se he'd
accidentally been issued the unbelievable luxury item sugar instead of
the usual salt, and Erich asked Sid if he had any new Ghostgirls in
stock and Sid sucked his beard like the old goat he is. "Dost thou ask
me, lusty Allemand? Nay, there are several great beauties, amongst them
an Austrian countess from Strauss's Vienna, and if it were not for
sweetling here ... Mnnnn."

I poked a finger in Erich's chest between two of the bright buttons with
their tiny death's heads. "You, my little von Hohenwald, are a menace to
us real girls. You have too much of a thing about the unawakened, ghost
kind."

He called me his little Demon and hugged me a bit too hard to prove it
wasn't so, and then he suggested we show Bruce the Art Gallery. I
thought this was a real brilliant idea, but when I tried to argue him
out of it, he got stubborn. Bruce and Lili were willing to do anything
anyone wanted them to, though not so willing to pay any attention while
doing it. The saber cut was just a thin red line on his cheek; she'd
washed away all the dried blood.

The Gallery gets you, though. It's a bunch of paintings and sculptures
and especially odd knick-knacks, all made by Soldiers recuperating here,
and a lot of them telling about the Change War from the stuff they're
made of--brass cartridges, flaked flint, bits of ancient pottery glued
into futuristic shapes, mashed-up Incan gold rebeaten by a Martian,
whorls of beady Lunan wire, a picture in tempera on a crinkle-cracked
thick round of quartz that had filled a starship porthole, a Sumerian
inscription chiseled into a brick from an atomic oven.

* * * * *

There are a lot of things in the Gallery and I can always find some I
haven't ever seen before. It gets you, as I say, thinking about the guys
that made them and their thoughts and the far times and places they came
from, and 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