“Well, I don’t believe it,” Angela said. “But if it is true, I don’t see the harm in it. They don’t hurt us, after all. They do the work, and make nice things for us to buy, and keep everything running smoothly.”
“So they tell us. And when the social machine hits such a bump as murder, they can restore smooth operation by choosing a scapegoat, knowing that all his peers will accept their version rather than his.”
Angela stood and picked up the book of verse from which she had been reading. “I think we’ve had enough Weirdbook Toadstools for today. I’m sure I saw a copy of Tirra Lira on the squire’s shelves over there.”
“Ah, excellent, excellent,” he replied. “‘The Little Maid of Timbuctoo’: ‘Maid and youth, he thwacked them both.’”
Angela shrugged helplessly. “You can be so impossible at times.”
“Cheer up, M. Poe,” said Click. “You should love the asylum for homicidal maniacs.”
“Sergeant Click. I have been devoting my mind to this problem with considerable interest, and I cannot make myself believe it was any handiwork of mine.”
“You’re sure about that, M.? You’ve handed me a fair slab of circumstantial evidence that you may not have too much use for us realizers. All that about our secret Handbook.”
“Oh, that’s only the way he talks. He’s innocent as a doughnut,” said Angela.
“Here I pay the price for speaking honestly and openly.” Corwin sighed. “True, I confess I would have been able to leave my chambers and creep downstairs again when all the others save M. Aelfric were abed. But had I done it, I feel convinced it would have been carried out with more—dare I say, finesse? Poor M. Standard’s death would have been a work of art, not a utilitarian bludgeoning.”
“I don’t like it when you talk this way.” Angela turned to go to the bookshelves beside the fireplace, but Corwin caught her hand and held her back.
“I feel persuaded,” he went on to Click, “that my best hope of avoiding the blame is to help you locate the true murderer. For whom you might otherwise stop searching.”
“Give us a little credit for some passing interest in abstract justice.” Click chewed the stem of his pipe.
“And stop being so silly, Poe,” Angela scolded. “Of course they’d rather have the right one than a scapegoat. If they don’t get the right one ...”
“Exactly,” Corwin finished. “If they don’t get the right one, more deaths may follow. If the premise with which I began this conversation is grounded in fact, M. Margaret Standard herself may not be safe beneath this roof.”
“I take it you want to play amateur detective and, in the good old phrase, crack this case wide open for us.” Click sighed. “Things like this seem to bring amateur detectives out of the insulation.”
“Not so much your amateur detective.” Corwin leaned forward. “More nearly your tool. Your pick to prod open dark and possibly dangerous locks.”
“I don’t think I care for this,” said Angela. “You two don’t need me here any more, do you?”
“Angela—Garvey, stay,” Corwin beseeched her. “Take not away your wholesome light. It was imperative to reveal my plan to the representative of the Law, but I suspect the role of my chief accomplice must fall to you.”
Chapter 12
Why am I sitting out here with these people? thought Pamela Weaver. They’re the worst of the lot, the countess and M. White. That must be why. Who else but the worst people would commit murder?
Captain What’s-His-Name who thinks we’re on a ship? He would have tipped the body ... M. Aelfric ... over the railing along with the murder weapon and thought he’d buried it at sea.
That silly Angela Garvey Garvey who likes everyone to first-name her? I don’t think there’s such a thing as a murder weapon anywhere in her pretty world. M. Poe? He’d have been the victim, not the murderer. He’s trying to make himself the victim now. As if he’s jealous of M. Aelfric.
The red-haired woman ... M. Quantum? She’s a strange one. They’re not usually so close-tongued about where they live and what they see—it’s one of their main topics of conversation. Never-failing well of small talk. She was lying about seeing a flashlight, I think. She was smooth at it, very smooth, but I’m sure she was lying. Or that other woman who looks Oriental and saw a hobnail nightlight? Yesterday afternoon she was almost bragging abut the way her perceptions still change overnight, at her grown-up age. Who knows what she saw last night? They went out after lunch to walk in the garden, those two. They must be out there somewhere now, behind the shrubs and evergreens. Could they have done it together last night? But why?
M. Livingstone? An old, well-meaning simpleton. That leaves M. DiMedici and M. White as the two malevolent guests, the two most likely to commit murder. If I were a fancier, Pamela thought, I might see her with a cobra hood and him with ... with horns and a cross hung upside-down, I suppose.
Or did Pamela feel like this because they alone had made their fancy-class prejudice so obvious? Everyone else had been polite to the working-class realizer—carefully polite, maybe, or “pay her no attention, she hardly matters” polite, or “protect her from the harpies” polite, but polite nevertheless. Be fair, Angela Garvey seemed to have treated her exactly the same as anyone else. Angela Garvey seemed to have to make a conscious effort to remember that servants were servants and not social equals who enjoyed doing all the work and waiting on their friends.
White and DiMedici alone had been downright rude. With an effort, Pamela reminded herself she had known all these people, except the kind old squire himself, less than twenty-four hours. Had she not been making a concentrated effort, she might not have them all separated and sorted yet in her mind. And she was fair enough to remember her own prejudices against the fancy class. (We input time, labor, and money. The only thing they input is money, even if they do input five or six times as much per capita.) Someone, somewhere, had written that just because people were unpleasant did not mean they were murderers. Well-meaning M. Livingstone might have gotten drunk and seen Aelfric as an attacking savage. (Oh, God! But he had been hit on the back of his beautiful head.) They might all be very good people, even M. White and the countess, if you could get beneath the nap down to the warp and woof. You could even call this pair’s rudeness honesty, and everyone else’s politeness hypocrisy.
Pamela wanted to test her ideas somehow. “M. DiMedici,” she said.
The ebony woman turned her head and stared at the realizer out of half-closed eyes. “Countess,” she corrected.
“Your Countess-ship.” Pamela swallowed the last of her drink. “Would you call murder another mark of a shallow mind?”
The countess sucked in her breath and clenched her fist tight on the reversi piece in her hand.
Chapter 13
In the garden, Nantice Borzoi Serendip stared at a large crimson rose being eaten by a black and white worm with four orange tufts at the chewing end.
“I knew something was wrong with today as soon as I woke,” she told Willa Quantum. “It was one of those misty days. My bedroom was gray and foggy. I could hardly find my hairbrush, let alone see the shape of my bed.”
“Has it settled down now?” Willa asked sympathetically.
“Yes, but ...” Nantice glanced around. The squire’s garden, so beautiful yesterday, now looked like a landscape by Gabinny: trees all straight lines, black limbs sticking out at angles from black trunks with no curves, only a few stark leaves like playing-card diamonds: shrubs like blocks of old, fermented laundry; sharp-edged paths dictating the shortest distances between beds of flowers with a blight on every leaf and a worm on every blossom. “But it settled into a nightmare. I don’t like this kind of day.”
“Can’t you change it? Try thinking of something else.”
“You think I can just change it at will?”
“Have you tried?”
“I’m not like the rest of you,” Nantice complained. “You suppose that because things change for me by themselves, because I still wake up in a new world almost every day—let me tell you, if you envy me, you’re all wrong. It’s not that much pleasure. Oh, yes, it’s beautiful when things are going well, but when something cracks, like this weekend ... You’ve all made the worlds you chose to make, you stay in them the whole time and they help you. No matter what happens, you see it the way you can best accept it. But my world changes all by itself according to what really happens, and when what happens is bad, my whole world is bad and there’s nothing I can do about it until things go right again.”
“Have you ever thought it might change with your moods?” Willa suggested. “Not so much according to what happens, you see, as according to how what happens affects your moods. Maybe if you learn to control your moods a little better—”
“Stop it!” Nantice was sick of getting this kind of attitude from everybody, fanciers and realizers alike. “You think you’re all so adult and I’m still such a child! Simply because my world never hardened over like all those little ice ponds you’ve got yourselves frozen into and never even try to pick at the ice. Well, haven’t you ever thought that maybe children are right? Maybe we see the world more clearly than any of you with your grown-up never-changingness. Maybe hardening of the perceptions is exactly like hardening of the arteries!”
“Nantice, I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, don’t talk to me, I can’t stand it out here any longer!” Nantice turned and ran back toward the house, back down a maze path that turned at right angles between tall hedges slanting in high over her head until the sky was only a very narrow gray echo-path.
“Nantice!” Willa went on calling. Her footsteps came drumming after, but Nantice was always able to keep at least one corner between them.
She came in sight of the house and skitted to a stop.
She saw three figures on the balcony. Two were skeletons—clothed, moving skeletons. The third sat with its back to her, on a white marble ledge held up by the black iron bars that railed the balcony today. The glass doors made a foggy backdrop behind them, like a dead showscreen, and Fitzhugh Manor framed it all with walls of white-gray slabs, sheered as straight as if they had come new from the quarry, except that today Nantice thought she saw M. Poe’s crack running from foundation to roof.
The only curvatures anywhere were in the bones of the skeletons. Even their clothes fell in stiff straight lines. One wore crimson and gold brocade, a trapezoid of colored gown bent crooked because the figure was seated. The other skeleton wore a white casing that all but blent into the fogged glass behind it. The third figure, however, the one with back to the garden, wore fluid clothes, now that Nantice looked again: gauze floating cloudlike, hardly visible, until she began feeling uncertain that there really was someone beneath the flow, rather than a simple eddy of wind and dust.
No, there was someone there, because both skeletons were turned partly toward it, as if regarding it, even talking to it. Nantice caught snapping sounds as they shut and opened their jaws at it. From the skeleton in crimson and gold came a stream of livid red—hatred or scorn. From the other, a stream of something harder to determine, some emotion that was strong but indeterminate, mixed.
There were days when Nantice Borzoi Serendip could see auras, emotions, and correspondences. They were seldom good days.
Willa caught up at last, stopped beside her. “Nantice ...”
Nantice pointed. “Willa, who are they? Who are those people up there on the balcony?”
Willa shaded her eyes. “Countess DiMedici—”
“Yes—the one in crimson, I thought it must be.”
“And M. White.”
“M. White? I thought it might be M. Corwin, or Sergeant Click, or even—no, of course it couldn’t have been, they took M. Standard away this morning. Didn’t they? And besides, he couldn’t ... unless it was his ghost still there, waiting ...”
“I’m not sure about the other one. A woman, I think, but with her back to us.”
“Oh!”
“What?”
The skeleton in crimson—the countess—had stood and pushed the figure on the railing. Nantice closed her eyes. They seemed to retain the sight of the gauzelike person toppling over toward the ground. But when she opened her eyes, the figure still sat on the railing and the countess still sat in her chair.
But the figure had turned at Nantice’s warning cry: And its face was a third grinning skull, this one with blood running down between the eye sockets.
“M. Weaver,” said Willa. “Nantice, what’s wrong? Take charge of yourself a little.” She smiled and waved to the three on the balcony. M. Weaver waved back and turned toward the house again. M. White raised one hand in acknowledgment, but did not wave. The countess ignored Willa’s gesture.
“I must have seen a wish.” Nantice clutched Willa’s arm. Two more people were coming out to the balcony. One was Angela Garvey—Angela never changed, she was a smiling constant even in Nantice Serendip’s world—but the other was one more skeleton. “Who are those?”
“Angela and M. Corwin,” Willa told her.
The new skeleton was talking to the first three. Angela called to Willa and Nantice, “Oh, good, there you are! Come in! The Standard’s almost here, M. Portent phoned from their limo.”
Nantice sighed. “M. Corwin. Yes, he would look like that. Let’s go inside and meet M. Standard. And then maybe I can lie down. If I sleep for a few hours it may all seem better when I wake again.”
Chapter 14
Margaret Walking-Horse’s final name had changed from Just to Standard thirty years ago, when she married Walter Carvingstone Standard. It had not changed because he made her his wife, but because he also made her his heir and next in command.
The Decade of Reform (actually numbering about a dozen years) had left two continents and parts of two more with new systems of nomenclature to fit the new social system. Here the fantasy perceivers made their influence felt. There was little practical reason why governors and producers should change their first and final names at will, but fanciers had already come to choose their own first names at some traditional occasion, varying with the family, between puberty and legal adulthood at eighteen, and had begun demanding the right to change both first and final names at will to match their personal worlds. The Founding Reformers had thought it simplest to extend the same system to the entire population. Now births were registered with only the infant’s family name and full set of fingerprints, taken in the old-fashioned way with permanent ink on rag paper. Until about a year ago, Names and Prints had been Names, Prints, and Numbers, but the Metterkranz System had at last made it possible to “alphabetize” fingerprints for ready-recall filing and the widely disliked government identification numbers had been dropped.
The working class, except fanciers’ servants, most often fit their final names to their occupations, and so last names had in a way come full circle from their medieval beginnings. Governors always took their final names from their offices, so for them the name-change fee was waived.
In a society of myriad personal fantasy worlds, The Standard was among the most vital governors. A sort of human meterstick, The Standard had full, final, and unarguable say as to what was objective reality and whether an individual was realizer or fancier. In practice, The Standard’s rulings were needed only in doubtful cases, but there was enough work to keep a large staff of assistant Standards busy.
Logic said that The Standard, being highest authority in all such matters, choose his or her own permanent and temporary staff members, especially the heir apparent. Walter Carvingstone Standard had married Margaret Walking-Horse Just, but that was optional. Margaret had not married Aelfric Saxton Legison. Childless, she had regarded him more as a favorite nephew. His death struck her as deeply as had her husband’s—more deeply, for A
elfric had been young and his death unnatural. He should have seen her buried.
She bore up well, however. She had been The Standard for almost twenty years. Her first clear thought on receiving the news had been, Who will replace him as my heir? Her first act was to name Norman Daggett. There might be a plane or limo accident between New Washington and Fitzhugh Manor, and no chief Standard should die without settling the line of succession. But Norm was a provisional choice, as he himself would understand. His reality perception was impeccable, but his administrative ability questionable. On the staff since Walter Carvingstone’s time, he suffered a streak of sentimentality that made him prefer playing scholarly old uncle to the junior Standards and Tempstands. If worst came, his value would lie in choosing his own successor. She could trust Norm to do that carefully and thoughtfully should anything overtake her before she had the tranquil leisure to make a more studied choice.
She occupied her mind during the trip by concentrating on all the actuality around her: sights, sounds, textures, aromas (very few unpleasant ones in a society that had revived perfumery as an art on a blank canvas of deodorized air), the looks of her fellow travelers. She tried to guess, by their expressions and scraps of conversation, what worlds the plain-garbed fanciers lived in, and always ended her meditation as soon as she was satisfied of the answer. Some realizers wore plain beige or brown as if pretending they were fanciers, while occasional fanciers wore bright, even outlandish costume. Margaret prided herself on recognizing them quickly and determining their motives, usually social pretension or vacation levity in plain-clothed realizers. Most bright-garbed fanciers had been gulled by mischievous sales clerks, but a few possessed just enough boldness and admixture of reality perception to tailor their dress to their fantasy in practice as well as imagination. Or to enlist the assistance of reality-perceiving friends.
This kind of observation had been Margaret’s habit since school days, so that when she concentrated on it some instinct of nostalgia connected her present waning middle age with the security of early childhood, helping her salve the emptiness with minutiae and trivia. It was her objective love of detail that made her a good Standard.
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