American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (101 page)

“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.

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 Ghost-girls 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 knickknacks, 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, mashedup 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 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?”