by Fritz Leiber
CHAPTER 11
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear, Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire. Lines of gray, muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists
--Sassoon
THE WESTERN FRONT, 1917
"Please don't, Lili."
"I shall, my love."
"Sweetling, wake up! Hast the shakes?"
I opened my eyes a little and lied to Siddy with a smile and locked myhands together tight and watched Bruce and Lili quarrel nobly near thecontrol divan and wished I had a great love to blur my misery andprovide me with a passable substitute for Change Winds.
Lili won the argument, judging from the way she threw her head back andstepped away from Bruce's arms while giving him a proud, tender smile.He walked off a few steps; praise be, he didn't shrug his shoulders atus like an old husband, though his nerves were showing and he didn'tseem to be standing Introversion well at all, as who of us were?
Lili rested a hand on the head of the control divan and pressed her lipstogether and looked around at us, mostly with her eyes. She'd wound agray silk bandeau around her bangs. Her short gray silk dress without awaistline made her look, not so much like a flapper, though she lookedlike that all right, as like a little girl, except the neckline wasscooped low enough to show she wasn't.
Her gaze hesitated and then stopped at me and I got a sunk feeling ofwhat was coming, because women are always picking on me for an audience.Besides, Sid and I were the centrist party of two in ourfresh-out-of-the-shell Place politics.
She took a deep breath and stuck out her chin and said in a voice thatwas even a little higher and Britisher than she usually uses, "We girlshave often cried, 'Shut the Door!' But now the Door is jolly well shutfor keeps!"
I knew I'd guessed right and I felt crawly with embarrassment, because Iknow about this love business of thinking you're the other person andtrying to live their life--and grab their glory, though you don't knowthat--and carry their message for them, and how it can foul things up.Still, I couldn't help admitting what she said wasn't too bad astart--unpleasantly apt to be true, at any rate.
"My fiance believes we may yet be able to open the Door. I do not. Hethinks it is a bit premature to discuss the peculiar pickle in which weall find ourselves. I do not."
There was a rasp of laughter from the bar. The militarists werereacting. Erich stepped out, looking very happy. "So now we have tolisten to women making speeches," he called. "What is this Place,anyhow? Sidney Lessingham's Saturday Evening Sewing Circle?"
* * * * *
Beau and Sevensee, who'd stopped their pacing halfway between the barand the control divan, turned toward Erich, and Sevensee looked a littleburlier, a little more like half a horse, than satyrs in mythology bookillustrations. He stamped--medium hard, I'd say--and said, "Ahh, go flyakite." I'd found out he'd learned English from a Demon who'd been alongshoreman with syndicalist-anarchist sympathies. Erich shut up for amoment and stood there grinning, his hands on his hips.
Lili nodded to the satyr and cleared her throat, looking scared. But shedidn't speak; I could see she was thinking and feeling something, andher face got ugly and haggard, as if she were in a Change Wind thathadn't reached me yet, and her mouth went into a snarl to fight tears,but some spurted out, and when she did speak her voice was an octavelower and it wasn't just London talking but New York too.
"I don't know how Resurrection felt to you people, because I'm new and Iloathe asking questions, but to me it was pure torture and I wished onlyI'd had the courage to tell Suzaku, 'I wish to remain a Zombie, if youdon't mind. I'd rather the nightmares.' But I accepted Resurrectionbecause I've been taught to be polite and because there is the Demon inme I don't understand that always wishes to live, and I found that Istill felt like a Zombie, although I could flit about, and that I stillhad the nightmares, except they'd grown a deal vivider.
"I was a young girl again, seventeen, and I suppose every woman wishesto be seventeen, but I wasn't seventeen inside my head--I was a womanwho had died of Bright's disease in New York in 1929 and also, because aBig Change blew my lifeline into a new drift, a woman who had died ofthe same disease in Nazi-occupied London in 1955, but rather more slowlybecause, as you can fancy, the liquor was in far shorter supply. I hadto live with both those sets of memories and the Change World didn'tblot them out any more than I'm told it does those of any Demon, and itdidn't even push them into the background as I'd hoped it would.
"When some Change Fellow would say to me, 'Hallo, beautiful, how about asmile?' or 'That's a posh frock, kiddo,' I'd be back at Bellevue lookingdown at my swollen figure and the light getting like spokes of ice, orin that dreadful gin-steeped Stepney bedroom with Phyllis coughingherself to death beside me, or at best, for a moment, a little girl inGlamorgan looking at the Roman road and wondering about the wonderfullife that lay ahead."
* * * * *
I looked at Erich, remembering he had a long nasty future back in thecosmos himself, and at any rate he wasn't smiling, and I thought maybehe's getting a little humility, knowing someone else has two of thosefutures, but I doubted it.
"Because, you see," Lili kept forcing it out, "all my three lives I'dbeen a girl who fell in love with a great young poet she'd never met,the voice of the new youth and all youth, and she'd told her first biglie to get in the Red Cross and across to France to be nearer him, andit was all danger and dark magics and a knight in armor, and shepictured how she'd find him wounded but not seriously, with a littlebandage around his head, and she'd light a fag for him and smilelightly, never letting him guess what she felt, but only being her bestself and watching to see if that made something happen to him....
"And then the Boche machine guns cut him down at Passchendaele and therecouldn't ever have been bandages big enough and the girl stayedseventeen inside and messed about and tried to be wicked, though shewasn't very good at that, and to drink, and she had a bit more talentthere, though drinking yourself to death is not nearly as easy as itsounds, even with a kidney weakness to help. But she turned the trick.
"Then a cock crows. She wakes with a tearing start from the gray dreamsof death that fill her lifeline. It's cold daybreak. There's the smellof a French farm. She feels her ankles and they're not at all like hugerubber boots filled with water. They're not swollen the least bit.They're young legs.
"There's a little window and the tops of a row of trees that may bepoplars when there's more light, and what there is shows cots like herown and heads under blankets, and hanging uniforms make large shadowsand a girl is snoring. There's a very distant rumble and it moves thewindow a bit. Then she remembers they're Red Cross girls many, manykilometers from Passchendaele and that Bruce Marchant is going to die atdawn today.
"In a few more minutes, he's going over the top where there's acrop-headed machine-gunner in field gray already looking down the sightsand swinging the gun a bit. But she isn't going to die today. She'sgoing to die in 1929 and 1955.
"And just as she's going mad, there's a creaking and out of the shadowstiptoes a Jap with a woman's hairdo and the whitest face and theblackest eyebrows. He's wearing a rose robe and a black sash which beltsto his sides two samurai swords, but in his right hand he has a strangesilver pistol. And he smiles at her as if they were brother and sisterand lovers at the same time and he says, '_Voulez-vous vivre,mademoiselle?_' and she stares and he bobs his head and says, 'Missywish live, yes, no?'"
* * * * *
Sid's paw closed quietly around my shaking hands. It always gets me tohear about anyone's Resurrection, and although mine was crazier, it alsohad the Krauts in it. I hoped she wouldn't go through the rest of theformula and she didn't.
"Five minutes later, he's gone down a stairs more like a ladder to wai
tbelow and she's dressing in a rush. Her clothes resist a little, as ifthey were lightly gummed to the hook and the stained wall, and she hatesto touch them. It's getting lighter and her cot looks as if someone werestill sleeping there, although it's empty, and she couldn't bringherself to put her hand on the place if her new life depended on it.
"She climbs down and her long skirt doesn't bother her because she knowshow to swing it. Suzaku conducts her past a sentry who doesn't see themand a puffy-faced farmer in a smock coughing and spitting the night outof his throat. They cross the farmyard and it's filled with rose lightand she sees the sun is up and she knows that Bruce Marchant has justbled to death.
"There's an empty open touring car chugging loudly, waiting for someone;it has huge muddy wheels with wooden spokes and a brass radiator thatsays 'Simplex.' But Suzaku leads her past it to a dunghill and bowsapologetically and she steps through a Door."
I heard Erich say to the others at the bar, "How touching! Now shall Itell everyone about my operation?" But he didn't get much of a laugh.
"That's how Lilian Foster came into the Change World with itssteel-engraved nightmares and its deadly pace and deadlier lassitudes. Iwas more alive than I ever had been before, but it was the kind of lifea corpse might get from unending electrical shocks and I couldn't summonany purpose or hope and Bruce Marchant seemed farther away than ever.
"Then, not six hours ago, a Soldier in a black uniform came through theDoor and I thought, 'It can't be, but it does look like hisphotographs,' and then I thought I heard someone say the name Bruce, andthen he shouted as if to all the world that he was Bruce Marchant, and Iknew there was a Resurrection beyond Resurrection, a true resurrection.Oh, Bruce--"
She looked at him and he was crying and smiling and all the young beautyflooded back into her face, and I thought, "It has to be Change Winds,but it can't be. Face it without slobbering, Greta--there's somethingthat works bigger miracles than Change."
And she went on, "And then the Change Winds died when the Snakesvaporized the Maintainer or the Ghostgirls Introverted it and all threeof them vanished so swiftly and silently that even Bruce didn'tnotice--those are the best explanations I can summon and I fancy one ofthem is true. At all events, the Change Winds died and my past and evenmy futures became something I could bear lightly, because I have someoneto bear them with me, and because at last I have a true futurestretching out ahead of me, an unknown future which I shall create byliving. Oh, don't you see that all of us have it now, this bigopportunity?"
"_Hussa_ for Sidney's suffragettes and the W.C.T.U.!" Erich cheered."Beau, will you play us a medley of 'Hearts and Flowers' and 'Onward,Christian Soldiers'? I'm deeply moved, Lili. Where do the rest of usqueue up for the Great Love Affair of the Century?"
