The Big Time, Fritz Leiber [book recommendations website TXT] 📗

he was shaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped into our hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of us could have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had to think of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs we were⁠—well, we wanted to keep on listening. VIII A Place to Stand

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.

Archimedes

Bruce’s voice had a faraway touch and he was looking up left at the Void as he said, “Have you ever really wondered why the two sides of this war are called the Snakes and the Spiders? Snakes may be clear enough⁠—you always call the enemy something dirty. But Spiders⁠—our name for ourselves? Bear with me, Ilhilihis; I know that no being is created dirty or malignant by Nature, but this is a matter of anthropoid feelings and folkways. Yes, Mark, I know that some of your legions have nicknames like the Drunken Lions and the Snails, and that’s about as insulting as calling the British Expeditionary Force the Old Contemptibles.

“No, you’d have to go to bands of vicious youths in cities slated for ruin to find a habit of naming like ours, and even they would try to brighten up the black a bit. But simply⁠—Spiders. And Snakes, for that’s their name for themselves too, you know. Spiders and Snakes. What are our masters, that we give them names like that?”

It gave me the shivers and set my mind working in a dozen directions and I couldn’t stop it, although it made the shivers worse.

Illy beside me now⁠—I’d never given it a thought before, but he did have eight legs of a sort, and I remembered thinking of him as a spider monkey, and hadn’t the Lunans had wisdom and atomic power and a billion years in which to get the Change War rolling?

Or suppose, in the far future, Terra’s own spiders evolved intelligence and a cruel cannibal culture. They’d be able to keep their existence secret. I had no idea of who or what would be on Earth in Sevensee’s day, and wouldn’t it be perfect black hairy poisoned spider-mentality to spin webs secretly through the world of thought and all of space and time?

And Beau⁠—wasn’t there something real Snaky about him, the way he moved and all?

Spiders and Snakes. Spinne und Schlange, as Erich called them. S. & S. But S.S. stood for the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the Black Shirts, and what if some of those cruel, crazy Jerries had discovered time travel and⁠—I brought myself up with a jerk and asked myself, “Greta, how nuts can you get?”

From where he was on the floor, the front of the bar his sounding board, Doc shrieked up at Bruce like one of the damned from the pit, “Don’t speak against the Spiders! Don’t blaspheme! They can hear the Unborn whisper. Others whip only the skin, but they whip the naked brain and heart,” and Erich called out, “That’s enough, Bruce!”

But Bruce didn’t spare him a look and said, “But whatever the Spiders are and no matter how much whip they use, it’s plain as the telltale on the Maintainer that the Change War is not only going against them, but getting away from them. Dwell for a bit on the current flurry of stupid slugging and panicky anachronism, when we all know that anachronism is what gets the Change Winds out of control. This punch-drunk pounding on the Cretan-Dorian fracas as if it were the only battle going and the only way to work things. Whisking Constantine from Britain to the Bosporus by rocket, sending a pocket submarine back to sail with the Armada against Drake’s woodensides⁠—I’ll wager you hadn’t heard those! And now, to save Rome, an atomic bomb.

“Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a fission weapon.⁠ ⁠… I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will make in what’s left of history⁠—the smothering of Greece and the vanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy’s Irish Captivity won’t be in it!”

The cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he didn’t pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned in irony and he said, “But I’m forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we’re just one little world⁠—one little solar system, Sevensee⁠—and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.

“Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever than go on living in a world without the Summa, the Field Equations, Process and Reality, Hamlet, Matthew, Keats, and the Odyssey, but our masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those rugged souls who want to go on living no matter what.”

Erich’s “Bruce, I’m telling you that’s enough,” was lost in the quickening flow of the New Boy’s words. “I won’t spend much time on the minor signs of our major crack-up⁠—the canceling of leaves, the sharper shortages, the loss of the Express Room, the use of Recuperation Stations for ops and all the other frantic patchwork⁠—last operation but one, we were saddled with three Soldiers from outside the Galaxy and, no fault of theirs, they were no earthly use. Such little things might happen at a bad spot in any war and are perhaps only local. But there’s a big thing.”

He paused again, to let us wonder, I guess. Maud must have worked her way over to me, for I felt