The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK®: The Complete Steampunk Series

COPYRIGHT INFO

The Fanciers and Realizers MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2017 by Phyllis Ann Karr. All rights reserved. Cover art © Katafree / Fotolia.

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The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

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A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

My association with Phyllis Ann Karr goes back more decades than I care to think about. I bought and read her first fantasy novels when they appeared from Ace Books in the early 1980s, became her literary agent for a few years, went on to reprint many of her books through Wildside Press, and today am still releasing more of her work—in MEGAPACK® collections.

Her Fanciers & Realizers series—parts of which have appeared in anthologies over the years—is collected here in toto, including several previously unpublished novels, essays, and stories, and an unfinished novel. This is a book you probably ought to read in linear order; notes to stories are at the beginnings and ends of stories, and the various sections have still more info. And don’t miss Phyllis’s introduction, which explains far better than I can what the series is all about.

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidepress.com

ABOUT THE SERIES

Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, Who’s the editor?

The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://wildsidepress.forumotion.com/ (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

TYPOS

Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected] or use the message boards above.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Chances are that this is a closed canon.

In 1982, I hatched an idea for a novel using fantasy perceivers, and crafted a future where I thought it could work. The initial version of the Reformed States of America was that future. I developed it, not to make any political statement, still less to build a utopia, but simply as a setting where my fantasy perceivers could interact with the reality-perceiving majority.

Over the next few decades, the series went into four and a half novels—The Standard Murder Mystery, The Monday after Murder, Mayday on the Melon, The Dracula of Pi Rho, and The Purgatory Club (unfinished) and two novellas—Something Shady at Sunvale Clinic and Seven Against Hellmouth. As well as a multitude of short stories, by my old-fashioned definition of short story, not SFWA’s current word-count definition. In late 2005, my husband’s premature death of vCJD, following an unusually long decline, pretty well stopped my fictioneering for several years; and when I got back into it, there had been a kind of break. Then early in 2011, my last remaining close relative, my mother, suffered a stroke. By that autumn, striving very hard to publish something sufficiently popular to bring in four-figure advances, I re-imagined the R.S.A. without the fantasy-perception idea that had been its original raison d’etre and commenced redoing my favorite characters’ stories according to the template of modern romance. A few of the pieces in this present volume, with minor adjustments, would supplement the re-imagined cycle very nicely.

The new R.S.A. stories are very different from the original. For example, any similarities between The Standard Murder Mystery and All But a Pleasure are purely coincidental, and there is virtually no resemblance at all between the big Rosemary Lestrade novel of the first series, The Monday after Murder, and the new R.S.A. novel Lestrade in Love. Nevertheless, in process of transcribing my old holograph notebooks and typescripts (as good a pastime as any), I find myself intrigued all over again with my earlier vision of fantasy perceivers and reality perceivers somehow building a society together.

How it works should become apparent in the following stories themselves. The present collection comprises all the pieces set in this world that have yet turned up in my old files, excepting only the Computer Wizard of Oz tales, which are a cycle unto themselves.

This cycle was begun when the Computer Age we know and love was still in its dawning, and I failed to foresee what it would become in only a few decades. This, as well as the political developments never happening that I had postulated in order to fashion my Fanciers/Realizers world—and some, like the break-up of the Soviet Union, happening that I had never suspected—threw my R.S.A. timeline from futuristic into alternate-history speculative fiction. I further emphasized the alternative-timeline aspect by placing the political reform of my re-imagined R.S.A. back more than a century, to the decades following our Civil War. But for these original R.S.A. stories, the reader must simply imagine that developments have gone otherwise than in our own timeline.

Four of the stories found early publication: Murder with an Artist’s Rag and Who Mourns for Silverstairs? in Gordon Linzer’s semi-prozine Space & Time (Winter 1989 and Winter 1991), A Cold Stake in Yolen and Greenberg’s 1991 anthology Vampires, and Babbitt’s Daughter in Shwartz and Greenberg’s 1995 anthology Sisters in Fantasy. The rest of the short stories, and all the novels, appear here for the first time.

Recommended practice is to begin and end an anthology or collection with its two strongest works. By that criterion, I would probably choose The Monday after Murder and The Dracula of Pi Rho for the two prize slots. But what is the critical opinion of the author’s self worth?

Strict chronological arrangement would be extraordinarily difficult. By date of composition: both because some of the pieces were being written simultaneously, and because the state of my back files is such as to render finding the dated draft notebooks an extremely hit-or-miss process, some of these notebooks being no longer in my possession anyway. By the fictitious dates in which these incidents are supposed to have happened: because some of the stories overlap, and many share recurring characters. I eventually determined on an arrangement largely by central characters, though even this has its idiosyncrasies. E.g., The Dracula of Pi Rho could have gone either with either the Cagey Thursday or the Clement Czarny material.

Hoyts’ Hobbitat, 2016

CAGEY WARRINGTON THURSDAY

I decided to kick off with Something Shady at Sunvale Clinic, not because I judge it either the first or the best (though it is one of the earliest by the internal chronology of the Fanciers/Realizers R.S.A.), but because the name of its culprit became so much a household word that if anyone reading this collection straight through is to have any hope of not knowing in advance whodunit, the only way was to put this mystery novella first.

Maybe giving Cagey Warrington Thursday the kick-off place serves also as my apology to a character who would almost certainly have had a much longer series of her own, had the Realizers/Fanciers tales only taken off commercially during the 1980s.

Let me say here at the outset that I totally reject, as inappropriate to stories set in the speculative future, the old mystery-writers’ taboo against introducing any new toxic substances unknown to science. Science is discovering new substances all the time.

SOMETHING SHADY AT SUNVALE CLINIC

Chapter 1

I met Rob Grove on Tuesday, February 19, 2036. I was almost a quarter of a century old; he was maybe a dozen years older. The three weeks I knew him seemed, at the time, the best three weeks of my life.

In the small hours of Tuesday morning, March 11, he was dead. Of Carmine’s disease, the official personal-access report told us much later that day.

It wasn’t until 2038 that Dr. Georgina Siroonian ever thought to connect Carmine’s disease with Zinkola’s famous secret ingredient just discovered in the last preserved rain forests of the Amazon, Erythoxylon gremlothenia, which turned out to be less potent than vodka on most people but to have serious or deadly effects on a very small minority, the way that bee or wasp venom can be fatal to a tiny percentage of the population. The Zinkola company had gone bankrupt early in the new decade; but caches of cans, plastibulbs, and collectors’ bottles kept turning up in semi-secret circulation among diehard Free 2020s people throughout the 2030s, even after it was proved to be responsible for Carmine’s disease.

Most of the Erythoxylon gremlothenia deaths must have happened when the beverage was at its most popular in ’28, ’29, and ’30, before anyone really noticed—that is, before Dr. Mel Swimming-Beaver Carmine diagnosed the syndrome as a new mystery disease. The earlier deaths must have been chalked up to various other causes; the known victims between when it was named Carmine’s and when it was officially renamed Gremlothenia poisoning eventually numbered 446. That doesn’t seem so many, spaced out over the better part of a decade; but in March of 2036, Carmine’s was still the most feared new sickness of the century. As far as we could see then, it could strike anybody, anywhere, with the speed of lightning, and nobody could figure out how it was transmitted or how long it might take to incubate. For all we knew then, it might have been the start of a new Black Death. There was enough fear of panic that the diagnosis of Carmine’s didn’t appear in Rob’s public obit, only in the personal-access official death report.

My closest personal contact with Rob had consisted of handshakes and two Saturday night kisses with well puckered lips—I may have been a child of the 2020s, but I was a grownup of the 2030s—and I told myself that if Carmine’s could be spread that casually, most of the population would already be dead. I won’t pretend that in my grief about Rob I stopped caring about myself. But until well after the funeral my grief for him came first.

Monday evening, March 10…the start of a perfect date…then that terrible purple rash spreading across his neck up his jawline to his cheeks, looking like a shadow at first in the restaurant’s candlelight…a few coughs, throat clearings, sips of water, and then all at once he was in a fit of coughing, deeper and deeper, finally pitching forward across his framboises glacees…the emergency alarm, the ambulance, the hospital, the attendants gurneying him away behind those sterile ultraviolet doors…the helpless, nightlong waiting, waiting for the cherub-faced old woman, the grandmotherly nurse they always keep for breaking bad news, to appear with her soft hands and soft sympathies that never really help at all…then being sent home with a sedative and Rob’s personal access number, to wait for the posthumous examination report…and they weren’t even very willing to give his personal access number to a mere casual friend, because you weren’t really anything more to him than that, were you, dear? Not yet ...

Then the funeral, arranged and paid for by I didn’t know whom; I only knew that the hospital never called me back, as they’d promised to do if nobody else showed up to claim his body; I had to get the when and where from the public newscreen obituary notices.

I knew they must have had to take part of Rob for the postmortem, but it had been a tactful and partial autopsy, its traces invisible on him as he lay in his casket, almost as handsome as a waxwork effigy and even less like himself. The casket, I supposed, was expensive; at least, it didn’t look cheap, but I’d never had to buy a coffin for anybody. There were heartbreakingly few flowers, though: only five more arrangements besides mine, two of them immense and one so small and so full of the cheapest and gaudiest flowers as to suggest a practical joke. The two immense arrangements had ribbons reading, Dear Friend, and Respected Fried. The tiny one had no ribbon at all.

The last two floral baskets, respectably sized but not flashy, had ribbons reading Dearly Beloved and Good Friend; I suspected they were generic arrangements put there by the funeral parlor in an effort to save appearances, because during the entire visitation evening, the only other person I saw in the small chapel besides myself and the occasionally-appearing funeral director was my employer, who came only to keep me company.

But then, the visitation evening was Tuesday, the evening of the same day he’d died, and the funeral was Wednesday, which gave any family and friends he might have had elsewhere around the country very little time. Today it seems indecently hasty that a person should die between 02:00 and 02:30 hours at night, be postmortemed and in the casket by afternoon of the same day, spend a single evening on view, and go into the crematorium the following morning. But that had become fairly common practice during the 2020s, and even by 2036 we still saw nothing strange in it, especially when a person was transient or little known in town, and/or when something like Carmine’s was the cause of death. It’s funny, how some things can change all at once within just a few months or years, and other things, like funeral practices, can take decades to change. I was only grateful that the authorities allowed one evening of visitation, Carmine’s being such a fearsome disease.

Cagey—my employer—didn’t go to the actual funeral. To her, Rob had been nothing but a male presence who showed up at Warrington House to collect me for a date or bring me home, and who often phoned between whiles for long conversations with me about this and that. Besides, at the funeral home on visitation evening she had slipped while pouring herself a cup of coffee in the hall, overturning a flower pedestal next to the beverage dispenser; and, observing that something like that happened to her every time she entered a funeral home—as if it never happened to her anyplace else—she had declared her intention to start legal inquiries into ways and means of not attending her own funeral. At the time, I resented her joking about such things. But she may have been perfectly serious.

Anyway, Nancy, Gucchi, Harve, and Ilene, my fellow workers at Warrington House, went with me instead, and the five of us made up more than half the attendance.

Not counting the funeral home people, one of whom gave a generic eulogy, there were only four others besides us: a tall woman, a short woman, a short man, and a medium-sized man. The short woman and man were both quite elderly, and I guessed they were senior citizens earning a few tridollars as generic mourners provided, like some of the flowers, by the funeral home for the sake of appearances. Cagey checked with the funeral director some time later and found out in confidence that they were hired mourners; they never came into the story at all except for Rob’s funeral.

I had some suspicion that the other two were hired mourners as well. They were middle-aged and well dressed; but the country’s employment level still hadn’t gotten back to normal from the long decades around the turn of the century, and the funeral home provided suitable clothing for mourners, when necessary. I thought they could be out-of-work actors, though in that case their stony faces, at a time when some show of grief would be appropriate, demonstrated why they’d be out of work as actors. At least the elderly woman had the grace to dab a tissue at her eyes from time to time for her money, and the elderly man to look somber.

That tall, middle-aged woman looked to me so hard and angry, so like Agnes Morehead in a sinister-housekeeper role, that it never occurred to me at all to wonder if I should feel jealous of her. Besides, she looked too old to have been any romantic interest of Rob’s, though not old enough to be his mother. I remember thinking in a misty way that she might have been one of his high-school teachers, except that he was a stranger to this area.

The medium-sized man looked old enough, that day, to be the woman’s husband. All I would have remembered about him, if that had been the only time I ever saw him, was that once I glimpsed a funny little smile playing around his face, and thought that if he was trying to enact grief, he was doing an especially bad job of it.

I don’t believe I ever thought of connecting them with the flowers or funeral arrangements. I must have assumed all those details had been handled by distant relatives, via phone and computer communication lines. I really knew very little about Rob’s life before February, 2036.

When I got home from the funeral, I found my employer rereading Rob’s official death report on the mailroom screen.

Carmine’s, she repeated. You know, Tommi, I’ve never liked that diagnosis. What about the purple rash—

Oh, I wish I’d never seen that ugly purple rash! I cried. I wish it had never been there to see!

For once, neither of us had a recorder going; or if Cagey did, she erased it afterward and never told me. So I’m not at all sure what I said next. Something, I expect, like, I don’t care anyway, what difference does it make? I know I rushed out of the room, because I found myself in my own bedroom in time to drop face down on the bed and have my sob out.

Some employers wouldn’t take any excuse for that sort of outburst, then or now. They’d shake their heads, say, Twenty-twentyish, and deduct time and a half from the offender’s wages, if not worse. As well as I can tabulate, it happens oftener in videoshows and plays than real life, but everybody agrees that acting as I did that afternoon to my employer’s face is in the same unguided behavior pattern that made the 2020s such a lurid decade. When I eventually got back into control of myself, I felt thankful to have the employer I did.

Cagey Warrington Thursday, who never minded if people spelled her first name the way it was pronounced, K.G., was one of those individuals we’ve taken to calling fanciers. She wasn’t really a police detective any more than the Boston Pops is a volcano rock group, for all its occasional selection of Vesixius or Lavular Larvae hits. But Cagey Thursday lived in her own cops-and-robbers world and interpreted her Reformed Constitutional rights-to-be-eccentric as including the right to call herself Sergeant and wear a dollarstore badge.

She was obviously enough a playactor to get away with it most of the time, and rich enough to bail herself out the rare times her act got her in trouble with the real police. She was also rich enough to hire and occasionally bail out a police partner. For almost two years, ever since March of 2034, I had been that paid partner.

It was good employment, and I was still grateful to have stumbled into it a few months after graduation. Of course, with an A.M., even an A.M. in Cinematic Literature, I was probably overqualified. But Cagey paid me four hundred tridols a month—one hundred in real cash, the rest by check-credit to my bank account—more than real pollies were making at that time, and they had to pay their own living expenses out of it, while I got crashspace and meals in the various Warrington properties, all as a fringe of the job.

It could be embarrassing. As a police detective, Cagey often seemed more of a Clouseau than a Dalgleish. But in spite of her clumsinesses, eccentricities, and absentmindednesses, she had brains and a heart.

Far from deploring the Terrible Twenties, Cagey liked to say that she wished she had been able to enjoy them as a grownup; she was only three years older than I. She probably would have enjoyed playing her detective games in that decade. She probably also would have been killed off very early that way. One of her keenest ambitions in the ’30s was to unearth a cache of contraband Zinkola; it wasn’t really illegal, but she could pretend it was.

* * * *

When I finally dried my eyes that Wednesday afternoon, blew my nose, and returned to the Warrington House mailroom, Cagey was gone. She had left a blinking message on the screen: Gone to newsroom. On the desktop beside it, a half-drunk mug of almost cold coffee was making its ring on a printout of Rob’s official death report.

As usual, Cagey had forgotten to switch the unit from Send/Receive to Compose/Edit mode. Her message was going out to any mailscreens that might happen to be on and switched to General Scan. Since nobody watching them would know who had gone to what newsroom, or anything else about the message except that it had been logged 3/12/36 between 16:35:14 and 16:35:20, that hardly mattered. I keyed Cancel/Blank, switched the machine off, returned the mug to the beverageserve’s automatic wash and dispense unit, and went on to my employer’s newsroom.

The newscreen was frozen on Rob’s public obituary. A printout of that lay beneath another half-empty coffee mug. Again I punched off the screen and took care of the mug. A note scrawled in manual highlighter on the margin of the printout said, FILES.

In spite of all that had happened the last few days, I couldn’t help smiling. Whenever I caught up with my employer, her first comment would be to the effect that we had to get everything—mailscreen, newscreen, back files, and all—consolidated into one single, convenient, up-to-date data processing room. We never would. Secretly, she liked walking around from room to room, wing to wing. It gave her plenty of exercise, and it fit in with her perception of Warrington House as a more or less oldfashioned police station.

I went on to the basement room we called our back files. It was much too large. Cagey’s parents, now dividing most of their year between Jamaica and Reykjavik, had planned it as a private triple-lane bowling alley. Cagey had partitioned off one of the lanes, floored it over, lighted it with four ghastly antique bare-bulb ceiling lamps, and lined it with bookshelves and metal filing cabinets salvaged from junkshops. Not that she couldn’t have afforded everything new and deluxe. She preferred the atmosphere of real junk. Seeing that almost everything she considered truly important was on computer disks and microchips, a single filing cabinet would have been enough. The rest of the filing cabinets were filled up with duplicate printouts, the shelves with dusty secondhand books—twenty or thirty of them actual dictionaries, atlases, and other outdated but occasionally useful reference volumes, the rest mainly old textbooks and turn-of-the-century bestsellers. Every now and then, when she found another dictionary, Who’s Who of people most of whom must be dead by now, or stray encyclopedia volume, she would box up an old novel to make room for it; and once or twice a month she would say something about re-sorting her file folders.

This afternoon I found two of the ceiling lights still on, one drawer of the computerforms cabinet partly pulled out, and the screen flashing another message. The screen was the only visible thing in this room that couldn’t have come out of a 1950s movie, and even it was limited-function, strictly for reading, printouts, and messages. This time the message was: Mailroom. Bring your copies.

I glanced around and didn’t see any new printouts. Either she had forgotten to make them, or absentmindedly stuffed them in a file drawer, or left them on top of one of the dangerously balanced piles. Or she might mean the printout sheets she had left in the other rooms. Not that it mattered. I often neglected to bring my copies. It made her feel superior in competence, and she always had copies of her own. I pushed the file drawer shut, switched off the screen and lights, and went back up to the mailroom.

This time Cagey was there, letting yet another mug of coffee cool while she checked the Marltown city directory.

Sergeant, I remarked, trying for a light touch, you may just be accounting for half the electricity used up in Marltown from day to day.

Mm-hmm, she agreed without looking up. One of these days we’re going to have to get all our working data together in one modern processing room.

I caught back a giggle—pure, overstrained nature breaking out at the first scrap of anything that resembled humor. It must have sounded like a sob, because Cagey glanced around at once, her round face full of concern. She looked a bit like a cross between Elsa Lanchester and Angela Lansbury at about age thirty, and she echoed the overall roundness by wearing little eyeglasses, two lenses each one as round as a monocle, with no kind of frame except nosebridge and wire earpieces. She didn’t need them—they were plain window plastiglass—but she liked them as a costume accessory. She perceived them as making her look wise beyond her years. In fact, they made her look rather like a cartoon owl, which may have been close enough.

Feeling all right now, Tommi? she asked gently.

In control again, Sarge, I replied.

Because there won’t be any problem about a temporary reassignment, she went on, if you’d rather not work with me on this case. Being, in a sense, personally involved ...

This case, Sergeant Thursday?

She nodded soberly. Officer Tomlinson, I believe that what we have on our hands here is first-degree homicide.

Chapter 2

Of course. Why else all the printouts? My brain must have been in more of a holding pattern than I’d thought.

We had been to over a dozen oldfashioned murder weekends, but Cagey knew these were purest make-believe. Twice she had even played victim, once according to the pre-arranged scenario and once on her own inspiration, just to keep things lively with an extra and totally inexplicable murder. Unfortunately, she had never solved any of those murder games; but even if she had, I don’t think it would have satisfied her yearning.

News of real crimes, recognized as such, were worthless to her. She had had to give up trying to join forces with the regular police years before; that had been when she decided on hiring her own partner. But she was always on the watch for some real crime that nobody else recognized as one, always scanning newscasts and obits for anything at once suspicious and ignored by the regular police. Two or three times a month we hopped aboard a plane or needletrain and chased some news item to its original state. We’d even been overseas that way. Now and then Cagey succeeded in getting somebody else to agree that yes, there might have been a crime; but at that point, the local police always insisted on taking over. So far, Cagey’s big successes had been finding lost pets and children.

My conscious brain should have clicked the first instant she’d brought up Rob’s purple rash. I suppose I hadn’t quite expected…but then, why shouldn’t she make a case out of Rob’s death? Cagey Warrington Thursday could have made a case out of her own mother’s death, if only as a way of coping with it.

All right, I’d see if I couldn’t make it a way of coping, too. After all, what had he really been to me? A potential husband? A man I could have come to know intimately, but hadn’t known at all a month ago. I had known Cagey a lot longer. How could I let her chase this fancy with who knew what strange sidekick?

Because if I opted out of the case, she would surely hire a new partner for it. I wasn’t worried about being replaced permanently; but on a murder investigation, my employer needed someone familiar, reliable, and of proven responsibility at her side. Following up on Rob’s death should keep her happily occupied for at least as many weeks as I had known him; and steadying her through her self-produced mazes might possibly help me psychodoctor my own way through my personal loss.

So I told her, Sergeant Thursday, I want to work with you on this one. As you say, I’m personally involved. That means I’ve got a personal interest in settling the score.

Good woman! She keyed the mailroom unit to print out the directory page that was showing on the screen. Turning back to me, she went on, Now, do you have your copies of ... No, I see you don’t. Okay, we can both use mine.

Beside the keyboard lay a manila folder two centimeters thick with papers. Cagey grabbed it up by the fold—too quickly and carelessly—and the loose papers flipped out, some landing in a splayed sheaf on the floor, others fluttering down like huge snowflakes, a few skidding to a stop on the edge of the desktop.

Never mind, said Cagey. Sorting documents is the best way to study ’em.

I got down and gathered the sheets that had fallen to the floor, including the ones that slipped the rest of the way off the desk when Cagey started to pick them up. Even though I was used to her methods, I couldn’t understand how she had already found so much to print out regarding the death of Robyn H. Grove. Not until I saw that most of the sheets were public news records of known cases of Carmine’s disease.

There had been, as I recalled, some two or three hundred confirmed cases since Carmine’s first made news in ’31. I wondered if she had a printout for every one.

She collected her copies of the directory page, added them to the folder and its few file sheets that hadn’t reached the floor, said, My office, and left the room. I made sure I had all the rest of the printouts, shook them into a manageable imitation of neatness, switched off the screen, and followed.

Cagey’s office had originally been a guest bedroom in the south wing. Now it had a real, 1960s police station desk—Cagey’s pride and joy—in the middle; an even older antique rolltop desk for the computer in one corner; another old metal filing cabinet opposite; and an overstuffed sofa along one wall, beneath frames holding old photos of obscure people in oldfashioned police uniform and de-acidified clippings from actual twentieth-century pressprinted, woodpulp newspapers.

There were three chairs: Cagey’s swivelchair on rollers behind the desk, and two heavy old straightbacks on the visitors’ side. When we had only one set of printouts at hand, however, we sat on the sofa with the sheaf between us. By the time I got there, Cagey was already sitting on her usual end of the sofa, feet up on one of the straight chairs and two new mugs of coffee, steaming hot from the dispenser, one on the flat of each sofa arm.

I pulled up the other straight chair and used its seat as a ledge for sorting and rearranging the printouts, while Cagey talked, from time to time snatching sheets by singles and pinchfuls to find the data she wanted to illustrate some point. My coffee was the way I liked it: milk, no sugar.

There have been, Cagey said, "to date, two hundred and eighty-seven documented cases of Carmine’s disease, up until Tuesday morning. And not one—not one—of those two hundred and eighty-seven have any purple rash listed among the clear and immediate symptoms."

How did you get all their personal access codes, Sergeant?

Carmine’s is a classified public health hazard, she reminded me. That meant all relevant documentation had to be filed where any qualified researcher could access it; Cagey had gotten the medical researchers’ access code from Verne Tarkinson, a friend with a degree in chemistry, a job in the Warrington Environmental Research Foundation, and a moonlighting role as Cagey’s favorite forensic pathologist. While Verne never postmortemed any human bodies, he could and did run any simple chemical analyses or other such work she fancied needed doing.

Well, not by initial computer check, you must mean, I persisted, sipping my coffee. Surely she couldn’t have read through all 287 reports yet.

Not by initial computer check, she agreed. Which is why I scrolled for the printouts, of course. You take half, I’ll take half, and between us we should have them thoroughly human-eyeballed by tomorrow morning. I’d meant to take out numbers ... let’s see…forty-five, ninety-two, and two hundred thirty-something. One had a purple rash, but it was a proven allergic reaction to some unpronounceable preservative, he’d been suffering from it sporadically for years, and the last attack was already fading by the time he collapsed from Carmine’s. The other two had rashes, but they were orange, almost yellow.

Maybe Rob’s rash was another allergic reaction to something, I suggested. Unrelated to his death. Just…coincidental.

Maybe, she said without enthusiasm. But I doubt it. You’d never seen anything like it on him before, had you?

No. But I only knew him three weeks, and ... never saw more of his skin than his face, neck, and hands. Hard to believe; but I’d never even seen him in short or rolled-up sleeves, as I might have if our three weeks had been in summer rather than winter.

And he never mentioned anything about allergies?

No. But people don’t always know they have them. And they can develop very suddenly.

Did you ever notice him scratching or—

Please, Sergeant! I said. Rob Grove was a perfect gentleman.

She had remarked once or twice, while talking him over with me after a date, that she could never find lifetime happiness with a perfect gentleman. She didn’t repeat it now. Instead, she asked, But you first noticed the rash appear only minutes before the other symptoms?

It was painful, but I closed my eyes and remembered. Right after the appetizers. He had shrimp cocktail.

Which you’d seen him eat before without ill effect.

There might have been something different in the sauce. And by the time dessert came, he was ...

Cagey put her hand on my shoulder. For a few minutes neither of us spoke. At last she said, All this can wait till morning.

No, Sarge, I think I’d just as soon get to it right away.

She cleared her throat. Actually, Tommi, there isn’t that much more to talk about just at this point. What we basically have to go on so far is a remarkably fast diagnosis of Carmine’s disease in spite of a symptom unreported in any earlier known cases. Interestingly, while the official death report under Rob’s name—which we couldn’t have seen without his personal access number—says ‘Carmine’s’ unambiguously, the researchers’ access report that just calls him number two hundred eighty-eight and codes his autopsist as ‘Jamie’ adds a big question mark to the diagnosis, and the public obit calls it a probable case of choking to death.

The public obit just wants to prevent a Carmine’s panic in this locality.

"Agreed. I made printouts of all three documents, but we can probably toss the public obit right away. It’s the other two ... Let’s see, where are they? ... Never mind, I memorized the signature on the death report. James Fitzpatrick Macumber, M.D. Makes ‘Jamie’ a logical code name on the researchers’ access datasheet. A new code, too—

number two eighty-eight was Jamie’s first Carmine’s report. Was Macumber Rob’s regular physician?"

I swallowed and said, I’m afraid we hadn’t reached the stage of swapping health care anecdotes, Sergeant.

No, of course not, why should you? Well, I believe they usually like to get the regular physician in for this kind of work when they can. Although it’s more than possible he didn’t actually have a regular physician, at least not around here in Marltown. She hesitated, as if not quite sure she should tell me something, then went on, He ... uh ... seems to have been a Twenties Floater, Tommi. I looked up the rest of his personal access file, and ... Well, what did he tell you about his past? Came from out of state, didn’t he?

In those days, Floaters was what we called people who were trying to live down their 2020s past by accomplishing a complete change of persona.

It wasn’t that difficult. For one thing, data-collecting and record-keeping had gone more or less haywire everywhere during the 2020s. Then millions of records were lost, thanks to not having been copied soon enough for secondary repositories, when the Great Christmas Quake of December 2029 hit lower California. And after that disaster had shocked us back to sanity, the general attitude of the ’30s was that anyone who wanted to bury a wild ’20s past and live within the law from now on should be left alone to do it in peace and privacy. After all, who hadn’t been doing at least one criminal thing—spending home-printed money—during those years when the Federal Government tried to abolish all pocket coins and currency and force everybody into the electronic creditline system for all transactions? My own parents had run our neighborhood mint for a while; my friends and I used to color the bills with instamarkers after school.

And then, strangely, that other fashion grew up in the ’30s of letting on that you had a lurid ’20s past whether you really had or not. Many, maybe most of the people who redocumented their past lives were probably harmless—fanciers and fashion-hoppers; freesoul eccentrics and protesters against what they called the methodical depersonalization of the National Registration system; people who had broken unpopular laws without breaking popular morality; and the kind of people who in any era find themselves in bad situations, maybe through no fault of their own, and run away into new identities.

From 2033 until 2041 the National Name and Print Directory was open to any access code at all; but in 2036, before the Metterkranz System, it could still take up to a couple of months of computer time to run a full check on all possible identities of any given fingerprint; and even the regular police were rarely interested in going to all that trouble without strong evidence that a Twenties Floater was still committing serious crimes. For almost everybody, the social thing was to accept people’s own word for it about their past lives.

Thinking back over the tidbits Rob had confided to me, I told my employer, He came from Colorado, most recently. He’d also lived in New York, Quebec, Arizona, I think a little town near Mexico City for a while…but he’d been in Marltown for ... let me think…about a year and a half. If Marltown had been the hick village out-of-staters seem to assume it is, I might have met him sooner.

Long enough to stop in somewhere for at least one annual checkup, said Cagey. Assuming he had the checkup habit. For the time being, we may as well assume he did, and that he had his last one either from Macumber or from Macumber’s senior partner in the Sunvale Family Health Clinic. Where is that city directory page? Oh, here!

Turning from the pile of printout sheets between us to the few sheets she herself had carried in and put beneath her mug on the arm of the sofa, she jerked around so quickly that her elbow knocked the mug over. Sluicing black coffee, it bounced to the floor and rolled half a meter across the carpet.

Around her own home, Cagey had long ago learned how to live with such everyday accidents. The mugs were plastichine, top quality, but unbreakable by anything short of a blow from a sledgehammer. The carpeting and as much furniture as possible was coffee-colored, and about a third of the papers tucked away in her files had coffee stains.

Now I got a couple of old towels out of the bottom file drawer and mopped up the worst of the spill, while she returned the mug to the wall-unit washer-dispenser, drew herself a new serving, and spread the most badly splashed printouts on the carpet to dry.

One of the sheets, however, she shook off and brought back to the sofa: her copy of the printout page from the Marltown city directory.

It featured a quarter-screen ad for the Sunvale Family Health Clinic, listing the names of Raisa Rachmaninova Suttler, M.D.; James Fitzpatrick Macumber, M.D.; and Arlington Johnson Coffield, Phar.D.

Chapter 3

Our next step, as Cagey planned it the following morning over a breakfast of pancakes and coffee, was to get into Sunvale Family Health Clinic undercover as new patients. I should call for an appointment as if for a regular yearly checkup, and the same afternoon or morning I had my visit, she would develop a medical emergency and be rushed there. That way, we ought to have the best chance of seeing both physicians, she drawing the one who wasn’t busy with me.

How do you know they’ll rush you to Sunvale Clinic instead of the nearest hospital? I said.

I’ll have a fit in Soleri Shoppers Paradise. It’s no more than a block away down Madden Drive, a mile closer than the nearest hospital, which would be ... let’s see ... St. Lucy’s, isn’t it?

Anyway, it wasn’t Marltown General, where Rob had died.

Relieved that she had decided on a fit instead of staging a minor injury—which could go major for an accident-prone person—I ran down Madden Drive in my own memory. Yes, there was the St. Lucy’s sign outside the tidy white brick building, and another mile to the Soleri mall. But Sunvale might have a standing policy that all Shoppers’ Paradise emergencies go direct to St. Lucy’s in spite of the extra distance.

Come on, Officer Tomlinson! You don’t think they’d be exactly flooded with emergencies at a shopping complex as small as Soleri’s? But if anybody threatens to rush me all the way to St. Lucy’s, I’ll just ‘recover,’ walk out, stage another fit right in front of Sunvale Clinic, and stagger through the door myself with the last twinges of my own failing strength.

It sounds like a good plan, Sergeant, I agreed. But whenever you come in, they’ll probably have to bump one of their regularly scheduled patients for you. Suppose it’s me? Then we’d both end up seeing the same doctor, after all.

She sighed. We’ll just have to take that chance. If it happens, we’ll correlate our data on the medic we both get and find some other way to access the other one. Once you’re established as a clinic’s patient, you can usually get a look at all its medicos, if you go in often enough. But try to get yourself scheduled for a Thursday, Officer Tomlinson. My lucky day.

I pointed out, Today’s a Thursday, Sergeant.

And it’ll be both our lucky day, if you can get in this early. Pushing her swivel chair back, she swung her feet up to her desktop (almost upsetting her In/Out basket), and sipped her third mug of coffee since breakfast. The third mug she had filled, that is. I doubt she had actually drunk more than thirty milliliters all total of her first two mugs.

There might be a way I can do it, Sergeant, I said. Explaining how concerned I am about maybe having contacted Carmine’s.

Excellent, Officer! That’s really— Trying to swing her legs down too abruptly, she set her chair rolling violently backward. It hit the far wall with a rattling thud, knocking a ragged fountain of coffee up from her mug .

She rose and pulled the chair a few centimeters forward to glance at the damage to its finish and the wall’s paint. Make a note for Mickey, she remarked; Mickey being our household maintenance engineer. Then, returning to her desk, she perched herself on its edge, set her nearly empty mug down to make a ring on the nearest pile of papers, and went on, In fact, somebody must be slipping at Marltown General. If Doc ‘Jamie’ Macumber was aware you’d been dating Rob, he should’ve contacted you himself by now.

I said a little bitterly, They can hardly run down all the casual contacts Rob must have made in town.

"But you aren’t really worried about having Carmine’s, are you, Tommi?"

Not really, no, I suppose not, I replied, lying a little; I saw that Cagey couldn’t be worried about it at all, or she’d have come up with the suggestion that I get it checked, rather than just calling for a routine examination. But then, she’d never believed that Rob had had Carmine’s. Still, I couldn’t help adding, it’d be nice to know for sure.

And Carmine’s should be a top priority with clinics and places. She nodded eagerly. Tommi, how come you haven’t made sergeant yet? All right, give it a try. The sooner the better. Let’s see ... it’s oh eight twenty-three now ... Yes, according to their ad, they should’ve been open twenty-three minutes already.

All right, I said. Pulling my chair closer to the desk, I swiveled the phonebox around to face me. It was a convertible unit, with both oldfashioned handheld speaker-receiver; the usual more convenient microphone-amplifier combo; and a vidphone screen, which was still standard equipment at that time.

Handheld receivers had made a comeback in the ’20s, and Cagey liked them for the ambience. I preferred the convenience of the speaker design; so did she, when it was a question of both of us hearing the whole conversation. As for the screen ...

Do I look all right? I asked automatically.

Uh ... no, she replied. That is, I mean, you look fine, Tommi. You always look fine. The trouble is, you look so healthy that if they see you, they may not believe you need an appointment for anything, and put it off three or four months. So don’t use vidphone today. We don’t want to risk them seeing any background that’d give it away you’re phoning from a police station, anyway.

I could phone from another room.

Mmm ... No, better do it right here and just leave the visuals dead. No matter what room you phoned from, there’s always the offchance they’d see something in the background that might identify Warrington House, and we don’t want them making any connection between you and me.

Her unspoken reason might have been that she didn’t like the thought of my getting a look at the face of anyone at Sunvale so long before she did. There were still phones available that could receive visual without sending it, but by the ’30s that was considered frightful phone manners. It was even more rude to printout still photos from your vidphone. And as for recording phone conversations ... Well, that was why she always liked for both of us to hear all our police calls.

Society was suffering one of its strange schizophrenias in this area, because it was common practice to record conversations, as long as all the parties understood it was being done. Consultations with doctors, psychohygienic counselors, lawyers, business and political associates ... some people even said Catholic confessions. The 2020s had given us a sort of sense that the conversations which were not recorded were the illicit ones, that recording a conversation highlighted its honesty. Whether or not any recorded statements could ever be admitted as court evidence was always up to the defense.

People sometimes demanded copies of some of their conversations. A few spectacular cases of the ’20s had created a feeling that it could be safer to be able to demonstrate what you really had said than to depend on the memories or malice of witnesses testifying to what they remembered you as saying.

If not demanded, most conversations ended up erased within a month or two, because people could afford only so much recording matrix and storage space for it; but people still made the recordings, both as professionals and as amateurs. Not that very many people were still carrying around recording devices constantly in operation—by 2036, probably no more than three people in a hundred were doing it. Still, nobody would have thought too much about it if they saw Cagey and me doing it. In fact, everybody who knew Cagey probably assumed it of her and her partner. The only reason we kept our recorders hidden and didn’t change chips unless we could do so without being see was to keep up Cagey’s fanciful scenario of crime detection twentieth-century style.

That was, when we were talking with people face to face. Recording phone conversations secretly was another thing. In the ’30s the Privacy Protection Mandate was beginning to be strictly observed, and flash-and-ping devices to signal recordings in progress were required equipment on all phones. Then, as now, the police always publicly denied ever making unauthorized recordings, and they had cracked down so heavily on Cagey the time she tried to get an electronics specialist to silence her phone recorder and printer, that she had had to live up to that particular guiderule. Sunvale Clinic might record it from their end, with the correctly authorized ping, but what circumstances would let us ask for a copy without looking suspicious?

Keying the phone for audio only, I entered the number from the directory. The chimes played maybe two measures of In the Jolly Old Land of Oz, the familiar recording ping sounded, and then an incredibly vibrant baritone voice said, Good morning, Sunvale Family Health Clinic, Angelo Stavropolos speaking, how may we serve you?

Cagey’s eyebrows shot up. So, probably, did mine. I wished I could see the face that went with that voice; but at the same time, not having run a comb through my hair beforehand, I felt just as glad that the visual was off.

Controlling my voice, I explained that I wanted to make an appointment, and that I’d be a new Sunvale client.

A simple regular checkup, he inquired, or for anything specific? He added a few words about how knowing my needs would help him better determine which of the clinic’s physicians could best service me; I remember that because on hearing it, Cagey rolled her eyes at the ceiling and held up two fingers for the clinic’s two listed M.D.’s.

I told M. Stavropolos that I was afraid I might have contacted Carmine’s disease.

Carmine’s? he responded, and I could almost hear his long-suffering nod. I see. Yes., M., that could be serious, and of course we’ll check it out for you at once. He then ran on for what seemed like five minutes about how very likely it was to be something else, how many minor complaints presented symptoms closely resembling those of Carmine’s, how most of the known cases had clustered around distant population centers, how Carmine’s carried off its known victims so quickly that if I’d had the symptoms longer than six hours it almost had to be something else. All this sounded like a memorized speech, and I wondered at first why he gave it to prospective patients; but by the time he’d finished it, I’d figured out that clinics must get hypochondriac calls by the hundreds about such popular alarm diseases as Carmine’s.

He was obviously building me up for a long wait before my appointment. Cagey had started drumming the pads of her fingertips impatiently on her coffee mug.

At last M. Stavropolos got around to reassuring me how completely competent every member of the Sunvale medical team was at spotting Carmine’s, and asked me if two weeks from ... Monday, I think he said ... would be all right for me. It wasn’t a Thursday, but Cagey threw up her hands—happily her mug was almost empty—and nodded for me to take it anyway.

M. Stavropolos asked for my name, and I gave him my real one, family name first: Tomlinson, Sylvia, Marlene. Then he asked, as if just for the record, what had led me to choose Sunvale Family Health Clinic.

By now it had occurred to me that, if Cagey didn’t want them to make any connection between her and me, maybe she didn’t want them to make any connection between either of us and Rob. So, thinking that we should have foreseen this last question and planned my answer in advance, I shot my employer a glance.

She looked up from mopping the small puddles of coffee that had flown out of her mug on her last wild gesture, and mouthed something at me. Guessing it was Rob’s name, I took the chance and told M. Stavropolos, You were recommended to me by…by M. Grove.

Grove? The receptionist’s tone changed completely. M. Robyn Hopkins Grove? M. Tomlinson, if you’d hold on just a moment, one of our team just came through the door ...

Cagey dropped her rag and leaned over the phonebox as we both listened hard. There was a murmur of voices that sounded some distance away from the Sunvale phone unit; we couldn’t quite make out any of the words.

After a few minutes a different male voice came through at me: Ms. Marlene?

That’s Tomlinson, M., I said politely.

"Tomlinson? Oh, yes, that’s the way Angel took it down, right enough. You’ll have to excuse an old fuddy-dud who was born ’way back before the Reformed System, M. Tomlinson, ’way back when everybody was ‘Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms.’ and the family name was the final name. My own caller’s Macumber, James Fitzpatrick Macumber, M.D. Now, then, you say you got our little clinic’s name from M. Robyn Hopkins Grove?"

"Yes. At least ... I think that Sunvale was the name he mentioned."

Dr. Macumber coughed diplomatically. "M. Tomlinson, may I ask ... you are aware—"

That he died early Tuesday morning. ... Yes, Doctor, I’m the party who accompanied him to the hospital.

I see. And have you actually discovered anything that seems like a symptom in yourself, M. Tomlinson? Or ...

No, Doctor, it’s just that I’d been dating him ...

Right, right, M., we don’t need to go into any of that over the phoneline. Let’s just have a look, here ... Yes, I can work you in today. This afternoon at sixteen thirty, if that’ll be all right?

I think I swallowed before replying. Yes, Dr. Macumber, that will be fine.

After one or two more polite pleasantries, I signed off. Cagey gave the phone a tap to be sure it was dead, and then let out a whooping cheer and sprang up to get herself more coffee. Have you switched the recorder back on for our little conference, Officer Tomlinson?

I had, and said, Yes.

Good. Well, she went on, moderating her outburst, you might have gotten in this morning if you’d said you had Carmine’s symptoms yourself—

I couldn’t have produced them when I got there. Not unless I tried to fake them, and if they saw through my fake, we’d have been out.

"You could’ve said you’d had them and they went away. But who cares? You’re in, that’s the important part, and it gives me most of the day to plan my own strategy. Jamie Macumber sounded doggone anxious to check you, too, Tommi. More anxious than he tried to let on, I’d bet. After all, he’s the one who signed the postmortem ... Which means I’m pretty sure to draw the other one. Dr. Raisa R. Suttler…the senior partner—going by the fact that her name gets top billing in their ad. Cagey stopped, took another look at the printout directory page, and added, tapping it, Y’know, Officer Tomlinson, we shouldn’t forget this third partner, either. Coffield. Coffield, the pharmacist. Yep, we’ll have to keep our eyes peeled for chances to gather data on M. Arlington Johnson Coffield, Phar.D."

Chapter 4

We spent the morning at our home computers looking up everything we could about the partners in Sunvale Clinic.

We could search only Cagey’s own files and the public records in various open-access data repositories. Cagey never acquired more than intermediate computer skills, and my own essential honesty kept me from any wish to learn the tricks of piracy. Besides, even before the ’20s, banks, governments, and other concerns had been learning how to keep their especially sensitive and important data in software and store it out of the machine except when actually needed for use. The Lawless Decade made them do more and more of this sort of thing in order to fight computer crime, and also popularized strictly internal powerpac hardware that couldn’t be patched into by any other computer equipment on electric line or even airwave.

Not much of this caution had yet worn off by 2036. It was probably even harder to rob a bank with computers in the 2030s than it is today. I’d guess it was even harder to get at sensitive private information than it would have been to rob a bank, and that’s considering only the privacy safeguards on the databanks, without adding the factor that up until the Metterkranz System for filing fingerprints, it was still relatively easy to become a missing person under one name and start a completely new life under another name somewhere else. Nowadays it’s difficult to believe how many people did this during the 2020s and early 2030s, especially right after the Great Christmas Quake destroyed thousands of records and documents that hadn’t yet been filed anywhere else.

But what with libraries, newspaper datamorgues, and Cagey’s own collection of reference disks and microchips, we had plenty to keep us busy just gathering the public, nonsensitive data.

Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber had been born Jan. 10, 1996, in Brooklyn, New York. He had earned his M.D. from Columbia, graduating with high honors in 2022; interned at Belleview Hospital; and gone from there to become one of the first members of the medical staff at the brand-new Oshiba Memorial Hospital in Boston, where he had stayed until 2027, when he joined Dr. Suttler in coming to Kentucky and establishing Sunvale Family Health Clinic in Marltown.

His avocation was botany. The way other people spend their nights as amateur astronomers or their summers as volunteers on archeological digs, Dr. Macumber spent his vacations in the last preserved rainforests of South America, Africa, and Asia, collecting new species of plants. He had discovered a number of these new species himself and, after due process, named them or had them named for him. Professor Phylla Walters Walters of Indiana University had gone on public record with the statement that if Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber were a professional botanist he would probably win a Nobel for his work in the field.

Very impressed at the thought that I was going to meet this man in