."

_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