The Change War

by Fritz Leiber

  One thing though: just don’t scare me again pretending to work witchcraft—with a virginals or any other way.

  Okay?

  Swell.

  Me, now, I’m going to watch the play.

  IV

  …to dream of new dimensions,

  Cheating checkmate

  by painting the king’s robe

  So that he slides like a queen;

  —Graves

  I swung back to the play just at the moment Lady Mack soliloquizes, “Come to my woman’s breasts. And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers.” Although I knew it was just folded towel Martin was touching with his fingertips as he lifted them to the top half of his green bodice, I got carried away, he made it so real. I decided boys can play girls better than people think. Maybe they should do it a little more often, and girls play boys too.

  Then Sid-Macbeth came back to his wife from the wars, looking triumphant but scared because the murder-idea’s started to smoulder in him, and she got busy fanning the blaze like any other good little hausfrau intent on her husband rising in the company and knowing that she’s the power behind him and that when there are promotions someone’s always got to get the axe. Sid and Martin made this charming little domestic scene so natural yet gutsy too that I wanted to shout hooray. Even Sid clutching Martin to that ridiculous pot-chested cuirass didn’t have one note of horseplay in it. Their bodies spoke. It was the McCoy.

  After that, the play began to get real good, the fast tempo and exaggerated facial expressions actually helping it. By the time the Dagger Scene came along I was digging my fingernails into my sweaty palms. Which was a good thing—my eating up the play, I mean—because it kept me from looking at the audience again, even taking a fast peek. As you’ve gathered, audiences bug me. All those people out there in the shadows, watching the actors in the light, all those silent voyeurs as Bruce calls them. Why, they might be anything. And sometimes (to my mind-wavery sorrow) I think they are. Maybe crouching in the dark out there, hiding among the others, is the one who did the nasty thing to me that tore off the top of my head.

  Anyhow, if I so much as glance at the audience, I begin to get ideas about it—and sometimes even I don’t, as just at this moment I thought I heard horses restlessly pawing hard ground and one whinny, though that was shut off fast. Krishna kressed us! I thought, Skiddy cant have hired horses for Nefer-Elizabeth much as he’s a circus man at heart. We don’t have that kind of money. Besides—

  But just then Sid-Macbeth gasped as if he were sucking in a bucket of air. He’d shed the cuirass, fortunately. He said, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?” and the play hooked me again, and I had no time to think about or listen for anything else. Most of the offstage actors were on the other side of the stage, as that’s where they make their exists and entrances at this point in the Second Act. I stood alone in the wings, watching the play like a bug, frightened only of the horrors Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote it.

  Yes, the play was going great. The Dagger Scene was terrif where Duncan gets murdered offstage, and so was the part afterwards where hysteria mounts as the crime’s discovered.

  But just at this point I began to catch notes I didn’t like. Twice someone was late on entrance and came on as if shot from a cannon. And three times at least Sid had to throw someone a line when they blew up—in the clutches Sid’s better than any prompt book. It began to look as if the play were getting out of control, maybe because the new tempo was so hot.

  But they got through the Murder Scene okay. As they came trooping off, yelling “Well contented,” most of them on my side for a change, I went for Sid with a towel. He always sweats like a pig in the Murder Scene. I mopped his neck and shoved the towel up under his doublet to catch the dripping armpits.

  Meanwhile he was fumbling around on a narrow table where they lay props and costumes for quick changes. Suddenly he dug his fingers into my shoulder, enough to catch my attention at this point, meaning I’d show bruises tomorrow, and yelled at me under his breath, “And you love me, our crowns and robes. Presto!”

  I was off like a flash to the costumery. There were Mr. and Mrs. Mack’s king-and-queen robes and stuff hanging and sitting just where I knew they’d have to be.

  I snatched them up, thinking, Boy, they made a mistake when they didn’t tell about this special performance, and I started back like Flash Two.

  As I shot out the dressing room door the theater was very quiet. There’s a short low-pitched scene on stage then, to give the audience a breather. I heard Miss Nefer say loudly (it had to be loud to get to me from even the front of the audience): “’Tis a good bloody play, Eyes,” and some voice I didn’t recognize reply a bit grudgingly, “There’s meat in it and some poetry too, though rough-wrought.” She went on, still as loudly as if she owned the theater, “’Twill make Master Kyd bite his nails with jealousy—ha, ha!”

  Ha-ha yourself, you scene-stealing witch, I thought, as I helped Sid and then Martin on with their royal outer duds. But at the same time I knew Sid must have written those lines himself to go along with his prologue. They had the unmistakable rough-wrought Lessingham touch. Did he really expect the audience to make anything of that reference to Shakespeare’s predecessor Thomas Kyd of The Spanish Tragedy and the lost Hamlet? And if they knew enough to spot that, wouldn’t they be bound to realize the whole Elizabeth-Macbeth tie-up was anachronistic? But when Sid gets an inspiration he can be very bull-headed.

  Just then, while Bruce-Banquo was speaking his broody low soliloquy on stage, Miss Nefer cut in again loudly with, “Aye, Eyes, a good bloody play. Yet somehow, methinks—I know not how—I’ve heard it before.” Whereupon Sid grabbed Martin by the wrist and hissed, “Did’st hear? Oh, I like not that,” and I thought, Oh-ho, so now she’s beginning to ad-lib.

  Well, right away they all went on stage with a flourish, Sid and Martin crowned and hand in hand. The play got going strong again. But there were still those edge-of-control undercurrents and I began to be more uneasy than caught up, and I had to stare consciously at the actors to keep off a wavery-fit.

  Other things began to bother me too, such as all the doubling.

  Macbeth’s a great play for doubling. For instance, anyone except Macbeth or Banquo can double one of the Three Witches—or one of the Three Murderers for that matter. Normally we double at least one or two of the Witches and Murderers, but this performance there’d been more multiple-parting than I’d ever seen. Doc had whipped off his Duncan beard and thrown on a brown smock and hood to play the Porter with his normal bottle-roughened accents. Well, a drunk impersonating a drunk, pretty appropriate. But Bruce was doing the next-door-to-impossible double of Banquo and Macduff, using a ringing tenor voice for the latter and wearing in the murder scene a helmet with dropped visor to hide his Banquo beard. He’d be able to tear it off, of course, after the Murderers got Banquo and he’d made his brief appearance as a bloodied-up ghost in the Banquet Scene. I asked myself, My God, has Siddy got all the other actors out in front playing courtiers to Elizabeth-Nefer? Wasting them that way? The whoreson rogue’s gone nuts!

  But really it was plain frightening, all that frantic doubling and tripling with its suggestion that the play (and the company too, Freya forfend) was becoming a rickety patchwork illusion with everybody racing around faster and faster to hide the holes. And the scenery-wavery stuff and the warped Park-sounds were scary too. I was actually shivering by the time Sid got to: “Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood: Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” Those graveyard lines didn’t help my nerves any, of course. Nor did thinking I heard Nefer-Elizabeth say from the audience, rather softly for her this time, “Eyes, I have heard that speech, I know not where. Think you ’tiz stolen?”

  Greta, I told myself, you need a miltown before the crow makes wing through your kooky head.

  I turned to go and fetch me one from my
closet. And stopped dead.

  Just behind me, pacing back and forth like an ash-colored tiger in the gloomy wings, looking daggers at the audience every time she turned at that end of her invisible cage, but ignoring me completely, was Miss Nefer in the Elizabeth wig and rig.

  Well, I suppose I should have said to myself, Greta, you imagined that last loud whisper from the audience. Miss Nefer’s simply unkinked herself, waved a hand to the real audience and come back stage. Maybe Sid just had her out there for the first half of the play. Or maybe she just couldn’t stand watching Martin give such a bang-up performance in her part of Lady Mack.

  Yes, maybe I should have told myself something like that, but somehow all I could think then—and I thought it with a steady mounting shiver—was, We got two Elizabeths. This one is our witch Nefer. I know. I dressed her. And I know that devil-look from the virginals. But if this is our Elizabeth, the company Elizabeth, the stage Elizabeth…who’s the other?

  And because I didn’t dare to let myself think of the answer to that question, I dodged around the invisible cage that the ash-colored skirt seemed to ripple against as the Tiger Queen turned and I ran into the dressing room, my only thought to get behind my New York City Screen.

  V

  Even little things are turning out to be great things and becoming intensely interesting.

  Have you ever thought about the properties of numbers?

  —The Maiden

  Lying on my cot, my eyes crosswise to the printing, I looked from a pink Algonquin menu to a pale green New Amsterdam program, with a tiny doll of Father Knickerbocker dangling between them on a yellow thread. Really they weren’t covering up much of anything. A ghostly hole an inch and a half across seemed to char itself in the program. As if my eye were right up against it, I saw in vivid memory what I’d seen the two times I’d dared a peek through the hole in the curtain: a bevy of ladies in masks and Nell Gwyn dresses and men in King Charles knee-breeches and long curled hair, and the second time a bunch of people and creatures just wild: all sorts and colors of clothes, humans with hoofs for feet and antennae springing from their foreheads, furry and feathery things that had more arms than two and in one case that many heads—as if they were dressed up in our Tempest, Peer Gynt and Insect People costumes and some more besides.

  Naturally I’d had mind-wavery fits both times. Afterwards Sid had wagged a finger at me and explained that on those two nights we’d been giving performances for people who’d arranged a costume theater-party and been going to attend a masquerade ball, and ’zounds, when would I learn to guard my half-patched pate?

  I don’t know, I guess never, I answered now, quick looking at a Giants pennant, a Korvette ad, a map of Central Park, my Willy Mays baseball and a Radio City tour ticket. That was eight items I’d looked at this trip without feeling any inward improvement. They weren’t reassuring me at all.

  The blue fly came slowly buzzing down over my screen and I asked it, “What are you looking for? A spider?” when what should I hear coming back through the dressing room straight toward my sleeping closet but Miss Nefer’s footsteps. No one else walks that way.

  She’s going to do something to you, Greta, I thought. She’s the maniac in the company. She’s the one who terrorized you with the boning knife in the shrubbery, or sicked the giant tarantula on you at the dark end of the subway platform, or whatever it was, and the others are covering up for. She’s going to smile the devil-smile and weave those white twig-fingers at you, all eight of them. And Birnam Wood’ll come to Dunsinane and you’ll be burnt at the stake by men in armor or drawn and quartered by eight-legged monkeys that talk or torn apart by wild centaurs or whirled through the roof to the moon without being dressed for it or sent burrowing in the past to stifle in Iowa 1948 or Egypt 4008 B.C. The screen won’t keep her out.

  Then a head of hair pushed over the screen. But it was black-bound-with-silver, Brahma bless us, and a moment later Martin was giving me one of his rare smiles.

  I said, “Marty, do something for me. Don’t ever use Miss Nefer’s footsteps again. Her voice, okay, if you have to. But not the footsteps. Don’t ask me why, just don’t.”

  Martin came around and sat on the foot of my cot. My legs were already doubled up. He straightened out his blue-and-gold skirt and rested a hand on my black sneakers.

  “Feeling a little wonky, Greta?” he asked. “Don’t worry about me. Banquo’s dead and so’s his ghost. I’ve got lots of time.”

  I just looked at him, queerly I guess. Then without lifting my head I asked him, “Martin, tell me the truth. Does the dressing room move around?”

  I was talking so low that he hitched a little closer, not touching me anywhere else though.

  “The Earth’s whipping around the sun at 20 miles a second,” he replied, “and the dressing room goes with it.”

  I shook my head, my cheek scrubbing the pillow, “I mean…shifting,” I said. “By itself.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “Well,” I told him, “I’ve had this idea—it’s just a sort of fancy, remember—that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing room and a sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it. Actors can fit in anywhere. They’re used to learning new parts and wearing strange costumes. Heck, they’re even used to traveling a lot. And if an actor’s a bit strange nobody thinks anything of it—he’s almost expected to be foreign, it’s an asset to him.”

  “And a theater, well, a theater can spring up almost anywhere and nobody asks questions, except the zoning authorities and such and they can always be squared. Theaters come and go. It happens all the time. They’re transitory. Yet theaters are crossroads, anonymous meeting places, anybody with a few bucks or sometimes nothing at all can go. And theaters attract important people, the sort of people you might want to do something to. Caesar was stabbed in a theater. Lincoln was shot in one. And…”

  My voice trailed off. “A cute idea,” he commented.

  I reached down to his hand on my shoe and took hold of his middle finger as a baby might.

  “Yeah,” I said, “But Martin, is it true?”

  He asked me gravely, “What do you think?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “How would you like to work in a company like that?” he asked speculatively.

  “I don’t really know,” I said.

  He sat up straighter and his voice got brisk. “Well, all fantasy aside, how’d you like to work in this company?” he asked, lightly slapping my ankle. “On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you’re ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks you never take him seriously.”

  “Pardon me while I gasp and glow,” I said. Then, “Oh Marty, I can’t really imagine myself doing the tiniest part.”

  “Me neither, eight months ago,” he said. “Now, look. Lady Macbeth.”

  “But Marty,” I said, reaching for his finger again, “you haven’t answered my question. About whether it’s true.”

  “Oh that!” he said with a laugh, switching his hand to the other side. “Ask me something else.”

  “Okay,” I said, “why am I bugged on the number eight? Because I’m permanently behind a private 8-ball?”

  “Eight’s a number with many properties,” he said, suddenly as intently serious as he usually is. “The corners of a cube.”

  “You mean I’m a square?” I said. “Or just a brick? You know, ‘She’s a brick.’”

  “But eight’s most curious property” he continued with a frown, “is that lying on its side it signifies infinity. So eight erect is really—” and suddenly his made-up, naturally solemn face got a great glow of inspiration and devotion—“Infinity Arisen!”

  Well, I don’t know. You meet quite a few people in the theater who are bats on numerology, they use it to pick stage-names. But I’d never have guessed it of Martin. He always struck me as the skeptical, cynical type.

&nb
sp; “I had another idea about eight,” I said hesitatingly. “Spiders. That 8-legged asterisk on Miss Nefer’s forehead—” I suppressed a shudder.

  “You don’t like her, do you?” he stated.

  “I’m afraid of her,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t be. She’s a very great woman and tonight she’s playing an infinitely more difficult part than I am. No, Greta,” he went on as I started to protest, “believe me, you don’t understand anything about it at this moment. Just as you don’t understand about spiders, fearing them. They’re the first to climb the rigging and to climb ashore too. They’re the web-weavers, the line-throwers, the connectors, Siva and Kali united in love. They’re the double mandala, the beginning and the end, infinity mustered and on the march—”

  “They’re also on my New York screen!” I squeaked, shrinking back across the cot a little and pointing at a tiny glinting silver-and-black thing mounting below my Willy-ball.

  Martin gently caught its line on his finger and lifted it very close to his face. “Eight eyes too,” he told me. Then, “Poor little god,” he said and put it back.

  “Marty? Marty?” Sid’s desperate stage-whisper rasped the length of the dressing room.

  Martin stood up. “Yes, Sid?”

  Sid’s voice stayed in a whisper but went from desperate to ferocious. “You villainous elf-skin! Know you not the Cauldron Scene’s been playing a hundred heartbeats? ’Tis ’most my entrance and we still mustering only two witches out of three! Oh, you nott-pated starveling!”

  Before Sid had got much more than half of that out, Martin had slipped around the screen, raced the length of the dressing room, and I’d heard a lusty thwack as he went out the door. I couldn’t help grinning, though with Martin racked by anxieties and reliefs over his first time as Lady Mack, it was easy to understand it slipping his mind that he was still doubling Second Witch.