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No Great Magic

<h3>VIII</h3> <div class="block2"> God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been. It is more impossible than rising the dead. —Summa Theologica </div> The moment I was out of sight of the audience I broke away from Sid and ran to the dressing room. I flopped down on the first chair I saw, my head and arms trailed over its back, and I almost passed out. It wasn't a mind-wavery fit. Just normal faint. I couldn't have been there long—well, not very long, though the battle-rattle and alarums of the last scene were echoing tinnily from the stage—when Bruce and Beau and Mark (who was playing Malcolm, Martin's usual main part) came in wearing their last-act stage-armor and carrying between them Queen Elizabeth flaccid as a sack. Martin came after them, stripping off his white wool nightgown so fast that buttons flew. I thought automatically, I'll have to sew those. They laid her down on three chairs set side by side and hurried out. Unpinning the folded towel, which had fallen around his waist, Martin walked over and looked down at her. He yanked off his wig by a braid and tossed it at me. I let it hit me and fall on the floor. I was looking at that white queenly face, eyes open and staring sightless at the ceiling, mouth open a little too with a thread of foam trailing from the corner, and at that ice-cream-cone bodice that never stirred. The blue fly came buzzing over my head and circled down toward her face. "Martin," I said with difficulty, "I don't think I'm going to like what we're doing." He turned on me, his short hair 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 grease-paint 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. "'By 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-mache 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 all the seeds of time ... wetted by some hell-trickle ... sprouted at once in their granary? Speak ... speak! You played me a play ... that I am writing in my secretest heart. Have you disjointed the frame of things ... to steal my unborn thoughts? Fair is foul indeed. Is all the world a stage? Speak, I say! Are you not my friend Sidney James Lessingham of King's Lynn ... singed by time's fiery wand ... sifted over with the ashes of thirty years? Speak, are you not he? Oh, there are more things in heaven and earth ... aye, and perchance hell too ... Speak, I charge you!" And with that he put his hands on Sid's shoulders, half to shake him, I think, but half to keep from falling over. And for the one time I ever saw it, glib old Siddy had nothing to say. He worked his lips. He opened his mouth twice and twice shut it. Then, with a kind of desperation in his face, he motioned the actors out of the way behind him with one big arm and swung the other around the stranger's narrow shoulders and swept him out of the dressing room, himself following. The actors came pouring in then, Bruce tossing Macbeth's head to Martin like a football while he tugged off his horned helmet, Mark dumping a stack of shields in the corner, Maudie pausing as she skittered past me to say, "Hi Gret, great you're back," and patting my temple to show what part of me she meant. Beau went straight to Sid's dressing table and set the portrait aside and lifted out Sid's reserve makeup box. "The lights, Martin!" he called. Then Sid came back in, slamming and bolting the door behind him and standing for a moment with his back against it, panting. I rushed to him. Something was boiling up inside me, but before it could get to my brain I opened my mouth and it came out as, "Siddy, you can't fool me, that was no dirty S-or-S. I don't care how much he shakes and purrs, or shakes a spear, or just plain shakes—Siddy, that was Shakespeare!" "Aye, girl, I think so," he told me, holding my wrists together. "They can't find dolls to double men like that—or such is my main hope." A big sickly grin came on his face. "Oh, gods," he demanded, "with what words do you talk to a man whose speech you've stolen all your life?" I asked him, "Sid, were we ever in Central Park?" He answered, "Once—twelve months back. A one-night stand. They came for Erich. You flipped." He swung me aside and moved behind Beau. All the lights went out. Then I saw, dimly at first, the great dull-gleaming jewel, covered with dials and green-glowing windows, that Beau had lifted from Sid's reserve makeup box. The strongest green glow showed his intent face, still framed by the long glistening locks of the Ross wig, as he kneeled before the thing—Major Maintainer, I remembered it was called. "When now? Where?" Beau tossed impatiently to Sid over his shoulder. "The forty-fourth year before our Lord's birth!" Sid answered instantly. "Rome!" Beau's fingers danced over the dials like a musician's, or a safe-cracker's. The green glow flared and faded flickeringly. "There's a storm in that vector of the Void." "Circle it," Sid ordered. "There are dark mists every way." "Then pick the likeliest dark path!" I called through the dark, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair, eh, Siddy?" "Aye, chick," he answered me. "'Tis all the rule we have!" —FRITZ LEIBER <hr /> <div class="tr"> Typographical errors corrected in text: Page 155: 'and and' replaced with 'and' Page 159: Eliabeth replaced with Elizabeth Page 160: automotically replaced with automatically Page 162: 'the the' replaced with 'the' Page 166: 'performances mixed in something else again.' replaced with 'performances mixed is something else again.' Page 167: Gerta replaced with Greta Page 174: rythms replaced with rhythms Page 175: 'exists and entrances' replaced with 'exits and entrances' Page 175: terrif replaced with terrific Page 176: grudigingly replaced with grudgingly Page 177: 'to hid his Banquo beard.' replaced with 'to hide his Banquo beard.' Page 184: quick replaced with quickly Page 186: Sdiney replaced with Sidney Page 187: 'tolling the the reply' replaced with 'tolling the reply' Page 187: 'hight hand' replaced with 'right hand' Page 188: swisting replaced with twisting Page 190: saphire replaced with sapphire Page 191: kidnaped replaced with kidnapped </div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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