The Big Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

sometimes, when I’m feeling low, I’ll come and look at them so I’ll feel still lower and get inspired to kick myself back into a good temper. It’s the only history of the Place there is and it doesn’t change a great deal, because the things in it and the feelings that went into them resist the Change Winds better than anything else.
    Right now, Erich’s witty lecture was bouncing off the big ears I hide under my pageboy bob and I was thinking how awful it is that for us that there’s not only change but
    Change. You don’t know from one minute to the next whether a mood or idea you’ve got is really new or just welling up into you because the past has been altered by the Spiders or
    Snakes.
    Change Winds can blow not only death but anything short of it, down to the featheriest fancy. They blow thousands of times faster than time moves, but no one can say how much faster or how far one of them will travel or what damage it’ll do or how soon it’ll damp out. The Big Time isn’t the little time.
    And then, for the Demons, there’s the fear that our personality will just fade and someone else climb into the driver’s seat and us not even know. Of course, we Demons are supposed to be able to remember through Change and in spite of it; that’s why we are Demons and not Ghosts like the other Doublegangers, or merely Zombies or Unborn and nothing more, and as Beau truly said, there aren’t any great men among us—and blamed few of the masses, either—we’re a rare sort of people and that’s why the Spiders have to Recruit us where they find us without caring about our previous knowledge and background, a Foreign Legion of time, a strange kind of folk, bright but always in the background, with built-in nostalgia and cynicism, as adaptable as Centaurian shape-changers but with memories as long as
    Lunan’s six arms, a kind of Change People, you might say, the cream of the damned.
    But sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn’t once entirely different from anything we remember, and we’ve forgotten that we forgot.
    As I say, the Gallery gets you feeling real low, and so now I said to myself, “Back to your lousy little commandant, kid,” and gave myself a stiff boot.
    Erich was holding up a green bowl with gold dolphins or spaceships on it and saying, “And, to my mind, this proves that Etruscan art is derived from Egyptian. Don’t you agree, Bruce?”
     
    Bruce looked up, all smiles from Lili, and said, “What was that, dear chap?”
    Erich’s forehead got dark as the Door and I was glad the hussars had parked their sabers along with their shakos, but before he could even get out a Jerry cuss-word, Doc breezed up in that plateaustate of drunkenness so like hypnotized sobriety, moving as if he were on a dolly, ghosted the bowl out of Erich’s hand, said, “A beautiful specimen of Middle
    Systemic Venusian. When Eightaitch finished it, he told me you couldn’t look at it and not feel the waves of the Northern Venusian Shallows rippling around your roofs. But it might look better inverted. I wonder. Who are you, young officer? Nichevo ,” and he carefully put the bowl back on its shelf and rolled on.
    It’s a fact that Doc knows the Art Gallery better than any of us, really by heart, he being the oldest inhabitant, though he maybe picked a bad time to show off his knowledge.
    Erich was going to take out after him, but I said, “Nix, Kamerad, remember gloves and sugar,” and he contented himself with complaining, “That nichevo —it’s so gloomy and hopeless, ungeheuerlich . I tell you, Liebchen , they shouldn’t have Russians working for the Spiders not even as Entertainers.”
    I grinned at him and squeezed his hand. “Not much entertainment in Doc these days, is there?” I agreed.
    He grinned back at me a shade sheepishly and his face smoothed and his blue eyes looked sweet again for a second and he said, “I shouldn’t want to claw