CHAPTER 16
"Familiar with infinite universe
sheafs and open-ended postulate
systems?—the notion that everything
is possible—and I mean everything—and
everything has happened.
Everything."
—Heinlein
THE POSSIBILITY-BINDERS
An hour later, I was nursing a
weak highball and a black eye
in the sleepy-time darkness on the
couch farthest from the piano, half
watching the highlighted party going
on around it and the bar, while
the Place waited for rendezvous
with Egypt and the Battle of
Alexandria.
Sid had swept all our outstanding
problems into one big bundle
and, since his hand held the joker
of the Minor Maintainer, he had
settled them all as high-handedly
as if they'd been those of a bunch
of schoolkids.It amounted to this:
We'd been Introverted when most of the damning things had happened, so presumably only we knew about them, and we were all in so deep one way or another that we'd all have to keep quiet to protect our delicate complexions.
Well, Erich's triggering the bomb did balance rather neatly Bruce's incitement to mutiny, and there was Doc's drinking, while everybody who had declared for the peace message had something to hide. Mark and Kaby I felt inclined to trust anywhere, Maud for sure, and Erich in this particular matter, damn him. Illy I didn't feel at all easy about, but I told myself there always has to be a fly in the ointment—a darn big one this time, and furry.
Sid didn't mention his own dirty linen, but he knew we knew he'd flopped badly as boss of the Place and only recouped himself by that last-minute flimflam.
Remembering Sid's trick made me think for a moment about the real Spiders. Just before I snuck out of Surgery, I'd had a vivid picture of what they must look like, but now I couldn't get it again. It depressed me, not being able to remember—oh, I probably just imagined I'd had a picture, like a hophead on a secret-of-the-universe kick. Me ever find out anything about the Spiders?—except for nervous notions like I'd had during the recent fracas?—what a laugh!
The funniest thing (ha-ha!) was that I had ended up the least-trusted person. Sid wouldn't give me time to explain how I'd deduced what had happened to the Maintainer, and even when Lili spoke up and admitted hiding it, she acted so bored I don't think everybody believed her—although she did spill the realistic detail that she hadn't used partial Inversion on the glove; she'd just turned it inside out to make it a right and then done a full Inversion to get the lining back inside.
I tried to get Doc to confirm
that he'd reasoned the
thing out the same way I had, but
he said he had been blacked out
the whole time, except during the
first part of the hunt, and he didn't
remember having any bright ideas
at all. Right now, he was having
Maud explain to him twice, in detail,
everything that had happened.
I decided that it was going to take
a little more work before my reputation
as a great detective was established.
I looked over the edge of the
couch and just made out in the
gloom one of Bruce's black gloves.
It must have been kicked there.
I fished it up. It was the right-hand
one. My big clue, and was I
sick of it! Got mittens, God forbid!
I slung it away and, like a
lurking octopus, Illy shot up a tentacle
from the next couch, where
I hadn't known he was resting, and
snatched the glove like it was a
morsel of underwater garbage.
These ETs can seem pretty shuddery
non-human at times.I thought of what a cold-blooded, skin-saving louse Illy had been, and about Sid and his easy suspicions, and Erich and my black eye, and how, as usual, I'd got left alone in the end. My men!
Bruce had explained about being an A-tech. Like a lot of us, he'd had several widely different jobs during his first weeks in the Change World and one of them had been as secretary to a group of the minor atomics boys from the Manhattan-Project-Earth-Satellite days. I gathered he'd also absorbed some of his bothersome ideas from them. I hadn't quite decided yet what species of heroic heel he belonged to, but he was thick with Mark and Erich again. Everybody's men!
Sid didn't have to argue with anybody; all the wild compulsions and mighty resolves were dead now, anyway until they'd had a good long rest. I sure could use one myself, I knew.
The party at the piano was getting wilder. Lili had been dancing the black bottom on top of it and now she jumped down into Sid's and Sevensee's arms, taking a long time about it. She'd been drinking a lot and her little gray dress looked about as innocent on her as diapers would on Nell Gwyn. She continued her dance, distributing her marks of favor equally between Sid, Erich and the satyr. Beau didn't mind a bit, but serenely pounded out "Tonight's the Night"—which she'd practically shouted to him not two minutes ago.
I was glad to be out of the party. Who can compete with a highly experienced, utterly disillusioned seventeen-year-old really throwing herself away for the first time?
Something touched my
hand. Illy had stretched a tentacle
into a furry wire to return
me the black glove, although he
ought to have known I didn't want
it. I pushed it away, privately calling
Illy a washed-out moronic
tarantula, and right away I felt a
little guilty. What right had I to
be critical of Illy? Would my own
character have shown to advantage
if I'd been locked in with
eleven octopoids a billion years
away? For that matter, where did
I get off being critical of anyone?
Still, I was glad to be out of
the party, though I kept on watching
it. Bruce was drinking alone
at the bar. Once Sid had gone over
to him and they'd had one together
and I'd heard Bruce reciting
from Rupert Brooke those deliberately
corny lines, "For England's
the one land, I know, Where
men with Splendid Hearts may
go; and Cambridgeshire, of all
England, The Shire for Men who
Understand;" and I'd remembered
that Brooke too had died young
in World War One and my ideas
had got fuzzy. But mostly Bruce
was just calmly drinking by himself.
Every once in a while Lili
would look at him and stop dead
in her dancing and laugh.I'd figured out this Bruce-Lili-Erich business as well as I cared to. Lili had wanted the nest with all her heart and nothing else would ever satisfy her, and now she'd go to hell her own way and probably die of Bright's disease for a third time in the Change World. Bruce hadn't wanted the nest or Lili as much as he wanted the Change World and the chances it gave for Soldierly cavorting and poetic drunks; Lili's seed wasn't his idea of healing the cosmos; maybe he'd make a real mutiny some day, but more likely he'd stick to bar-room epics.
His and Lili's infatuation wouldn't die completely, no matter how rancid it looked right now. The real-love angle might go, but Change would magnify the romance angle and it might seem to them like a big thing of a sort if they met again.
Erich had his Kamerad, shaped to suit him, who'd had the guts and cleverness to disarm the bomb he'd had the guts to trigger. You have to hand it to Erich for having the nerve to put us all in a situation where we'd have to find the Maintainer or fry, but I don't know anything disgusting enough to hand to him.
I had tried a while back. I had gone up behind him and said, "Hey, how's my wicked little commandant? Forgotten your und so weiter?" and as he turned, I clawed my nails and slammed him across the cheek. That's how I got the black eye. Maud wanted to put an electronic leech on it, but I took the old handkerchief in ice water. Well, at any rate Erich had his scratches to match Bruce's, not as deep, but four of them, and I told myself maybe they'd get infected—I hadn't washed my hands since the hunt. Not that Erich doesn't love scars.
Mark was the one who helped
me up after Erich knocked
me down.
"You got any omnias for that?"
I snapped at him."For what?" Mark asked.
"Oh, for everything that's been happening to us," I told him disgustedly.
He seemed to actually think for a moment and then he said, "Omnia mutantur, nihil interit."
"Meaning?" I asked him.
He said, "All things change, but nothing is really lost."
It would be a wonderful philosophy to stand with against the Change Winds. Also damn silly. I wondered if Mark really believed it. I wished I could. Sometimes I come close to thinking it's a lot of baloney trying to be any decent kind of Demon, even a good Entertainer. Then I tell myself, "That's life, Greta. You've got to love through it somehow." But there are times when some of these cookies are not too easy to love.
Something brushed the palm of my hand again. It was Illy's tentacle, with the tendrils of the tip spread out like a little bush. I started to pull my hand away, but then I realized the Loon was simply lonely. I surrendered my hand to the patterned gossamer pressures of feather-talk.
It almost floored me, I tell you. Here I was understanding feather-talk, which I just didn't, and I was understanding it in English, which didn't make sense at all.
For a second, I thought Illy must have spoken, but I knew he hadn't, and for a couple more seconds I thought he was working telepathy on me, using the feather-talk as cues. Then I tumbled to what was happening: he was playing English on my palm like on the keyboard of his squeakbox, and since I could play English on a squeakbox myself, my mind translated automatically.
Realizing this almost gave my mind stage fright, but I was too fagged to be hocused by self-consciousness. I just lay back and let the thoughts come through. It's good to have someone talk to you, even an underweight octopus, and without the squeaks Illy didn't sound so silly; his phrasing was soberer.
"Feeling sad, Greta girl, because
you'll never understand
what's happening to us all,"
Illy asked me, "because you'll
never be anything but a shadow
fighting shadows—and trying to
love shadows in between the battles?
It's time you understood
we're not really fighting a war at
all, although it looks that way,
but going through a kind of evolution,
though not exactly the kind
Erich had in mind.
"Your Terran thought has a
word for it and a theory for it—a
theory that recurs on many
worlds. It's about the four orders
of life: Plants, Animals, Men and
Demons. Plants are energy-binders—they
can't move through space
or time, but they can clutch energy
and transform it. Animals are
space-binders—they can move
through space. Man (Terran or
ET, Lunan or non-Lunan) is a
time-binder—he has memory."Demons are the fourth order of evolution, possibility-binders—they can make all of what might be part of what is, and that is their evolutionary function. Resurrection is like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly: a third-order being breaks out of the chrysalis of its lifeline into fourth-order life. The leap from the ripped cocoon of an unchanging reality is like the first animal's leap when he ceases to be a plant, and the Change World is the core of meaning behind the many myths of immortality.
"All evolution looks like a war at first—octopoids against monopoids, mammals against reptiles. And it has a necessary dialectic: there must be the thesis—we call it Snake—and the antithesis—Spider—before there can be the ultimate synthesis, when all possibilities are fully realized in one ultimate universe. The Change War isn't the blind destruction it seems.
"Remember that the Serpent is your symbol of wisdom and the Spider your sign for patience. The two names are rightly frightening to you, for all high existence is a mixture of horror and delight. And don't be surprised, Greta girl, at the range of my words and thoughts; in a way, I've had a billion years to study Terra and learn her languages and myths.
"Who are the real Spiders and Snakes, meaning who were the first possibility-binders? Who was Adam, Greta girl? Who was Cain? Who were Eve and Lilith?
"In binding all possibility, the Demons also bind the mental with the material. All fourth-order beings live inside and outside all minds, throughout the whole cosmos. Even this Place is, after its fashion, a giant brain: its floor is the brainpan, the boundary of the Void is the cortex of gray matter—yes, even the Major and Minor Maintainers are analogues of the pineal and pituitary glands, which in some form sustain all nervous systems.
"There's the real picture, Greta girl."
The feather-talk faded out and Illy's tendril tips merged into a soft pad on which I fingered, "Thanks, Daddy Longlegs."
Chewing over in my mind
what Illy had just told me, I
looked back at the gang around
the piano. The party seemed to
be breaking up; at least some of
them were chopping away at it.
Sid had gone to the control divan
and was getting set to tune in
Egypt. Mark and Kaby were there
with him, all bursting with eagerness
and the vision of tanks on
ranks of mounted Zombie bowmen
going up in a mushroom
cloud; I thought of what Illy had
told me and I managed a smile—seems
we've got to win and lose
all the battles, every which way.
Mark had just put on his Parthian
costume, groaning cheerfully,
"Trousers again!" and was striding
around under a hat like a fur-lined
ice-cream cone and with the
sleeves of his metal-stuffed candys
flapping over his hands. He waved
a short sword with a heart-shaped
guard at Bruce and Erich and
told them to get a move on.Kaby was going along on the operation wearing the old-woman disguise intended for Benson-Carter. I got a half-hearted kick out of knowing she was going to have to cover that chest and hobble.
Bruce and Erich weren't taking orders from Mark just yet. Erich went over and said something to Bruce at the bar, and Bruce got down and went over with Erich to the piano, and Erich tapped Beau on the shoulder and leaned over and said something to him, and Beau nodded and yanked "Limehouse Blues" to a fast close and started another piece, something slow and nostalgic.
Erich and Bruce waved to Mark and smiled, as if to show him that whether he came over and stood with them or not, the legate and the lieutenant and the commandant were very much together. And while Sevensee hugged Lili with a simple enthusiasm that made me wonder why I've wasted so much imagination on genetic treatments for him, Erich and Bruce sang:
"To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
To our brothers in the tunnels outside time,
Sing three Change-resistant Zombies, raised from death and robot-crammed,
And Commandos of the Spiders—
Here's to crime!
We're three blind mice on the wrong time-track,
Hush—hush—hush!
We've lost our now and will never get back,
Hush—hush—hush!
Change Commandos out on the spree,
Damned through all possibility,
Ghostgirls, think kindly on such as we,
Hush—hush—hush!"
I fingered to Illy, "That's the picture, all right, Spider boy."
The story takes place at the Place, a ‘Recuperation Station’, where ‘Entertainer’ Greta Forzane is one of a team who provides rest and relaxation for battle-weary soldiers. Told from Greta’s perspective, the narrative is rather small and focussed, a story of what crime readers would call ‘a locked room mystery’.
When a mission going through the Recuperation Station goes wrong, Greta and her colleagues find themselves with three Hussar soldiers and an atomic bomb, originally on the way to save Rome. Whilst discussing what to do and catching up with the latest events from the War, the whole Place becomes Introverted - isolated from space and time with the loss of its Major Maintainer, the device that keeps the Station working. The group are in what is effectively a locked room, unable to rejoin or communicate with, the Time Streams. The bomb is ticking, with thirty minutes to go, and without the Major Retainer to return them to their usual position there’s seemingly no way that our characters can avoid the Place becoming ‘a sun in a bag’….
