American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (102 page)

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 cuss-word, 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 smootching, 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 she’d 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 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.”

De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms.

—Eliot

s o s 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 emergencygreen and fast, but the mode 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 these 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 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 first 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 highcollared 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 first,” 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 sweetsmelling 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 voicebox 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 emergencylike 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.

I started to ask Illy about it, but just then Beau came scampering back from the bar with a big red-and-black earthenware goblet of wine—we try to keep a variety of drinking tools in stock so folks will feel more at home. Kaby grabbed it from him and drained most of it in one swallow and then smashed it on the floor. She does things like that, though Sid’s tried to teach her better. Then she stared at what she was thinking about until the whites showed all around her eyes and her lips pulled way back from her teeth and she looked a lot less human than the two ETs, just like a fury. Only a time traveler knows how like the wild murals and engravings of them some of the ancients can look.

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.

When 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.