The Big Time (5 page)

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 first,” but she ripped out, “Save your comfort for the Luau,” 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—”

Just then, one of them swept across my face like a sweet-smelling feather duster and I

said, “Illy, man, it’s been a lot of sleeps,” and brushed my fingers across his muzzle. It still took a little selfcontrol not to hug him, and I did reach a little cluckingly for his lopped tentacle, but he wafted it away from me and the little voicebox belted to his side squeaked, “Naughty, naughty. Papa will fix his little old self. Greta girl, ever bandaged even a Terra octopus?”

I had, an intelligent one from around a quarter billion A.D., but I didn’t tell him so. I

stood and let him talk to the palm of my hand with one of his tenacles—I don’t savvy feather-talk but it feels good, though I’ve often wondered who taught him English—and watched him use a couple others to whisk a sort of Lunan band-aid out of his pouch and cap his wound with it.

Meanwhile, the satyr knelt over the bronze chest, which was decorated with little death’s heads and crosses with hoops at the top and swastikas, but looking much older than

Nazi, and the satyr said to Sid, “Quick thinldn, Gov, when ya saw the Door comin in high n soffened up gravty unner it, but cud I hay sum hep now?”

Sid touched the Minor Maintainer and we all got very light and my stomach did a ifip-flop while the satyr piled on the chest the clothes and weapons that Illy had been carrying and pranced off with it and carefully put it down at the end of the bar. I decided the satyr’s

English instructor, must have been quite a character, too. Wish I’d met him—her—it.

Sid thought to ask fly if he wanted Moon-normal gravity in one sector, but my boy likes to mix, and being such a lightweight, Earth-normal gravity doesn’t bother him. As he said to me once, “Would Jovian gravity bother a beetle, Greta girl?”

I asked Illy about the satyr and he squeaked that his name was Sevensee and that he’d

never met him before this operation. I knew the satyrs were from a billion years in the future, just as the Loonies were from a billion in the past, and I thought— Kreesed us!—but it must have been a real big or emergency-like operation to have the Spiders using those two for it, with two billion year between them—a time-difference that gives you a feeling of awe for a second, you know.

I started to ask Illy about it, but just then Beau came scampering back from the bar with a big redand-black earthenware goblet of wine—we try to keep a variety of drlnking tools in stock so folks will feel more at home. Kaby grabbed it from him and drained most of it in one swallow and then smashed it on the floor. She does things like that, though Sid’s tried to teach her better. Then she stared at what she was thinking about until the whites showed all around her eyes and her lips pulled way back from her teeth and she looked a lot less human than the two ETs, just like a fury. Only a time traveler knows how like the wild murals and engravings of them some of the ancients can look.

My hair stood up at the screech she let out. She smashed a fist into the divan and cried, “Goddess! Must I see Crete destroyed, revived, and now destroyed again? It is too much for your servant.”

Personally, I thought she could stand anything.

There was a rush of questions at what she said about Crete—I asked one of them, for the news certainly frightened me—but she shot up her arm straight for silence and took a deep breath and began.

“In the balance hung the battle. Rowing like black centipedes, the Dorian hulls bore down on our outnumbered ships. On the bright beach, masked by rocks, Sevensee and I stood by the needle gun, ready to give the black hulls silent wounds. Beside us was Ilhilihis, suited as a sea monster. But then … then …”

Then I saw she wasn’t altogether the iron babe, for her voice broke and she started to shake and to sob rackingly, although her face was still a mask of rage, and she threw up the wine. Sid stepped in and made her stop, which I think he’d been wanting to do all along.

When I take up a newspaper and read it, I

fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines.

There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me.

—Ibsen

SID INSISTS ON GHOSTGIRLS

My Elizabethan boy friend put his fists on his hips and laid down the law to us as if we were a lot of nervous children who’d been playing too hard.

“Look you, masters, this is a Recuperation Station and I am running it as such. A

plague of all operations! I care not if the frame of things dis joints and the whole Change

World goes to ruin, but you, warrior maid, are going to rest and drink more wine slowly before you tell your tale and your colleagues are going to be properly companioned. No questions, anyone. Beau, and you love us, give us a lively tune.”

Kaby relaxed a little and let him put his hand carefully against her back in token of support and she said grudgingly, “All right, Fat Belly.”

Then, so help me, to the tune of the Muskrat Ramble, which I’d taught Beau, we got girls for those two ETs and everybody properly paired up.

Right here I want to point out that a lot of the things they say in the Change World about Recuperation Stations simply aren’t so—and anyway they always leave out nine-tenths of it. The Soldiers that come through the Door are looking for a good time, sure, but they’re hurt real bad too, every one of them, deep down in their minds and hearts, if not always in their bodies or so you can see it right away.

Believe me, a temporal operation is no joke, and to start with, there isn’t one person in a hundred who can endure to be cut from his lifeline and become a really wide-awake

Doubleganger—a Demon, that is—let alone a Soldier. What does a badly hurt and mixed-up creature need who’s been fighting hard? One
individual
to look out for him and feel for him and patch him up, and it helps if the one is of the opposite sex—that’s something that goes beyond species.

There’s your basis for the Place and the wild way it goes about its work, and also for most other Recuperation Stations or Entertainment Spots. The name Entertainer can be misleading, but I like it. She’s got to be a lot more than a good party girl— or boy—though she’s got to be that too. She’s got to be a nurse and a psychologist and an actress and a mother and a practical ethnologist and a lot of things with longer names—and a reliable friend.

None of us are all those things perfectly or even near it. We just try. But when the call comes, Entertainers have to forget grudges and gripes and envies and jealousies—and remember, they’re lively people with sharp emotions—because there isn’t any time then for anything but
help and don’t ask who!

And, deep inside her, a good Entertainer doesn’t care who. Take the way it shaped up this time. It was pretty clear to me I ought to shift to Illy, although I wasn’t quite easy in my mind about leaving Erich, because the Lunan was a long time from home and, after all, Erich was among anthropoids. Ilhilihis needed someone who was
simpatico
.

I like Illy and not just because he is a sort of tail cross between a spider monkey and a persian cat—though that is a handsome combo when you come to think of it. I like him for himself. So when he came in all lopped and shaky after a mean operation, I was the right person to look out for him. Now I’ve made my little speech and know-nothings in the Change

World can go making their bum jokes. But I ask you, how could an arrangement between Illy and me be anything but Platonic?

We might have had some octopoid girls and nymphs in stock—Sid couldn’t be sure until he checked—but Ilhilihis and Sevensee voted for real people and I knew Sid saw it their way. Maud squeezed Mark’s hand and tripped over to Sevensee (“Those are sharp hoofs you got, man”—she’s picked up some of my language, like she has everything else), though Beau did frown over his shoulder at Lili from the piano, maybe to argue that she ought to take on the ET, as Mark had been a real casualty and could use live nursing. But it was plain as day to anybody but Beau that Bruce and Lili were a big thing and the last to be disturbed.

Erich acted stiffly hurt at losing me, but I knew he wasn’t. He thinks he has a great technique with Ghostgirls and he likes to show it off, and he really is pretty slick at it, if you go for that sort of thing and—yang my yin!—who doesn’t at times?

And when Sid formally wafted the Countess out of Stores—a real blonde stunner in a white satin hobble skirt with a white egret swaying up from her tiny hat, way ahead of Maud and Lili and me when it came to looks, though transparent as cigarette smoke—and when

Erich clicked his heels and bowed over her hand and proudly conducted her to a couch, black

Svengali to her Trilby, and started to German-talk some life into her with much head cocking and toothy smiling and a flow of witty flattery, and when she began to flirt back and the dream look in her eyes sharpened hungrily and focused on him—well, then I knew that Erich was happy and felt he was doing proud by the
Reichswehr
. No, my little commandant wasn’t worrying me on that score.

Mark had drawn a Greek hetaera name of Phryne; I suppose not the one who maybe still does the famous courtroom striptease back in Athens, and he was waking her up with little sips of his scotch and soda, though, from some looks he’d flashed, I got the idea Kaby was the kid he really went for. Sid was coaxing the fighting gal to take some high-energy bread and olives along with the wine, and, for a wonder, Doc seemed to be carrying on an animated and rational conversation with Sevensee and Maud, maybe comparing notes on the

Northern Venusian Shallows, and Beau had got on to Panther Rag, and Bruce and Lili were leaning on the piano, smiling very appreciatively, but talking to each other a mile a minute.

Illy turned back from inspecting them all and squeaked, “Animals with clothes are so refreshing, dahling! Like you’re all carrying banners!”

Maybe he had something there, though my banners were kind of Ash Wednesday, a charcoal gray sweater and skirt. He looked at my mouth with a tentacle to see how I was smiling and he squeaked softly, “Do I seem dull and commonplace to you, Greta girl, because

I haven’t got banners? Just another Zombie from a billion years in your past, as gray and lifeless as Luna is today, not as when she was a real dreamy sister planet simply bursting with air and water and feather forests. Or am I as strangely interesting to you as you are to me, girl from a billion years in my future?”

“Illy, you’re sweet,” I told him, giving him a little pat. I noticed his fur was still vibrating nervously and I decided to heck with Sid’s orders, I’m going to pump him about what he was doing with Kaby and the satyr. Couldn’t have him a billion years from home and bottled up, too. Besides, I was curious.