produce a warrant, demonstrate my right to take you back to Indiana on a prior charge, and work up an immediate extradition.”

  “You want I should just hand over to you a hold like that on me?”

  “You’re right. The temptation to use it once we got back home might be too much. But it could come down to that, or wait around in Nevada until they get to your case here. Can you post your own bail? If not, you could be stuck in a Reno holding cell with the Rogers and Astaire version of The Maltese Falcon for the next four or five months, with a corresponding jail bill to pay off later.”

  “It ain’t even the Rogers and Astaire version,” he reminded her with a grimace. “Whoops!” He caught his own coffee tray just in time, a three-cup pot. “All right, Dragon Lady, I admit you’ve got an argument. Trouble is, I don’t have a single outstanding offence to my record back home.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “Clean as a whistle. Innocent as a baby’s behind for the last three and a half years. Not a doggone thing since the Rodrigo business, and that cleared the courts leaving me smelling sweet as a rosebud. Oh, a couple traffic violations, but I don’t guess those’ll help you much.”

  “Unfortunately, no.” If there were strict justice in the universe, now that killing somebody with a speeding car counted as murder and carried the price tag of life imprisonment, speeding and drunken driving ought to be just as serious as any other kind of assault with a deadly weapon, instead of still getting shrugged off as misdemeanors whenever, through dumb luck, no casualties resulted.

  Glimpsing another covered plate on the conveyor belt, she hefted it off, checked its table number card, and set it down in front of her.

  “Nice catch,” said Hammersmith. “Of course, there is one little thing. That matter of getting into a certain condominium back in Nostalgia City and helping ourselves to certain of its contents.”

  She took the napkin-wrapped cutlery out of its groove in the top of the cover, lifted the cover off her plate, and looked at her pancakes. Most of the syrup was in a well in the middle of the stack. She used her knife to cut one thin canal and watched the first drops of condensed milk and coconut flavoring flow down to the edge of the plate before she looked back up at Hammersmith and shook her head. “Won’t work,” she told him, meeting his eyes steadily but without bothering to restrain her normal blinks. “That was breaking and entering, too. They wouldn’t extradite you for an offense of the same magnitude committed somewhere else. Only for something worse.”

  “You might swear out a seduction charge against me,” he suggested.

  “With who as the victim?”

  He winked. “Dragon Lady, give it a guess.”

  She replied with a snort that made a couple of the floaters at the neighboring table glance around.

  “Watch it,” the p.i. said easily. “People are staring.”

  She gave them a palms-up shrug. They grinned and turned back to their own four-way conversation.

  “We’ll make it assault and battery,” she said. “I’ll screen M. Click to network us a backdated form from his end.”

  “Assault and battery with who as the victim?”

  She took a bite of pancake and chewed slowly. Oversweetened—hopefully with nutritionally fortified and balanced oversweetener—but edible. She swallowed and followed it down with a mouthful of coffee before replying, “Give it a guess.”

  “Frankly, M. Lestrade, I’d rather we got your junior sergeant to make himself the complainant.”

  “Too bad. I’m the one whose sensibilities you’ve been assaulting and battering for the past eighteen months.”

  “You’ve got the sensibilities of a tyrannosaurus rex.”

  “Thanks for the compliment, M. Hammersmith, but don’t overestimate me. I can get nervous collapses like anybody else. Anyway, we can bury my complaint unfiled in the same time capsule with the Nostalgia City episode you’re so fond of dragging into the conversation.”

  He spread his hands. “Dragon Lady, your command is my wish.”

  * * * *

  And that’s where my original word-processing leaves it, line break and all. I had thought there was a scene in which a worried Angela explains to Click and/or Lestrade that Corwin’s family fortune is down to the last trimillion and that’s why he’s eager to earn some more money himself. Maybe that scene is in never-typed holograph ms. somewhere. Or maybe it never got beyond my brain, like the scene in which Withycombe explains to somebody, “I should have been the hero in a Georgette Heyer whodunit, but found myself in an Agatha Christie situation.”

  I remember that Lestrade was to succeed in clearing Gentian Truemeasure. Probably it would have involved a trip to Apex’s residence and haunts in New York City. I also remember that Corwin was eventually to undergo a sun dance, and in that scene have some insight into the Withycombe case. Despite Lestrade’s doubts, Withycombe was indeed guilty of the actual act of murder; but I think Apex had originally planned it. Ideally, the two cases touched each other, most likely by Apex’s involvement with the same dealer who had supplied the real Lord Moan (who was of course quite guilty) with the means for doing away with his wife. I may well have been using the technique that had satisfied me in The Monday After Murder, and created my cast of suspects trusting to find the clues along the way to close in on the guilty party; as of 2016 John Stock looks to me like a very strong contender to have been hired
by Hector Apex for assassinating Adrian Withycombe. Unless Stock is too obvious a candidate. I think Withycombe and Magadance would have gotten married there in Hummingbird Hill, and she arranged to continue footing his bill there when Apex was brought to justice. The example would have helped soothe Corwin’s lingering sensitivity about falling back on his wife’s healthy fortune. In the re-imagined scenario, while remaining very comfortably off in financial terms, Corwin and Angela are no longer as soaringly wealthy as in the original version.

  No romantic tension was ever to develop between Lestrade and Hammersmith. It was to have been as free of romantic tension as if they were both of the same gender in a pre-1960 work aimed at the family market. In the original fanciers/realizers cycle, Rosemary Lestrade was to remain single her entire life and probably at last be killed in process of uncovering the real story behind the big scandal over President Preston’s black box. In the new, fanciers-free cycle she finds a life partner infinitely better for her than the private eye could ever be, and actually retires from the police to occupy herself as a private investigator working to clear wrongfully accused or suspected clients.

  Dickens died in the middle of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I have no such ironclad alibi for failing to finish The Purgatory Club. I think what killed it was my despair at ever finding a publisher for my fanciers/realizers work, only four short stories of which (by my definition of “short story,” not SFWA’s) had ever made it into print—and one of those had downplayed the fantasy-perception element to near invisibility.

  Readers of All But a Pleasure and related stories will recognize in the Hummingbird Hill Purgatory Club the seed of the “purgatorios” which enjoy a semi-underground existence among the law-abiding population of the R.S.A. as re-imagined in this 21st century. I have never been personally involved with such a group, unless such things as karate dojos count. But I have never been able to figure out why S/M groups should be considered kinkily disreputable and running marathons, etc., admired.

  Now that within the past year or two I have actually recommenced work on The Posthumous Autobiography of Sir Jasper Murgatroyd with plans to include it as a finished novel in my projected Haunted Murgatroyds of Ruddigore Megapack, I cannot state absolutely that I will never get back to The Purgatory Club, given enough remaining years of productive life. After all, Sir Jasper’s story was on the backburner for over four decades, the Hummingbird Hill mystery for only about two. On the other hand, Sir Jasper remained more or less in stasis all that time, while Corwin and Angela, Rosemary Lestrade and her junior partner (re-surnamed Clayton), and their entire umwelt underwent a Major Rehaul setting it back about a century and eliminating the fantasy-perceiving element. And I glimpse a lot of other stories I want to try to tell, so this one must just take its chances.

  Well, maybe Edwin Drood has made a bigger stir and given the world a lot more fun as a half-finished work than it would have if its original author had brought it to completion. Who knows?

  NOTES.

  Like some obscure fictional detective or other, Rosemary Lestrade kept an overnight case packed and ready. I had in mind Josie O’Gorman, created by L. Frank Baum for the “Mary Louise” series under his “Edith Van Dyne” pseudonym. There may of course be others.

  [Corwin’s] sister Raddy, nine years his senior. In the re-imagined R.S.A. cycle, she has become Corinna Casanova, still his senior but by fewer years, and gotten a novel of her own. Her history in the re-imagined version is entirely different from her history as a fancier in the original R.S.A. cycle.

  purely mental imagination. I can hear someone carp, “Redundancy! Imagination is by definition mental.” But we are in the fanciers/realizers world, and fanciers make a distinction between mental and perceptive imagination.

  * * * *

  A PARTIAL DICTIONARY OF THE FANCIERS/REALIZERS WORLD

  This, which was to have been much more extensive than it is, falls among the most orderly of the author’s working notes aimed at keeping the work as internally consistent as possible. (Our real world itself is far from consistent!)

  Anything that had stuck in my memory, and that remained feasible in the R.S.A. universe as re-imagined, got put in again. For example, Al Everymind. Nevertheless, I never went back to my earlier notes while writing All But a Pleasure, Lestrade in Love, Corinna Casanova, The Deathguards, and “The Breaking Point,” but started afresh with only such of the contents of that old lumber room as had stuck in my brain.

  Where no further note follows, the entry may have been made simply for the sake of keeping my terms, usage, or spelling consistent. Or I may never have gotten around to filling in further description. Such terms as “actor” apply to either gender. “Current” means the time of The Standard Murder Mystery, The Monday after Murder, Mayday on the Melon, the unfinished Purgatory Club, and shorter works involving their characters. For the most part, the stories centering on Cagey Warrington and/or Clement Czarny take place a generation or two earlier.

  On the 24-hour clock. In the 1980s, I was informed that properly its hours should be written without a colon, as: 0215, 2030, for 2:15 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. Retyping in 2016, I found that this seemed to look too confusing with dates of years; and, having in the interim observed the colon actually being used with hours of the 24-hour clock, even if for times including seconds—02:15:46, etc.—I stuck it back in.

  A

  accommodations computer. Computer keeping track of registrants, etc. in hotels and other authorized public lodging.

  Ace Chang. Often named with Hitler and Bwahngo as three of history’s prime villains.

  adjusted suffrage, universal. See: universal adjusted suffrage.

  admission tab. Used with a mikebox.

  Aeroflot. Airline corporation.

  Age of Morality. See: Morality, Age of.

  airchairs. Inflated chairs.

  airfeather blankets. Extremely lightweight for their warmth.

  Air-riders’ Threshold, the. That point at which someone employed in air traffic loses any sense of boredom during long, uneventful flights.

  air-set, to. As, images on instaprint film air-set.

  airshaft. A type of elevator.

  algenometry. A “new” popular mathematical discipline; or, rather, a teaching method combining algebra and geometry in one course.

  alternative religion. Adjective form with hyphen: alternative-religion. I.e., not Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or any of the traditional Oriental creeds such as Buddhism.

  Ancient Mass. See: Revived Ancient Mass.

  armed forces, the. The usual hitch in the Army of the R.S.A. is 18 months.

  asprik. Originally a brand name, has become a semi-generic term for a popular painkiller with an aspirin base. Asprik usually comes in green-coated caplets.

  authorized public lodging. Hotels, motels, etc. listed in a recognized accommodations computer. (N.B. “Unauthorized” lodging is in no way illegal per se, simply unlisted and frequently uncomputerized. “Authorized” in this context carries a sense similar to our “AAA Approved.”)

  auto-registering home thermometer.

  B

  bagchairs.

  Barrymore, Magda. Emmy-winning actor.

  Bazaar, Kodak’s. See: Kodak’s Bazaar.

  Bermuda Triangle, the. More often called the Great Trap in the latter part of the 21st century.

  bigcity. Adjective.

  Blackwood Magazine, The New. See: New Blackwood Magazine.

  bligh. Noun. A tyrannical captain. (Not a restricted final name.)

  bogeygob. The bogeyman, bogeyperson.

  Bolivia. Bolivia has a small but energetic and growing transport company.

  Botkin, Stith. Semi-popular but nevertheless respected folklore scholar.

  brackets. To stay reality-registered, people need to be reTested at specific intervals. People in the 95%-100% reality perception bracket
need reTesting only once every five years.

  braingrease. Slang for such substances as booze, thought (rightly or wrongly) to facilitate cogitation.

  Brinks. Still prominent in the armored-car business.

  Brown County Pufferbelly. See: pufferbelly.

  bubbledomes.

  bud colleges. Kindergartens.

  bugbrain. Children’s slang.

  Burton, Douglas, Jr. Emmy-winning actor.

  Bwahngo. Thought of with Hitler and Ace Chang as among history’s major villains.

  C

  caller. Noun. What a person prefers to be called.

  candles, mock. Fine mock candles can be made using power cells or batteries.

  capitalization. Centuries are standardly lower-cased; as, the twentieth century. (More often, however, the digits are used: 20th century.)

  Capchild. Author of drug-related or drug-suggestive work reminiscent of that of Bosch and De Quincy.

  Carpello. An artist, known for oil paintings.

  carphone.

  C.E. The Common Era. (Some people maintain that the initials stand for “Christian Era.”) Has largely replaced A.D. in reality-perceivers’ usage. (Note of 2016. As it seems pretty well to have done in our own milieu, to an extent I hadn’t foreseen even as late as ca. 1989-91.)

  cellowrap. Probably not a brand name.

  cell-powered electric lights. E.g., mock candles.

  Central Fiduciary records.

  Central Police Computer.

  chairs. Chairs made of molded plastiform are comfortable and popular.

  Chambrier. A famous gourmand.

  Chanel. This venerable perfume producer is still in business. Chanel No. 17 has become one of its most popular fragrances.

  Chang, Ace. See: Ace Chang.

  chime. Chimes are usually used where the late 20th cent. uses buzzers or bells; as, with telephones. Used as verb, to chime someone means about the same as 20th-century “to ring up.”