idea you've got is really new or just welling
up into you because the past has been altered by the Spiders or Snakes.

Change Winds can blow not only death but anything short of it, down to
the featheriest fancy. They blow thousands of times faster than time
moves, but no one can say how much faster or how far one of them will
travel or what damage it'll do or how soon it'll damp out. The Big Time
isn't the little time.

And then, for the Demons, there's the fear that our personality will
just fade and someone else climb into the driver's seat and us not even
know. Of course, we Demons are supposed to be able to remember through
Change and in spite of it; that's why we are Demons and not Ghosts like
the other Doublegangers, or merely Zombies or Unborn and nothing more,
and as Beau truly said, there aren't any great men among us--and blamed
few of the masses, either--we're a rare sort of people and that's why
the Spiders have to Recruit us where they find us without caring about
our previous knowledge and background, a Foreign Legion of time, a
strange kind of folk, bright but always in the background, with built-in
nostalgia and cynicism, as adaptable as Centaurian shape-changers but
with memories as long as a Lunan's six arms, a kind of Change People,
you might say, the cream of the damned.

But sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are
and if the whole past wasn't once entirely different from anything we
remember, and we've forgotten that we forgot.

As I say, the Gallery gets you feeling real low, and so now I said to
myself, "Back to your lousy little commandant, kid," and gave myself a
stiff boot.

Erich was holding up a green bowl with gold dolphins or spaceships on it
and saying, "And, to my mind, this proves that Etruscan art is derived
from Egyptian. Don't you agree, Bruce?"

Bruce looked up, all smiles from Lili, and said, "What was that, dear
chap?"

* * * * *

Erich's forehead got dark as the Door and I was glad the hussars had
parked their sabers along with their shakos, but before he could even
get out a Jerry cussword, Doc breezed up in that plateau-state of
drunkenness so like hypnotized sobriety, moving as if he were on a
dolly, ghosted the bowl out of Erich's hand, said, "A beautiful specimen
of Middle Systemic Venusian. When Eightaitch finished it, he told me you
couldn't look at it and not feel the waves of the Northern Venusian
Shal