Bimbos of the Death Sun

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Diefenbaker hesitated. “I guess so, Carolyn. I mean, Saffron. But remember that you’re an elf. It’s the humans who have to find out what it means.”

  “That’s okay!” said Saffron brightly. “I’m a very unusual elf. Lawful good. I can befriend a human and tip him off. I think I’ll tell Gawaine. He’s cute.”

  “Hmm. Where’s everybody else?”

  “Running all over the hotel, I guess. The Dungeon Master has people going everywhere looking for clues.”

  Appin Dungannon was pleased with his chapter. It shone on his computer screen like a bad deed in a saccharine world, and as usual he had enjoyed the thrill of finality in rereading that special chapter. He glanced at his watch. Nearly ten-thirty. His editor was due to arrive soon. In time for lunch, he hoped. Louis could always charge it to the publisher’s expense account.

  Suddenly he remembered that he would be addressing the entire convention at one. Damn! He hoped Louis wasn’t hungry. Given a choice between a burger at rush hour and a lunch deferred, he would always choose the latter.

  Pressing Home, Home, Up, Appin Dungannon scanned the chapter from the beginning, looking for typos and other lapses of concentration. Thus far he hadn’t found any. His work had been pretty good this weekend, all things considered. No one had bothered him all morning. He was pleased that he had frightened the fen so thoroughly that they had left him alone.

  Of course, one of them hadn’t been frightened. He glanced again at the note he’d found under his door last night. Not frightened at all. But Dungannon was pleased with the overall results of his weekend. His image was intact.

  He supposed he ought to get a printout made for Louis, archaic bastard that he was. As a science fiction editor, Louis would believe in six impossible things before breakfast, including a civilization of cloud beings, but you couldn’t convince him that a floppy disk was as good as a manuscript. It was a pain to lug a printer around in his travels. Appin Dungannon smiled to himself: not that he ever lugged personally, of course.

  He adjusted the paper feed in the printer and flipped on the machine. There was probably something ironic about creating rune sagas on a computer; he wondered what Beowulf would have been like, had it been word-processed. Longer, probably. He reached for a blank note card and scribbled a memo to himself. That might make an interesting talk: the effects of technology on world-perception. It had occurred to him before. Late twentieth-century people saw landscapes as a moving panorama, going by at fifty-five miles per hour. Surely this made their thinking different from the rest of humanity, who had seen landscape as a static view, like a painting. Such differences in perception probably meant that he had failed miserably at capturing the ethos of Celtic Britain, but at least he had the wit to realize it. Unlike the buffoons who thought they could live his works and still cook their dinners in a microwave. There was more to capturing the past than dressing the part. He wondered if such a lecture to a fantasy audience would be a waste of breath.

  The printer was noisy, but probably no more than a television tuned to one of those mindless game shows. No one should be trying to sleep at this hour of the morning anyway. Appin Dungannon leaned back in his chair and watched the machine spit out pages of pseudo-Celtic drivel. Maybe in the next one he would have a French character named Louis confined to a leper colony near Glastonbury. Louis the Leper. It had a ring to it. He wondered if his editor would let that one go by. Tratyn Runewind goes to find someone at a leper colony near Glastonbury … It was the wrong period, of course. There weren’t any lepers in Britain until the time of the Crusades, but he doubted if any of his readers knew that. He turned the idea over in his mind. Yes, it was interesting. One might bring in the healing wells … He grabbed for another note card, and wrote down “Lepers. Glastonbury.” What could he use for a working title? Books went better for him if they had names.

  Appin Dungannon was still snickering at his new creation, A Farewell to Arms, when he heard the knock on the door.

  Louis, already? Dungannon glanced at the printer. Judging by the size of the paper stack, it still had a good bit to go. With a sigh, he bent over his note card, intent upon looking busy, and called out, “Come in! It’s open.”

  The visitor wasn’t Louis.

  Appin Dungannon looked at the long hair, the medieval costume, the pseudo-Norse medallion, and then at the pistol that was leveled at his chest.

  “Young man,” he said. “That is an out-of-period weapon.”

  TEN

  Louis Warren studied the Rubicon program posted in the hotel lobby while he considered his options. It was now 11:29 A.M. He could either go up to Appin Dungannon’s room now, and be shouted at for wasting the author’s valuable time with a social call, or he could wait until a few minutes before Dungannon’s scheduled one o’clock lecture, and be accused of slighting his company’s top author.

  As usual he wondered why he hadn’t stayed in teaching, and as usual he told himself that the chairman of the English department was probably much like Appin Dungannon. At least as an editor, he could limit his encounters with the ogre to two or three times a year, instead of having to endure him more or less constantly as a faculty member. Like chest x-rays, one had to give the system time to overcome the toxicity before exposing oneself to another dose.

  It seemed a shame to end his stay in Washington with a visit to Appin Dungannon, but they did need the new manuscript quickly, since the withdrawal of the Maysfield novel had left a hole in their September list. Of course, Dungannon had refused to send the manuscript by courier: too expensive; too much trouble; he didn’t trust the company. Louis Warren sighed. He should never have let Dungannon know that their trips to Washington coincided. Of course Dungannon would insist on personal attention. His ego required any amount of that nonsense. For one uneasy moment, Warren wondered if the author had something even more humiliating planned for their meeting. He pictured Dungannon ordering him to stay for the lecture, and then introducing him to the fannish multitude of would-be authors and instructing him to accept unsolicited manuscripts. The very idea of being deluged with several dozen incoherent Tolkien rip-offs made the editor queasy. Perhaps he should try to find a copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education to take back on the plane. It always featured several pages of job listings.

  Deciding to get it over with, Louis Warren inquired at the front desk for Dungannon’s room number. “He’s expecting me,” he explained to the hesitant clerk.

  “Better you than me.” The young man grinned. “Shall I call him and say you’re on your way up?”

  Warren shook his head. “One interruption is enough.” Besides, he thought, advance notice would only give him more time to work on his rage.

  Warren hardly noticed the assorted costumed fen who swarmed about him in the hotel. At least once a year the publisher sent him to do workshops at one of the larger cons, where he would explain to an audience of elves and Conans that the world didn’t really need another book about six cloaked adventurers in search of a magic sword. And, no, he wasn’t interested in the one about the Viet Nam vet transported back to the time of the Visigoths, either. A variation of that one came in about once a month. Fantasy fans worked very hard on their literary creations, and seemed to have an infinite capacity for churning out pages—much greater than his capacity for reading them—but they were sadly lacking in originality; probably all that television they’d watched since infancy: formula and imitation. It was a rare young fantasy writer who managed to escape its pall.

  When the elevator stopped, Louis Warren edged past two Imperial Stormtroopers, and followed the room numbers to Appin Dungannon’s lair. The Do Not Disturb signs came as no surprise; he’d half expected barbed wire as well.

  “Mr. Dungannon! Are you there? It’s Louis Warren.” He accompanied this announcement with a discreet and, he hoped, inoffensive tap on the door.

  All was silent within.

  Naturally Appin Dungannon would not bother to answer the door right away. He probably had a s
tandard chart for how long to keep people waiting: room service five minutes, reporters eight minutes, associate editors fifteen minutes. Fans: twenty to life.

  Louis Warren knocked again. “Mr. Dungannon. I’m here to pick up the manuscript.” Putting his ear against the door, Louis could hear the faint clack of a printer in operation. Surely Dungannon would not leave the room with the printer going. Or perhaps he would. warren looked at his watch. Quarter to twelve. It was perfectly possible for Dungannon to have gone to lunch, leaving it up to the editor to collect the manuscript. He supposed he ought to check, since the alternative would be to camp out in the hallway for a couple of hours, wishing pestilence and famine on Appin Dungannon, while passing Trekkies mistook him for an autograph hound.

  Louis Warren tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked, so he eased his way into the room, wondering whether Dungannon was present, and about to hurl a lamp at his head, or absent, and planning to have him arrested for breaking and entering. Perhaps he ought to leave a note.

  The only sound in the room was the clack of the printer. Warren looked at the unmade bed, the row of bottles on the window ledge, the cowboy hat atop the computer monitor, and finally at Appin Dungannon, seated in a chair by the desk.

  He looked much as usual: bulging piggy eyes, gargoyle face, unfashionably long hair. … The pallor was a change from his usual boozy redness, though, and the stain on his shirt was definitely not Chivas Regal. … Louis Warren kept staring at the body, idly wondering if he had two more wishes coming.

  Finally the shock wore off a bit, and he stumbled back into the hall, nearly colliding with a tall, black-cloaked vampire. “Excuse me,” murmured Louis Warren. “I wonder if you would know anything about death?”

  Several minutes later, the still-dazed editor had been taken to Miles Perry and Walter Diefenbaker, who had been on their way to lunch. When he explained who he was and what he’d found. Miles Perry frantically hurried off to notify police and hotel officials, leaving a shaken Dief to cope with Louis Warren, and wondering if he were ever going to get another square meal.

  “Poor, poor man!” said Dief, shaking his head. “I’m afraid that I always found him rather … unpleasant—probably my fault for not getting to know him better. I expect he was a rather lonely soul really. Still, I’m quite sorry he’s passed on.”

  The editor didn’t seem to be listening. Probably shock, Diefenbaker decided. One was never prepared for something like this.

  “Can I get you a Coke?” murmured Dief, hoping for an excuse to seek out the vending machines. “I’m sure you must be quite shaken up.”

  “No, I’ll be fine,” said Warren vaguely. “It was a shock, that’s all. And there’s so much to do.”

  “I’m sure there must be. Had he any family?”

  The editor wasn’t listening. “Really, a lot of things to do. His book jacket biography will have to be rewritten, and publicity will have to design some new ads for the magazines. ‘Appin Dungannon’s Last Book,’ something like that.”

  “I see.”

  “And I’ll have to call Harlan Ellison and get him to work on a eulogy for Dungannon.”

  “Harlan Ellison? But I thought he hated Dungannon’s work,” said Dief.

  Warren didn’t respond, but looked over at Diefenbaker, suddenly remembering that he was there. “Is there a phone I could use?”

  Walter Diefenbaker sighed. “Perhaps you ought to wait until you’ve talked to the police.”

  At 1:10 P.M. most of the fen had gathered in the auditorium to hear Appin Dungannon’s lecture. His lateness did not surprise them, but the absence of a stammering con official apologizing for the delay was noted as being unusual.

  Jay Omega and Marion had joined the group about 1:05 P.M., after a salad-bar lunch in the dining room, and the stragglers from the morning’s role-playing game came in shortly thereafter.

  “Has anybody seen Appin Dungannon?”

  “He doesn’t skip out on scheduled lectures, does he?”

  “Nah. He has to keep getting the venom out of his system, or else he’ll need dialysis.”

  Marion recognized the monk’s robe in the row in front of her. “You were the Dungeon Master for the game this morning, weren’t you? How did it go?”

  “Pretty well,” Jack Larson replied. “Some of them were a little slow with the clues, but they finally figured out who’d been stealing black horses in fourteenth-century Scotland.”

  “Who?” asked Jay Omega.

  “Thomas the Rhymer,” said Marion. “Right? I expect he’d need them for the Sleeping Warriors.”

  “Very good,” said Jack Larson. “It took the group an hour and a half to come up with that. How’d you know?”

  Marion smiled. “Ph.D. in folklore.”

  “Who are the Sleeping Warriors?” asked Jay Omega.

  “I’ll give you a reading list,” Marion replied.

  At the sound of sporadic applause they looked up at the stage to see Walter Diefenbaker making his way hesitantly to the microphone. “I just remembered you,” he blurted out.

  Shaking his head, he began again. “Your master of ceremonies, Miles Perry, has been detained by an emergency, and I’ve been asked to tell you that—” The police had not yet arrived, and he didn’t really know what he was authorized to tell them. Squinting out into the audience, he saw Marion and Jay Omega giving him puzzled looks.

  Diefenbaker decided on discretion; explanations could follow. “I came to tell you that our guest speaker, Appin Dungannon, is unable to be with us this afternoon due to a sudden illness—”

  “Cirrhosis isn’t sudden!” someone called out.

  “—and so, instead of Mr. Dungannon, we will have our other guest author, Jay Omega, discuss the contemporary science fiction market with you.” He motioned for Jay Omega to take the stage.

  “What the hell!” hissed the substitute speaker.

  “Go on!” whispered Marion. “They’re obviously in a bind, so you might as well help them out. You can do it! You lecture six hours a week.”

  “On engineering. I’ve never tried to talk about writing.”

  “Go on, Jay! It’ll be good for the book.”

  Jay Omega, grinning nervously, joined Dief on stage.

  “What’s going on?” he muttered under cover of the applause.

  Diefenbaker muttered back, “Dungannon has been murdered. Try to keep them here at least ’til two.” He hurried away.

  Jay Omega stared open-mouthed at the departing Dief until he remembered that two hundred people were staring at him from the darkened audience. He summoned up a faint smile and tried to collect his thoughts. Dungannon was dead? He couldn’t have been much more than fifty. Omega wished he could say something—some expression of regret—but obviously the con people didn’t want it made public. He felt a twinge of guilt for having envied Dungannon his celebrity as a writer.

  Jay Omega adjusted the microphone stand a few inches upward to accommodate the height difference. “Good afternoon,” he said to the audience. “I’m sure I won’t be as helpful as Appin Dungannon would have been, but I’ll do my best. As you know. I write hard science fiction, so I may not be much help to you aspiring fantasy writers, although I will say that if you plan to write about things like the Sleeping Warriors, a doctorate in folklore wouldn’t hurt. Now before I talk about my own work, does anyone have any questions?”

  A student in the third row raised his hand. “Do you make more money from your first novel or from teaching engineering?”

  Marion sighed. “Now there’s a fantasy for you!”

  Miles Perry did not think that things boded well for Rubicon. “If You Never Attend Another SF Convention in Your Life: Go to Rubicon. —They’ll Guarantee It!” He could imagine the snide comments in zines across the country. Meanwhile, he was waiting for the police officers to finish their work in Dungannon’s room. He said he’d be available for questioning. At least he didn’t have to worry about an alibi: never having had a moment’s peace all mo
rning ought to provide one nonstop.

  He found that he was sweating profusely and, alert to appearances, he took out his handkerchief to mop his brow. A real murder! He had half hoped that the police would invite him up to the room, so that he could watch the photographing and the gathering of evidence. Would they put a chalk outline where the body had been? But upon reflection he decided that the time to himself might be more valuable in his present state of agitation. What did one do when the special guest expired at the con? Canceling the banquet was out of the question. He supposed it ought to be a subdued affair, in memory of the deceased.

  Someone was sure to suggest a chorus of “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!” That had to be quashed at the outset. Decorum would be the watchword. He hoped the murderer wouldn’t turn out to be someone else famous, like Jay Omega. That would be too much notoriety for any con.

  “Mr. Perry? We’re ready to ask you a few questions now.” Lt. Thomas Ayhan, with a gray crew cut and a rumpled brown suit, was easily the most distinguished person at the con. Miles thought he looked more like a bank vice-president than a policeman, and one made him as uneasy as the other. Ayhan smiled reassuringly and pulled out a little blue notebook. “Oh, before we begin, I need to ask you: was the deceased a Roman Catholic, by any chance?”