Chapter 5

Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts
creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world.
They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me.
--Ibsen

SID INSISTS ON GHOSTGIRLS

My Elizabethan boy friend put his fists on his hips and laid down the law to us as if we were a lot of nervous children who’d been playing too hard.

“Look you, masters, this is a Recuperation Station and I am running it as such. A plague of all operations! I care not if the frame of things disjoints and the whole Change World goes to ruin, but you, warrior maid, are going to rest and drink more wine slowly before you tell your tale and your colleagues are going to be properly companioned. No questions, anyone. Beau, and you love us, give us a lively tune.”

Kaby relaxed a little and let him put his hand carefully against her back in token of support and she said grudgingly, “All right, Fat Belly.”

Then, so help me, to the tune of the Muskrat Ramble, which I’d taught Beau, we got girls for those two ETs and everybody properly paired up.

Right here I want to point out that a lot of the things they say in the Change World about Recuperation Stations simply aren’t so--and anyway they always leave out nine-tenths of it. 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.

There’s your basis for the Place and the wild way it goes about its work, and also for most other Recuperation Stations or Entertainment Spots. The name Entertainer can be misleading, but I like it. She’s got to be a lot more than a good party girl--or boy--though she’s got to be that too. She’s got to be a nurse and a psychologist and an actress and a mother and a practical ethnologist and a lot of things with longer names--and a reliable friend.

None of us are all those things perfectly or even near it. We just try. But when the call comes, Entertainers have to forget grudges and gripes and envies and jealousies--and remember, they’re lively people with sharp emotions--because there isn’t any time then for anything but help and don’t ask who!

And, deep inside her, a good Entertainer doesn’t care who. Take the way it shaped up this time. It was pretty clear to me I ought to shift to Illy, although I wasn’t quite easy in my mind about leaving Erich, because the Lunan was a long time from home and, after all, Erich was among anthropoids. Ilhilihis needed someone who was simpatico.

I like Illy and not just because he is a sort of tall cross between a spider monkey and a persian cat--though that is a handsome combo when you come to think of it. I like him for himself. So when he came in all lopped and shaky after a mean operation, I was the right person to look out for him. Now I’ve made my little speech and know-nothings in the Change World can go on making their bum jokes. But I ask you, how could an arrangement between Illy and me be anything but Platonic?