The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (early reader chapter books .txt) 📕

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

“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 fiancé 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