'We've had enough.'"

But I didn't turn back to Bruce right away. Phryne's chiton had slipped
off one shoulder and she and the Countess were sitting sagged forward,
elbows on knees, legs spread--at least, as far as the Countess's hobble
skirt would let her--and swayed toward each other a little. They were
still surprisingly solid, although they hadn't had any personal
attention for a half hour, and they were looking up over my head with
half-shut eyes and they seemed, so help me, to be listening to what
Bruce was saying and maybe hearing some of it.

"We make a careful distinction between Zombies and Unborn, between those
troubled by our operations whose lifelines lie in the past and those
whose lifelines lie in the future. But is there any distinction any
longer? Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can
we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places
have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we're on, but that's
different and it's not made for real living.

"The Spiders tell us that the real now is somewhere in the last half of
the 20th Century, which means that several of us here are also alive in
the cosmos, have lifelines along which the now is traveling. But do you
swallow that story quite so easily, Ilhilihis, Sevensee? How does it
strike the servants of the Triple Goddess? The Spiders of Octavian Rome?
The Demons of Good Queen Bess? The gentlemen Zombies of the Greater
South? Do the Unborn man the starships, Maud?

"The Spiders also tell us that, although the fog of battle makes the now
hard to pin down precisely, it will return with the unconditional
surrender of the Snakes and the establishment of cosmic peace, and roll
on as majestically toward the future as before, quickening the continuum
with its passage. Do you really believe that? Or do you believe, as I
do, that we've used up all the future as well as the past, wasted it in
premature experience, and that we've had the real now smudged out of
existence, stolen from us forever, the precious now of true growth, the
child-moment in which all life lies, the moment like a newborn baby that
is the only home for hope there is?"

* * * * *

He let that start to sink in, then took a couple of quick steps and went
on, his voice rising over Erich's "Bruce, for the last time--" and
seeming to pick up a note of hope from the very word he had used, "But
although things look terrifyingly