“Remember that the Serpent is your symbol of wisdom and the Spider your sign for patience. The two names are rightly frightening to you, for all high existence is a mixture of horror and delight. And don’t be surprised, Greta girl, at the range of my words and thoughts; in a way, I’ve had a billion years to study Terra and learn her languages and myths.
“Who are the real Spiders and Snakes, meaning who were the first possibility-binders? Who was Adam, Greta girl? Who was Cain? Who were Eve and Lilith?
“In binding all possibility, the Demons also bind the mental with the material. All fourth-order beings live inside and outside all minds, throughout the whole cosmos. Even this Place is, after its fashion, a giant brain: its floor is the brainpan, the boundary of the Void is the cortex of gray matter—yes, even the Major and Minor Maintainers are analogues of the pineal and pituitary glands, which in some form sustain all nervous systems.
“There’s the real picture, Greta girl.”
The feather-talk faded out and Illy’s tendril tips merged into a soft pad on which I fingered, “Thanks, Daddy Longlegs.”
Chewing over in my mind what Illy had just told me, I looked back at the gang around the piano. The party seemed to be breaking up; at least some of them were chopping away at it. Sid had gone to the control divan and was getting set to tune in Egypt. Mark and Kaby were there with him, all bursting with eagerness and the vision of tanks on ranks of mounted Zombie bowmen going up in a mushroom cloud; I thought of what Illy had told me and I managed a smile—seems we’ve got to win and lose all the battles, every which way.
Mark had just put on his Parthian costume, groaning cheerfully, “Trousers again!” and was striding around under a hat like a fur-lined ice-cream cone and with the sleeves of his metal-stuffed candys flapping over his hands. He waved a short sword with a heart-shaped guard at Bruce and Erich and told them to get a move on.
Kaby was going along on the operation wearing the old-woman disguise intended for Benson-Carter. I got a halfhearted kick out of knowing she was going to have to cover that chest and hobble.
Bruce and Erich weren’t taking orders from Mark just yet. Erich went over and said something to Bruce at the bar, and Bruce got down and went over with Erich to the piano, and Erich tapped Beau on the shoulder and leaned over and said something to him, and Beau nodded and yanked “Limehouse Blues” to a fast close and started another piece, something slow and nostalgic.
Erich and Bruce waved to Mark and smiled, as if to show him that whether he came over and stood with them or not, the legate and the lieutenant and the commandant were very much together. And while Sevensee hugged Lili with a simple enthusiasm that made me wonder why I’ve wasted so much imagination on genetic treatments for him, Erich and Bruce sang:
“To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
To our brothers in the tunnels outside time,
Sing three Change-resistant Zombies, raised from death and robot-crammed,
And Commandos of the Spiders—
Here’s to crime!
We’re three blind mice on the wrong time-track,
Hush—hush—hush!
We’ve lost our now and will never get back,
Hush—hush—hush!
Change Commandos out on the spree,
Damned through all possibility,
Ghostgirls, think kindly on such as we,
Hush—hush—hush!”
While they were singing, I looked down at my charcoal skirt and over at Maud and Lili and I thought, “Three gray hustlers for three black hussars, that’s our speed.” Well, I’d never thought of myself as a high-speed job, winning all the races—I wouldn’t feel comfortable that way. Come to think of it, we’ve got to lose and win all the races in the long run, the way the course is laid out.
I fingered to Illy, “That’s the picture, all right, Spider boy.”
Colophon
The Big Time
was published in 1958 by
Fritz Leiber.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2010 by
Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Creation of the World—V,
a painting completed between 1906 and 1907 by
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
November 4, 2015, 11:25 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/fritz-leiber/the-big-time.
The volunteer-driven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org.
Uncopyright
May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Copyright pages exist to tell you can’t do something. Unlike them, this Uncopyright page exists to tell you, among other things, that the writing and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the U.S. public domain. The U.S. public domain represents our collective cultural heritage, and items in it are free for anyone in the U.S. to do almost anything at all with, without having to get permission. Public domain items are free of copyright restrictions.
Copyright laws are different around the world. If you’re not located in the U.S., check with your local laws before using this ebook.
Non-authorship activities performed on public domain items—so-called “sweat of the brow” work—don’t create a new copyright. That means nobody can claim a new copyright on
