ic leave six times since
coming to work at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if
you care to call them that, for believe me they are busman's holidays,
considering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last one I spent
in Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got
over it. Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be
fitted by the Spiders into serious operations of the Change War, and you
can imagine how restful that makes them.

"See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don't
go too far up front, though, but don't wander off either. Relax and
enjoy yourself."

Ha! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they come to the
Place is a horse of a far brighter color, simply dazzling by comparison.
Entertainment is our business and we give them a bang-up time and send
them staggering happily back into action, though once in a great while
something may happen to throw a wee shadow on the party.

* * * * *

I am dead in some ways, but don't let that bother you--I am lively
enough in others. If you met me in the cosmos, you would be more apt to
yak with me or try to pick me up than to ask a cop to do same or a
father to douse me with holy water, unless you are one of those
hard-boiled reformer types. But you are not likely to meet me in the
cosmos, because (bar Basin Street and the Prater) 15th Century Italy and
Augustan Rome--until they spoiled it--are my favorite (Ha!) vacation
spots and, as I have said, I stick as close to the Place as I can. It is
really the nicest Place in the whole Change World. (Crisis! I even
_think_ of it capitalized!)

Anyhoo, when this thing started, I was twiddling my thumbs on the couch
nearest the piano and thinking it was too late to do my fingernails and
whoever came in probably wouldn't notice them anyway.

The Place was jumpy like it always is on an approach and the gray velvet
of the Void around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when
you close your eyes in the dark.

Sid was tuning the Maintainers for the pick-up and the right shoulder of
his gold-worked gray doublet was streaked where he'd been wiping his
face on it with quick ducks of his head.

Beauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid's other shoulder,
one white-trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control
divan, and he wasn't missing a single flicker of Sid's old finger