Fritz Leiber Best of Fritz Leiber

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stream, this freshet, this flood of females, young and not-so-young that all thinking of themselves as
girls and wearing the girl s suede mask even if they didn t still have the girl s natural face, all
converging on Dr. Slyker s office with money stolen from their parents or highjacked from their married
lovers, or paid when they signed the six-year contract with semiannual options, or held out on their
syndicate boyfriends, or received in a lump sum hi lieu of alimony, or banked for dreary years every
fortnight from paychecks and then withdrawn in one grand gesture, or thrown at them by their husbands
that morning like so much confetti, or, so help me, advanced them on their half-written novels. Yes,
there was something very impressive about this pink stream of womankind rippling with the silver and
green of cash conveyed infallibly, as if all the corridors and streets outside were concrete-walled
spillways, to Dr. Slyker s office, but not to work any dynamos there except financial ones, instead to be
worked over by a one-man dynamo and go foaming madly or trickling depletedly away or else stagnate
excitingly for months, then: souls like black swamp water gleaming with mysterious lights.
Slyker stopped short with a harsh little laugh. We ought to have music with this, don t you think? he
said. I believe I ve got the Nutcracker Suite on the spindle, and he touched one of an unobtrusive bank
of buttons on his desk.
They came without the whisper of a turntable or the faintest preliminary susurrus of tape, those first
evocative, rich, sensual, yet eery chords, but they weren t the opening of any section of the Nutcracker I
knew and yet, damn it, they sounded as if they should be. And then they were cut off as if the tape had
been snipped and I looked at Slyker and he was white and one of his hands was just coming back from
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best of fritz leiber
the bank of buttons and the other was clutching the file folders as if they might somehow get away from
him and both hands were shaking and I felt a shiver crawling down my own neck.
Excuse me, Carr, he said slowly, breathing heavily, but that s high-voltage music, psychically very
dangerous, that I use only for special purposes. It is part of the Nutcracker, incidentally the Ghost-
girls Pavan which Tchaikovsky suppressed completely under orders from Madam Sesostris, the Saint
Petersburg clairvoyant. It was tape-recorded for me by& no, I don t know you quite well enough to tell
you that. However, we will shift from tape to disk and listen to the known sections of the suite, played
by the same artists.
I don t know how much this recording or the circumstances added to it, but I have never heard the
Danse Arabe or the Waltz of the Flowers or the Dance of the Flutes so voluptuous and exquisitely
menacing those tinkling, superficially sugar-frosted bits of music that class after class of little-girl
ballerinas have minced and teetered to ad nauseam, but underneath the glittering somber fancies of a
thorough-going eroticist. As Slyker, guessing my thoughts, expressed it: Tchaikovsky shows off each
instrument the flute, the throatier woodwinds, the silver chimes, the harp bubbling gold as if he were
dressing beautiful women in jewels and feathers and furs solely to arouse desire and envy in other men.
For of course we only listened to the music as background for Dr. Slyker s zigzagging, fragmentary,
cream-skimming reminiscences. The stream of girls flowed on hi their smart suits and flowered dresses
and bouffant blouses and toreador pants, their improbable loves and unsuspected hates and incredible
ambitions, the men who gave them money, the men who gave them love, the men who took both, the
paralyzing trivial fears behind their wisely chic or corn-fed fresh facades, their ravishing and infuriating
mannerisms, the trick of eye or lip or hair or wrist-curve or bosom-angle that was the focus of sex hi
each.
For Slyker could bring his girls to life very vividly, I had to grant that, as if he had more to jog his
memory than case histories and notes and even photographs, as if he had the essence of each girl [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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