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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--
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 rugged 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 sunender 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-- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]