You can't know there's a war on—for the Snakes
coil and Spiders weave to keep you from knowing
it's being fought over your live and dead body!
CHAPTER 1
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly's done.
When the battle's lost and won.
—Macbeth
ENTER THREE HUSSARS
My name is Greta Forzane.
Twenty-nine and a party
girl would describe
me. I was born in Chicago, of
Scandinavian parents, but now I
operate chiefly outside space and
time—not in Heaven or Hell, if
there are such places, but not in
the cosmos or universe you know
either.
I am not as romantically entrancing
as the immortal film star
who also bears my first name, but
I have a rough-and-ready charm of
my own. I need it, for my job is
to nurse back to health and kid
back to sanity Soldiers badly
roughed up in the biggest war going.
This war is the Change War,
a war of time travelers—in fact, our
private name for being in this war
is being on the Big Time. Our
Soldiers fight by going back to
change the past, or even ahead to
change the future, in ways to help
our side win the final victory a
billion or more years from now.
A long killing business, believe
me.You don't know about the Change War, but it's influencing your lives all the time and maybe you've had hints of it without realizing.
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints of the Change War.
How I got recruited into the Change War, how it's conducted, what the two sides are, why you don't consciously know about it, what I really think about it—you'll learn in due course.
The place outside the cosmos
where I and my pals do our
nursing job I simply call the Place.
A lot of my nursing consists of
amusing and humanizing Soldiers
fresh back from raids into time.
In fact, my formal title is Entertainer
and I've got my silly
side, as you'll find out.
My pals are two other gals and
three guys from quite an assortment
of times and places. We're
a pretty good team, and with Sid
bossing, we run a pretty good Recuperation
Station, though we have
our family troubles. But most of
our troubles come slamming into
the Place with the beat-up Soldiers,
who've generally just been
going through hell and want to
raise some of their own. As a matter
of fact, it was three newly arrived
Soldiers who started this
thing I'm going to tell you about,
this thing that showed me so much
about myself and everything.When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and two thousand nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one thousand. This two-nightmares routine every time you lay down your dizzy little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it.
The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub where the Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated for a party, though a Zeppelin is one thing we haven't had yet. You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with anything from the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look strangely similar except for size.
Solely on doctor's orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since coming to work at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if you care to call them that, for believe me they are busman's holidays, considering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last one I spent in Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got over it. Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be fitted by the Spiders into serious operations of the Change War, and you can imagine how restful that makes them.
"See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don't go too far up front, though, but don't wander off either. Relax and enjoy yourself."
Ha! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they come to the Place is a horse of a far brighter color, simply dazzling by comparison. Entertainment is our business and we give them a bang-up time and send them staggering happily back into action, though once in a great while something may happen to throw a wee shadow on the party.
I am dead in some ways, but
don't let that bother you—I
am lively enough in others. If you
met me in the cosmos, you would
be more apt to yak with me or try
to pick me up than to ask a cop
to do same or a father to douse
me with holy water, unless you
are one of those hard-boiled reformer
types. But you are not likely
to meet me in the cosmos, because
(bar Basin Street and the
Prater) 15th Century Italy and
Augustan Rome—until they spoiled
it—are my favorite (Ha!) vacation
spots and, as I have said, I
stick as close to the Place as I can.
It is really the nicest Place in the
whole Change World. (Crisis! I
even think of it capitalized!)
Anyhoo, when this thing started,
I was twiddling my thumbs on
the couch nearest the piano and
thinking it was too late to do my
fingernails and whoever came in
probably wouldn't notice them anyway.The Place was jumpy like it always is on an approach and the gray velvet of the Void around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when you close your eyes in the dark.
Sid was tuning the Maintainers for the pick-up and the right shoulder of his gold-worked gray doublet was streaked where he'd been wiping his face on it with quick ducks of his head.
Beauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid's other shoulder, one white-trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control divan, and he wasn't missing a single flicker of Sid's old fingers on the dials; Beau's co-pilot besides piano player. Beau's face had that dead blank look it must have had when every double eagle he owned and more he didn't were riding on the next card to be turned in the gambling saloon on one of those wedding-cake Mississippi steamboats.
Doc was soused as usual, sitting at the bar with his top hat pushed back and his knitted shawl pulled around him, his wide eyes seeing whatever horrors a life in Nazi-occupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk Demon in the Change World.
Maud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili—the New Girl, of course—were telling the big beads of their identical pearl necklaces.
You might say that all us Entertainers were a bit edgy; being Demons doesn't automatically make us brave.
Then the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door began to darken in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds blowing hard and my heart missed a couple of beats, and the next thing three Soldiers had stepped out of the cosmos and into the Place, their first three steps hitting the floor hard as they changed times and weights.
They were dressed as officers
of hussars, as we'd been advised,
and—praise the Bonny Dew!—I
saw that the first of them was
Erich, my own dear little commandant,
the pride of the von Hohenwalds
and the Terror of the
Snakes. Behind him was some
hard-faced Roman or other, and
beside Erich and shouldering into
him as they stamped forward was
a new boy, blond, with a face like
a Greek god who's just been touring
a Christian hell.
They were uniformed exactly
alike in black—shakos, fur-edged
pelisses, boots, and so forth—with
white skull emblems on the shakos.
The only difference between them
was that Erich had a Caller on his
wrist and the New Boy had a
black-gauntleted glove on his left
hand and was clenching the mate
in it, his right hand being bare like
both of Erich's and the Roman's."You've made it, lads, hearts of gold," Sid boomed at them, and Beau twitched a smile and murmured something courtly and Maud began to chant, "Shut the Door!" and the New Girl copied her and I joined in because the Change Winds do blow like crazy when the Door is open, even though it can't ever be shut tight enough to keep them from leaking through.
"Shut it before it blows wrinkles in our faces," Maud called in her gamin voice to break the ice, looking like a skinny teen-ager in the tight, knee-length frock she'd copied from the New Girl.
But the three Soldiers weren't paying attention. The Roman—I remembered his name was Mark—was blundering forward stiffly as if there were something wrong with his eyes, while Erich and the New Boy were yelling at each other about a kid and Einstein and a summer palace and a bloody glove and the Snakes having booby-trapped Saint Petersburg. Erich had that taut sadistic smile he gets when he wants to hit me.
The New Boy was in a tearing rage. "Why'd you pull us out so bloody fast? We fair chewed the Nevsky Prospekt to pieces galloping away."
"Didn't you feel their stun guns, Dummkopf, when they sprung the trap—too soon, Gott sei Dank?" Erich demanded.
"I did," the New Boy told him. "Not enough to numb a cat. Why didn't you show us action?"
"Shut up. I'm your leader. I'll show you action enough."
"You won't. You're a filthy Nazi coward."
"Weibischer Engländer!"
"Bloody Hun!"
"Schlange!"
The blond lad knew enough German to understand that last crack. He threw back his sable-edged pelisse to clear his sword arm and he swung away from Erich, which bumped him into Beau. At the first sign of the quarrel, Beau had raised himself from the divan as quickly and silently as a—no, I won't use that word—and slithered over to them.
"Sirs, you forget yourselves," he said sharply, off balance, supporting himself on the New Boy's upraised arm. "This is Sidney Lessingham's Place of Entertainment and Recuperation. There are ladies—"
With a contemptuous snarl,
the New Boy shoved him
off and snatched with his bare
hand for his saber. Beau reeled
against the divan, it caught him
in the shins and he fell toward
the Maintainers. Sid whisked them
out of the way as if they were a
couple of beach radios—simply
nothing in the Place is nailed down—and
had them back on the coffee
table before Beau hit the floor.
Meanwhile, Erich had his saber
out and had parried the New
Boy's first wild slash and lunged
in return, and I heard the scream
of steel and the rutch of his boot
on the diamond-studded pavement.
Beau rolled over and came up
pulling from the ruffles of his
shirt bosom a derringer I knew
was some other weapon in disguise—a
stun gun or even an Atropos.
Besides scaring me damp for Erich
and everybody, that brought me
up short: us Entertainers' nerves
must be getting as naked as the
Soldiers', probably starting when
the Spiders canceled all cosmic
leaves twenty sleeps back.
Sid shot Beau his look of command,
rapped out, "I'll handle this,
you whoreson firebrand," and
turned to the Minor Maintainer. I
noticed that the telltale on the
Major was glowing a reassuring
red again, and I found a moment
to thank Mamma Devi that the
Door was shut.Maud was jumping up and down, cheering I don't know which—nor did she, I bet—and the New Girl was white and I saw that the sabers were working more businesslike. Erich's flicked, flicked, flicked again and came away from the blond lad's cheek spilling a couple of red drops. The blond lad lunged fiercely, Erich jumped back, and the next moment they were both floating helplessly in the air, twisting like they had cramps.
I realized quick enough that Sid had shut off gravity in the Door and Stores sectors of the Place, leaving the rest of us firm on our feet in the Refresher and Surgery sectors. The Place has sectional gravity to suit our Extraterrestrial buddies—those crazy ETs sometimes come whooping in for recuperation in very mixed batches.
From his central position, Sid called out, kindly enough but taking no nonsense, "All right, lads, you've had your fun. Now sheathe those swords."
For a second or so, the two black hussars drifted and contorted. Erich laughed harshly and neatly obeyed—the commandant is used to free fall. The blond lad stopped writhing, hesitated while he glared upside down at Erich and managed to get his saber into its scabbard, although he turned a slow somersault doing it. Then Sid switched on their gravity, slow enough so they wouldn't get sprained landing.
Erich laughed, lightly this
time, and stepped out briskly
toward us. He stopped to clap the
New Boy firmly on the shoulder
and look him in the face.
"So, now you get a good scar,"
he said.The other didn't pull away, but he didn't look up and Erich came on. Sid was hurrying toward the New Boy, and as he passed Erich, he wagged a finger at him and gayly said, "You rogue." Next thing I was giving Erich my "Man, you're home" hug and he was kissing me and cracking my ribs and saying, "Liebchen! Doppchen!"—which was fine with me because I do love him and I'm a good lover and as much a Doubleganger as he is.
We had just pulled back from each other to get a breath—his blue eyes looked so sweet in his worn face—when there was a thud behind us. With the snapping of the tension, Doc had fallen off his bar stool and his top hat was over his eyes. As we turned to chuckle at him, Maud squeaked and we saw that the Roman had walked straight up against the Void and was marching along there steadily without gaining a foot, like it does happen, his black uniform melting into that inside-your-head gray.
Maud and Beau rushed over to fish him back, which can be tricky. The thin gambler was all courtly efficiency again. Sid supervised from a distance.
"What's wrong with him?" I asked Erich.
He shrugged. "Overdue for Change Shock. And he was nearest the stun guns. His horse almost threw him. Mein Gott, you should have seen Saint Petersburg, Liebchen: the Nevsky Prospekt, the canals flying by like reception carpets of blue sky, a cavalry troop in blue and gold that blundered across our escape, fine women in furs and ostrich plumes, a monk with a big tripod and his head under a hood—it gave me the horrors seeing all those Zombies flashing past and staring at me in that sick unawakened way they have, and knowing that some of them, say the photographer, might be Snakes."
Our side in the Change War is the Spiders, the other side is the Snakes, though all of us—Spiders and Snakes alike—are Doublegangers and Demons too, because we're cut out of our lifelines in the cosmos. Your lifeline is all of you from birth to death. We're Doublegangers because we can operate both in the cosmos and outside of it, and Demons because we act reasonably alive while doing so—which the Ghosts don't. Entertainers and Soldiers are all Demon-Doublegangers, whichever side they're on—though they say the Snake Places are simply ghastly. Zombies are dead people whose lifelines lie in the so-called past.
"What were you doing in
Saint Petersburg before the
ambush?" I asked Erich. "That is,
if you can talk about it."
"Why not? We were kidnapping
the infant Einstein back from the
Snakes in 1883. Yes, the Snakes
got him, Liebchen, only a few
sleeps back, endangering the West's
whole victory over Russia—""—which gave your dear little Hitler the world on a platter for fifty years and got me loved to death by your sterling troops in the Liberation of Chicago—"
"—but which leads to the ultimate victory of the Spiders and the West over the Snakes and Communism, Liebchen, remember that. Anyway, our counter-snatch didn't work. The Snakes had guards posted—most unusual and we weren't warned. The whole thing was a great mess. No wonder Bruce lost his head—not that it excuses him."
"The New Boy?" I asked. Sid hadn't got to him and he was still standing with hooded eyes where Erich had left him, a dark pillar of shame and rage.
"Ja, a lieutenant from World War One. An Englishman."
"I gathered that," I told Erich. "Is he really effeminate?"
"Weibischer?" He smiled. "I had to call him something when he said I was a coward. He'll make a fine Soldier—only needs a little more shaping."
"You men are so original when you spat." I lowered my voice. "But you shouldn't have gone on and called him a Snake, Erich mine."
"Schlange?" The smile got crooked. "Who knows—about any of us? As Saint Petersburg showed me, the Snakes' spies are getting cleverer than ours." The blue eyes didn't look sweet now. "Are you, Liebchen, really nothing more than a good loyal Spider?"
"Erich!"
"All right, I went too far—with Bruce and with you too. We're all hacked these days, riding with one leg over the breaking edge."
Maud and Beau were supporting the Roman to a couch, Maud taking most of his weight, with Sid still supervising and the New Boy still sulking by himself. The New Girl should have been with him, of course, but I couldn't see her anywhere and I decided she was probably having a nervous breakdown in the Refresher, the little jerk.
"The Roman looks pretty bad, Erich," I said.
"Ah, Mark's tough. Got virtue, as his people say. And our little starship girl will bring him back to life if anybody can and if ..."
"... you call this living," I filled in dutifully.
He was right. Maud had fifty-odd
years of psychomedical
experience, 23rd Century at that.
It should have been Doc's job, but
that was fifty drunks back.
"Maud and Mark, that will be
an interesting experiment," Erich
said. "Reminiscent of Goering's
with the frozen men and the naked
gypsy girls.""You are a filthy Nazi. She'll be using electrophoresis and deep suggestion, if I know anything."
"How will you be able to know anything, Liebchen, if she switches on the couch curtains, as I perceive she is preparing to do?"
"Filthy Nazi I said and meant."
"Precisely." He clicked his heels and bowed a millimeter. "Erich Friederich von Hohenwald, Oberleutnant in the army of the Third Reich. Fell at Narvik, where he was Recruited by the Spiders. Lifeline lengthened by a Big Change after his first death and at latest report Commandant of Toronto, where he maintains extensive baby farms to provide him with breakfast meat, if you believe the handbills of the voyageurs underground. At your service."
"Oh, Erich, it's all so lousy," I said, touching his hand, reminded that he was one of the unfortunates Resurrected from a point in their lifelines well before their deaths—in his case, because the date of his death had been shifted forward by a Big Change after his Resurrection. And as every Demon finds out, if he can't imagine it beforehand, it is pure hell to remember your future, and the shorter the time between your Resurrection and your death back in the cosmos, the better. Mine, bless Bab-ed-Din, was only an action-packed ten minutes on North Clark Street.
Erich put his other hand lightly over mine. "Fortunes of the Change War, Liebchen. At least I'm a Soldier and sometimes assigned to future operations—though why we should have this monomania about our future personalities back there, I don't know. Mine is a stupid Oberst, thin as paper—and frightfully indignant at the voyageurs! But it helps me a little if I see him in perspective and at least I get back to the cosmos pretty regularly, Gott sei Dank, so I'm better off than you Entertainers."
I didn't say aloud that a Changing cosmos is worse than none, but I found myself sending a prayer to the Bonny Dew for my father's repose, that the Change Winds would blow lightly across the lifeline of Anton A. Forzane, professor of physiology, born in Norway and buried in Chicago. Woodlawn Cemetery is a nice gray spot.
"That's all right, Erich," I said. "We Entertainers Got Mittens too."
He scowled around at me suspiciously, as if he were wondering whether I had all my buttons on.
"Mittens?" he said. "What do you mean? I'm not wearing any. Are you trying to say something about Bruce's gloves—which incidentally seem to annoy him for some reason. No, seriously, Greta, why do you Entertainers need mittens?"
"Because we get cold feet sometimes. At least I do. Got Mittens, as I say."
A sickly light dawned in his
Prussian puss. He muttered,
"Got mittens ... Gott mit uns ...
God with us," and roared softly,
"Greta, I don't know how I put up
with you, the way you murder
a great language for cheap laughs."
"You've got to take me as I am,"
I told him, "mittens and all, thank
the Bonny Dew—" and hastily explained,
"That's French—le bon
Dieu—the good God—don't hit
me. I'm not going to tell you any
more of my secrets."He laughed feebly, like he was dying.
"Cheer up," I said. "I won't be here forever, and there are worse places than the Place."
He nodded grudgingly, looking around. "You know what, Greta, if you'll promise not to make some dreadful joke out of it: on operations, I pretend I'll soon be going backstage to court the world-famous ballerina Greta Forzane."
He was right about the backstage part. The Place is a regular theater-in-the-round with the Void for an audience, the Void's gray hardly disturbed by the screens masking Surgery (Ugh!), Refresher and Stores. Between the last two are the bar and kitchen and Beau's piano. Between Surgery and the sector where the Door usually appears are the shelves and taborets of the Art Gallery. The control divan is stage center. Spaced around at a fair distance are six big low couches—one with its curtains now shooting up into the gray—and a few small tables. It is like a ballet set and the crazy costumes and characters that turn up don't ruin the illusion. By no means. Diaghilev would have hired most of them for the Ballet Russe on first sight, without even asking them whether they could keep time to music.
CHAPTER 2
Last week in Babylon,
Last night in Rome,
—Hodgson
A RIGHT-HAND GLOVE
Beau had gone behind the bar
and was talking quietly at
Doc, but with his eyes elsewhere,
looking very sallow and professional
in his white, and I thought—Damballa!—I'm
in the French
Quarter. I couldn't see the New
Girl. Sid was at last getting to
the New Boy after the fuss about
Mark. He threw me a sign and I
started over with Erich in tow.
"Welcome, sweet lad. Sidney
Lessingham's your host, and a fellow
Englishman. Born in King's
Lynn, 1564, schooled at Cambridge,
but London was the life and death
of me, though I outlasted Bessie,
Jimmie, Charlie, and Ollie almost.
And what a life! By turns a clerk,
a spy, a bawd—the two trades
are hand in glove—a poet of no
account, a beggar, and a peddler of
resurrection tracts. Beau Lassiter,
our throats are tinder!"At the word "poet," the New Boy looked up, but resentfully, as if he had been tricked into it.
"And to spare your throat for drinking, sweet gallant, I'll be so bold as to guess and answer one of your questions," Sid rattled on. "Yes, I knew Will Shakespeare—we were of an age—and he was such a modest, mind-your-business rogue that we all wondered whether he really did write those plays. Your pardon, 'faith, but that scratch might be looked to."
Then I saw that the New Girl hadn't lost her head, but gone to Surgery (Ugh!) for a first-aid tray. She reached a swab toward the New Boy's sticky cheek, saying rather shrilly, "If I might ..."
Her timing was bad. Sid's last words and Erich's approach had darkened the look in the young Soldier's face and he angrily swept her arm aside without even glancing at her. Erich squeezed my arm. The tray clattered to the floor—and one of the drinks that Beau was bringing almost followed it. Ever since the New Girl's arrival, Beau had been figuring that she was his responsibility, though I don't think the two of them had reached an agreement yet. Beau was especially set on it because I was thick with Sid at the time and Maud with Doc, she loving tough cases.
"Easy now, lad, and you love me!" Sid thundered, again shooting Beau the "Hold it" look. "She's just a poor pagan trying to comfort you. Swallow your bile, you black villain, and perchance it will turn to poetry. Ah, did I touch you there? Confess, you are a poet."
There isn't much gets by Sid,
though for a second I forgot
my psychology and wondered if
he knew what he was doing with
his insights.
"Yes, I'm a poet, all right," the
New Boy roared. "I'm Bruce Marchant,
you bloody Zombies. I'm
a poet in a world where even the
lines of the King James and your
precious Will whom you use for
laughs aren't safe from Snakes'
slime and the Spiders' dirty legs.
Changing our history, stealing our
certainties, claiming to be so blasted
all-knowing and best intentioned
and efficient, and what does it lead
to? This bloody SI glove!"He held up his black-gloved left hand which still held the mate and he shook it.
"What's wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?" Sid demanded. "And you love us, tell us." While Erich laughed, "Consider yourself lucky, Kamerad. Mark and I didn't draw any gloves at all."
"What's wrong with it?" Bruce yelled. "The bloody things are both lefts!" He slammed it down on the floor.
We all howled, we couldn't help it. He turned his back on us and stamped off, though I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed my arm and said between gasps, "Mein Gott, Liebchen, what have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!"
One of us didn't laugh. Ever since the New Girl heard the name Bruce Marchant, she'd had a look in her eyes like she'd been given the sacrament. I was glad she'd got interested in something, because she'd been pretty much of a snoot and a wet blanket up until now, although she'd come to the Place with the recommendation of having been a real whoopee girl in London and New York in the Twenties. She looked disapprovingly at us as she gathered up the tray and stuff, not forgetting the glove, which she placed on the center of the tray like a holy relic.
Beau cut over and tried to talk
to her, but she ghosted past him
and once again he couldn't do
anything because of the tray in his
hands. He came over and got rid
of the drinks quick. I took a big
gulp right away because I saw
the New Girl stepping through the
screen into Surgery and I hate
to be reminded we have it and
I'm glad Doc is too drunk to use
it, some of the Arachnoid surgical
techniques being very sickening
as I know only too well from a
personal experience that is number
one on my list of things to be
forgotten.
By that time, Bruce had come
back to us, saying in a carefully
hard voice, "Look here, it's not
the dashed glove itself, as you very
well know, you howling Demons.""What is it then, noble heart?" Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard heightening the effect of innocent receptivity.
"It's the principle of the thing," Bruce said, looking around sharply, but none of us cracked a smile. "It's this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos—and don't tell me that isn't in the cards!—masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders—and we don't know who they are ultimately; it's just a name; we see only agents like ourselves—the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of our lifelines—"
"Is that bad, lad?" Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced.
"—and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another time-traveling power called the Snakes—just a name, too—which is bent on perverting and enslaving the whole cosmos, past, present and future."
"And isn't it, lad?"
"Before we're properly awake, we're Recruited into the Big Time and hustled into tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserable closets, gray sacks, puss pockets—no offense to this Place—that the Spiders have created, maybe by gigantic implosions, but no one knows for certain, and then we're sent off on all sorts of missions into the past and future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart the Snakes."
"True, lad."
"And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks come so fast, our emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public and private metaphysics distorted so insanely, the deepest thread of reality we cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can get things straight."
"We've all felt that way, lad," Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek death's head; "You should have seen me, Kamerad, my first fifty sleeps," Erich put in; while I added, "Us girls, too, Bruce."
"Oh, I know I'll get hardened to it, and don't think I can't. It's not that," Bruce said harshly. "And I wouldn't mind the personal confusion, the mess it's made of my spirit, I wouldn't even mind remaking history and destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past, if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart the Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the East. But what have they done to achieve this? I'll give you some beautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key."
"You got time for culture?"
I heard myself say and I
clapped my hand over my mouth
in gentle reproof.
"But you remember the dialogues,
lad," Sid observed. "And
rail not at Crete—I have a sweet
Keftian friend.""For how long will I remember Plato's dialogues? And who after me?" Bruce challenged. "Here's another. The Spiders want Rome powerful and, to date, they've helped Rome so much that she collapses in a blaze of German and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of Julius Caesar."
This time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place loves these bull sessions. "You omit to mention, sir, that Rome's newest downfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes have fomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power futurewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever letting it pass into the hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is the Snakes' Three-Thousand-Year Plan which we are fighting against, striving to revive Rome's glories."
"Striving is the word for it," Bruce snapped. "Here's yet another example. To beat Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out of World War Two, thereby ensuring a German invasion of the New World and creating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!"
He stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chanting in a weird spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow.
"Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Kein' Peitsch', gnädige Herren. Salz, Salz, Salz."
I turned and there was Doc waltzing toward us with little tiny steps, bent over so low that the ends of his shawl touched the floor, his head crooked up sideways and looking through us.
I knew then, but Erich translated softly. "'Salt, salt, I bring salt. No whip, merciful sirs.' He is speaking to my countrymen in their language." Doc had spent his last months in a Nazi-operated salt mine.
He saw us and got up, straightening
his top hat very carefully.
He frowned hard while my
heart thumped half a dozen times.
Then his face slackened, he
shrugged his shoulders and muttered,
"Nichevo."
"And it does not matter, sir,"
Beau translated, but directing his
remark at Bruce. "True, great civilizations
have been dwarfed or
broken by the Change War. But
others, once crushed in the bud,
have bloomed. In the 1870s, I
traveled a Mississippi that had
never known Grant's gunboats. I
studied piano, languages, and the
laws of chance under the greatest
European masters at the University
of Vicksburg.""And you think your pipsqueak steamboat culture is compensation for—" Bruce began but, "Prithee none of that, lad," Sid interrupted smartly. "Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards, and I'll drink dead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so puny as to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no, nor with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and nerves of brass. Waste not your pity on them."
"True indeed, sir," Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack on his Greater South. "Most of us enter the Change World with the false metaphysic that the slightest change in the past—a grain of dust misplaced—will transform the whole future. It is a long while before we accept with our minds as well as our intellects the law of the Conservation of Reality: that when the past is changed, the future changes barely enough to adjust, barely enough to admit the new data. The Change Winds meet maximum resistance always. Otherwise the first operation in Babylonia would have wiped out New Orleans, Sheffield, Stuttgart, and Maud Davies' birthplace on Ganymede!
"Note how the gap left by Rome's collapse was filled by the imperialistic and Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historian can tell the difference in most ages between the former Latin and the present Gothic Catholic Church. As you yourself, sir, said of Greece, it is as if an old melody were shifted into a slightly different key. In the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it's true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless accidents."
"All right, you bloody savants—maybe I pushed my point too far," Bruce growled. "But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methods we use in our wonderful Change War. Poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra. Kidnapping Einstein when he's a baby."
"The Snakes did it first," I reminded him.
"Yes, and we copied them. How resourceful does that make us?" he retorted, arguing like a woman. "If we need Einstein, why don't we Resurrect him, deal with him as a man?"
Beau said, serving his culture
in slightly thicker slices, "Pardonnez-moi,
but when you have
enjoyed your status as Doubleganger
a soupcon longer, you will
understand that great men can
rarely be Resurrected. Their beings
are too crystallized, sir, their
lifelines too tough."
"Pardon me, but I think that's
rot. I believe that most great men
refuse to make the bargain with
the Snakes, or with us Spiders
either. They scorn Resurrection
at the price demanded.""Brother, they ain't that great," I whispered, while Beau glided on with, "However that may be, you have accepted Resurrection, sir, and so incurred an obligation which you as a gentleman must honor."
"I accepted Resurrection all right," Bruce said, a glare coming into his eyes. "When they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '17 ten minutes before I died, I grabbed at the offer of life like a drunkard grabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I was also seizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace." His voice was getting wilder all the time. Just beyond our circle, I noticed the New Girl watching him worshipfully. "But what did I find the Spiders wanted me for? Only to fight more wars, over and over again, make them crueler and stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each Big Change, work our way a little closer to the death of the cosmos."
Sid touched my wrist and, as Bruce raved on, he whispered to me, "What kind of ball, think you, will please and so quench this fire-brained rogue? And you love me, discover it."
I whispered back without taking my eyes off Bruce either, "I know somebody who'll be happy to put on any kind of ball he wants, if he'll just notice her."
"The New Girl, sweetling? 'Tis well. This rogue speaks like an angry angel. It touches my heart and I like it not."
Bruce was saying hoarsely but loudly, "And so we're sent on operations in the past and from each of those operations the Change Winds blow futurewards, swiftly or slowly according to the opposition they breast, sometimes rippling into each other, and any one of those Winds may shift the date of our own death ahead of the date of our Resurrection, so that in an instant—even here, outside the cosmos—we may molder and rot or crumble to dust and vanish away. The wind with our name in it may leak through the Door."
Faces hardened at that, because
it's bad form to mention
Change Death, and Erich flared
out with, "Halt's Maul, Kamerad!
There's always another Resurrection."
But Bruce didn't keep his mouth
shut. He said, "Is there? I know
the Spiders promise it, but even
if they do go back and cut another
Doubleganger from my lifeline,
is he me?" He slapped his
chest with his bare hand. "I don't
think so. And even if he is me, with
unbroken consciousness, why's he
been Resurrected again? Just to
refight more wars and face more
Change Death for the sake of an
almighty power—" his voice was
rising to a climax—"an almighty
power so bloody ineffectual, it
can't furnish one poor Soldier
pulled out of the mud of Passchendaele,
one miserable Change
Commando, one Godforsaken Recuperee
a proper issue of equipment!"And he held out his bare right hand toward us, fingers spread a little, as if it were the most amazing object and most deserving of outraged sympathy in the whole world.
The New Girl's timing was perfect. She whisked through us, and before he could so much as wiggle the fingers, she whipped a black gauntleted glove on it and anyone could see that it fitted his hand perfectly.
This time our laughing beat the other. We collapsed and slopped our drinks and pounded each other on the back and then started all over.
"Ach, der Handschuh, Liebchen! Where'd she get it?" Erich gasped in my ear.
"Probably just turned the other one inside out—that turns a left into a right—I've done it myself," I wheezed, collapsing again at the idea.
"That would put the lining outside," he objected.
"Then I don't know," I said. "We got all sorts of junk in Stores."
"It doesn't matter, Liebchen," he assured me. "Ach, der Handschuh!"
All through it, Bruce just stood there admiring the glove, moving the fingers a little now and then, and the New Girl stood watching him as if he were eating a cake she'd baked.
When the hysteria quieted
down, he looked up at her
with a big smile. "What did you
say your name was?"
"Lili," she said, and believe you
me, she was Lili to me even in
my thoughts from then on, for the
way she'd handled that lunatic."Lilian Foster," she explained. "I'm English also. Mr. Marchant, I've read A Young Man's Fancy I don't know how many times."
"You have? It's wretched stuff. From the Dark Ages—I mean my Cambridge days. In the trenches, I was working up some poems that were rather better."
"I won't hear you say that. But I'd be terribly thrilled to hear the new ones. Oh, Mr. Marchant, it was so strange to hear you call it Passiondale."
"Why, if I may ask?"
"Because that's the way I pronounce it to myself. But I looked it up and it's more like Pas-ken-DA-luh."
"Bless you! All the Tommies called it Passiondale, just as they called Ypres Wipers."
"How interesting. You know, Mr. Marchant, I'll wager we were Recruited in the same operation, summer of 1917. I'd got to France as a Red Cross nurse, but they found out my age and were going to send me back."
"How old were you—are you? Same thing, I mean to say."
"Seventeen."
"Seventeen in '17," Bruce murmured, his blue eyes glassy.
It was real corny dialogue and I couldn't resent the humorous leer Erich gave me as we listened to them, as if to say, "Ain't it nice, Liebchen, Bruce has a silly little English schoolgirl to occupy him between operations?"
Just the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklace and tight little gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Bruce hulking over her tenderly in his snazzy hussar's rig, I knew that I was seeing the start of something that hadn't been part of me since Dave died fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort of thing that almost made me wish there could be children in the Change World. I wondered why I'd never thought of trying to work things so that Dave got Resurrected and I told myself: no, it's all changed, I've changed, better the Change Winds don't disturb Dave or I know about it.
"No, I didn't die in 1917—I was merely Recruited then," Lili was telling Bruce. "I lived all through the Twenties, as you can see from the way I dress. But let's not talk about that, shall we? Oh, Mr. Marchant, do you think you can possibly remember any of those poems you started in the trenches? I can't fancy them bettering your sonnet that concludes with, 'The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep; Look at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.'"
That one almost made me whoop—what monkeys we are, I thought—though I'd be the first to admit that the best line to use on a poet is one of his own—in fact, as many as possible. I decided I could safely forget our little Britons and devote myself to Erich or whatever needed me.
CHAPTER 3
Hell is the place for me. For to
Hell go the fine churchmen, and
the fine knights, killed in the
tourney or in some grand war,
the brave soldiers and the gallant
gentlemen. With them will
I go. There go also the fair
gracious ladies who have lovers
two or three beside their lord.
There go the gold and the silver,
the sables and ermine. There
go the harpers and the minstrels
and the kings of the earth.
—Aucassin
NINE FOR A PARTY
I exchanged my drink for
a new one from another tray
Beau was bringing around. The
gray of the Void was beginning
to look real pleasant, like warm
thick mist with millions of tiny
diamonds floating in it. Doc was
sitting grandly at the bar with a
steaming tumbler of tea—a chaser,
I guess, since he was just putting
down a shot glass. Sid was talking
to Erich and laughing at the same
time and I said to myself it begins
to feel like a party, but something's
lacking.
It wasn't anything to do with
the Major Maintainer; its telltale
was glowing a steady red like a
nice little home fire amid the tight
cluster of dials that included all
the controls except the lonely and
frightening Introversion switch that
was never touched. Then Maud's
couch curtains winked out and
there were she and the Roman
sitting quietly side by side.He looked down at his shiny boots and the rest of his black duds like he was just waking up and couldn't believe it all, and he said, "Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis," and I raised my eyebrows at Beau, who was taking the tray back, and he did proud by old Vicksburg by translating: "All things change and we change with them."
Then Mark slowly looked around at us, and I can testify that a Roman smile is just as warm as any other nationality, and he finally said, "We are nine, the proper number for a party. The couches, too. It is good."
Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, "Welcome back from the Void, Kamerad," and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, "Herren und Damen, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them all, Marcus Vipsaius Niger, legate to Nero Claudius (called Germanicus in a former time stream) and who in 763 A.U.C. (Correct, Mark? It means 10 A.D., you meatheads!) died bravely fighting the Parthians and the Snakes in the Battle of Alexandria. Hoch, hoch, hoch!"
We all swung our glasses and
cheered with him and Sid
yelled at Erich, "Keep your feet
off the furniture, you unschooled
rogue," and grinned and boomed
at all three hussars, "Take your
ease, Recuperees," and Maud and
Mark got their drinks, the Roman
paining Beau by refusing Falernian
wine in favor of scotch and
soda, and right away everyone was
talking a mile a minute.
We had a lot to catch up on.
There was the usual yak about the
war—"The Snakes are laying mine
fields in the Void," "I don't believe
it, how can you mine nothing?"—and
the shortages—bourbon, bobby
pins, and the stabilitin that would
have brought Mark out of it faster—and
what had become of people—"Marcia?
Oh, she's not around
any more," (She'd been caught in
a Change Gale and green and
stinking in five seconds, but I
wasn't going to say that)—and
Mark had to be told about Bruce's
glove, which convulsed us all over
again, and the Roman remembered
a legionary who had carried a gripe
all the way to Octavius because
he'd accidentally been issued the
unbelievable luxury item sugar instead
of the usual salt, and Erich
asked Sid if he had any new Ghostgirls
in stock and Sid sucked his
beard like the old goat he is. "Dost
thou ask me, lusty Allemand? Nay,
there are several great beauties,
amongst them an Austrian countess
from Strauss's Vienna, and if it
were not for sweetling here ...
Mnnnn."I poked a finger in Erich's chest between two of the bright buttons with their tiny death's heads. "You, my little von Hohenwald, are a menace to us real girls. You have too much of a thing about the unawakened, ghost kind."
He called me his little Demon and hugged me a bit too hard to prove it wasn't so, and then he suggested we show Bruce the Art Gallery. I thought this was a real brilliant idea, but when I tried to argue him out of it, he got stubborn. Bruce and Lili were willing to do anything anyone wanted them to, though not so willing to pay any attention while doing it. The saber cut was just a thin red line on his cheek; she'd washed away all the dried blood.
The Gallery gets you, though. It's a bunch of paintings and sculptures and especially odd knick-knacks, all made by Soldiers recuperating here, and a lot of them telling about the Change War from the stuff they're made of—brass cartridges, flaked flint, bits of ancient pottery glued into futuristic shapes, mashed-up Incan gold rebeaten by a Martian, whorls of beady Lunan wire, a picture in tempera on a crinkle-cracked thick round of quartz that had filled a starship porthole, a Sumerian inscription chiseled into a brick from an atomic oven.
There are a lot of things in
the Gallery and I can always
find some I haven't ever seen before.
It gets you, as I say, thinking
about the guys that made them
and their thoughts and the far
times and places they came from,
and sometimes, when I'm feeling
low, I'll come and look at them so
I'll feel still lower and get inspired
to kick myself back into a good
temper. It's the only history of the
Place there is and it doesn't change
a great deal, because the things
in it and the feelings that went into
them resist the Change Winds better
than anything else.
Right now, Erich's witty lecture
was bouncing off the big ears
I hide under my pageboy bob and
I was thinking how awful it is that
for us that there's not only change
but Change. You don't know from
one minute to the next whether a
mood or idea you've got is really
new or just welling up into you
because the past has been altered
by the Spiders or Snakes.Change Winds can blow not only death but anything short of it, down to the featheriest fancy. They blow thousands of times faster than time moves, but no one can say how much faster or how far one of them will travel or what damage it'll do or how soon it'll damp out. The Big Time isn't the little time.
And then, for the Demons, there's the fear that our personality will just fade and someone else climb into the driver's seat and us not even know. Of course, we Demons are supposed to be able to remember through Change and in spite of it; that's why we are Demons and not Ghosts like the other Doublegangers, or merely Zombies or Unborn and nothing more, and as Beau truly said, there aren't any great men among us—and blamed few of the masses, either—we're a rare sort of people and that's why the Spiders have to Recruit us where they find us without caring about our previous knowledge and background, a Foreign Legion of time, a strange kind of folk, bright but always in the background, with built-in nostalgia and cynicism, as adaptable as Centaurian shape-changers but with memories as long as a Lunan's six arms, a kind of Change People, you might say, the cream of the damned.
But sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn't once entirely different from anything we remember, and we've forgotten that we forgot.
As I say, the Gallery gets you feeling real low, and so now I said to myself, "Back to your lousy little commandant, kid," and gave myself a stiff boot.
Erich was holding up a green bowl with gold dolphins or spaceships on it and saying, "And, to my mind, this proves that Etruscan art is derived from Egyptian. Don't you agree, Bruce?"
Bruce looked up, all smiles from Lili, and said, "What was that, dear chap?"
Erich's forehead got dark as
the Door and I was glad the
hussars had parked their sabers
along with their shakos, but before
he could even get out a Jerry cussword,
Doc breezed up in that
plateau-state of drunkenness so
like hypnotized sobriety, moving
as if he were on a dolly, ghosted
the bowl out of Erich's hand, said,
"A beautiful specimen of Middle
Systemic Venusian. When Eightaitch
finished it, he told me you
couldn't look at it and not feel
the waves of the Northern Venusian
Shallows rippling around your
hoofs. But it might look better inverted.
I wonder. Who are you,
young officer? Nichevo," and he
carefully put the bowl back on its
shelf and rolled on.
It's a fact that Doc knows the
Art Gallery better than any of us,
really by heart, he being the oldest
inhabitant, though he maybe picked
a bad time to show off his knowledge.
Erich was going to take out
after him, but I said, "Nix, Kamerad,
remember gloves and
sugar," and he contented himself
with complaining, "That nichevo—it's
so gloomy and hopeless, ungeheuerlich.
I tell you, Liebchen,
they shouldn't have Russians working
for the Spiders, not even as
Entertainers."I grinned at him and squeezed his hand. "Not much entertainment in Doc these days, is there?" I agreed.
He grinned back at me a shade sheepishly and his face smoothed and his blue eyes looked sweet again for a second and he said, "I shouldn't want to claw out at people that way, Greta, but at times I am just a jealous old man," which is not entirely true, as he isn't a day over thirty-three, although his hair is nearly white.
Our lovers had drifted on a few steps until they were almost fading into the Surgery screen. It was the last spot I would have picked for the formal preliminaries to a little British smooching, but Lili probably didn't share my prejudices, though I remembered she'd told me she'd served a brief hitch in an Arachnoid Field Hospital before being transferred to the Place.
But she couldn't have had anything like the experience I'd had during my short and sour career as a Spider nurse, when I'd acquired my best-hated nightmare and flopped completely (jobwise, but on the floor, too) at seeing a doctor flick a switch and a being, badly injured but human, turn into a long cluster of glistening strange fruit—ugh, it always makes me want to toss my cookies and my buttons. And to think that dear old Daddy Anton wanted his Greta chile to be a doctor.
Well, I could see this wasn't
getting me anywhere I wanted
to go, and after all there was a
party going on.
Doc was babbling something at
a great rate to Sid—I just hoped
Doc wouldn't get inspired to go
into his animal imitations, which
sound pretty fierce and once seriously
offended some recuperating
ETs.Maud was demonstrating to Mark a 23rd Century two-step and Beau sat down at the piano and improvised softly on her rhythm.
As the deep-thrumming relaxing notes hit us, Erich's face brightened and he dragged me over. Pleasantly soon I had my feet off the diamond-rough floor, which we don't carpet because most of the ETs, the dear boys, like it hard, and I was shouldering back deep into the couch nearest the piano, with cushions all around me and a fresh drink in my hand, while my Nazi boy friend was getting ready to discharge his Weltschmerz as song, which didn't alarm me too much, as his baritone is passable.
Things felt real good, like the Maintainer was just idling to keep the Place in existence and moored to the cosmos, not exerting itself at all or at most taking an occasional lazy paddle stroke. At times the Place's loneliness can be happy and comfortable.
Then Beau raised an eyebrow at Erich, who nodded, and next thing they were launched into a song we all know, though I've never found out where it originally came from. This time it made me think of Lili, and I wondered why—and why it's a tradition at Recuperation Stations to call the new girl Lili, though in this case it happened to be her real name.
Standing in the Doorway just outside of space,
Winds of Change blow 'round you but don't touch your face;
You smile as you whisper tenderly,
"Please cross to me, Recuperee;
The operation's over, come in and close the Door."
CHAPTER 4
De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms.
—Eliot
SOS FROM NOWHERE
I realized the piano had deserted
Erich and I cranked my
head up and saw Beau, Maud and
Sid streaking for the control divan.
The Major Maintainer was blinking
emergency-green and fast, but
the code was plain enough for even
me to recognize the Spider distress
call and for a second I felt
just sick. Then Erich blew out his
reserve breath in the middle of
"Door" and I gave myself another
of those helpful mental boots at
the base of the spine and we hurried
after them toward the center
of the Place along with Mark.
The blinks faded as we got there
and Sid told us not to move because
we were making shadows.
He glued an eye to the telltale and
we held still as statues as he
caressed the dials like he was making
love.One sensitive hand flicked out past the Introversion switch over to the Minor Maintainer and right away the Place was dark as your soul and there was nothing for me but Erich's arm and the knowledge that Sid was nursing a green light I couldn't even see, although my eyes had plenty time to accommodate.
Then the green light finally came back very slowly and I could see the dear reliable old face—the green-gold beard making him look like a merman—and then the telltale flared bright and Sid flicked on the Place lights and I leaned back.
"That nails them, lads, whoever and whenever they may be. Get ready for a pick-up."
Beau, who was closest of course, looked at him sharply. Sid shrugged uneasily. "Meseemed at first it was from our own globe a thousand years before our Lord, but that indication flickered and faded like witchfire. As it is, the call comes from something smaller than the Place and certes adrift from the cosmos. Meseemed too at one point I knew the fist of the caller—an antipodean atomicist named Benson-Carter—but that likewise changed."
Beau said, "We're not in the right phase of the cosmos-Places rhythm for a pick-up, are we, sir?"
Sid answered, "Ordinarily not, boy."
Beau continued, "I didn't think we had any pick-ups scheduled. Or stand-by orders."
Sid said, "We haven't."
Mark's eyes glowed. He tapped Erich on the shoulder. "An octavian denarius against ten Reichsmarks it is a Snake trap."
Erich's grin showed his teeth. "Make it first through the Door next operation and I'm on."
It didn't take that to tell me
things were serious, or the
thought that there's always a first
time for bumping into something
from really outside the cosmos.
The Snakes have broken our code
more than once. Maud was quietly
serving out weapons and Doc
was helping her. Only Bruce and
Lili stood off. But they were watching.
The telltale brightened. Sid
reached toward the Maintainer,
saying, "All right, my hearties. Remember,
through this Doorway
pass the fishiest finaglers in and out
of the cosmos."The Door appeared to the left and above where it should be and darkened much too fast. There was a gust of stale salt seawind, if that makes sense, but no stepped-up Change Winds I could tell—and I had been bracing myself against them. The Door got inky and there was a flicker of gray fur whips and a flash of copper flesh and gilt and something dark and a clump of hoofs and Erich was sighting a stun gun across his left forearm, and then the Door had vanished like that and a tentacled silvery Lunan and a Venusian satyr were coming straight toward us.
The Lunan was hugging a pile of clothes and weapons. The satyr was helping a wasp-waisted woman carry a heavy-looking bronze chest. The woman was wearing a short skirt and high-collared bolero jacket of leather so dark brown it was almost black. She had a two-horned petsofa hairdress and she was boldly gilded here and there and wore sandals and copper anklets and wristlets—one of them a copper-plated Caller—and from her wide copper belt hung a short-handled double-headed ax. She was dark-complexioned and her forehead and chin receded, but the effect was anything but weak; she had a face like a beautiful arrowhead—and a familiar one, by golly!
But before I could say, "Kabysia Labrys," Maud shrilly beat me to it with, "It's Kaby with two friends. Break out a couple of Ghostgirls."
And then I saw it really was old-home week because I recognized my Lunan boy friend Ilhilihis, and in the midst of all the confusion I got a nice kick out of knowing I was getting so I could tell the personality of one silver-furred muzzle from another.
They reached the control divan and Illy dumped his load and the others let down the chest, and Kaby staggered but shook off the two ETs when they started to support her, and she looked daggers at Sid when he tried to do the same, although she's his "sweet Keftian friend" he'd mentioned to Bruce.
She leaned straight-armed on
the divan and took two gasping
breaths so deep that the ridges
of her spine showed through her
brown-skinned waist, and then she
threw up her head and commanded,
"Wine!"
While Beau was rushing it, Sid
tried to take her hand again, saying,
"Sweetling, I'd never heard
you call before and knew not this
pretty little fist," but she ripped
out, "Save your comfort for the
Lunan," and I looked and saw—Hey,
Zeus!—that one of Ilhilihis'
six tentacles was lopped off halfway.That was for me, and, going to him, I fast briefed myself: "Remember, he only weighs fifty pounds for all he's seven feet high; he doesn't like low sounds or to be grabbed; the two legs aren't tentacles and don't act the same; uses them for long walks, tentacles for leaps; uses tentacles for close vision too and for manipulation, of course; extended, they mean he's at ease; retracted, on guard or nervous; sharply retracted, disgusted; greeting—"
Just then, one of them swept across my face like a sweet-smelling feather duster and I said, "Illy, man, it's been a lot of sleeps," and brushed my fingers across his muzzle. It still took a little self-control not to hug him, and I did reach a little cluckingly for his lopped tentacle, but he wafted it away from me and the little voice-box belted to his side squeaked, "Naughty, naughty. Papa will fix his little old self. Greta girl, ever bandaged even a Terra octopus?"
I had, an intelligent one from around a quarter billion A.D., but I didn't tell him so. I stood and let him talk to the palm of my hand with one of his tentacles—I don't savvy feather-talk but it feels good, though I've often wondered who taught him English—and watched him use a couple others to whisk a sort of Lunan band-aid out of his pouch and cap his wound with it.
Meanwhile, the satyr knelt over the bronze chest, which was decorated with little death's heads and crosses with hoops at the top and swastikas, but looking much older than Nazi, and the satyr said to Sid, "Quick thinkin, Gov, when ya saw the Door comin in high n soffened up gravty unner it, but cud I hav sum hep now?"
Sid touched the Minor Maintainer and we all got very light and my stomach did a flip-flop while the satyr piled on the chest the clothes and weapons that Illy had been carrying and pranced off with it all and carefully put it down at the end of the bar. I decided the satyr's English instructor must have been quite a character, too. Wish I'd met him—her—it.
Sid thought to ask Illy if he wanted Moon-normal gravity in one sector, but my boy likes to mix, and being such a lightweight, Earth-normal gravity doesn't bother him. As he said to me once, "Would Jovian gravity bother a beetle, Greta girl?"
I asked Illy about the satyr
and he squeaked that his name
was Sevensee and that he'd never
met him before this operation. I
knew the satyrs were from a billion
years in the future, just as
the Loonies were from a billion in
the past, and I thought—Kreesed
us!—but it must have been a real
big or emergency-like operation to
have the Spiders using those two
for it, with two billion years between
them—a time-difference that
gives you a feeling of awe for a
second, you know.
My hair stood up at the screech she let out. She smashed a fist into the divan and cried, "Goddess! Must I see Crete destroyed, revived, and now destroyed again? It is too much for your servant."
Personally, I thought she could stand anything.
There was a rush of questions at what she said about Crete—I asked one of them, for the news certainly frightened me—but she shot up her arm straight for silence and took a deep breath and began.
"In the balance hung the battle. Rowing like black centipedes, the Dorian hulls bore down on our outnumbered ships. On the bright beach, masked by rocks, Sevensee and I stood by the needle gun, ready to give the black hulls silent wounds. Beside us was Ilhilihis, suited as a sea monster. But then ... then ..."
Then I saw she wasn't altogether the iron babe, for her voice broke and she started to shake and to sob rackingly, although her face was still a mask of rage, and she threw up the wine. Sid stepped in and made her stop, which I think he'd been wanting to do all along.
CHAPTER 5
Whenever I take up a newspaper
and read it, I fancy I see
ghosts creeping between the
lines. There must be ghosts all
over the world. They must be
as countless as the grains of the
sands, it seems to me.
—Ibsen
SID INSISTS ON GHOSTGIRLS
My Elizabethan boy friend put
his fists on his hips and laid
down the law to us as if we were
a lot of nervous children who'd
been playing too hard.
"Look you, masters, this is a Recuperation
Station and I am running
it as such. A plague of all
operations! I care not if the frame
of things disjoints and the whole
Change World goes to ruin, but
you, warrior maid, are going to
rest and drink more wine slowly
before you tell your tale and your
colleagues are going to be properly
companioned. No questions, anyone.
Beau, and you love us, give
us a lively tune."Kaby relaxed a little and let him put his hand carefully against her back in token of support and she said grudgingly, "All right, Fat Belly."
Then, so help me, to the tune of the Muskrat Ramble, which I'd taught Beau, we got girls for those two ETs and everybody properly paired up.
Right here I want to point out that a lot of the things they say in the Change World about Recuperation Stations simply aren't so—and anyway they always leave out nine-tenths of it. The Soldiers that come through the Door are looking for a good time, sure, but they're hurt real bad too, every one of them, deep down in their minds and hearts, if not always in their bodies or so you can see it right away.
Believe me, a temporal operation is no joke, and to start with, there isn't one person in a hundred who can endure to be cut from his lifeline and become a really wide-awake Doubleganger—a Demon, that is—let alone a Soldier. What does a badly hurt and mixed-up creature need who's been fighting hard? One individual to look out for him and feel for him and patch him up, and it helps if the one is of the opposite sex—that's something that goes beyond species.
There's your basis for the Place and the wild way it goes about its work, and also for most other Recuperation Stations or Entertainment Spots. The name Entertainer can be misleading, but I like it. She's got to be a lot more than a good party girl—or boy—though she's got to be that too. She's got to be a nurse and a psychologist and an actress and a mother and a practical ethnologist and a lot of things with longer names—and a reliable friend.
None of us are all those things
perfectly or even near it. We
just try. But when the call comes,
Entertainers have to forget grudges
and gripes and envies and jealousies—and
remember, they're lively
people with sharp emotions—because
there isn't any time then
for anything but help and don't
ask who!
And, deep inside her, a good
Entertainer doesn't care who. Take
the way it shaped up this time.
It was pretty clear to me I ought
to shift to Illy, although I wasn't
quite easy in my mind about leaving
Erich, because the Lunan was
a long time from home and, after
all, Erich was among anthropoids.
Ilhilihis needed someone who was
simpatico.I like Illy and not just because he is a sort of tall cross between a spider monkey and a persian cat—though that is a handsome combo when you come to think of it. I like him for himself. So when he came in all lopped and shaky after a mean operation, I was the right person to look out for him. Now I've made my little speech and know-nothings in the Change World can go on making their bum jokes. But I ask you, how could an arrangement between Illy and me be anything but Platonic?
We might have had some octopoid girls and nymphs in stock—Sid couldn't be sure until he checked—but Ilhilihis and Sevensee voted for real people and I knew Sid saw it their way. Maud squeezed Mark's hand and tripped over to Sevensee ("Those are sharp hoofs you got, man"—she's picked up some of my language, like she has everything else), though Beau did frown over his shoulder at Lili from the piano, maybe to argue that she ought to take on the ET, as Mark had been a real casualty and could use live nursing. But it was plain as day to anybody but Beau that Bruce and Lili were a big thing and the last to be disturbed.
Erich acted stiffly hurt at losing me, but I knew he wasn't. He thinks he has a great technique with Ghostgirls and he likes to show it off, and he really is pretty slick at it, if you go for that sort of thing and—yang my yin!—who doesn't at times?
And when Sid formally wafted the Countess out of Stores—a real blonde stunner in a white satin hobble skirt with a white egret swaying up from her tiny hat, way ahead of Maud and Lili and me when it came to looks, though transparent as cigarette smoke—and when Erich clicked his heels and bowed over her hand and proudly conducted her to a couch, black Svengali to her Trilby, and started to German-talk some life into her with much head cocking and toothy smiling and a flow of witty flattery, and when she began to flirt back and the dream look in her eyes sharpened hungrily and focused on him—well, then I knew that Erich was happy and felt he was doing proud by the Reichswehr. No, my little commandant wasn't worrying me on that score.
Mark had drawn a Greek
hetaera, name of Phryne; I
suppose not the one who maybe
still does the famous courtroom
striptease back in Athens, and he
was waking her up with little sips
of his scotch and soda, though,
from some looks he'd flashed, I
got the idea Kaby was the kid he
really went for. Sid was coaxing
the fighting gal to take some high-energy
bread and olives along with
the wine, and, for a wonder, Doc
seemed to be carrying on an animated
and rational conversation
with Sevensee and Maud, maybe
comparing notes on the Northern
Venusian Shallows, and Beau had
got on to Panther Rag, and Bruce
and Lili were leaning on the piano,
smiling very appreciatively, but
talking to each other a mile a
minute.
Illy turned back from inspecting
them all and squeaked, "Animals
with clothes are so refreshing, dahling!
Like you're all carrying banners!"Maybe he had something there, though my banners were kind of Ash Wednesday, a charcoal gray sweater and skirt. He looked at my mouth with a tentacle to see how I was smiling and he squeaked softly, "Do I seem dull and commonplace to you, Greta girl, because I haven't got banners? Just another Zombie from a billion years in your past, as gray and lifeless as Luna is today, not as when she was a real dreamy sister planet simply bursting with air and water and feather forests. Or am I as strangely interesting to you as you are to me, girl from a billion years in my future?"
"Illy, you're sweet," I told him, giving him a little pat. I noticed his fur was still vibrating nervously and I decided the heck with Sid's orders, I'm going to pump him about what he was doing with Kaby and the satyr. Couldn't have him a billion years from home and bottled up, too. Besides, I was curious.
CHAPTER 6
Maiden, Nymph, and Mother
are the eternal royal Trinity of
the island, and the Goddess, who
is worshipped there in each of
these aspects, as New Moon,
Full Moon, and Old Moon, is
the sovereign Deity.
—Graves
CRETE CIRCA 1300 B.C.
Kaby pushed back at Sid some
seconds of bread and olives,
and, when he raised his bushy eyebrows,
gave him a curt nod that
meant she knew what she was doing.
She stood up and sort of took
a position. All the talk quieted
down fast, even Bruce's and Lili's.
Kaby's face and voice weren't
strained now, but they weren't relaxed
either.
"Woe to Spider! Woe to Cretan!
Heavy is the news I bring you.
Bear it bravely, like strong women.
When we got the gun unlimbered,
I heard seaweed fry and
crackle. We three leaped behind
the rock wall, saw our gun grow
white as sunlight in a heat-ray of
the Serpents! Natch, we feared we
were outnumbered and I called
upon my Caller."
Beau claims that all the ancients fit their thoughts into measured lines as naturally as we pick a word that will do, but I'm not sure how good the Vicksburg language department is. Though why I should wonder about things like that when I've got Kaby spouting the stuff right in front of me, I don't know.
"But I didn't die there, kiddos. I still hoped to hurt the Greek ships, maybe with the Snake's own heat gun. So I quick tried to outflank them. My two comrades crawled beside me—they are males, but they have courage. Soon we spied the ambush-setters. They were Snakes and they were many, filthily disguised as Cretans."
There was an indignant murmur at this, for our cutthroat Change War has its code, the Soldiers tell me. Being an Entertainer, I don't have to say what I think.
"They had seen us when we saw them," Kaby swept on, "and they loosed a killing volley. Heat- and knife-rays struck about us in a storm of wind and fire, and the Lunan lost a feeler, fighting for Crete's Triple Goddess. So we dodged behind a sand hill, steered our flight back toward the water. It was awful, what we saw there: Crete's brave ships all sunk or sinking, blue sky sullied by their death-smoke. Once again the Greeks had licked us!—aided by the filthy Serpents.
"Round our wrecks, their black ships scurried, like black beetles, filth their diet, yet this day they dine on heroes. On the quiet sunlit beach there, I could feel a Change Gale blowing, working changes deep inside me, aches and pains that were a stranger's. Half my memories were doubled, half my lifeline crooked and twisted, three new moles upon my sword-hand. Goddess, Goddess, Triple Goddess—"
Her voice wavered and Sid
reached out a hand, but she
straightened her back.
"Triple Goddess, give me courage
to tell everything that happened.
We ran down into the water, hoping
to escape by diving. We had
hardly gotten under when the heat-rays
hit above us, turning all the
cool green surface to a roaring
white inferno. But as I believe I
told you, I was calling on my
Caller, and a Door now opened to
us, deep below the deadly steam-clouds.
We dived in like frightened
minnows and a lot of water with
us."Off Chicago's Gold Coast, Dave once gave me a lesson in skin-diving and, remembering it, I got a flash of Kaby's Door in the dark depths.
"For a moment, all was chaos. Then the Door slammed shut behind us. We'd been picked up in time's nick by—an Express Room of our Spiders!—sloshing two feet deep in water, much more cramped for space than this Place. It was manned by a magician, an old coot named Benson-Carter. He dispelled the water quickly and reported on his Caller. We'd got dry, were feeling human, Illy here had shed his swimsuit, when we looked at the Maintainer. It was glowing, changing, melting! And when Benson-Carter touched it, he fell backward—death was in him. Then the Void began to darken, narrow, shrink and close around us, so I called upon my Caller—without wasting time, let me tell you!
"We can't say for sure what was it slowly squeezed that sweet Express Room, but we fear the dirty Snakes have found a way to find our Places and attack outside the cosmos!—found the Spiderweb that links us in the Void's gray less-than-nothing."
No murmur this time. This reaction was genuine; we'd been hit where we lived and I could see everybody was scared as sick as I was. Except maybe Bruce and Lili, who were still holding hands and beaming gently. I decided they were the kind that love makes brave, which it doesn't do to me. It just gives me two people to worry about.
"I can see you dig our feelings," Kaby continued. "This thing scared the pants off of us. If we could have, we'd have even Introverted the Maintainer, broken all the ties that bind us, chanced it incommunicado. But the little old Maintainer was a seething red-hot puddle filled with bubbles big as handballs. We sat tight and watched the Void close. I kept calling on my Caller."
I squeezed my eyes shut, but
that made it easier to see the
three of them with the Void shutting
down on them. (Was ours
still behaving? Yes, Bibi Miriam.)
Poetry or no poetry, it got me.
"Benson-Carter, lying dying,
also thought the Snakes had done
it. And he knew that death was
in him, so he whispered me his
mission, giving me precise instructions:
how to press the seven
death's hands, starting lockside
counterclockwise, one, three, five,
six, two, four, seven, then you have
a half an hour; after you have
pressed the seven, do not monkey
with the buttons—get out fast
and don't stop moving."I wasn't getting this part and I couldn't see that anyone else was, though Bruce was whispering to Lili. I remembered seeing skulls engraved on the bronze chest. I looked at Illy and he nodded a tentacle and spread two to say, I guessed, that yes, Benson-Carter had said something like that, but no, Illy didn't know much about it.
"All these things and more he whispered," Kaby went on, "with the last gasps of his life-force, telling all his secret orders—for he'd not been sent to get us, he was on a separate mission, when he heard my SOSs. Sid, it's you he was to contact, as the first leg of his mission, pick up from you three black hussars, death's-head Demons, daring Soldiers, then to wait until the Places next match rhythm with the cosmos—matter of two mealtimes, barely—and to tune in northern Egypt in the age of the last Caesar, in the year of Rome's swift downfall, there to start an operation in a battle near a city named for Thrace's Alexander, there to change the course of battle, blow sky-high the stinking Serpents, all their agents, all their Zombies!
"Goddess, pardon, now I savvy how you've guided my least footstep, when I thought you'd gone and left me—for I flubbed your three-mole signal. We've found Sid's Place, that's the first leg, and I see the three black hussars, and we've brought with us the weapon and the Parthian disguises, salvaged from the doomed Express Room when your Door appeared in time's nick, and the Room around us closing spewed us through before it vanished with the corpse of Benson-Carter. Triple Goddess, draw the milk now from the womanhood I flaunt here and inject the blackest hatred! Vengeance now upon the Serpents, vengeance sweet in northern Egypt, for your island, Crete, Goddess!—and a victory for the Spiders! Goddess, Goddess, we can swing it!"
The roar that made me try to stop my ears with my shoulders didn't come from Kaby—she'd spoken her piece—but from Sid. The dear boy was purple enough to make me want to remind him you can die of high blood pressure just as easy in the Change World.
"Dump me with ops! 'Sblood, I'll not endure it! Is this a battle post? They'll be mounting operations from field hospitals next. Kabysia Labrys, thou art mad to suggest it. And what's this prattle of locks, clocks, and death's heads, buttons and monkeys? This brabble, this farrago, this hocus-pocus! And where's the weapon you prate of? In that whoreson bronze casket, I suppose."
She nodded, looking blank and almost a little shy as poetic possession faded from her. Her answer came like its faltering last echo.
"It is nothing but a tiny tactical atomic bomb."
CHAPTER 7
After about 0.1 millisecond (one
ten-thousandth part of a second)
has elapsed, the radius of the
ball of fire is some 45 feet, and
the temperature is then in the
vicinity of 300,000 degrees Centigrade.
At this instant, the luminosity,
as observed at a distance
of 100,000 yards (5.7
miles), is approximately 100
times that of the sun as seen at
the earth's surface ... the ball
of fire expands very rapidly to
its maximum radius of 450 feet
within less than a second from
the explosion.
—Los Alamos
TIME TO THINK
Brother, that was all we
needed to make everybody
but Kaby and the two ETs start
yelping at once, me included. It
may seem strange that Change
People, able to whiz through time
and space and roust around outside
the cosmos and knowing at
least by hearsay of weapons a billion
years in the future, like the
Mindbomb, should panic at being
shut in with a little primitive
mid-20th Century gadget. Well,
they feel the same as atomic scientists
would feel if a Bengal tiger
were brought into their laboratory,
neither more nor less scared.
I'm a moron at physics, but I
do know the Fireball is bigger than
the Place. Remember that, besides
the bomb, we'd recently been presented
with a lot of other fears we
hadn't had time to cope with, especially
the business of the Snakes
having learned how to get at our
Places and melt the Maintainers
and collapse them. Not to mention
the general impression—first Saint
Petersburg, then Crete—that the
whole Change War was going
against the Spiders.Yet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were all panicking. It made me admit what I didn't like to: that we were all in pretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn't happen to be our out.
And had the rest of us been controlling our drinking so well lately?
Maud yelled, "Jettison it!" and pulled away from the satyr and ran from the bronze chest. Beau, harking back to what they'd thought of doing in the Express Room when it was too late, hissed, "Sirs, we must Introvert," and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for the control divan. Erich seconded him with a white-faced "Gott in Himmel, ja!" from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slim stem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass.
I felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degrees worse than foxholing. It's supposed not only to keep the Door tight shut, but also to lock it so even the Change Winds can't get through—cut the Place loose from the cosmos altogether.
I'd never talked with anyone from a Place that had been Introverted.
Mark dumped Phryne off his
lap and ran after Maud. The
Greek Ghostgirl, quite solid now,
looked around with sleepy fear
and fumbled her apple-green
chiton together at the throat. She
wrenched my attention away from
everyone else for a moment, and
I couldn't help wondering whether
the person or Zombie back in the
cosmos, from whose lifeline the
Ghost has been taken, doesn't at
least have strange dreams or
thoughts when something like this
happens.
Sid stopped Beau, though he almost
got bowled over doing it, and
he held the gambler away from
the Maintainer in a bear hug and
bellowed over his shoulders,
"Masters, are you mad? Have you
lost your wits? Maud! Mark! Marcus!
Magdalene! On your lives, unhand
that casket!"Maud had swept the clothes and bows and quivers and stuff off it and was dragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump it through fast when we got one, I guess, while Mark acted as if he were trying to help her and wrestle it away from her at the same time.
They kept on as if they hadn't heard a word Sid said, with Mark yelling, "Let go, meretrix! This holds Rome's answer to Parthia on the Nile."
Kaby watched them as if she wanted to help Mark but scorned to scuffle with a mere—well, Mark had said it in Latin, I guess—call girl.
Then, on the top of the bronze chest, I saw those seven lousy skulls starting at the lock as plain as if they'd been under a magnifying glass, though ordinarily they'd have been a vague circle to my eyes at the distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the opposite direction, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, and squeaked, "Easy now, Greta girl, don't you be doing it, too. Hold still or Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you have a mind to."
My stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but it stopped me and I got my mind back, partly.
"Unhand it, I say!" Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and he released Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler's shoulder.
Then my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Void and blustered at no one in particular, "'Sdeath, think you I'd mutiny against my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent fox and pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggests it? Introversion's no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervised and sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I'd Introverted ere we got Kaby's call for succor, hey?"
His warrior maid nodded with
harsh approval and he noticed
it and shook his free hand at
her and scolded her, "Not that I
say yea to your mad plan for that
Devil's casket, you half-clad lackwit.
And yet to jettison.... Oh, ye
gods, ye gods—" he wiped his hand
across his face—"grant me a minute
in which I may think!"
Thinking time wasn't an item
even on the strictly limited list
at the moment, although Sevensee,
squatting dourly on his hairy
haunches where Maud had left
him, threw in a dead-pan "Thas
tellin em, Gov."Then Doc at the bar stood up tall as Abe Lincoln in his top hat and shawl and 19th Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence and said something that sounded like: "Introversh, inversh, glovsh," and then his enunciation switched to better than perfect as he continued, "I know to an absolute certainty what we must do."
It showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a church while we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for a poor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves.
He said something like, "Inversh ... bosh ..." and held our eyes for a moment longer. Then the light went out of his and he slobbered out a "Nichevo" and slid an arm far along the bar for a bottle and started to pour it down his throat without stopping sliding.
Before he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second while our attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top of it, so fast it was almost like he'd popped up from nowhere, though I'd seen him start from behind the piano.
"I've a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?" he said in a voice that was very clear and just loud enough. "So it can't go off," he went on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk manner putting more heart into me all the time. "What's more, if it were to be triggered, we'd still have half an hour. I believe you said it had that long a fuse?"
He stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded.
"Right," he said. "It'd have to be that long for whoever plants it in the Parthian camp to get away. There's another safety margin.
"Second question. Is there a locksmith in the house?"
For all Bruce's easiness, he was
watching us like a golden eagle
and he caught Beau's and Maud's
affirmatives before they had a
chance to explain or hedge them
and said, "That's very good. Under
certain circumstances, you two'd
be the ones to go to work on the
chest. But before we consider that,
there's Question Three: Is anyone
here an atomics technician?"
That one took a little conversation
to straighten out, Illy having
to explain that, yes, the Early Lunans
had atomic power—hadn't
they blasted the life off their planet
with it and made all those ghastly
craters?—but no, he wasn't a technician
exactly, he was a "thinger"
(I thought at first his squeakbox
was lisping); what was a thinger?—well,
a thinger was someone who
manipulated things in a way that
was truly impossible to describe,
but no, you couldn't possibly thing
atomics; the idea was quite ridiculous,
so he couldn't be an atomics
thinger; the term was worse than
a contradiction, well, really!—while
Sevensee, from his two-thousand-millennia
advantage of the Lunan,
grunted to the effect that his culture
didn't rightly use any kind
of power, but just sort of moved
satyrs and stuff by wrastling space-time
around, "or think em roun ef
we hafta. Can't think em in the
Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have—I
dunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow.""So we don't have an A-tech," Bruce summed up, "which makes it worse than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn't know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question." He directed it toward Sid. "How long before we can jettison anything?"
Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn't seem to be taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the word "rhythm," he pulled the answer away from him.
"In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again. Thank you, Master Lessingham. That's at least five hours—two mealtimes, as the Cretan officer put it," and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly smile. "So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there's not a thing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!"
His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn't seem to notice them and we hardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.
"All right then," he repeated suddenly. "We're twelve Spiders and two Ghosts, and we've time for a bit of a talk, and we're all in the same bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we'll all know what we're talking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are off!"
Bruce ripped them out of his
belt where they'd been tucked
and slammed them down on the
bar, to be kicked off the next time
he paced back and forth, and it
wasn't funny.
"Because," he went right on,
"I've been getting a completely
new picture of what this Spiders'
war has been doing to each one
of us. Oh, it's jolly good sport to
slam around in space and time and
then have a rugged little party
outside both of them when the
operation's over. It's sweet to know
there's no cranny of reality so narrow,
no privacy so intimate or
sacred, no wall of was or will be
strong enough, that we can't shoulder
in. Knowledge is a glamorous
thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony
or the passion of fighting and
including all three, the ultimate
insatiable hunger, and it's great
to be Faust, even in a pack of
other Fausts."It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's life or a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes—hah! killing men or carrying off women isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It's sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and decide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.
"Or he can't stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you've got to decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams, only they'll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, or whether, if she's got that tantalizing something, to bring her shell along for a Ghostgirl—that's sweet, too. It's even sweet to have Change Death poised over your neck, to know that the past isn't the precious indestructible thing you've been taught it was, to know that there's no certainty about the future either, whether there'll even be one, to know that no part of reality is holy, that the cosmos itself may wink out like a flicked switch and God be not and nothing left but nothing!"
He threw out his arms against the Void. "And knowing all that, it's doubly sweet to come through the Door into the Place and be out of the worst of the Change Winds and enjoy a well-earned Recuperation and share the memories of all these sweetnesses I've been talking about, and work out all the fascinating feelings you've been accumulating back in the cosmos, layer by black layer, in the company of and with the help of the best bloody little band of fellow Fausts and Faustines going!
"Oh, it's a sweet life, all right, but I'm asking you—" and here his eyes stabbed us again, one by one, fast—"I'm asking you what it's done to us. I've been getting a completely new picture, as I said, of what my life was and what it could have been if there'd been changes of the sort that even we Demons can't make, and what my life is. I've been watching how we've all been responding to things just now, to the news of Saint Petersburg and to what the Cretan officer told beautifully—only it wasn't beautiful what she had to tell—and mostly to that bloody box of bomb. And I'm simply asking each one of you, what's happened to you?"
He stopped his pacing and
stuck his thumbs in his belt
and seemed to be listening to the
wheels turning in at least eleven
other heads—only I stopped mine
pretty quick, with Dave and
Father and the Rape of Chicago
coming up out of the dark on the
turn and Mother and the Indiana
Dunes and Jazz Limited just behind
them, followed by the unthinkable
thing the Spider doctor
had flicked into existence when I
flopped as a nurse, because I can't
stand that to be done to my mind
by anybody but myself.
I stopped them by using the old
infallible Entertainers' gimmick, a
fast survey of the most interesting
topic there is—other people's
troubles.
Offhand, Beau looked as if he
had most troubles, shamed
by his boss and his girl given her
heart to a Soldier; he was hugging
them to himself very quiet.
I didn't stop for the two ETs—they're
too hard to figure—or for
Doc; nobody can tell whether a
fallen-down drunk's at the black
or bright end of his cycle; you
just know it's cycling.Maud ought to be suffering as much as Beau, called names and caught out in a panic, which always hurts her because she's plus three hundred years more future than the rest of us and figures she ought to be that much wiser, which she isn't always—not to mention she's over fifty years old, though her home-century cosmetic science keeps her looking and acting teenage most of the time. She'd backed away from the bronze chest so as not to stand out, and now Lili came from behind the piano and stood beside her.
Lili had the opposite of troubles, a great big glow for Bruce, proud as a promised princess watching her betrothed. Erich frowned when he saw her, for he seemed proud too, proud of the way his Kamerad had taken command of us panicky whacks Führer-fashion. Sid still looked mostly grateful and inclined to let Bruce keep on talking.
Even Kaby and Mark, those two dragons hot for battle, standing a little in front and to one side of us by the bronze chest, like its guardians, seemed willing to listen. They made me realize one reason Sid had for letting Bruce run on, although the path his talk was leading us down was flashing with danger signals: When it was over, there'd still be the problem of what to do with the bomb, and a real opposition shaping up between Soldiers and Entertainers, and Sid was hoping a solution would turn up in the meantime or at least was willing to put off the evil day.
But beyond all that, and like the rest of us, I could tell from the way Sid was squinting his browy eyes and chewing his beardy lip that he was shaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped into our hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of us could have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had to think of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs we were—well, we wanted to keep on listening.
CHAPTER 8
Give me a place to stand,
and I will move the world.
—Archimedes
A PLACE TO STAND
Bruce's voice had a faraway
touch and he was looking up
left at the Void as he said, "Have
you ever really wondered why the
two sides of this war are called
the Snakes and the Spiders?
Snakes may be clear enough—you
always call the enemy something
dirty. But Spiders—our name for
ourselves? Bear with me, Ilhilihis;
I know that no being is created
dirty or malignant by Nature, but
this is a matter of anthropoid feelings
and folkways. Yes, Mark, I
know that some of your legions
have nicknames like the Drunken
Lions and the Snails, and that's
about as insulting as calling the
British Expeditionary Force the
Old Contemptibles.
"No, you'd have to go to bands
of vicious youths in cities slated
for ruin to find a habit of naming
like ours, and even they would try
to brighten up the black a bit.
But simply—Spiders. And Snakes,
for that's their name for themselves
too, you know. Spiders and Snakes.
What are our masters, that we give
them names like that?"It gave me the shivers and set my mind working in a dozen directions and I couldn't stop it, although it made the shivers worse.
Illy beside me now—I'd never given it a thought before, but he did have eight legs of a sort, and I remembered thinking of him as a spider monkey, and hadn't the Lunans had wisdom and atomic power and a billion years in which to get the Change War rolling?
Or suppose, in the far future, Terra's own spiders evolved intelligence and a cruel cannibal culture. They'd be able to keep their existence secret. I had no idea of who or what would be on Earth in Sevensee's day, and wouldn't it be perfect black hairy poisoned spider-mentality to spin webs secretly through the world of thought and all of space and time?
And Beau—wasn't there something real Snaky about him, the way he moved and all?
Spiders and Snakes. Spinne und Schlange, as Erich called them. S & S. But SS stood for the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the Black Shirts, and what if some of those cruel, crazy Jerries had discovered time travel and—I brought myself up with a jerk and asked myself, "Greta, how nuts can you get?"
From where he was on the
floor, the front of the bar his
sounding board, Doc shrieked up
at Bruce like one of the damned
from the pit, "Don't speak against
the Spiders! Don't blaspheme!
They can hear the Unborn whisper.
Others whip only the skin, but
they whip the naked brain and
heart," and Erich called out,
"That's enough, Bruce!"
But Bruce didn't spare him a
look and said, "But whatever the
Spiders are and no matter how
much whip they use, it's plain as
the telltale on the Maintainer that
the Change War is not only going
against them, but getting away
from them. Dwell for a bit on the
current flurry of stupid slugging
and panicky anachronism, when
we all know that anachronism is
what gets the Change Winds out
of control. This punch-drunk
pounding on the Cretan-Dorian
fracas as if it were the only battle
going and the only way to work
things. Whisking Constantine from
Britain to the Bosporus by rocket,
sending a pocket submarine back
to sail with the Armada against
Drake's woodensides—I'll wager
you hadn't heard those! And now,
to save Rome, an atomic bomb."Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a fission weapon.... I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will make in what's left of history—the smothering of Greece and the vanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy's Irish Captivity won't be in it!"
The cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he didn't pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned in irony and he said, "But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world—one little solar system, Sevensee—and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.
"Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever than go on living in a world without the Summa, the Field Equations, Process and Reality, Hamlet, Matthew, Keats, and the Odyssey, but our masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those rugged souls who want to go on living no matter what."
Erich's "Bruce, I'm telling
you that's enough," was lost
in the quickening flow of the New
Boy's words. "I won't spend much
time on the minor signs of our
major crack-up—the canceling of
leaves, the sharper shortages, the
loss of the Express Room, the use
of Recuperation Stations for ops
and all the other frantic patchwork—last
operation but one, we were
saddled with three Soldiers from
outside the Galaxy and, no fault
of theirs, they were no earthly
use. Such little things might happen
at a bad spot in any war and
are perhaps only local. But there's
a big thing."
He paused again, to let us wonder,
I guess. Maud must have
worked her way over to me, for I
felt her dry little hand on my
arm and she whispered out of the
side of her mouth, "What do we
do now?""We listen," I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her need to be doing something about things.
She cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, "You, too?"
I didn't get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts!—because just then Bruce's voice took up again in the faraway range.
"Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of history can stand before it's all stitches, whether too much Change won't one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? Change Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you've stripped off the paint.
"If that goes on, won't the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself, then nothing? How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more Doublegangers cut out of it? And there's another thing about every operation—it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change Winds die, it leaves them a little more disturbed and nightmare-ridden and frazzled. Those of you who have been on operations in heavily worked-over temporal areas will know what I mean—that look they give you out of the sides of their eyes as if to say, 'You again? For Christ's sake, go away. We're the dead. We're the ones who don't want to wake up, who don't want to be Demons and hate to be Ghosts. Stop torturing us.'"
I looked around at the Ghostgirls;
I couldn't help it. They'd
somehow got together on the control
divan, facing us, their backs
to the Maintainers. The Countess
had dragged along the bottle of
wine Erich had fetched her earlier
and they were passing it back and
forth. The Countess had a big
rose splotch across the ruffled
white lace of her blouse.
Bruce said, "There'll come a day
when all the Zombies and all the
Unborn wake up and go crazy together
and figuratively come
marching at us in their numberless
hordes, saying, 'We've had
enough.'"But I didn't turn back to Bruce right away. Phryne's chiton had slipped off one shoulder and she and the Countess were sitting sagged forward, elbows on knees, legs spread—at least, as far as the Countess's hobble skirt would let her—and swayed toward each other a little. They were still surprisingly solid, although they hadn't had any personal attention for a half hour, and they were looking up over my head with half-shut eyes and they seemed, so help me, to be listening to what Bruce was saying and maybe hearing some of it.
"We make a careful distinction between Zombies and Unborn, between those troubled by our operations whose lifelines lie in the past and those whose lifelines lie in the future. But is there any distinction any longer? Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we're on, but that's different and it's not made for real living.
"The Spiders tell us that the real now is somewhere in the last half of the 20th Century, which means that several of us here are also alive in the cosmos, have lifelines along which the now is traveling. But do you swallow that story quite so easily, Ilhilihis, Sevensee? How does it strike the servants of the Triple Goddess? The Spiders of Octavian Rome? The Demons of Good Queen Bess? The gentlemen Zombies of the Greater South? Do the Unborn man the starships, Maud?
"The Spiders also tell us that, although the fog of battle makes the now hard to pin down precisely, it will return with the unconditional surrender of the Snakes and the establishment of cosmic peace, and roll on as majestically toward the future as before, quickening the continuum with its passage. Do you really believe that? Or do you believe, as I do, that we've used up all the future as well as the past, wasted it in premature experience, and that we've had the real now smudged out of existence, stolen from us forever, the precious now of true growth, the child-moment in which all life lies, the moment like a newborn baby that is the only home for hope there is?"
He let that start to sink in,
then took a couple of quick
steps and went on, his voice rising
over Erich's "Bruce, for the last
time—" and seeming to pick up a
note of hope from the very word
he had used, "But although things
look terrifyingly black, there remains
a chance—the slimmest
chance, but still a chance—of
saving the cosmos from Change
Death and restoring reality's richness
and giving the Ghosts good
sleep and perhaps even regaining
the real now. We have the means
right at hand. What if the power
of time traveling were used not
for war and destruction, but for
healing, for the mutual enrichment
of the ages, for quiet communication
and growth, in brief, to bring
a peace message—"
But my little commandant is
quite an actor himself and knows
a wee bit about the principles of
scene-stealing, and he was not going
to let Bruce drown him out
as if he were just another extra
playing a Voice from the Mob.
He darted across our front, between
us and the bar, took a running
leap, and landed bang on the
bloody box of bomb.A bit later, Maud was silently showing me the white ring above her elbow where I'd grabbed her and Illy was teasing a clutch of his tentacles out of my other hand and squeaking reproachfully, "Greta girl, don't ever do that."
Erich was standing on the chest and I noticed that his boots carefully straddled the circle of skulls, and I should have known anyway you could hardly push them in the right order by jumping on them, and he was pointing at Bruce and saying, "—and that means mutiny, my young sir. Um Gottes willen, Bruce, listen to me and step down before you say anything worse. I'm older than you, Bruce. Mark's older. Trust in your Kameraden. Guide yourself by their knowledge."
He had got my attention, but I had much rather have him black my eye.
"You older than me?" Bruce was grinning. "When your twelve-years' advantage was spent in soaking up the wisdom of a race of sadistic dreamers gone paranoid, in a world whose thought-stream had already been muddied by one total war? Mark older than me? When all his ideas and loyalties are those of a wolf pack of unimaginative sluggers two thousand years younger than I am? Either of you older because you have more of the killing cynicism that is all the wisdom the Change World ever gives you? Don't make me laugh!
"I'm an Englishman, and I come from an epoch when total war was still a desecration and the flowers and buds of thoughts not yet whacked off or blighted. I'm a poet and poets are wiser than anyone because they're the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time. Right, Sid? When I talk to all of you about a peace message, I want you to think about it concretely in terms of using the Places to bring help across the mountains of time when help is really needed, not to bring help that's undeserved or knowledge that's premature or contaminating, sometimes not to bring anything at all, but just to check with infinite tenderness and concern that everything's safe and the glories of the universe unfolding as they were intended to—"
"Yes, you are a poet, Bruce," Erich broke in. "You can tootle soulfully on the flute and make us drip tears. You can let out the stops on the big organ pipes and make us tremble as if at Jehovah's footsteps. For the last twenty minutes, you have been giving us some very charmante poetry. But what are you? An Entertainer? Or are you a Soldier?"
Right then—I don't know
what it was, maybe Sid clearing
his throat—I could sense our
feelings beginning to turn against
Bruce. I got the strangest feeling
of reality clamping down and
bright colors going dull and dreams
vanishing. Yet it was only then I
also realized how much Bruce had
moved us, maybe some of us to
the verge of mutiny, even. I was
mad at Erich for what he was
doing, but I couldn't help admiring
his cockiness.
I was still under the spell of
Bruce's words and the more-than-words
behind them, but then
Erich would shift around a bit and
one of his heels would kick near
the death's-head pushbuttons and
I wanted to stamp with spike heels
on every death's-head button on
his uniform. I didn't know exactly
what I felt yet."Yes, I'm a Soldier," Bruce told him, "and I hope you won't ever have to worry about my courage, because it's going to take more courage than any operation we've ever planned, ever dreamed of, to carry the peace message to the other Places and to the wound-spots of the cosmos. Perhaps it will be a fast wicket and we'll be bowled down before we score a single run, but who cares? We may at least see our real masters when they come to smash us, and for me that will be a deep satisfaction. And we may do some smashing of our own."
"So you're a Soldier," Erich said, his smile showing his teeth. "Bruce, I'll admit that the half-dozen operations you've been on were rougher than anything I drew in my first hundred sleeps. For that, I am all honest sympathy. But that you should let them get you into such a state that love and a girl can turn you upside down and start you babbling about peace messages—"
"Yes, by God, love and a girl have changed me!" Bruce shouted at him, and I looked around at Lili and I remembered Dave saying, "I'm going to Spain," and I wondered if anything would ever again make my face flame like that. "Or, rather, they've made me stand up for what I've believed in all along. They've made me—"
"Wunderbar," Erich called and began to do a little sissy dance on the bomb that set my teeth on edge. He bent his wrists and elbows at arty angles and stuck out a hip and ducked his head simperingly and blinked his eyes very fast. "Will you invite me to the wedding, Bruce? You'll have to get another best man, but I will be the flower girl and throw pretty little posies to all the distinguished guests. Here, Mark. Catch, Kaby. One for you, Greta. Danke schön. Ach, zwei Herzen in dreivierteltakt ... ta-ta ... ta-ta ... ta-ta-ta-ta-ta ..."
"What the hell do you think a woman is?" Bruce raged. "Something to mess around with in your spare time?"
Erich kept on humming "Two
Hearts in Waltz Time"—and
jigging around to it, damn him—but
he slipped in a nod to Bruce
and a "Precisely." So I knew
where I stood, but it was no news
to me.
"Very well," Bruce said, "let's
leave this Brown Shirt maricón to
amuse himself and get down to
business. I made all of you a proposal
and I don't have to tell you
how serious it is or how serious
Lili and I are about it. We not only
must infiltrate and subvert other
Places, which luckily for us are
made for infiltration, we also must
make contact with the Snakes and
establish working relationships with
their Demons at our level as one
of our first steps."That stopped Erich's jig and got enough of a gasp from some of us to make it seem to come from practically everybody. Erich used it to work a change of pace.
"Bruce! We've let you carry this foolery further than we should. You seem to have the idea that because anything goes in the Place—dueling, drunkenness, und so weiter—you can say what you have and it will all be forgotten with the hangover. Not so. It is true that among such a set of monsters and free spirits as ourselves, and working as secret agents to boot, there cannot be the obvious military discipline that would obtain in a Terran army.
"But let me tell you, Bruce, let me grind it home into you—Sid and Kaby and Mark will bear me out in this, as officers of equivalent rank—that the Spider line of command stretches into and through this Place just as surely as the word of der Führer rules Chicago. And as I shouldn't have to emphasize to you, Bruce, the Spiders have punishments that would make my countrymen in Belsen and Buchenwald—well, pale a little. So while there is still a shadow of justification for our interpreting your remarks as utterly tasteless clowning—"
"Babble on," Bruce said, giving him a loose downward wave of his hand without looking. "I made you people a proposal." He paused. "How do you stand, Sidney Lessingham?"
Then I felt my legs getting weak, because Sid didn't answer right away. The old boy swallowed and started to look around at the rest of us. Then the feeling of reality clamping down got something awful, because he didn't look around, but straightened his back a little. Just then, Mark cut in fast.
"It grieves me, Bruce, but I think you are possessed. Erich, he must be confined."
Kaby nodded, almost absently.
"Confine or kill the coward,
whichever is easier, whip the woman,
and let's get on to the Egyptian
battle."
"Indeed, yes," Mark said. "I
died in it. But now perhaps no
longer."Kaby said to him, "I like you, Roman."
Bruce was smiling, barely, and his eyes were moving and fixing. "You, Ilhilihis?"
Illy's squeak box had never sounded mechanical to me before, but it did as he answered, "I'm a lot deeper into borrowed time than the rest of you, tra-la-la, but Papa still loves living. Include me very much out, Brucie."
"Miss Davies?"
Beside me, Maud said flatly, "Do you think I'm a fool?" Beyond her, I saw Lili and I thought, "My God, I might look as proud if I were in her shoes, but I sure as hell wouldn't look as confident."
Bruce's eyes hadn't quite come to Beau when the gambler spoke up. "I have no cause to like you, sir, rather the opposite. But this Place has come to bore me more than Boston and I have always found it difficult to resist a long shot. A very long one, I fear. I am with you, sir."
There was a pain in my chest and a roaring in my ears and through it I heard Sevensee grunting, "—sicka these lousy Spiders. Deal me in."
And then Doc reared up in front of the bar and he'd lost his hat and his hair was wild and he grabbed an empty fifth by the neck and broke the bottom of it all jagged against the bar and he waved it and screeched, "Ubivaytye Pauki—i Nyemetzi!"
And right behind his words, Beau sang out fast the English of it, "Kill the Spiders—and the Germans!"
And Doc didn't collapse then, though I could see he was hanging onto the bar tight with his other hand, and the Place got stiller, inside and out, than I've ever known it, and Bruce's eyes were finally moving back toward Sid.
But the eyes stopped short of
Sid and I heard Bruce say,
"Miss Forzane?" and I thought,
"That's funny," and I started to
look around at the Countess, and
felt all the eyes and I realized,
"Hey, that's me! But this can't
happen to me. To the others, yes,
but not to me. I just work here.
Not to Greta, no, no, no!"
But it had, and the eyes didn't
let go, and the silence and the feeling
of reality were Godawful, and
I said to myself, "Greta, you've
got to say something, if only a
suitable four-letter word," and then
suddenly I knew what the silence
was like. It was like that of a big
city if there were some way of
shutting off all the noise in one
second. It was like Erich's singing
when the piano had deserted him.
It was as if the Change Winds
should ever die completely ...
and I knew beforehand what had
happened when I turned my back
on them all.The Ghostgirls were gone. The Major Maintainer hadn't merely been switched to Introvert. It was gone, too.
CHAPTER 9
"We examined the moss between
the bricks, and found it undisturbed."
"You looked among D——'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?"
"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume...."
"You looked among D——'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?"
"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume...."
—Poe
A LOCKED ROOM
Three hours later, Sid and
I plumped down on the
couch nearest the kitchen, though
too tired to want to eat for a while
yet. A tighter search than I could
ever have cooked up had shown
that the Maintainer was not in the
Place.
Of course it had to be in the
Place, as we kept telling each
other for the first two hours. It
had to be, if circumstances and the
theories we lived by in the Change
World meant anything. A Maintainer
is what maintains a Place.
The Minor Maintainer takes care
of oxygen, temperature, humidity,
gravity, and other little life-cycle
and matter-cycle things generally,
but it's the Major Maintainer that
keeps the walls from buckling and
the ceiling from falling in. It is
little, but oh my, it does so much.It doesn't work by wires or radio or anything complicated like that. It just hooks into local space-time.
I have been told that its inside working part is made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, each one of which is practically a vest-pocket cosmos in itself. Outside, it looks like a portable radio with a few more dials and some telltales and switches and plug-ins for earphones and a lot of other sensory thingumajigs.
But the Maintainer was gone and the Void hadn't closed in, yet. By this time, I was so fagged, I didn't care much whether it did or not.
One thing for sure, the Maintainer had been switched to Introvert before it was spirited away or else its disappearance automatically produced Introversion, take your choice, because we sure were Introverted—real nasty martinet-schoolmaster grip of reality on my thoughts that I knew, without trying, liquor wouldn't soften, not a breath of Change Wind, absolutely stifling, and the gray of the Void seeming so much inside my head that I think I got a glimmering of what the science boys mean when they explain to me that the Place is a kind of interweaving of the material and the mental—a Giant Monad, one of them called it.
Anyway, I said to myself, "Greta, if this is Introversion, I want no part of it. It is not nice to be cut adrift from the cosmos and know it. A lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific and a starship between galaxies are not in it for loneliness."
I asked myself why the Spiders
had ever equipped Maintainers
with Introversion switches
anyway, when we couldn't drill
with them and weren't supposed to
use them except in an emergency
so tight that it was either Introvert
or surrender to the Snakes,
and for the first time the obvious
explanation came to me:
Introversion must be the same
as scuttling, its main purpose to
withhold secrets and materiel from
the enemy. It put a place into a
situation from which even the
Spider high command couldn't
rescue it, and there was nothing
left but to sink down, down (out?
up?), down into the Void.If that was the case, our chances of getting back were about those of my being a kid again playing in the Dunes on the Small Time.
I edged a little closer to Sid and sort of squunched under his shoulder and rubbed my cheek against the smudged, gold-worked gray velvet. He looked down and I said, "A long way to Lynn Regis, eh, Siddy?"
"Sweetling, thou spokest a mouthful," he said. He knows very well what he is doing when he mixes his language that way, the wicked old darling.
"Siddy," I said, "why this gold-work? It'd be a lot smoother without it."
"Marry, men must prick themselves out and, 'faith I know not, but it helps if there's metal in it."
"And girls get scratched." I took a little sniff. "But don't put this doublet through the cleaner yet. Until we get out of the woods, I want as much you around as possible."
"Marry, and why should I?" he asked blankly, and I think he wasn't fooling me. The last thing time travelers find out is how they do or don't smell. Then his face clouded and he looked as though he wanted to squunch under my shoulder. "But 'faith, sweetling, your forest has a few more trees than Sherwood."
"Thou saidst it," I agreed, and wondered about the look. He oughtn't to be interested in my girlishness now. I knew I was a mess, but he had stuck pretty close to me during the hunt and you never can tell. Then I remembered that he was the other one who hadn't declared himself when Bruce was putting it to us, and it probably troubled his male vanity. Not me, though—I was still grateful to the Maintainer for getting me out of that spot, whatever other it had got us all into. It seemed ages ago.
We'd all jumped to the conclusion
that the two Ghostgirls
had run away with the Maintainer,
I don't know where or why,
but it looked so much that way.
Maud had started yipping about
how she'd never trusted Ghosts
and always known that some day
they'd start doing things on their
own, and Kaby had got it firmly
fixed in her head, right between the
horns, that Phryne, being a Greek,
was the ringleader and was going
to wreak havoc on us all.
But when we were checking
Stores the first time, I had noticed
that the Ghostgirl envelopes looked
flat. Ectoplasm doesn't take up
much space when it's folded, but I
had opened one anyway, then another,
and then called for help.Every last envelope was empty. We had lost over a thousand Ghostgirls, Sid's whole stock.
Well, at least it proved what none of us had ever seen or heard of being demonstrated: that there is a spooky link—a sort of Change Wind contact—between a Ghost and its lifeline; and when that umbilicus, I've heard it called, is cut, the part away from the lifeline dies.
Interesting, but what had bothered me was whether we Demons were going to evaporate too, because we are as much Doublegangers as the Ghosts and our apron strings had been cut just as surely. We're more solid, of course, but that would only mean we'd take a little longer. Very logical.
I remember I had looked up at Lili and Maud—us girls had been checking the envelopes; it's one of the proprieties we frequently maintain and anyway, if men check them, they're apt to trot out that old wheeze about "instant women" which I'm sick to death of hearing, thank you.
Anyway, I had looked up and said, "It's been nice knowing you," and Lili had said, "Twenty-three, skiddoo," and Maud had said, "Here goes nothing," and we had shook hands all around.
We figured that Phryne and the Countess had faded at the same time as the other Ghostgirls, but an idea had been nibbling at me and I said, "Siddy, do you suppose it's just barely possible that, while we were all looking at Bruce, those two Ghostgirls would have been able to work the Maintainer and get a Door and lam out of here with the thing?"
"Thou speakst my thoughts, sweetling. All weighs against it: Imprimis, 'tis well known that Ghosts cannot lay plots or act on them. Secundo, the time forbade getting a Door. Tercio—and here's the real meat of it—the Place folds without the Maintainer. Quadro, 'twere folly to depend on not one of—how many of us? ten, elf—not looking around in all the time it would have taken them—"
"I looked around once, Siddy. They were drinking and they had got to the control divan under their own power. Now when was that? Oh, yes, when Bruce was talking about Zombies."
"Yes, sweetling. And as I was about to cap my argument with quinquo when you 'gan prattle, I could have sworn none could touch the Maintainer, much less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet ..."
"Eftsoons yet," I seconded him.
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