The Big Time quotes

My name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me.

I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time—not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either.

Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies?

Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you’ve had hints of the Change War.

How I got recruited into the Change War, how it’s conducted, what the two sides are, why you don’t consciously know about it, what I really think about it—you’ll learn in due course.

“What’s wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?” Sid demanded. “And you love us, tell us.” While Erich laughed, “Consider yourself lucky, Kamerad. Mark and I didn’t draw any gloves at all.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Bruce yelled. “The bloody things are both lefts!” He slammed it down on the floor.

We all howled, we couldn’t help it. He turned his back on us and stamped off, though I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed my arm and said between gasps, “Mein Gott, Liebchen, what have I always told you about Soldiers?

“Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards, and I’ll drink dead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so puny as to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no, nor with the tenth.

Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and nerves of brass.

Waste not your pity on them.”

… 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.

The Soldiers that come through the Door are looking for a good time, sure, but they’re hurt real bad too, every one of them, deep down in their minds and hearts, if not always in their bodies or so you can see it right away.

Believe me, a temporal operation is no joke, and to start with, there isn’t one person in a hundred who can endure to be cut from his lifeline and become a really wide-awake Doubleganger⁠—a Demon, that is⁠—let alone a Soldier.

What does a badly hurt and mixed-up creature need who’s been fighting hard? One individual to look out for him and feel for him and patch him up, and it helps if the one is of the opposite sex—that’s something that goes beyond species.

She nodded, looking blank and almost a little shy as poetic possession faded from her. Her answer came like its faltering last echo.

“It is nothing but a tiny tactical atomic bomb.”

“I’m an Englishman, and I come from an epoch when total war was still a desecration and the flowers and buds of thoughts not yet whacked off or blighted.

I’m a poet and poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.

Right, Sid?

Illy’s squeak box had never sounded mechanical to me before, but it did as he answered,

“I’m a lot deeper into borrowed time than the rest of you, tra-la-la, but Papa still loves living. Include me very much out, Brucie.”

Beside me, Maud said flatly, “Do you think I’m a fool?” Beyond her, I saw Lili and I thought, “My God, I might look as proud if I were in her shoes, but I sure as hell wouldn’t look as confident.”

The instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks into the Place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing but ourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make of that, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation.

I decided I felt like I’d been dropped into a swimming pool full of cement and held under until it hardened.

I could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonder they didn’t hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best; maybe she’d got a little preparation from the long watches between stars;

Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he said counted, so he’d hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.

Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people especially, more than any man or woman I’ve ever known⁠—he’s like a big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his mouth

—and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the cosmos.

Still, I was glad to be out of the party, though I kept on watching it.

Bruce was drinking alone at the bar.

Once Sid had gone over to him and they’d had one together and I’d heard Bruce reciting from Rupert Brooke those deliberately corny lines, “For England’s the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;