The Fritz Leiber Megapack Page 20

  During the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossed around as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat of Snake science amounting to sorcery; the Spider high command bunkering the Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the Express Room, in such a hurry that they hadn’t even time to transmit warnings; the hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beings who are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of the Change War into the future much beyond Sevensee’s epoch—unless the Late Cosmicians are the ones fighting the Change War.

  One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one of us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political police, agent of—who knows, after Bruce?—a secret Change World Committee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, or strictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the Maintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich’s and Bruce’s factions.

  Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but that didn’t apply to what I did with my own thoughts.

  * * * *

  Who wanted to escape so bad they’d Introvert the Place, cutting off all possible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and running the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all?

  Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things up, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid couldn’t keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments for derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as Erich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of the bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly hadn’t had my eye on him every second.

  Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he said counted, so he’d hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.

  Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people especially, more than any man or woman I’ve ever known—he’s like a big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his mouth—and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the cosmos.

  Maud, Kaby, Mark and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of, though Sevensee’s being from the very far future did tie in with that idea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something developing between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to be Introverted together.

  “Stick to the facts, Greta,” I reminded myself with a private groan.

  That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself.

  Erich, I thought—now we’re getting somewhere. The little commandant has the nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if he thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be locked in with him, he’d do it in a second.

  But even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he’d been heckling Bruce from the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for him to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and…well, that was nine-tenths of the problem.

  If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanation of all. Gr-r-r!

  Bruce’s motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it immortal?) danger he’d put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed a shame he’d been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the Maintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar, we’d all have noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I’d have noticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls—if it worked as Sid claimed, and he said he had never seen it in operation, just read in the manual—oh, ’sdeath!

  * * * *

  But Bruce didn’t need opportunity, as I’m sure all the males in the Place would have told me right off, because he had Lili to pull the job for him and she had as much opportunity as any of the rest of us. Myself, I have large reservations to this woman-putty-in-the-hands-of-the-man-she-loves-madly theory, but I had to admit there was something to be said for it in this case, and it had seemed quite natural to me when the rest of us had decided, by unspoken agreement, that neither Lili’s nor Bruce’s checks counted when we were hunting for the Maintainer.

  That took care of all of us and left only the mysterious stranger, intruding somehow through a Door (how’d he get it without using our Maintainer?) or from an unimaginable hiding place or straight out of the Void itself. I know that last is impossible—nothing can step out of nothing—but if anything ever looked like it was specially built for something not at all nice to come looming out of, it’s the Void—misty, foggily churning, slimy gray.…

  “Wait a second,” I told myself, “and hang onto this, Greta. It should have smacked you in the face at the start.”

  Whatever came out of the Void, or, more to the point, whoever slipped back from our crowd to the Maintainer, Bruce would have seen them. He was looking at the Maintainer past our heads the whole time, and whatever happened to it, he saw it.

  Erich wouldn’t have, even after he was on the bomb, because he’d been stagewise enough to face Bruce most of the time to build up his role as tribune of the people.

  But Bruce would have—unless he got so caught up in what he was saying.…

  No, kid, a Demon is always an actor, no matter how much he believes in what he’s saying, and there never was an actor yet who wouldn’t instantly notice a member of the audience starting to walk out on his big scene.

  So Bruce knew, which made him a better actor than I’d have been willing to grant, since it didn’t look as if anyone else had thought of what had just occurred to me, or they’d have gone over and put it to him.

  Not me, though—I don’t work that way. Besides, I didn’t feel up to it—Nervy Anna enfold me, I felt like pure hell.

  “Maybe,” I told myself encouragingly, “the Place is Hell,” but added, “Be your age, Greta—be a real rootless, ruleless, ruthless twenty-nine.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed

  With bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear,

  Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.

  Lines of gray, muttering faces, masked with fear,

  They leave their trenches, going over the top,

  While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists

  —Sassoon

  THE WESTERN FRONT, 1917

  “Please don’t, Lili.”

  “I shall, my love.”

  “Sweetling, wake up! Hast the shakes?”

  I opened my eyes a little and lied to Siddy with a smile and locked my hands together tight and watched Bruce and Lili quarrel nobly near the control divan and wished I had a great love to blur my misery and provide me with a passable substitute for Change Winds.

  Lili won the argument, judging from the way she threw her head back and stepped away from Bruce’s arms while giving him a proud, tender smile. He walked off a few steps; praise be, he didn’t shrug his shoulders at us like an old husband, though his nerves were showing and he didn’t seem to be standing Introversion well at all, as who of us were?

  Lili rested a hand on the head of the control divan and pressed her lips together and looked around at us, mostly with her eyes. She’d wound a gray silk bandeau around her bangs. Her short gray silk dress without a waistline made her look, not so much like a flapper, though she looked like that all right, as like a little girl, except the neckline was scooped low enough to show she wasn’t.

  Her gaze hesitated and then stopped at me and I got a sunk feeling of what was coming, because women are always picking on me for an audience. Besides, Sid and I were the centrist party of two in our fresh-out-of-the-shell Place politics.

  She took a deep breath and stuck out her chin and said in a voice that was even a little higher and British
er than she usually uses, “We girls have often cried, ‘Shut the Door!’ But now the Door is jolly well shut for keeps!”

  I knew I’d guessed right and I felt crawly with embarrassment, because I know about this love business of thinking you’re the other person and trying to live their life—and grab their glory, though you don’t know that—and carry their message for them, and how it can foul things up. Still, I couldn’t help admitting what she said wasn’t too bad a start—unpleasantly apt to be true, at any rate.

  “My fiance believes we may yet be able to open the Door. I do not. He thinks it is a bit premature to discuss the peculiar pickle in which we all find ourselves. I do not.”

  There was a rasp of laughter from the bar. The militarists were reacting. Erich stepped out, looking very happy. “So now we have to listen to women making speeches,” he called. “What is this Place, anyhow? Sidney Lessingham’s Saturday Evening Sewing Circle?”

  * * * *

  Beau and Sevensee, who’d stopped their pacing halfway between the bar and the control divan, turned toward Erich, and Sevensee looked a little burlier, a little more like half a horse, than satyrs in mythology book illustrations. He stamped—medium hard, I’d say—and said, “Ahh, go flya kite.” I’d found out he’d learned English from a Demon who’d been a longshoreman with syndicalist-anarchist sympathies. Erich shut up for a moment and stood there grinning, his hands on his hips.

  Lili nodded to the satyr and cleared her throat, looking scared. But she didn’t speak; I could see she was thinking and feeling something, and her face got ugly and haggard, as if she were in a Change Wind that hadn’t reached me yet, and her mouth went into a snarl to fight tears, but some spurted out, and when she did speak her voice was an octave lower and it wasn’t just London talking but New York too.

  “I don’t know how Resurrection felt to you people, because I’m new and I loathe asking questions, but to me it was pure torture and I wished only I’d had the courage to tell Suzaku, ‘I wish to remain a Zombie, if you don’t mind. I’d rather the nightmares.’ But I accepted Resurrection because I’ve been taught to be polite and because there is the Demon in me I don’t understand that always wishes to live, and I found that I still felt like a Zombie, although I could flit about, and that I still had the nightmares, except they’d grown a deal vivider.

  “I was a young girl again, seventeen, and I suppose every woman wishes to be seventeen, but I wasn’t seventeen inside my head—I was a woman who had died of Bright’s disease in New York in 1929 and also, because a Big Change blew my lifeline into a new drift, a woman who had died of the same disease in Nazi-occupied London in 1955, but rather more slowly because, as you can fancy, the liquor was in far shorter supply. I had to live with both those sets of memories and the Change World didn’t blot them out any more than I’m told it does those of any Demon, and it didn’t even push them into the background as I’d hoped it would.

  “When some Change Fellow would say to me, ‘Hallo, beautiful, how about a smile?’ or ‘That’s a posh frock, kiddo,’ I’d be back at Bellevue looking down at my swollen figure and the light getting like spokes of ice, or in that dreadful gin-steeped Stepney bedroom with Phyllis coughing herself to death beside me, or at best, for a moment, a little girl in Glamorgan looking at the Roman road and wondering about the wonderful life that lay ahead.”

  I looked at Erich, remembering he had a long nasty future back in the cosmos himself, and at any rate he wasn’t smiling, and I thought maybe he’s getting a little humility, knowing someone else has two of those futures, but I doubted it.

  “Because, you see,” Lili kept forcing it out, “all my three lives I’d been a girl who fell in love with a great young poet she’d never met, the voice of the new youth and all youth, and she’d told her first big lie to get in the Red Cross and across to France to be nearer him, and it was all danger and dark magics and a knight in armor, and she pictured how she’d find him wounded but not seriously, with a little bandage around his head, and she’d light a fag for him and smile lightly, never letting him guess what she felt, but only being her best self and watching to see if that made something happen to him.…

  “And then the Boche machine guns cut him down at Passchendaele and there couldn’t ever have been bandages big enough and the girl stayed seventeen inside and messed about and tried to be wicked, though she wasn’t very good at that, and to drink, and she had a bit more talent there, though drinking yourself to death is not nearly as easy as it sounds, even with a kidney weakness to help. But she turned the trick.

  “Then a cock crows. She wakes with a tearing start from the gray dreams of death that fill her lifeline. It’s cold daybreak. There’s the smell of a French farm. She feels her ankles and they’re not at all like huge rubber boots filled with water. They’re not swollen the least bit. They’re young legs.

  “There’s a little window and the tops of a row of trees that may be poplars when there’s more light, and what there is shows cots like her own and heads under blankets, and hanging uniforms make large shadows and a girl is snoring. There’s a very distant rumble and it moves the window a bit. Then she remembers they’re Red Cross girls many, many kilometers from Passchendaele and that Bruce Marchant is going to die at dawn today.

  “In a few more minutes, he’s going over the top where there’s a crop-headed machine-gunner in field gray already looking down the sights and swinging the gun a bit. But she isn’t going to die today. She’s going to die in 1929 and 1955.

  “And just as she’s going mad, there’s a creaking and out of the shadows tiptoes a Jap with a woman’s hairdo and the whitest face and the blackest eyebrows. He’s wearing a rose robe and a black sash which belts to his sides two samurai swords, but in his right hand he has a strange silver pistol. And he smiles at her as if they were brother and sister and lovers at the same time and he says, ‘Voulez-vous vivre, mademoiselle?’ and she stares and he bobs his head and says, ‘Missy wish live, yes, no?’”

  * * * *

  Sid’s paw closed quietly around my shaking hands. It always gets me to hear about anyone’s Resurrection, and although mine was crazier, it also had the Krauts in it. I hoped she wouldn’t go through the rest of the formula and she didn’t.

  “Five minutes later, he’s gone down a stairs more like a ladder to wait below and she’s dressing in a rush. Her clothes resist a little, as if they were lightly gummed to the hook and the stained wall, and she hates to touch them. It’s getting lighter and her cot looks as if someone were still sleeping there, although it’s empty, and she couldn’t bring herself to put her hand on the place if her new life depended on it.

  “She climbs down and her long skirt doesn’t bother her because she knows how to swing it. Suzaku conducts her past a sentry who doesn’t see them and a puffy-faced farmer in a smock coughing and spitting the night out of his throat. They cross the farmyard and it’s filled with rose light and she sees the sun is up and she knows that Bruce Marchant has just bled to death.

  “There’s an empty open touring car chugging loudly, waiting for someone; it has huge muddy wheels with wooden spokes and a brass radiator that says ‘Simplex.’ But Suzaku leads her past it to a dunghill and bows apologetically and she steps through a Door.”

  I heard Erich say to the others at the bar, “How touching! Now shall I tell everyone about my operation?” But he didn’t get much of a laugh.

  “That’s how Lilian Foster came into the Change World with its steel-engraved nightmares and its deadly pace and deadlier lassitudes. I was more alive than I ever had been before, but it was the kind of life a corpse might get from unending electrical shocks and I couldn’t summon any purpose or hope and Bruce Marchant seemed farther away than ever.

  “Then, not six hours ago, a Soldier in a black uniform came through the Door and I thought, ‘It can’t be, but it does look like his photographs,’ and then I thought I heard someone say the name Bruce, an
d then he shouted as if to all the world that he was Bruce Marchant, and I knew there was a Resurrection beyond Resurrection, a true resurrection. Oh, Bruce—”

  She looked at him and he was crying and smiling and all the young beauty flooded back into her face, and I thought, “It has to be Change Winds, but it can’t be. Face it without slobbering, Greta—there’s something that works bigger miracles than Change.”

  And she went on, “And then the Change Winds died when the Snakes vaporized the Maintainer or the Ghostgirls Introverted it and all three of them vanished so swiftly and silently that even Bruce didn’t notice—those are the best explanations I can summon and I fancy one of them is true. At all events, the Change Winds died and my past and even my futures became something I could bear lightly, because I have someone to bear them with me, and because at last I have a true future stretching out ahead of me, an unknown future which I shall create by living. Oh, don’t you see that all of us have it now, this big opportunity?”

  “Hussa for Sidney’s suffragettes and the W.C.T.U.!” Erich cheered. “Beau, will you play us a medley of ‘Hearts and Flowers’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’? I’m deeply moved, Lili. Where do the rest of us queue up for the Great Love Affair of the Century?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past’s mistakes and the future’s fears.

  I had to learn to close the front door to tomorrow and the back door to yesterday and settle down to here and now.

  —Anonymous

  A BIG OPPORTUNITY

  Nobody laughed at Erich’s screwball sarcasms and still I thought, “Yes, perish his hysterical little gray head, but he’s half right—Lili’s got the big thing now and she wants to serve it up to the rest of us on a platter, only love doesn’t cook and cut that way.”

  Those weren’t bad ideas she had about the Maintainer, though, especially the one about the Ghostgirls doing the Introverting—it would explain why there couldn’t be Introversion drill, the manual stuff about blue flashes being window-dressing, and something disappearing without movement or transition is the sort of thing that might not catch the attention—and I guess they gave the others something to think about too, for there wasn’t any follow-up to Erich’s frantic sniping.