Little, Big (82 page)

Midway through the silent cars, he met the white-faced engineer, and they consulted, but said little. There was no one else aboard; there had been no conductor; it was a special train, everyone aboard had known where they were going. So the porter said to the engineer. "They knew," he said, "where they were going."

The engineer returned to his cab, to use the radio, though he hadn't yet decided what to say. The porter continued through the cars, feeling ghostly. In the bar car he found, amid empty glasses and crushed cigarettes, a deck of cards, old-fashioned cards, flung about as though in rage.

"Somebody playin' fifty-two pickup," he said.

He gathered them up—the figures on them, knights and kings and queens such as he had not seen before, seemed to plead with him from their scattered places to do so. The last one—a joker maybe, a character with a beard, falling from a horse into a stream—he found caught in the window's edge, face outward, as though in the act of escaping. When he had assembled them all, and squared them up, he stood unmoving in the car with them in his hands, filled with a deep sense of the world, the whole world, and his place in it, somewhere near the center; and of the value which later ages would put on his standing here alone, at this moment, on this empty train, at this deserted station.

For the Tyrant, Russell Eigenblick, would not be forgotten. A long bad time lay ahead for his people, a bitter time when those who had contended against him would turn, in his absence, to contend with each other; and the fragile Republic would be broken and reshaped in several different ways. In that long contention, a new generation would forget the trials and hardships their parents had suffered under the Beast; they would look back with growing nostalgia, with deep pain of loss, to those years just beyond the horizon of living memory, to those years when, it would seem to them, the sun always shone. His work, they would say, had gone unfinished, his Revelation unmade; he had gone away, and left his people unransomed.

But not died. No; gone off, disappeared, one night between dawn and day slipped away: but not died. Whether in the Smokies or the Rockies, deep in a crater lake or far beneath the ruined Capital itself, he lay only asleep, with his executive assistants around him, his red beard growing longer; waiting for the day (foretold by a hundred signs) when his people's great need should at last awake him again.

Are you, or are you not? Have

you the taste of your existence,

or do you not? Are you within

the country or on the border? Are

you mortal or immortal?

—Parliament of the Birds

'I want a clean cup,' the Hatter

interrupted. 'Everyone move one place.'

—Alice in Wonderland

That the Dog predicted by Sophie which greeted Daily Alice at the door should turn out to be Spark didn't surprise Alice much, but that the old man whom she found to guide her on the far side of the river should be her cousin George Mouse was unexpected.

"I don't think of you as old, George," she said. "Not
old
."

"Hey," George said, "older than you, and you're no spring chicken, you know, kid."

"How did you get here?" she asked.

"How did I get where?" he replied.

They walked together through dark woods, talking of many things. They walked a long way; spring came on more fully; the woods deepened. Alice was glad of his company, although she had not been sure she needed a guide; the woods were unknown to her, and scary; George carried a thick stick, and knew the path. "Dense," she said; and as she said it she remembered her wedding journey: she remembered Smoky asking, about a stand of trees over by Rudy Flood's, whether those were the woods Edgewood was on the edge of. She remembered the night they had spent in the cave of moss. She remembered walking through the woods on the way to Amy and Chris's house. "Dense," he had said; "Protected," she'd answered. As each of these memories and many others awoke in her, unfolding as vivid as life, Alice seemed to remember them for the last time, asthough they faded and dropped as soon as they blossomed; or rather that each memory she called up ceased, as soon as she called it up, to be a memory, and became instead, Somehow, a prediction: something that had not been but which Alice, with a deep sense of happy possibility, could imagine one day being.

"Well," George said. "This is about as far as I go."

They had approached the edge of the wood. Beyond, sunny glades went on like pools, sunlight falling in square shafts upon them through tall trees; and beyond that, a white, sunlit world, obscure to their eyes accustomed to the dimness.

"Goodbye, then," Alice said. "You'll come to the banquet?"

"Oh, sure," George said. "How could I help it?"

They stood a moment in silence, and then George, a little embarrassed for he'd never done this before, asked her blessing; and she gave it gladly, on his flocks and on his produce, and on his old head; she bent and kissed him where he knelt, and went on.

The glades like pools, one after another, continued a long way. This part, Alice thought, was the best so far: these violets and these new moist ferns, those graylichened stones, these bars of benevolent sun. "So big," she said. "So big." A thousand creatures paused in their spring occupations to watch her pass; the hum of newborn insects was like a constant breath. "Dad would have liked this place," she thought, and even as she thought it she knew how it was that he had come (or would come) to understand the voices of creatures, for she understood them herself, she needed only to listen.

Mute rabbits and noisy jays, gross belching frogs and chipmunks who made smart remarks—but what was that in the further glade, standing on one leg, lifting alternately one wing and then the other? A stork, wasn't it?

"Don't I know you?" Alice asked when she had entered there. The stork leapt away, startled and looking guilty and confused.

"Well, I'm not sure," the stork said. It looked at Alice first with one eye, and then with both eyes down its long red beak, which gave it a look at once worried and censorious, as though it peered over the tops of pince-nez spectacles. "I'm not sure at all. I'm not sure of much at all, to tell you the truth."

"I think I do," Alice said. "Didn't you once raise a family at Edgewood, on the roof?"

"I may have," the stork said. It made to preen its feathers with its beak, and did it very clumsily, as though surprised to find it had feathers at all. "This," Alice heard it say to itself, "is going to be just an enormous trial, I can see that."

Alice helped her loose a primary that had got folded the wrong way, and the stork, after some uncomfortable fluffing, said, "I wonder—I wonder if you would mind my walking a ways with you?"

"Of course you may," Alice said. "If you're sure you wouldn't rather fly."

"Fly?" said the stork, alarmed. "Fly?"

"Well," Alice said, "I'm not really sure where I'm going at all. I sort of just got here."

"No matter," the stork said. "I just got here myself, in a manner of speaking."

They walked on together, the stork as storks do taking long, careful steps as though afraid to find something unpleasant underfoot.

"How," Alice asked, since the stork said nothing more, "
did
you just get here?"

"Well," the stork said.

"I'll tell you my story," Alice said, "if you'll tell me yours." For the stork seemed to want to speak, but to be unable to bring itself to do it.

"It depends," the stork said at last, "on whose story it is you want to hear. Oh, very well. No more equivocation.

"Once," it said, after a further pause, "I was a real stork. Or rather, a real stork was all I was, or she was. I'm telling this very badly, but at all events I was also, or we were also, a young woman: a very proud and very ambitious young woman, who had just learned, in another country, some very difficult tricks from masters far older and wiser than herself. There was no need, no need at all, for her to practice one of these tricks on an unwitting bird, but she was young and somewhat thoughtless, and the opportunity presented itself.

"She performed her trick or manipulation very well, and was thrilled at her new powers, though how the stork bore it—well, I'm afraid she, I, never gave much thought to that, or rather
I
, the stork, I thought about nothing else.

"I had been given consciousness, you see. I didn't know that it was not my own but another's, and only loaned to me, or rather given or hidden in me for safe-keeping. I, I the stork, thought—well, it's very distressing to think of, but I thought that I was not a stork at all; I believed myself to be a human woman, who by the malice of someone, I didn't know whom, had been transformed into a stork, or imprisoned in one. I had no memory of the human woman I had been, because of course
she
retained that life and its memories, and went gaily on living it. I was left to puzzle it out.

"Well, I flew far, and learned much; I passed through doors no stork before had ever passed through. I made a living; I raised young—yes, at Edgewood once—and I had other employments, well, no need to speak of them; storks, you know . . . Anyway, among the things I learned, or was told, was that a great King was returning, or re-awaking; and that after his liberation would come my own, and that then I would truly be a human woman."

She paused in her tale, and stood staring; Alice, not knowing whether storks can weep or not, looked closely at her, and though no drop fell from her pinkish eye Alice thought that in some storkish sense she did weep.

"And so I am," she said at length. "And so I am, now, that human woman. At last. And still only, and for always, the real stork I always and only was." She lowered her head before Alice in sorrowful confession. "Alice, you do know me," she said. "I am, or was, or we were, or will be, your cousin Ariel Hawksquill."

Alice blinked. She had promised herself to be surprised by nothing here; and indeed, after she had contemplated the stork, or Hawksquill, for an astonished moment, it did seem that she had heard this tale before, or to have known that it would happen, or had happened. "But," she said, "where, I mean how, where is . . ."

"Dead," said the stork. "Dead, spoilt, ruined. Murdered. I really, she really, had no place else to go." She opened her red beak, and clacked it shut again, a sort of sigh. "Well. No matter. Only it will take time to get used to. Her disappointment, the stork's I mean. My new—body." She raised a wing and looked at it. "Fly," she said. "Well. Perhaps."

"I'm sure," Alice said, putting her hand on the stork's soft shoulder. "And I should think you could share, I mean share it with Ariel, I mean share it with the stork. You can accommodate." She smiled; it was like arbitrating a dispute between two of her children.

The stork stepped on in silence a time. Alice's hand on her shoulder seemed to soothe her, she had stopped her irritable fluffing. "Perhaps," she said at length. "Only—well. Forever and ever." There was a catch in her throat; Alice could see the long apple move. "It does seem hard."

"I know," Alice said. "It never comes out like you think it will; or even like you thought they
said
it would, though maybe it does. You learn to live with it," she said. "That's all."

"I'm sorry now," Ariel Hawksquill said, "of course too late, that I didn't accept your invitation of that night, to go with you. I should have."

"Well," Alice said.

"I thought I was separate from this fate. But I've been in this Tale all along, haven't I? With all the rest."

"I suppose," Alice said. "I suppose you have, if here you are now. Tell me though," she added, "whatever became of the cards?"

"Oh dear," said Hawksquill, turning her red beak away in shame. "I do have a lot to make up for, don't I?"

"It doesn't matter," Alice said. They were coming to the end of the forest glades; beyond lay a land of a different sort. Alice stopped. "I'm sure you can. Make up for it, I mean. For not coming and all." She looked out over the land she must now travel. So big, so big. "You can be a help to me, I think. I hope."

"I'm sure of it," Hawksquill said with conviction. "Sure."

"Because I'll need help," Alice said. There somewhere, beyond those hedges, over those green waves of earth where the new-risen grass-sea turned silver in the sunlight, Alice remembered or foresaw the knoll to be, on which there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace; and, if you knew the way, there was a small house there built underside, and a round door with a brass knocker; but there would be no need to knock, for the door would stand open, and the house would anyway be empty. And there would be knitting to take up, and duties, duties so large, so new. . . . "I'll need help," she said again. "I will."

"I'll help," said her cousin. "I can help."

Somewhere there, beyond those blue hills, how far? An open door, and a small house big enough to hold all this spinning earth; a chair to rock away the years, and an old broom in the corner to sweep away winter.

"Come along," the stork said. "We'll get used to it. It'll be all right."

"Yes," said Alice. There would be help, there must be; she couldn't do it all alone. It would be all right. Still she didn't take the first step beyond the woods' edge; she stood a long time, feeling the asking breezes on her face, remembering or forgetting many things.

Smoky Barnable, in the warm glow of many electric lights, sat down in his library to turn over once again the pages of the last edition of the
Architecture of Country Houses
. All the windows had been opened, and a cool fresh May night came and went unhindered as he read. The last of winter had been swept away as by a new broom.

Far upstairs, as silently as the stars it modeled, the orrery turned, passing its tiny but unresistable motion through many oiled brass gears to give impetus to the twenty-four-handed fly-wheel, shut up once again in its black case but delivering its own force to generators, which in turn fed the house with light and power, and would go on doing so until all the jewelled bearings, all the best-quality nylon and leather belts, all the hardened-steel points themselves wore away: years and years, Smoky supposed. The house, his house, as though from the effects of a tonic, had perked up, refreshed and strengthened; its basements had dried, its attics were ventilated; the dust that had filled it had been sucked up by a potent and ancient whole-house vacuum-cleaner whose existence in the walls of the house Smoky had vaguely known about but which no one had thought would ever work again; even the crack in the music-room ceiling seemed on the way to healing, though why was a mystery to Smoky. The old stocks of hoarded light-bulbs were brought out, and Smoky's house alone, the only one for miles, was lit up continuously, like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. Not out of pride, not really, though he had been very proud of his arrangements, but because he found it easier to expend the limitless energy than to store it (why store it, anyway?) or to disengage the machine.