Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

elfed, his fists planted high on his hips at the edge of his black tights, which now were all his clothes.

“You knew!” he said impatiently. “You knew you were signing up for more than acting when you said, ‘Count me in the company.’ ”

Like a legged sapphire the blue fly walked across her upper lip and stopped by the thread of foam.

“But Martin⁠ ⁠… changing the past⁠ ⁠… dipping back and killing the real queen⁠ ⁠… replacing her with a double⁠—”

His dark brows shot up. “The real⁠—You think this is the real Queen Elizabeth?” He grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the nearest table, gushed some on a towel stained with greasepaint and, holding the dead head by its red hair (no, wig⁠—the real one wore a wig too) scrubbed the forehead.

The white cosmetic came away, showing sallow skin and on it a faint tattoo in the form of an “S” styled like a yin-yang symbol left a little open.

“Snake!” he hissed. “Destroyer! The arch-enemy, the eternal opponent! God knows how many times people like Queen Elizabeth have been dug out of the past, first by Snakes, then by Spiders, and kidnapped or killed and replaced in the course of our war. This is the first big operation I’ve been on, Greta. But I know that much.”

My head began to ache. I asked, “If she’s an enemy double, why didn’t she know a performance of Macbeth in her lifetime was an anachronism?”

“Foxholed in the past, only trying to hold a position, they get dulled. They turn half zombie. Even the Snakes. Even our people. Besides, she almost did catch on, twice when she spoke to Leicester.”

“Martin,” I said dully, “if there’ve been all these replacements, first by them, then by us, what’s happened to the real Elizabeth?”

He shrugged. “God knows.”

I asked softly, “But does He, Martin? Can He?”

He hugged his shoulders in, as if to contain a shudder. “Look, Greta,” he said, “it’s the Snakes who are the warpers and destroyers. We’re restoring the past. The Spiders are trying to keep things as first created. We only kill when we must.”

I shuddered then, for bursting out of my memory came the glittering, knife-flashing, night-shrouded, bloody image of my lover, the Spider soldier-of-change Erich von Hohenwald, dying in the grip of a giant silver spider, or spider-shaped entity large as he, as they rolled in a tangled ball down a flight of rocks in Central Park.

But the memory-burst didn’t blow up my mind, as it had done a year ago, no more than snapping the black thread from my sweater had ended the world. I asked Martin, “Is that what the Snakes say?”

“Of course not! They make the same claims we do. But somewhere, Greta, you have to trust.” He put out the middle finger of his hand.

I didn’t take hold of it. He whirled it away, snapping it against his thumb.

“You’re still grieving for that carrion there!” he accused me. He jerked down a section of white curtain and whirled it over the stiffening body. “If you must grieve, grieve for Miss Nefer! Exiled, imprisoned, locked forever in the past, her mind pulsing faintly in the black hole of the dead and gone, yearning for Nirvana yet nursing one lone painful patch of consciousness. And only to hold a fort! Only to make sure Mary Stuart is executed, the Armada licked, and that all the other consequences flow on. The Snakes’ Elizabeth let Mary live⁠ ⁠… and England die⁠ ⁠… and the Spaniard hold North America to the Great Lakes and New Scandinavia.”

Once more he put out his middle finger.

“All right, all right,” I said, barely touching it. “You’ve convinced me.”

“Great!” he said. “Bye for now, Greta. I got to help strike the set.”

“That’s good,” I said. He loped out.

I could hear the skirling sword-clashes of the final fight to the death of the two Macks, Duff and Beth. But I only sat there in the empty dressing room pretending to grieve for a devil-smiling snow tiger locked in a time-cage and for a cute sardonic German killed for insubordination that I had reported⁠ ⁠… but really grieving for a girl who for a year had been a rootless child of the theater with a whole company of mothers and fathers, afraid of nothing more than subway bogies and Park and Village monsters.

As I sat there pitying myself beside a shrouded queen, a shadow fell across my knees. I saw stealing through the dressing room a young man in worn dark clothes. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three. He was a frail sort of guy with a weak chin and big forehead and eyes that saw everything. I knew at one he was the one who had seemed familiar to me in the knot of City fellows.

He looked at me and I looked from him to the picture sitting on the reserve makeup box by Siddy’s mirror. And I began to tremble.

He looked at it too, of course, as fast as I did. And then he began to tremble too, though it was a finer-grained tremor than mine.

The sword-fight had ended seconds back and now I heard the witches faintly wailing, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair⁠—” Sid has them echo that line offstage at the end to give a feeling of prophecy fulfilled.

Then Sid came pounding up. He’s the first finished, since the fight ends offstage so Macduff can carry back a red-necked papier-mâché head of him and show it to the audience. Sid stopped dead in the door.

Then the stranger turned around. His shoulders jerked as he saw Sid. He moved toward him just two or three steps at a time, speaking at the same time in breathy little rushes.

Sid stood there and watched him. When the other actors came boiling up behind him, he put his hands on the doorframe to either side so none of them could get past. Their faces peered around him.

And all this while the stranger was saying, “What may this mean? Can such things be? Are