American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (105 page)

I didn’t stop for the two ETs—they’re too hard to figure— or for Doc; nobody can tell whether a fallen-down drunk’s at the black or bright end of his cycle; you just know it’s cycling.

Maud ought to be suffering as much as Beau, called names and caught out in a panic, which always hurts her because she’s plus three hundred years more future than the rest of us and figures she ought to be that much wiser, which she isn’t always —not to mention she’s over fifty years old, though her homecentury cosmetic science keeps her looking and acting teen-age most of the time. She’d backed away from the bronze chest so as not to stand out, and now Lili came from behind the piano and stood beside her.

Lili had the opposite of troubles, a great big glow for Bruce, proud as a promised princess watching her betrothed. Erich frowned when he saw her, for he seemed proud too, proud of the way his
Kamerad
had taken command of us panicky whacks
Führer
-fashion. Sid still looked mostly grateful and inclined to let Bruce keep on talking.

Even Kaby and Mark, those two dragons hot for battle, standing a little in front and to one side of us by the bronze chest, like its guardians, seemed willing to listen. They made me realize one reason Sid had for letting Bruce run on, although the path his talk was leading us down was flashing with danger signals: When it was over, there’d still be the problem of what to do with the bomb, and a real opposition shaping up between Soldiers and Entertainers, and Sid was hoping a solution would turn up in the meantime or at least was willing to put off the evil day.

But beyond all that, and like the rest of us, I could tell from the way Sid was squinting his browy eyes and chewing his beardy lip that he was shaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped into our hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of us could have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had to think of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs we were—well, we wanted to keep on listening.

a place to stand

Bruce’s voice had a faraway touch and he was looking up left at the Void as he said, “Have you ever really wondered why the two sides of this war are called the Snakes and the Spiders? Snakes may be clear enough—you always call the enemy something dirty. But Spiders—our name for ourselves? Bear with me, Ilhilihis; I know that no being is created dirty or malignant by Nature, but this is a matter of anthropoid feelings and folkways. Yes, Mark, I know that some of your legions have nicknames like the Drunken Lions and the Snails, and that’s about as insulting as calling the British Expeditionary Force the Old Contemptibles.

“No, you’d have to go to bands of vicious youths in cities slated for ruin to find a habit of naming like ours, and even they would try to brighten up the black a bit. But simply— Spiders. And Snakes, for that’s their name for themselves too, you know. Spiders and Snakes. What are our masters, that we give them names like that?”

It gave me the shivers and set my mind working in a dozen directions and I couldn’t stop it, although it made the shivers worse.

Illy beside me now—I’d never given it a thought before, but he did have eight legs of a sort, and I remembered thinking of him as a spider monkey, and hadn’t the Lunans had wisdom and atomic power and a billion years in which to get the Change War rolling?

Or suppose, in the far future, Terra’s own spiders evolved intelligence and a cruel cannibal culture. They’d be able to keep their existence secret. I had no idea of who or what would be on Earth in Sevensee’s day, and wouldn’t it be perfect black hairy poisoned spider-mentality to spin webs secretly through the world of thought and all of space and time?

And Beau—wasn’t there something real Snaky about him, the way he moved and all?

Spiders and Snakes.
Spinne und Schlange
, as Erich called them. S & S. But SS stood for the Nazi
Schutzstaffel
, the Black Shirts, and what if some of those cruel, crazy Jerries had discovered time travel and—I brought myself up with a jerk and asked myself, “Greta, how nuts can you get?”

From where he was on the floor, the front of the bar his sounding board, Doc shrieked up at Bruce like one of the damned from the pit, “Don’t speak against the Spiders! Don’t blaspheme! They can hear the Unborn whisper. Others whip only the skin, but they whip the naked brain and heart,” and Erich called out, “That’s enough, Bruce!”

But Bruce didn’t spare him a look and said, “But whatever the Spiders are and no matter how much they use, it’s plain as the telltale on the Maintainer that the Change War is not only going against them, but getting away from them. Dwell for a bit on the current flurry of stupid slugging and panicky anachronism, when we all know that anachronism is what gets the Change Winds out of control. This punch-drunk pounding on the Cretan-Dorian fracas as if it were the only battle going and the only way to work things. Whisking Constantine from Britain to the Bosporus by rocket, sending a pocket submarine back to sail with the Armada against Drake’s woodensides—I’ll wager you hadn’t heard those! And now, to save Rome, an atomic bomb.

“Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a fission weapon . . . I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will make in what’s left of history—the smothering of Greece and the vanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy’s Irish Captivity won’t be in it!”

The cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he didn’t pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned in irony and he said, “But I’m forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we’re just one little world—one little solar system, Sevensee—and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.

“Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever than go on living in a world without the
Summa
, the Field Equations,
Process and Reality
,
Hamlet
, Matthew, Keats, and the
Odyssey
, but our masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those ragged souls who want to go on living no matter what.”

Erich’s “Bruce, I’m telling you that’s enough,” was lost in the quickening flow of the New Boy’s words. “I won’t spend much time on the minor signs of our major crack-up—the canceling of leaves, the sharper shortages, the loss of the Express Room, the use of Recuperation Stations for ops and all the other frantic patchwork—last operation but one, we were saddled with three Soldiers from outside the Galaxy and, no fault of theirs, they were no earthly use. Such little things might happen at a bad spot in any war and are perhaps only local. But there’s a big thing.”

He paused again, to let us wonder, I guess. Maud must have worked her way over to me, for I felt her dry little hand on my arm and she whispered out of the side of her mouth, “What do we do now?”

“We listen,” I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her need to be doing something about things.

She cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, “You, too?”

I didn’t get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts!—because just then Bruce’s voice took up again in the faraway range.

“Have you ever asked yourself how many operations the fabric of history can stand before it’s all stitches, whether too much Change won’t one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? Change Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you’ve stripped off the paint.

“If that goes on, won’t the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself, then nothing? How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more Doublegangers cut out of it? And there’s another thing about every operation—it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change Winds die, it leaves them a little more disturbed and nightmare-ridden and frazzled. Those of you who have been on operations in heavily worked-over temporal areas will know what I mean—that look they give you out of the sides of their eyes as if to say, ‘You again? For Christ’s sake, go away. We’re the dead. We’re the ones who don’t want to wake up, who don’t want to be Demons and hate to be Ghosts. Stop torturing us.’ ”

I looked around at the Ghostgirls; I couldn’t help it. They’d somehow got together on the control divan, facing us, their backs to the Maintainers. The Countess had dragged along the bottle of wine Erich had fetched her earlier and they were passing it back and forth. The Countess had a big rose splotch across the ruffled white lace of her blouse.

Bruce said, “There’ll come a day when all the Zombies and all the Unborn wake up and go crazy together and figuratively come marching at us in their numberless hordes, saying, ‘We’ve had enough.’ ”

But I didn’t turn back to Bruce right away. Phryne’s chiton had slipped off one shoulder and she and the Countess were sitting sagged forward, elbows on knees, legs spread—at least, as far as the Countess’s hobble skirt would let her—and swayed toward each other a little. They were still surprisingly solid, although they hadn’t had any personal attention for a half hour, and they were looking up over my head with half-shut eyes and they seemed, so help me, to be listening to what Bruce was saying and maybe hearing some of it.

“We make a careful distinction between Zombies and Unborn, between those troubled by our operations whose lifelines lie in the past and those whose lifelines lie in the future. But is there any distinction any longer? Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we’re on, but that’s different and it’s not made for real living.

“The Spiders tell us that the real now is somewhere in the last half of the 20th Century, which means that several of us here are also alive in the cosmos, have lifelines along which the now is traveling. But do you swallow that story quite so easily, Ilhilihis, Sevensee? How does it strike the servants of the Triple Goddess? The Spiders of Octavian Rome? The Demons of Good Queen Bess? The gentlemen Zombies of the Greater South? Do the Unborn man the starships, Maud?

“The Spiders also tell us that, although the fog of battle makes the now hard to pin down precisely, it will return with the unconditional surrender of the Snakes and the establishment of cosmic peace, and roll on as majestically toward the future as before, quickening the continuum with its passage. Do you really believe that? Or do you believe, as I do, that we’ve used up all the future as well as the past, wasted it in premature experience, and that we’ve had the real now smudged out of existence, stolen from us forever, the precious now of true growth, the child-moment in which all life lies, the moment like a newborn baby that is the only home for hope there is?”

He let that start to sink in, then took a couple of quick steps and went on, his voice rising over Erich’s “Bruce, for the last time—” and seeming to pick up a note of hope from the very word he had used, “But although things look terrifyingly black, there remains a chance—the slimmest chance, but still a chance—of saving the cosmos from Change Death and restoring reality’s richness and giving the Ghosts good sleep and perhaps even regaining the real now. We have the means right at hand. What if the power of time traveling were used not for war and destruction, but for healing, for the mutual enrichment of the ages, for quiet communication and growth, in brief, to bring a peace message—”

But my little commandant is quite an actor himself and knows a wee bit about the principles of scene-stealing and he was not going to let Bruce drown him out as if he were just another extra playing a Voice from the Mob. He darted across our front, between us and the bar, took a running leap, and landed bang on the bloody box of bomb.

A bit later, Maud was silently showing me the white ring above her elbow where I’d grabbed her and Illy was teasing a clutch of his tentacles out of my other hand and squeaking reproachfully, “Greta girl, don’t ever do that.”

Erich was standing on the chest and I noticed that his boots carefully straddled the circle of skulls, and I should have known anyway you could hardly push them in the right order by jumping on them, and he was pointing at Bruce and saying, “—and that means mutiny, my young sir.
Um Gottes willen
, Bruce, listen to me and step down before you say anything worse. I’m older than you, Bruce. Mark’s older. Trust in your
Kameraden
. Guide yourself by their knowledge.”

He had got my attention, but I had much rather have him black my eye.

“You older than me?” Bruce was grinning. “When your twelve-years’ advantage was spent in soaking up the wisdom of a race of sadistic dreamers gone paranoid, in a world whose thought-stream had already been muddied by one total war? Mark older than me? When all his ideas and loyalties are those of a wolf pack of unimaginative sluggers two thousand years younger than I am? Either of you older because you have more of the killing cynicism that is all the wisdom the Change World ever gives you? Don’t make me laugh!

“I’m an Englishman, and I come from an epoch when total war was still a desecration and the flowers and buds of thoughts not yet whacked off or blighted. I’m a poet and poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time. Right, Sid? When I talk to all of you about a peace message, I want you to think about it concretely in teams of using the Places to bring help across the mountains of time when help is really needed, not to bring help that’s undeserved or knowledge that’s premature or contaminating, sometimes not to bring anything at all, but just to check with infinite tenderness and concern that everything’s safe and the glories of the universe unfolding as they were intended to—”