Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction; War stories
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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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