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 my
hands together tight and watched Bruce and Lili quarrel nobly near the
control divan and wished I had a great love to blur my misery and
provide me with a passable substitute for Change Winds.
Lili won the argument, judging from the way she threw her head back and
stepped 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 at
us like an old husband, though his nerves were showing and he didn't
seem 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 lips
together and looked around at us, mostly with her eyes. She'd wound a
gray silk bandeau around her bangs. Her short gray silk dress without a
waistline made her look, not so much like a flapper, though she looked
like that all right, as like a little girl, except the neckline was
scooped low enough to show she wasn't.
Her gaze hesitated and then stopped at me and I got a sunk feeling of
what was coming, because women are always picking on me for an audience.
Besides, Sid and I were the centrist party of two in our
fresh-out-of-the-shell Place politics.
She took a deep breath and stuck out her chin and said in a voice that
was even a little higher and Britisher than she usually uses, "We girls
have often cried, 'Shut the Door!' But now the Door is jolly well shut
for keeps!"
I knew I'd guessed right and I felt crawly with embarrassment, because I
know about this love business of thinking you're the other person and
trying to live their life--and grab their glory, though you don't know
that--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 a
start--unpleasantly apt to be true, at any rate.
"My fiance believes we may yet be able to open the Door. I do not. He
thinks it is a bit premature to discuss the peculiar pickle in which we
all find ourselves. I do not."
There was a rasp of laughter from the bar. The militarists were
reacting. Erich stepped out, looking very happy. "So now we have to
listen 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 bar
and the control divan, turned toward Erich, and Sevensee looked a little
burlier, a little more like half a horse, than satyrs in mythology book
illustrations. He stamped--medium hard, I'd say--and said, "Ahh, go flya
kite." I'd found out he'd learned English from a Demon who'd been a
longshoreman with syndicalist-anarchist sympathies. Erich shut up for a
moment and stood there grinning, his hands on his hips.
Lili nodded to the satyr and cleared her throat, looking scared. But she
didn't speak; I could see she was thinking and feeling something, and
her face got ugly and haggard, as if she were in a Change Wind that
hadn'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 octave
lower 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 I
loathe asking questions, but to me it was pure torture and I wished only
I'd had the courage to tell Suzaku, 'I wish to remain a Zombie, if you
don't mind. I'd rather the nightmares.' But I accepted Resurrection
because I've been taught to be polite and because there is the Demon in
me I don't understand that always wishes to live, and I found that I
still felt like a Zombie, although I could flit about, and that I still
had the nightmares, except they'd grown a deal vivider.
"I was a young girl again, seventeen, and I suppose every woman wishes
to be seventeen, but I wasn't seventeen inside my head--I was a woman
who had died of Bright's disease in New York in 1929 and also, because a
Big Change blew my lifeline into a new drift, a woman who had died of
the same disease in Nazi-occupied London in 1955, but rather more slowly
because, as you can fancy, the liquor was in far shorter supply. I had
to live with both those sets of memories and the Change World didn't
blot them out any more than I'm told it does those of any Demon, and it
didn'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 a
smile?' or 'That's a posh frock, kiddo,' I'd be back at Bellevue looking
down at my swollen figure and the light getting like spokes of ice, or
in that dreadful gin-steeped Stepney bedroom with Phyllis coughing
herself to death beside me, or at best, for a moment, a little girl in
Glamorgan looking at the Roman road and wondering about the wonderful
life that lay ahead."
* * * * *
I looked at Erich, remembering he had a long nasty future back in the
cosmos himself, and at any rate he wasn't smiling, and I thought maybe
he's getting a little humility, knowing someone else has two of those
futures, but I doubted it.
"Because, you see," Lili kept forcing it out, "all my three lives I'd
been 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 big
lie to get in the Red Cross and across to France to be nearer him, and
it was all danger and dark magics and a knight in armor, and she
pictured how she'd find him wounded but not seriously, with a little
bandage around his head, and she'd light a fag for him and smile
lightly, never letting him guess what she felt, but only being her best
self and watching to see if that made something happen to him....
"And then the Boche machine guns cut him down at Passchendaele and there
couldn't ever have been bandages big enough and the girl stayed
seventeen inside and messed about and tried to be wicked, though she
wasn't very good at that, and to drink, and she had a bit more talent
there, though drinking yourself to death is not nearly as easy as it
sounds, 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 dreams
of death that fill her lifeline. It's cold daybreak. There's the smell
of a French farm. She feels her ankles and they're not at all like huge
rubber 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 be
poplars when there's more light, and what there is shows cots like her
own and heads under blankets, and hanging uniforms make large shadows
and a girl is snoring. There's a very distant rumble and it moves the
window a bit. Then she remembers they're Red Cross girls many, many
kilometers from Passchendaele and that Bruce Marchant is going to die at
dawn today.
"In a few more minutes, he's going over the top where there's a
crop-headed machine-gunner in field gray already looking down the sights
and swinging the gun a bit. But she isn't going to die today. She's
going to die in 1929 and 1955.
"And just as she's going mad, there's a creaking and out of the shadows
tiptoes a Jap with a woman's hairdo and the whitest face and the
blackest eyebrows. He's wearing a rose robe and a black sash which belts
to his sides two samurai swords, but in his right hand he has a strange
silver pistol. And he smiles at her as if they were brother and sister
and lovers at the same time and he says, '_Voulez-vous vivre,
mademoiselle?_' and she stares and he bobs his head and says, 'Missy
wish live, yes, no?'"
[Illustration]
* * * * *
Sid's paw closed quietly around my shaking hands. It always gets me to
hear about anyone's Resurrection, and although mine was crazier, it also
had the Krauts in it. I hoped she wouldn't go through the rest of the
formula and she didn't.
"Five minutes later, he's gone down a stairs more like a ladder to wait
below and she's dressing in a rush. Her clothes resist a little, as if
they were lightly gummed to the hook and the stained wall, and she hates
to touch them. It's getting lighter and her cot looks as if someone were
still sleeping there, although it's empty, and she couldn't bring
herself 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 knows
how to swing it. Suzaku conducts her past a sentry who doesn't see them
and a puffy-faced farmer in a smock coughing and spitting the night out
of his throat. They cross the farmyard and it's filled with rose light
and she sees the sun is up and she knows that Bruce Marchant has just
bled 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 that
says 'Simplex.' But Suzaku leads her past it to a dunghill and bows
apologetically and she steps through a Door."
I heard Erich say to the others at the bar, "How touching! Now shall I
tell everyone about my operation?" But he didn't get much of a laugh.
"That's how Lilian Foster came into the Change World with its
steel-engraved nightmares and its deadly pace and deadlier lassitudes. I
was more alive than I ever had been before, but it was the kind of life
a corpse might get from unending electrical shocks and I couldn't summon
any purpose or hope and Bruce Marchant seemed farther away than ever.
"Then, not six hours ago, a Soldier in a black uniform came through the
Door and I thought, 'It can't be, but it does look like his
photographs,' and then I thought I heard someone say the name Bruce, and
then he shouted as if to all the world that he was Bruce Marchant, and I
knew 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 beauty
flooded 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 something
that works bigger miracles than Change."
And she went on, "And then the Change Winds died when the Snakes
vaporized the Maintainer or the Ghostgirls Introverted it and all three
of them vanished so swiftly and silently that even Bruce didn't
notice--those are the best explanations I can summon and I fancy one of
them is true. At all events, the Change Winds died and my past and even
my futures became something I could bear lightly, because I have someone
to bear them with me, and because at last I have a true future
stretching out ahead of me, an unknown future which I shall create by
living. Oh, don't you see that all of us have it now, this big
opportunity?"
"_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 us
queue up for the Great Love Affair of the Century?"