The Fritz Leiber Megapack Page 15

  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, ghos
ted 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—”