My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
--Macbeth
MOTIVES AND OPPORTUNITIES
My big bad waif from King's Lynn had set the tray on his knees and
started to wolf the food down. The others were finishing up. Erich, Mark
and Kaby were having a quietly furious argument I couldn't overhear at
the end of the bar nearest the bronze chest, and Illy was draped over
the piano like a real octopus, listening in.
Beau and Sevensee were pacing up and down near the control divan and
throwing each other a word now and then. Beyond them, Bruce and Lili
were sitting on the opposite couch from us, talking earnestly about
something. Maud had sat down at the other end of the bar and was
knitting--it's one of the habits like chess and quiet drinking, or
learning to talk by squeak box, that we pick up to pass the time in the
Place in the long stretches between parties. Doc was fiddling around the
Gallery, picking things up and setting them down, still managing to stay
on his feet at any rate.
* * * * *
Lili and Bruce stood up, still gabbing intensely at each other, and Illy
began to pick out with one tentacle a little tune in the high keys that
didn't sound like anything on God's earth. "Where do they get all the
energy?" I wondered.
As soon as I asked myself that, I knew the answer and I began to feel
the same way myself. It wasn't energy; it was nerves, pure and simple.
Change is like a drug, I realized--you get used to the facts never
staying the same, and one picture of the past and future dissolving into
another maybe not very different but still different, and your mind
being constantly goosed by strange moods and notions, like nightclub
lights of shifting color with weird shadows between shining right on
your brain.
The endless swaying and jogging is restful, like riding on a train.
You soon get to like the movement and to need it without knowing, and
when it suddenly stops and you're just you and the facts you think from
and feel from are exactly the same when you go back to them--boy, that's
rough, as I found out now.
The instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks into
the Place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing but
ourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make of
that, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation.
I decided I felt like I'd been dropped into a swimming pool full of
cement and held under until it hardened.
I could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonder
they didn't hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best; maybe
she'd got a little preparation from the long watches between stars; and
then she is older than all of us, even Sid, though with a small "o" in
"older."
* * * * *
The restless work of the search for the Maintainer had masked the
feeling, but now it was beginning to come full force. Before the search,
Bruce's speech and Erich's interruptions had done a passable masking job
too. I tried to remember when I'd first got the feeling and decided it
was after Erich had jumped on the bomb, about the time he mentioned
poetry. Though I couldn't be sure. Maybe the Maintainer had been
Introverted even earlier, when I'd turned to look at the Ghostgirls. I
wouldn't have known. Nuts!
Believe me, I could feel that hardened cement on every inch of me. I
remembered Bruce's beautiful picture of a universe without Big Change
and decided it was about the worst idea going. I went on eating, though
I wasn't so sure now it was a good idea to keep myself strong.
"Does the Maintainer have an Introversion telltale? Siddy!"
"'Sdeath, chit, and you love me, speak lower. Of a sudden, I feel not
well, as if I'd drunk a butt of Rhenish and slept inside it. Marry yes,
blue. In short flashes, saith the manual. Why ask'st thou?"
"No reason. God, Siddy, what I'd give for a breath of Change Wind."
"Thou can'st say that eftsoons," he groaned. I must have looked pretty
miserable myself, for he put his arm around my shoulders and whispered
gruffly, "Comfort thyself, sweetling, that while we suffer thus sorely,
we yet cannot die the Change Death."
"What's that?" I asked him.
I didn't want to bounce around like the others. I had a suspicion I'd
carry it too far. So, to keep myself from going batty, I started to
rework the business of who had done what to the Maintainer.
During the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossed
around as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat of
Snake science amounting to sorcery; the Spider high command bunkering
the Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the Express
Room, in such a hurry that they hadn't even time to transmit warnings;
the hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beings
who are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of the
Change War into the future much beyond Sevensee's epoch--unless the Late
Cosmicians are the ones fighting the Change War.
One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one
of us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political
police, agent of--who knows, after Bruce?--a secret Change World
Committee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, or
strictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the
Maintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich's and Bruce's
factions.
Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but
that didn't apply to what I did with my own thoughts.
* * * * *
Who wanted to escape so bad they'd Introvert the Place, cutting off all
possible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and
running the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all?
Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things
up, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid
couldn't keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments
for derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as
Erich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of
the bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly
hadn't had my eye on him every second.
Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he
said counted, so he'd hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to
mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.
Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people
especially, more than any man or woman I've ever known--he's like a
big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his
mouth--and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the
cosmos.
Maud, Kaby, Mark and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of,
though Sevensee's being from the very far future did tie in with that
idea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something
developing between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to
be Introverted together.
"Stick to the facts, Greta," I reminded myself with a private groan.
That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself.
Erich, I thought--now we're getting somewhere. The little commandant has
the nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if
he thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be
locked in with him, he'd do it in a second.
But even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he'd been heckling Bruce
from the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for
him to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and ... well,
that was nine-tenths of the problem.
If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanation
of all. Gr-r-r!
Bruce's motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it
immortal?) danger he'd put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed
a shame he'd been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the
Maintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar, we'd all
have noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I'd have
noticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls--if it worked as Sid
claimed, and he said he had never seen it in operation, just read in the
manual--oh, 'sdeath!
* * * * *
But Bruce didn't need opportunity, as I'm sure all the males in
the Place would have told me right off, because he had Lili to
pull the job for him and she had as much opportunity as any of
the rest of us. Myself, I have large reservations to this
woman-putty-in-the-hands-of-the-man-she-loves-madly theory, but I had to
admit there was something to be said for it in this case, and it had
seemed quite natural to me when the rest of us had decided, by unspoken
agreement, that neither Lili's nor Bruce's checks counted when we were
hunting for the Maintainer.
That took care of all of us and left only the mysterious stranger,
intruding somehow through a Door (how'd he get it without using our
Maintainer?) or from an unimaginable hiding place or straight out of the
Void itself. I know that last is impossible--nothing can step out of
nothing--but if anything ever looked like it was specially built for
something not at all nice to come looming out of, it's the Void--misty,
foggily churning, slimy gray....
"Wait a second," I told myself, "and hang onto this, Greta. It should
have smacked you in the face at the start."
Whatever came out of the Void, or, more to the point, whoever slipped
back from our crowd to the Maintainer, Bruce would have seen them. He
was looking at the Maintainer past our heads the whole time, and
whatever happened to it, he saw it.
Erich wouldn't have, even after he was on the bomb, because he'd been
stagewise enough to face Bruce most of the time to build up his role as
tribune of the people.
But Bruce would have--unless he got so caught up in what he was
saying....
No, kid, a Demon is always an actor, no matter how much he believes in
what he's saying, and there never was an actor yet who wouldn't
instantly notice a member of the audience starting to walk out on his
big scene.
So Bruce knew, which made him a better actor than I'd have been willing
to grant, since it didn't look as if anyone else had thought of what had
just occurred to me, or they'd have gone over and put it to him.
Not me, though--I don't work that way. Besides, I didn't feel up to
it--Nervy Anna enfold me, I felt like pure hell.
"Maybe," I told myself encouragingly, "the Place is Hell," but added,
"Be your age, Greta--be a real rootless, ruleless, ruthless
twenty-nine."