found that I
still felt like a Zombie, although I could flit about, and that I still
had the nightmares, except they'd grown a deal vivider.

"I was a young girl again, seventeen, and I suppose every woman wishes
to be seventeen, but I wasn't seventeen inside my head--I was a woman
who had died of Bright's disease in New York in 1929 and also, because a
Big Change blew my lifeline into a new drift, a woman who had died of
the same disease in Nazi-occupied London in 1955, but rather more slowly
because, as you can fancy, the liquor was in far shorter supply. I had
to live with both those sets of memories and the Change World didn't
blot them out any more than I'm told it does those of any Demon, and it
didn't even push them into the background as I'd hoped it would.

"When some Change Fellow would say to me, 'Hallo, beautiful, how about a
smile?' or 'That's a posh frock, kiddo,' I'd be back at Bellevue looking
down at my swollen figure and the light getting like spokes of ice, or
in that dreadful gin-steeped Stepney bedroom with Phyllis coughing
herself to death beside me, or at best, for a moment, a little girl in
Glamorgan looking at the Roman road and wondering about the wonderful
life that lay ahead."

* * * * *

I looked at Erich, remembering he had a long nasty future back in the
cosmos himself, and at any rate he wasn't smiling, and I thought maybe
he's getting a little humility, knowing someone else has two of those
futures, but I doubted it.

"Because, you see," Lili kept forcing it out, "all my three lives I'd
been a girl who fell in love with a great young poet she'd never met,
the voice of the new youth and all youth, and she'd told her first big
lie to get in the Red Cross and across to France to be nearer him, and
it was all danger and dark magics and a knight in armor, and she
pictured how she'd find him wounded but not seriously, with a little
bandage around his head, and she'd light a fag for him and smile
lightly, never letting him guess what she felt, but only being her best
self and watching to see if that made something happen to him....

"And then the Boche machine guns cut him down at Passchendaele and there
couldn't ever have been bandages big enough and the girl stayed
seventeen inside and messed about and tried to be wicked, though she
wasn't very good at that, and to drink, and she had a bit more talent
there, though drinking yourself to death is not nearly