operations?"

Just the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklace
and tight little gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Bruce
hulking over her tenderly in his snazzy hussar's rig, I knew that I was
seeing the start of something that hadn't been part of me since Dave
died fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort of
thing that almost made me wish there could be children in the Change
World. I wondered why I'd never thought of trying to work things so that
Dave got Resurrected and I told myself: no, it's all changed, I've
changed, better the Change Winds don't disturb Dave or I know about it.

"No, I didn't die in 1917--I was merely Recruited then," Lili was
telling Bruce. "I lived all through the Twenties, as you can see from
the way I dress. But let's not talk about that, shall we? Oh, Mr.
Marchant, do you think you can possibly remember any of those poems you
started in the trenches? I can't fancy them bettering your sonnet that
concludes with, 'The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep; Look
at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.'"

That one almost made me whoop--what monkeys we are, I thought--though
I'd be the first to admit that the best line to use on a poet is one of
his own--in fact, as many as possible. I decided I could safely forget
our little Britons and devote myself to Erich or whatever needed me.

CHAPTER 3

Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine churchmen, and the
fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave
soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go. There go
also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside
their lord. There go the gold and the silver, the sables and ermine.
There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth.

--Aucassin

NINE FOR A PARTY

I exchanged my drink for a new one from another tray Beau was bringing
around. The gray of the Void was beginning to look real pleasant, like
warm thick mist with millions of tiny diamonds floating in it. Doc was
sitting grandly at the bar with a steaming tumbler of tea--a chaser, I
guess, since he was just putting down a shot glass. Sid was talking to
Erich and laughing at the same time and I said to myself it begins to
feel like a party, but something's lacking.

It wasn't anything to do with the Major Maintainer