The Big Time (7 page)

It showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a church while we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for a poor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves.

He said something like, “Inversh … bosh …” and held our eyes for a moment longer. Then the light went out of his and he slobbered out a “
Nichevo
” and slid an arm far along the bar for a bottle and started to pour it down his throat without stopping sliding.

Before he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second while our attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top of it, so fast it was almost like he’d popped up from nowhere, though I’d seen him start from behind the piano.

“I’ve a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?” he said in a voice that was very clear and just loud enough. “So it can’t go off,” he went on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk manner putting more heart into me all the time. “What’s more, if it were to be triggered, we’d still have half an hour. I believe you said it had that long a fuse?”

He stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded.

“Right,” he said. “It’d have to be that long for whoever plants it in the Parthian camp to get away. There’s another safety margin.

“Second question. Is there a locksmith in the house?”

For all Bruce’s easiness, he was watching us like a golden eagle and he caught Beau’s

and Maud’s affirmatives before they had a chance to explain or hedge them and said, “That’s very good. Under certain circumstances, you two’d be the ones to go to work on the chest. But before we consider that, there’s Question Three: Is anyone here an atomics technician?”

That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to explain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power—hadn’t they blasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly craters?—but no, he wasn’t a technician exactly, he was a “thinger” (I

thought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?— well, a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly impossible to describe, but no, you couldn’t possibly thing atomics; the idea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn’t be an atomics thinger; the term was worse than a contradiction, well, really!—while Sevensee, from his twothousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect that his culture didn’t rightly use any kind qf power, but just sort of moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling spacetirne around, “or think em roun ef we hafta. Can’t think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have—I dunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow.”

“So we don’t have an A-tech,” Bruce summed up, “which makes it worse than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn’t know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question.” He directed it toward Sid. “How long before we can jettison anything?”

Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn’t seem to be taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the word “rhythm,” he pulled the answer away from him.

“In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again. Thank you, Master

Lessingham. That’s at least five hours—two mealtimes, as the Cretan officer put it,” and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly smile. “So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there’s not a thing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!”

His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn’t seem to notice them and we hardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void.

“All right then,” he repeated suddenly. “We’re twelve Spiders and two Ghosts, and we’ve time for a bit of a talk, and we’re all in the same bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we’ll all. know what we’re talking about. I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are off!”

Bruce ripped them out of his belt where they’d been tucked and slammed them down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and forth, and it wasn’t funny.

“Because,” he went right on, “I’ve been getting a completely new picture of what this

Spiders’ war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it’s jolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged little party outside both of them when the operation’s over. It’s sweet to know there’s no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can’t shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the ultimate insatiable hunger, and it’s great to be Faust, even in a pack of other Fausts.

“It’s sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man’s life or a culture’s, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes— hah! killing men or carrying off women isn’t in it for glutting the sense of power. It’s sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It’s sweet to wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and decide whether he’ll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.

“Or he can’t stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you’ve got to decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams, only they’ll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, or whether, if she’s got that tantalizing something, to bring her shell along for a Ghostgirl—that’s sweet, too. It’s even sweet to have Change Death poised over your neck, to know that the past isn’t the precious indestructible thing you’ve been taught it was, to know that there’s no certainty about the future either, whether there’ll even be one,

to know that no part of reality is holy, that the cosmos itself may wink out like a flicked switch and God be not and nothing left but nothing.”

He threw out his arms against the Void. “And knowing all that, it’s doubly sweet to come through the Door into the Place and be out of the worst of the Change Winds and enjoy a well-earned Recuperation and share the memories of all these sweetnesses I’ve been talking about, and work out all the fascinating feelings you’ve been accumulating back in the cosmos, layer by black layer, in the company of and with the help of the best bloody little band of fellow Fausts and Faustines going!

“Oh, it’s a sweet life, all right, but I’m asking you—” and here his eyes stabbed us again, one by one, fast—“I’m asking you what it’s done to us. I’ve been getting a completely new picture, as I said, of what my life was and what it could have been if there’d been changes of the sort that even we Demons can’t make, and what my life is. I’ve been watching how we’ve all been responding to things just now, to the news of Saint Petersburg and to what the Cretan officer told beautifully— only it wasn’t beautiful what she had to tell—and mostly to that bloody box of bomb. And I’m simply asking each one of you, what’s happened to you?”

He stopped his pacing and stuck his thumbs in his belt and seemed to be listening to the wheels turning in at least eleven other heads—only I stopped mine pretty quick, with Dave and Father and the Rape of Chicago coming up out of the dark on the turn and Mother and the

Indiana Dunes and Jazz Limited just behind them, followed by the unthinkable thing the

Spider doctor had flicked into existence when I flopped as a nurse, because I can’t stand that to be done to my mind by anybody but myself.

I stopped them by using the old infallible Entertainers’ gimmick, a fast survey of the most interesting topic there is—other people’s troubles.

Offhand, Beau looked as if he had most troubles, shamed by his boss and his girl given her heart to a Soldier; he was hugging them to himself very quiet.

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 home-century 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
Fuhrer
-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.

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world

—Archimedes

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’lI wage 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—