De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms.
--Eliot
SOS FROM NOWHERE
I realized the piano had deserted Erich and I cranked my head up and saw
Beau, Maud and Sid streaking for the control divan. The Major Maintainer
was blinking emergency-green and fast, but the code was plain enough for
even me to recognize the Spider distress call and for a second I felt
just sick. Then Erich blew out his reserve breath in the middle of
"Door" and I gave myself another of those helpful mental boots at the
base of the spine and we hurried after them toward the center of the
Place along with Mark.
The blinks faded as we got there and Sid told us not to move because we
were making shadows. He glued an eye to the telltale and we held still
as statues as he caressed the dials like he was making love.
One sensitive hand flicked out past the Introversion switch over to the
Minor Maintainer and right away the Place was dark as your soul and
there was nothing for me but Erich's arm and the knowledge that Sid was
nursing a green light I couldn't even see, although my eyes had plenty
time to accommodate.
Then the green light finally came back very slowly and I could see the
dear reliable old face--the green-gold beard making him look like a
merman--and then the telltale flared bright and Sid flicked on the Place
lights and I leaned back.
"That nails them, lads, whoever and whenever they may be. Get ready for
a pick-up."
Beau, who was closest of course, looked at him sharply. Sid shrugged
uneasily. "Meseemed at first it was from our own globe a thousand years
before our Lord, but that indication flickered and faded like witchfire.
As it is, the call comes from something smaller than the Place and
certes adrift from the cosmos. Meseemed too at one point I knew the fist
of the caller--an antipodean atomicist named Benson-Carter--but that
likewise changed."
Beau said, "We're not in the right phase of the cosmos-Places rhythm for
a pick-up, are we, sir?"
Sid answered, "Ordinarily not, boy."
Beau continued, "I didn't think we had any pick-ups scheduled. Or
stand-by orders."
Sid said, "We haven't."
Mark's eyes glowed. He tapped Erich on the shoulder. "An octavian
denarius against ten Reichsmarks it is a Snake trap."
Erich's grin showed his teeth. "Make it first through the Door next
operation and I'm on."
* * * * *
It didn't take that to tell me things were serious, or the thought that
there's always a first time for bumping into something from really
outside the cosmos. The Snakes have broken our code more than once. Maud
was quietly serving out weapons and Doc was helping her. Only Bruce and
Lili stood off. But they were watching.
The telltale brightened. Sid reached toward the Maintainer, saying, "All
right, my hearties. Remember, through this Doorway pass the fishiest
finaglers in and out of the cosmos."
The Door appeared to the left and above where it should be and darkened
much too fast. There was a gust of stale salt seawind, if that makes
sense, but no stepped-up Change Winds I could tell--and I had been
bracing myself against them. The Door got inky and there was a flicker
of gray fur whips and a flash of copper flesh and gilt and something
dark and a clump of hoofs and Erich was sighting a stun gun across his
left forearm, and then the Door had vanished like that and a tentacled
silvery Lunan and a Venusian satyr were coming straight toward us.
The Lunan was hugging a pile of clothes and weapons. The satyr was
helping a wasp-waisted woman carry a heavy-looking bronze chest. The
woman was wearing a short skirt and high-collared bolero jacket of
leather so dark brown it was almost black. She had a two-horned
_petsofa_ hairdress and she was boldly gilded here and there and wore
sandals and copper anklets and wristlets--one of them a copper-plated
Caller--and from her wide copper belt hung a short-handled double-headed
ax. She was dark-complexioned and her forehead and chin receded, but the
effect was anything but weak; she had a face like a beautiful
arrowhead--and a familiar one, by golly!
But before I could say, "Kabysia Labrys," Maud shrilly beat me to it
with, "It's Kaby with two friends. Break out a couple of Ghostgirls."
And then I saw it really was old-home week because I recognized my Lunan
boy friend Ilhilihis, and in the midst of all the confusion I got a nice
kick out of knowing I was getting so I could tell the personality of one
silver-furred muzzle from another.
They reached the control divan and Illy dumped his load and the others
let down the chest, and Kaby staggered but shook off the two ETs when
they started to support her, and she looked daggers at Sid when he tried
to do the same, although she's his "sweet Keftian friend" he'd mentioned
to Bruce.
* * * * *
She leaned straight-armed on the divan and took two gasping breaths so
deep that the ridges of her spine showed through her brown-skinned
waist, and then she threw up her head and commanded, "Wine!"
While Beau was rushing it, Sid tried to take her hand again, saying,
"Sweetling, I'd never heard you call before and knew not this pretty
little fist," but she ripped out, "Save your comfort for the Lunan," and
I looked and saw--Hey, Zeus!--that one of Ilhilihis' six tentacles was
lopped off halfway.
That was for me, and, going to him, I fast briefed myself: "Remember, he
only weighs fifty pounds for all he's seven feet high; he doesn't like
low sounds or to be grabbed; the two legs aren't tentacles and don't act
the same; uses them for long walks, tentacles for leaps; uses tentacles
for close vision too and for manipulation, of course; extended, they
mean he's at ease; retracted, on guard or nervous; sharply retracted,
disgusted; greeting--"
Just then, one of them swept across my face like a sweet-smelling
feather duster and I said, "Illy, man, it's been a lot of sleeps," and
brushed my fingers across his muzzle. It still took a little
self-control not to hug him, and I did reach a little cluckingly for
his lopped tentacle, but he wafted it away from me and the little
voice-box belted to his side squeaked, "Naughty, naughty. Papa will fix
his little old self. Greta girl, ever bandaged even a Terra octopus?"
I had, an intelligent one from around a quarter billion A.D., but I
didn't tell him so. I stood and let him talk to the palm of my hand with
one of his tentacles--I don't savvy feather-talk but it feels good,
though I've often wondered who taught him English--and watched him use a
couple others to whisk a sort of Lunan band-aid out of his pouch and cap
his wound with it.
Meanwhile, the satyr knelt over the bronze chest, which was decorated
with little death's heads and crosses with hoops at the top and
swastikas, but looking much older than Nazi, and the satyr said to Sid,
"Quick thinkin, Gov, when ya saw the Door comin in high n soffened up
gravty unner it, but cud I hav sum hep now?"
Sid touched the Minor Maintainer and we all got very light and my
stomach did a flip-flop while the satyr piled on the chest the clothes
and weapons that Illy had been carrying and pranced off with it all and
carefully put it down at the end of the bar. I decided the satyr's
English instructor must have been quite a character, too. Wish I'd met
him--her--it.
Sid thought to ask Illy if he wanted Moon-normal gravity in one sector,
but my boy likes to mix, and being such a lightweight, Earth-normal
gravity doesn't bother him. As he said to me once, "Would Jovian gravity
bother a beetle, Greta girl?"
* * * * *
I asked Illy about the satyr and he squeaked that his name was Sevensee
and that he'd never met him before this operation. I knew the satyrs
were from a billion years in the future, just as the Loonies were from a
billion in the past, and I thought--Kreesed us!--but it must have been
a real big or emergency-like operation to have the Spiders using those
two for it, with two billion years between them--a time-difference that
gives you a feeling of awe for a second, you know.
[Illustration]
I started to ask Illy about it, but just then Beau came scampering back
from the bar with a big red-and-black earthenware goblet of wine--we try
to keep a variety of drinking tools in stock so folks will feel more at
home. Kaby grabbed it from him and drained most of it in one swallow and
then smashed it on the floor. She does things like that, though Sid's
tried to teach her better. Then she stared at what she was thinking
about until the whites showed all around her eyes and her lips pulled
way back from her teeth and she looked a lot less human than the two
ETs, just like a fury. Only a time traveler knows how like the wild
murals and engravings of them some of the ancients can look.
My hair stood up at the screech she let out. She smashed a fist into the
divan and cried, "Goddess! Must I see Crete destroyed, revived, and now
destroyed again? It is too much for your servant."
Personally, I thought she could stand anything.
There was a rush of questions at what she said about Crete--I asked one
of them, for the news certainly frightened me--but she shot up her arm
straight for silence and took a deep breath and began.
"In the balance hung the battle. Rowing like black centipedes, the
Dorian hulls bore down on our outnumbered ships. On the bright beach,
masked by rocks, Sevensee and I stood by the needle gun, ready to give
the black hulls silent wounds. Beside us was Ilhilihis, suited as a sea
monster. But then ... then ..."
Then I saw she wasn't altogether the iron babe, for her voice broke and
she started to shake and to sob rackingly, although her face was still a
mask of rage, and she threw up the wine. Sid stepped in and made her
stop, which I think he'd been wanting to do all along.