The Change War Page 2

  “A Deskful of Girls,” is one of Leiber’s finest, tongue-in-cheek fantasies. It also introduces an important addition to Leiber’s growing Changewar bestiary: the ghostgirl. With an affectionately satirical glance toward Raymond Chandler and other novelists of the private eye school, Leiber pulls a file from the casebook of Carr Mackay, private investigator. Mackay believes he has been commissioned by the hottest young starlet in town to recover incriminating documents from her psychiatrist’s office. Instead he finds that Dr. Slyker has been “cutting ghosts” from the most desirable of his women patients. What makes this story unusual, and psychologically interesting, is that Slyker’s collection of ghostgirls is sexy!

  After all what is a ghost, according to all traditional views, but the shell of a human being—an animated skin? And the skin is all sex—it’s touch, the boundary, the mask of flesh.

  But ghosts are supposed to be frightening? Well, who ever said that sex isn’t? It is to the neophyte, female or male, and don’t let any of the latter try to kid you. For one thing, sex opens up the unconscious mind, which isn’t exactly a picnic area. Sex is a force and rite that is basic, primal…The witch was a sexual creature. So is the ghost.

  In writing this story Leiber has drawn heavily from modern research into the unconscious mind and the literature of schizophrenia to develop a plausible and genuinely frightening science-fictional description of ghosts. Once again he has neatly balanced gothic and SF elements to breathe new life into an old theme.

  In “The Haunted Future,” a satirical note is again struck in Leiber’s description of Civil Service Knolls, the ultimate in planned and sanitized communities. By the 21st century mental hygiene has taken such strides that individuality is gradually being erased. The only recourse for diehard individualists is massive psychosis and a one-way ticket to the neighboring lunatic asylum. This story touches a familiar Leiberian theme: the dark depths of insanity and fear that lie just beneath the most orderly of modern societies.

  “The Number of the Beast” and “The Mind Spider” both explore a somewhat tired science fiction device, telepathy, to very different effect. “The Number of the Beast” is in actuality a detective story in the manner of Sherlock Holmes or Charlie Chan. The Young Captain of Police consults the Old Lieutenant when an instant decision has to be made: which of three alien telepaths is guilty of murder? Interstellar war lies in the offing if the wrong party is accused. Various avenues of investigation are explored, including “the number of the beast,” a reference to the supernaturalism of Aleister Crowley, but the final solution is attributable to nothing more than elegant and logical reasoning. It is all told with such good humor that it is a delight to read.

  “The Mind Spider is a telepathic horror story in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft with overtones of Poe’s Tale of Arthur Gordon Pym. The Horn family are the first humans to develop and exercise latent telepathic powers. Inadvertently their mental activity wakens a fearful mental evil, the mind spider, in its prison deep in Antarctica. The spider attempts to control them to make its escape and enslave the world.

  “Black Corridor,” the last story included here, comes much closer to addressing themes raised in the best of the Changewar canon. In several ways “Black Corridor” repeats the lessons of “No Great Magic” in a more stylized, although less richly realized fiction. The protagonist is not given a name; like Greta he is a character without a past, tentatively searching out his future. As the story opens he is crouched in the black corridor of the title, a corridor whose wall remorselessly moves to force the man down the long hallway to the end where two doors marked Water and Air are hung. The man is forced to make a decision between the doors; then, a succession of decisions between still more sets of doors marked Fire and Earth, Demons and Tigers, Instant Painless Death and Torture, finally between Perpetual Solitary Confinement in Happy Comfort or Death or Life. Finally the man emerges in an infirmary having, apparently, made all the right choices. He is handed a folder containing his identification and personal history, by now having found himself, as Greta did, from amidst a tumult of possibilities. And somewhere within that folder is an account of the reality he had shied from, that had left him wandering nameless through the black corridor.

  Like the protagonist of “Damnation Morning” he has found self-knowledge in the midst of horror, even by choosing between horrors, but the consequences of that knowledge are not discussed. Because of this, “Black Corridor,” seems half-realized compared to “No Great Magic” and “Damnation Morning,” but if it does not take up this final question it at least proposes an interim solution: “For the moment it was enough to know he was alive and a man.” It is a solution, Leiber often reminds us, that is sufficient unto the day.

  nothing is but what is not

  —Macbeth, I.iii.141

  Macbeth’s words suit Leiber very well. His is a fiction of paradoxes if not opposites. Good and evil, ignorance and knowledge, inside and outside, praise and dispraise, past and future: all play their part in Leiber’s world. Science fiction and gothic horror, too, are opposites which Leiber has successfully wedded in the Changewar saga in order to better probe the scienti-supernaturalism of modern life. Fritz Leiber is one of the first to make this connection between the dark recesses of man’s psyche and the swiftly eddying future. Leiber demonstrates what few have recognized: that the future in all its complexity, with all its branches of alternate possibility, is simply another word for soul.

  John Silbersack

  New York City

  No Great Magic

  I

  To bring the dead to life

  Is no great magic.

  Few are wholly dead:

  Blow on a dead man’s embers

  And a live flame will start.

  —Graves

  I DIPPED through the filmy curtain into the boys’ half of the dressing room and there was Sid sitting at the star’s dressing table in his threadbare yellowed undershirt, the lucky one, not making up yet but staring sternly at himself in the bulb-framed mirror and experimentally working his features a little, as actors will, and kneading the stubble on his fat chin.

  I said to him quietly, “Siddy, what are we putting on tonight? Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen or Shakespeare’s Macbeth? It says Macbeth on the callboard, but Miss Nefer’s getting ready for Elizabeth. She just had me go and fetch the red wig.”

  He tried out a few eyebrow rears—right, left, both together—then turned to me, sucking in his big gut a little, as he always does when a gal heaves into hailing distance, and said, “Your pardon, sweetling, what sayest thou?”

  Sid always uses that kook antique patter backstage, until I sometimes wonder whether I’m in Central Park, New York City, nineteen hundred and three quarters, or somewhere in Southwark, Merry England, fifteen hundred and same. The truth is that although he loves every last fat part in Shakespeare and will play the skinniest one with loyal and inspired affection, he thinks Willy S. penned Falstaff with nobody else in mind but Sidney J. Lessingham. (And no accent on the ham, please.)

  I closed my eyes and counted to eight, then repeated my question.

  He replied, “Why, the Bard’s tragical history of the bloody Scot, certes.” He waved his hand toward the portrait of Shakespeare that always sits beside his mirror on top of his reserve makeup box. At first that particular picture of the Bard looked too nancy to me—a sort of peeping-tom schoolteacher—but I’ve grown used to it over the months and even palsy-feeling.

  He didn’t ask me why I hadn’t asked Miss Nefer my question. Everybody in the company knows she spends the hour before curtain-time getting into character, never parting her lips except for that purpose—or to bite your head off if you try to make the most necessary conversation.

  “Aye, ’tiz Macbeth tonight,” Sid confirmed, returning to his frowning-practice: left eyebrow up, right down, reverse, repeat, rest. “And I must play the ill-starred Thane of Glamis.”

  I said, “That’s fine, Siddy, but where
does it leave us with Miss Nefer? She’s already thinned her eyebrows and beaked out the top of her nose for Queen Liz, though that’s as far as she’s got. A beautiful job, the nose. Anybody else would think it was plastic surgery instead of putty. But it’s going to look kind of funny on the Thaness of Glamis.”

  Sid hesitated a half second longer than he usually would—I thought, his timings off tonight—and then he harrumphed and said, “Why, Iris Nefer, decked out as Good Queen Bess, will speak a prologue to the play—a prologue which I have myself but last week writ.” He owled his eyes. “’Tis an experiment in new theater.”

  I said, “Siddy, prologues were nothing new to Shakespeare. He had them on half his other plays. Besides, it doesn’t make sense to use Queen Elizabeth. She was dead by the time he whipped up Macbeth, which is all about witchcraft and directed at King James.”

  He growled a little at me and demanded, “Prithee, how comes it your peewit-brain bears such a ballast of fusty book-knowledge, chit?”

  I said softly, “Siddy, you don’t camp in a Shakespearean dressing room for a year, tete-a-teting with some of the wisest actors ever, without learning a little. Sure I’m a mental case, a poor little A & A existing on your sweet charity, and don’t think I don’t appreciate it, but—”

  “A-and-A, thou sayest?” he frowned. “Methinks the gladsome new forswearers of sack and ale call themselves AA.”

  “Agoraphobe and Amnesiac,” I told him. “But look, Siddy, I was going to sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak a prologue to Macbeth is as much an anachronism as if you put her on the gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle of champagne over its schnozzle.”

  “Ha!” he cried as if he’d caught me out. “And saying there’s a new Elizabeth, wouldn’t that be the bravest advertisement ever for the Empire?—perchance rechristening the pilot, copilot and astrogator Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh? And the ship The Golden Hind? Tilly fally, lady!”

  He went on, “My prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings will never mark it. Think’st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling the hour in Caesar’s Rome, buried that Roman ’stead o’ burning him and gave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. Go to, doll.”

  “Czechoslovakia, Siddy?”

  “Bohemia, then, what skills it? Leave me now, sweet poppet. Go thy ways. I have matters of import to ponder. There’s more to running a repertory company than reading the footnotes to Furness.”

  Martin had just slouched by calling the Half Hour and looking in his solemnity, sneakers, levis and dirty T-shirt more like an underage refugee from Skid Row than Sid’s newest recruit, assistant stage manager and hardest-worked juvenile—though for once he’d remembered to shave. I was about to ask Sid who was going to play Lady Mack if Miss Nefer wasn’t, or, if she were going to double the roles, shouldn’t I help her with the change? She’s a slow dresser and the Elizabeth costumes are pretty realistically stayed. And she would have trouble getting off that nose, I was sure. But then I saw that Siddy was already slapping on the alboline to keep the grease paint from getting into his pores.

  Greta, you ask too many questions, I told myself. You get everybody riled up and you rack your own poor rickety little mind; and I hied myself off to the costumery to settle my nerves.

  The costumery, which occupies the back end of the dressing room, is exactly the right place to settle the nerves and warm the fancies of any child, including an unraveled adult who’s saving what’s left of her sanity by pretending to be one. To begin with there are the regular costumes for Shakespeare’s plays, all jeweled and spangled and brocaded, stage armor, great Roman togas with weights in the borders to make them drape right, velvets of every color to rest your cheek against and dream, and the fantastic costumes for the other plays we favor; Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Shaw’s Back to Methuselah and Hillard’s adaptation of Heinlein’s Children of Methuselah, the Capek brothers’ Insect People, O’Neill’s The Fountain, Flecker’s Hassan, Camino Real, Children of the Moon, The Beggars Opera, Mary of Scotland, Berkeley Square, The Road to Rome.

  There are also the costumes for all the special and variety performances we give of the plays: Hamlet in modern dress, Julius Caesar set in a dictatorship of the 1920’s, The Taming of the Shrew in caveman furs and leopard skins, where Petruchio comes in riding a dinosaur, The Tempest set on another planet with a spaceship wreck to start it off Karrumph!—which means a half dozen spacesuits, featherweight but looking ever so practical, and the weirdest sort of extraterrestrial-beast outfits for Ariel and Caliban and the other monsters.

  Oh, I tell you the stuff in the costumery ranges over such a sweep of space and time that you sometimes get frightened you’ll be whirled up and spun off just anywhere, so that you have to clutch at something very real to you to keep it from happening and to remind you where you really are—as I did now at the subway token on the thin gold chain around my neck (Siddy’s first gift to me that I can remember) and chanted very softly to myself, like a charm or a prayer, closing my eyes and squeezing the holes in the token: “Columbus Circle, Times Square, Penn Station, Christopher Street…”

  But you don’t ever get really frightened in the costumery. Not exactly, though your goosehairs get wonderfully realistically tingled and your tummy chilled from time to time—because you know it’s all make-believe, a lifesize doll world, a children’s dress-up world. It gets you thinking of far-off times and scenes as pleasant places and not as black hungry mouths that might gobble you up and keep you forever. It’s always safe, always just in the theatre, just on the stage, no matter how far it seems to plunge and roam…and the best sort of therapy for a pot-holed mind like mine, with as many gray ruts and curves and gaps as its cerebrum, that can’t remember one single thing before this last year in the dressing room and that can’t ever push its shaking body out of that same motherly fatherly room, except to stand in the wings for a scene or two and watch the play until the fear gets too great and the urge to take just one peek at the audience gets too strong…and I remember what happened the two times I did peek, and I have to come scuttling back.

  The costumery’s good occupational therapy for me, too, as my pricked and calloused fingertips testify. I think I must have stitched up or darned half the costumes in it this last twelve-month, though there are so many of them that I swear the drawers have accordion pleats and the racks extend into the fourth dimension—not to mention the boxes of props and the shelves of scripts and prompt-copies and other books, including a couple of encyclopedias and the many thick volumes of Furness’s Variorum Shakespeare, which as Sid had guessed I’d been boning up on. Oh, and I’ve sponged and pressed enough costumes, too, and even refitted them to newcomers like Martin, ripping up and resewing seams, which can be a punishing job with heavy materials.

  In a less sloppily organized company I’d be called wardrobe mistress, I guess. Except that to anyone in show business that suggests a crotchety old dame with lots of authority and scissors hanging around her neck on a string. Although I got my crochets, all right, I’m not that old. Kind of childish, in fact. As for authority, everybody outranks me, even Martin.

  Of course to somebody outside show business, wardrobe mistress might suggest a yummy gal who spends her time dressing up as Nell Gwyn or Anitra or Mrs. Pinchwife or Cleopatra or even Eve (we got a legal costume for it) and inspiring the boys. I’ve tried that once or twice. But Siddy frowns on it, and if Miss Nefer ever caught me at it I think she’d whang me.

  And in a normaller company it would be the wardrobe room, too, but costumery is my infantile name for it and the actors go along with my little whims.

  I don’t mean to suggest our company is completely crackers. To get as close to Broadway even as Central Park you got to have something. But in spite of Sid’s whip-cracking there is a comforting looseness about its efficiency—people trade around the parts they play without
fuss, the bill may be changed a half hour before curtain without anybody getting hysterics, nobody gets fired for eating garlic and breathing it in the leading lady’s face. In short, we re a team. Which is funny when you come to think of it, as Sid and Miss Nefer and Bruce and Maudie are British (Miss Nefer with a touch of Eurasian blood, I romance); Martin and Beau and me are American (at least I think I am) while the rest come from just everywhere.

  Besides my costumery work, I fetch things and run inside errands and help the actresses dress and the actors too. The dressing room’s very coeducational in a halfway respectable way. And every once in a while Martin and I police up the whole place, me skittering about with dustcloth and wastebasket, he wielding the scrub-brush and mop with such silent grim efficiency that it always makes me nervous to get through and duck back into the costumery to collect myself.

  Yes, the costumery’s a great place to quiet your nerves or improve your mind or even dream your life away. But this time I couldn’t have been there eight minutes when Miss Nefer’s Elizabeth-angry voice came skirling, “Girl! Girl! Greta, where is my ruff with silver trim?” I laid my hands on it in a flash and loped it to her, because Old Queen Liz was known to slap even her Maids of Honor around a bit now and then and Miss Nefer is a bear on getting into character—a real Paul Muni.

  She was all made up now, I was happy to note, at least as far as her face went—I hate to see that spooky eight-spoked faint tattoo on her forehead (I’ve sometimes wondered if she got it acting in India or Egypt maybe).

  Yes, she was already all made up. This time she’d been going extra heavy on the burrowing-into-character bit, I could tell right away, even if it was only for a hacked-out anachronistic prologue. She signed to me to help her dress without even looking at me, but as I got busy I looked at her eyes. They were so cold and sad and lonely (maybe because they were so far away from her eyebrows and temples and small tight mouth, and so shut away from each other by that ridge of nose) that I got the creeps. Then she began to murmur and sigh, very softly at first, then loudly enough so I got the sense of it.