The Big Time (6 page)

Maiden, Nymph, and Mother are the eternal royal

Trinity of the island, and the Goddess, who is worshipped there in each of these aspects, as

New Moon, Full Moon, and Old Moon, is the sovereign Deity.

—Graves

CRETE CIRCA 1300 B.C.

Kaby pushed back at Sid some seconds of bread and olives, and, when he raised his bushy eyebrows, gave him a curt nod that meant she knew what she was doing. She stood up and sort of took a position. AB the talk quieted down fast, even Bruce’s and Lili’s. Kaby’s face and voice weren’t strained now, but they weren’t relaxed either.

“Woe to Spider! Woe to Cretan! Heavy is the news I bring you. Bear it bravely, like strong women. When we got the gun unlimbered, I heard seaweed fry and crackle. We three leaped behind the rock wall, saw our gun grow white as sunlight in a heat-ray of the Serpents!

Natch, we feared we were outnumbered and I called upon my Caller.”

I don’t know how she does it, but she does—in English too. That is, when she figures she’s got something important to report, and maybe she needs a little time to get ready.

Beau claims that all the ancients fit their thoughts into measured lines as naturally as we pick a word that will do, but I’m not sure how good the Vicksburg language department is.

Though why I should wonder about things like that when I’ve got Kaby spouting the stuff right in front of me, I don’t know.

“But I didn’t die there, kiddos. I still hoped to hurt the Greek ships, maybe with the

Snake’s own heat gun. So I quick tried to outflank them. My two comrades crawled beside me—they are males, but they have courage. Soon we spied the ambushsetters. They were

Snakes and they were many, filthily disguised as Cretans.”

There was an indignant murmur at this, for our cutthroat Change War has its code, the Soldiers tell me. Being an Entertainer, I don’t have to say what I think.

“They had seen us when we saw them,” Kaby swept on, “and they loosed a killing volley. Heatand knife-rays struck about us in a storm of wind and fire, and the Lunan lost a feeler, fighting for Crete’s Triple Goddess. So we dodged behind a sand bill, steered our flight back toward the water. It was awful, what we saw there; Crete’s brave ships all sunk or sinking, blue sky sullied by their death-smoke. Once again the Greeks had licked us!—aided by the filthy Serpents.

“Round our wrecks, their black ships scurried, like black beetles, filth their diet, yet this day they dine on heroes. On the quiet sun-lit beach there, I could feel a Change Gale blowing, working changes deep inside me, aches and pains that were a stranger’s. Half my memories were doubled, half my lifeline crooked and twisted, three new moles upon my swordhand. Goddess, Goddess, Tripple Goddess—”

Her voice wavered and Sid reached out a hand, but she straightened her back.

“Triple Goddess, give me courage to tell everything that happened. We ran down into the water, hoping to escape by diving. We had hardly gotten under when the heat-rays hit above us, turning all the cool green surface to a roaring white inferno. But as I believe I told

you, I was calling on my Caller, and a Door now opened to us, deep below the deadly steam—

clouds. We dived in like frightened minnows and a lot of water with us.”

Off Chicago’s Gold Coast, Dave once gave me a lesson in skindiving and, remembering it, I got a flash of Kaby’s Door in the dark depths.

“For a moment all was chaos. Then the Door slammed shut behind us. We’d been picked up in time’s nick by—an Express Room of our Spiders!—sloshing two feet deep in water, much more cramped for space than this Place. It was manned by a magician, an old coot named BensonCarter. He dispelled the water quickly and reported on his Caller. We’d got dry, were feeling human, Illy here had shed his swimsuit, when we looked at the

Maintainer. It was glowing, changing, melting! And when BensonCarter touched it, he fell backward—death was in him. Then the Void began to darken, narrow, shrink and close around us, so I called upon my Caller—without wasting time, let me tell you!

“We can’t say for sure what was it slowly squeezed that sweet Express Room, but we fear the dirty Snakes have found a way to find our Places and attack outside the cosmos!—

found the Spiderweb that links us in the Void’s gray less-than-nothing.”

No murmur this time. This reaction was genuine; we’d been hit where we lived and I

could see everybody was scared as sick as I was. Except maybe Bruce and Lili, who were still holding hands and beaming gently. I decided they were the kind that love makes brave, which it doesn’t do to me. It just gives me two people to worry about.

“I can see you dig our feeling,” Kaby continued. “This thing scared the pants off of us. If we could have, we’d have even Introverted the Maintainer, broken all the ties that bind us, chanced it incommunicado. But the little old Maintainer was a seething red-hot puddle filled with bubbles big as handballs. We sat tight and watched the Void close. I kept calling on my Caller.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, but that made it easier to see the three of them with the Void shutting down on them. (Was ours till behaving? Yes, Bibi Miriam.) Poetry or no poetry, it got me.

“BensonCarter, lying dying, also thought the Snakes had done it. And he knew that death was in him, so he whispered me his mission, giving me precise instructions: how to press the seven death’s hands, starting lockside counterclockwise, one, three, five, six, two, four, seven, then you have a half an hour; after you have pressed the seven, do not monkey with the buttons—get out fast and don’t stop moving.”

I wasn’t getting this part and I couldn’t see that anyone else was, though Bruce was whispering to Lili. I remembered seeing skulls engraved on the bronze chest. I looked at Illy and he nodded a tentacle and spread two to say, I guessed, that yes, BensonCarter had said something like that, but no, Illy didn’t know much about it.

“All these things and more he whispered,” Kaby went on, “with the last gasps of his life-force, telling all his secret orders—for he’d not been sent to get us, he was on a separate mission, when he heard my SOSs. Sid, it’s you he was to contact, as the first leg of his mission, pick up from you three black hussars, death’s-head Demons, daring Soldiers, then to wait until the Places next match rhythm with the cosmos—matter of two mealtimes, barely—

and to tune in northern Egypt in the age of the last Caesar, in the year the Rome’s swift downfall, there to start on operation in a battle near a city named for Thrace’s Alexander, there to change the course of battle, blow sky-high the stinking Serpents, all their agents, all their Zombies!

“Goddess, pardon, now I savvy how you’ve guided my least footstep, when I thought you’d gone and left me—for I flubbed your three-mole signal. We’ve found Sid’s Place, that’s the first leg, and I see the three black hussars, and we’ve brought with us the weapon and the

Parthian disguises, salvaged from the doomed Express Room when your Door appeared in time’s nick, and the Room around us closing spewed us through before it vanished with the corpse of BensonCarter. Triple Goddess, draw the milk now from the womanhood I flaunt here and inject the blackest hatred! Vengeance now upon the Serpants, vengeance sweet in northern Egypt, for your island, Crete, Goddess!—and a victory for the Spiders! Goddess, Goddess, we can swing it!”

The roar that made me try to stop my ears with my shoulders didn’t come from

Kaby—she’d spoken her piece—but from Sid. The dear boy was purple enough to make me want to remind him you can die of high blood pressure just as easy in the Change World.

“Dump me with ops! ‘Sblood, I’ll not endure it! from field hospitals next. Kabysia

Labrys, thou art mad to suggest it. And what’s this prattle of locks, clocks, and death’s heads, buttons and monkeys? This brabble, this farrago, this hocus-pocus! And where’s the weapon you prate of? In that whoreson bronze casket, I suppose.”

She nodded, looking blank and almost a little shy as poetic possession faded from her. Her answer came like its faltering last echo.

“It is nothing but a tiny tactical atomic bomb.”

After about 0.1 millisecond (one ten-thousandth part of a second) has elapsed, the radius of the ball of fire is some 45 feet, and the temperature is then in the vicinity of 800,000 degrees

Centigrade. At this instant, the luminosity, as observed at a distance of 100,000 yards (5.7 miles), is approximately 100 times that of the sun as seen at the earth’s surface… . the ball of fire expands very rapidly to its maximum radius of 450

feet within less than a second from the explosion.

—Los Alamos

TIME TO THINK

Brother, that was all we needed to make everybody but Kaby and the two ETs start yelping at once, me included. It may seem strange that Change People, able to whiz through time and space and roust around outside the cosmos and knowing at least by hearsay of weapons a billion years in the future, like the Mindbomb, should panic at being shut in with a little primitive mid-20th Century gadget. Well, they feel the same as atomic scientists would feel if a Bengal tiger were brought into their laboratory, neither more nor less scared.

I’m a moron at physics, but I do know the Fireball is bigger than the Place. Remember that, besides the bomb, we’d recently been presented with a lot of other fears we hadn’t had time to cope with, especially the business of the Snakes having learned how to get at our

Places and melt the Maintainers and collapse them. Not to mention the general impression—

first Saint Petersburg, then Crete—that the whole Change War was going against the Spiders.

Yet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were all panicking.

It made me admit what I didn’t like to: that we were all in pretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn’t happen to be our out.

And had the rest of us been controlling our drinking so well lately?

Maud yelled, “Jettison and pulled away from the satyr and ran from the bronze chest.

Beau, harking back to what they’d thought of doing in the Express Room when it was too late, hissed, “Sirs, we must Introvert,” and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for the control divan. Erich seconded him with a white-faced “
Gott in Himmel, ja!
” from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slim stem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass.

I felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degrees worse than foxholing. It’s supposed not only to keep the Door tight shut, but also to lock it so even the

Change Winds can’t get through—cut the Place loose from the cosmos altogether.

I’d never talked with anyone from a Place that had been Introverted.

Mark dumped Phryne off his lap and ran after Maud. The Greek Ghostgirl, quite solid now, looked around with sleepy fear and fumbled her applegreen chiton together at the throat.

She wrenched my attention away from everyone else for a moment, and I couldn’t help wondering whether the person or Zombie back in the cosmos, from whose lifeline the Ghost has been taken, doesn’t at least have strange dreams or thoughts when something like this happens.

Sid stopped Beau, though he almost got bowled over doing it, and he held the gambler away from the Maintainer in a bear hug and bellowed over his shoulders, “Masters, are you mad? Have you lost your wits? Maud! Mark! Marcus! Magdalene! On your lives, unhand that casket!”

Maud had swept the clothes and bows and quivers and stuff off it and was dragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump it through fast when we got one, I

guess, while Mark acted as if he were trying to help her and wrestle it away from her at the same time.

They kept on as if they hadn’t heard a word Sid said, with Mark yelling, “Let go,
meretrix!
This holds Rome’s answer to Parthia on the Nile.”

Kaby watched them as if she wanted to help Mark but scorned to scuffle with a mere—well, Mark had said it in Latin, I guess—call girl.

Then, on the top of the bronze chest, I saw those seven lousy skulls starting at the lock as plain as if they’d been under a magnifying glass, though ordinarily they’d have been a vague circle to my eyes at the distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the opposite direction, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, and squeaked, “Easy now, Gretta girl, don’t you be doing it, too. Hold still or Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you have a mind to.”

My stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but it stopped me and I got my mind back, partly.

“Unhand it, I say!” Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and he released

Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler’s shoulder.

Then my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Void and blustered at no one in particular, “‘Sdeath, think you I’d mutiny against my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent fox and pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggests it? Introversion’s no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervised and sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I’d Introverted ‘ere we got Kaby’s call for succor, hey?”

His warrior maid nodded with harsh approval and he noticed it and shook his free hand at her and scolded her, “Not that I say yea to your mad plan for that Devil’s casket, you half-clad clack-wit. And yet to jettison … Oh, ye gods, ye gods—” he wiped his hand across his face—“grant me a minute in which I may think!”

Thinking time wasn’t an item even on the strictly limited list at the moment, although

Sevensee, squatting dourly on his hairy haunches where Maud had left him threw in a dead—

pan “Thas teilin em, Gov.”

Then Doc at the bar stood up tall as Abe Lincoln in his top hat and shawl and 19th

Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence and said something that sounded like:

“Introversh, inversh, glovsh,” and then his enunciation switched to better than perfect as he continued, “I know to an absolute certainty what we must do.”