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.
V.
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.
Her Blessing
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