“Sure you don’t want that bed made up, miz?”
“No. That’s all.” Where had the President’s staff found these gentle, bowed black men, who had been old and slow and few even in her own youth? Come to that, where did he find these grand old cars, and where tracks that could still be traveled on?
She poured brandy, grinding her teeth in nervous exhaustion, feeling that even her sturdiest memory mansions were being shaken to earth by this motion. Yet she needed, more than she had ever needed, to think clearly, fully, and not in circles. On the luggage rack above and opposite her was the alligator purse containing the cards.
A heaven deep within, the island-garden of the Immortals. Yes: if it were so, and if it were in fact heaven or someplace like it, then the one thing that could be said with certainty about it was that, whatever other delightful qualities it might have, it must be more spacious than the common world we leave to reach it.
More spacious: skies less limited, mountain peaks less reachable, seas deeper and less plumbable.
But there, the Immortals themselves must dream and ponder too, and take their spiritual exercises, and search for an even smaller heaven within that heaven. And that heaven, if it exist, must be yet more wide, less limited, higher, broader, deeper than the first. And so on… “And the vastest point, the center, the infinity—Faëry, where the gigantic heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea upon sea and there is no end to possibility—that circle is so tihy it has no doors at all.”
Yes, old Bramble might be right, only too simple—or rather too complex, with his fundibular other-worlds with doors attached. No, not two worlds; with Occam’s old razor she could slit the throat of that idea. One world only, but with different modes; what anyway was a “world?” The one she saw on television, “A World Elsewhere,” could fit without multiplication of entities into this one, it was molecule-thin but whole: it was only another mode, it was fiction.
And in a mode like fiction, like make-believe, existed the land to which her cousins said she was invited to—no, told she must!—joumey. Yes, journey; for if it was a land, the only way to get there was to travel.
All that was clear enough, but no help.
For Chinese heavens and make-believe lands had this in common, that however you reached them, it was your choice so to travel; in fact endless preparations were almost always required for such journeys, and a will or at least a dream of iron. And what had that to do with a mode which, against this world’s will, or without anyway asking its leave at all, invaded it piecemeal, siezing an architect’s fancy, a pentacle of five towns, a block of slum buildings, a Terminus ceiling—the Capital itself? Which fell on the citizens of this common mode and bore them away, or at least absorbed them willy-nilly in the advancing tide of its own being? The Holy Roman Empire, she had called it; she had been mistaken. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was only flotsam borne on this wave that moved the waters of Time, his sleep had been broken into as graves are broken into by the waters of a flood and the dead borne out, he was headed elsewhere.
Unless she, who had no intention of ending up in some place ruled by who knew what masters, masters who might well take her revolt against them very badly, could turn him. Turn him, as a secret agent is turned by the side he is spying on. For this she had stolen the cards. With them she might rule him, or at least make him see reason.
There was one great flaw in that scheme, however.
What a pickle, what a pickle. She glanced up at the purse over on the luggage rack. She felt that her shift against this storm was as hopeless as any, as any sad hopeless shift of those caught in the path of something, something uncaring and oncoming, and far huger than they had imagined. Eigenblick had said it in every speech, and he had been right, and she blind. To welcome it was as futile as to defy it, it would have you anyway if it wanted you, Hawksquill was very sorry she had been smug but still she must escape. Must.
Footsteps: she sorted their progress down the corridor toward her bedroom from the regular clatter of the train wheels’ turning.
No time to hide the cards, nowhere better anyway than in plain sight. This was all coming too rapidly to a head, she was after all only an old lady and no good at this, no good at all.
Do not, she counseled herself, do not look toward the alligator purse.
The door was flung open. Holding the jamb in his two hands to steady himself against the train’s motion, Russell Eigenblick stood before her. His somber tie was pulled awry, and sweat glistened on his forehead. He glared at Hawksquill.
“I can smell them,” he said.
There, there was the flaw in her scheme. She had glimpsed it first in the Oval Office on a certain snowy night. Now she was certain. The Emperor was mad: as mad as any hatter.
“Smell what, sir?” she asked mildly.
“I can smell them,” he said again.
“You’re up very early,” she said. “Too early for a glass of this?” She showed him the brandy bottle.
“Where are they?” he said, stumbling into the tiny chamber. “You have them, now, here somewhere.”
Do not look toward the alligator purse. “Them?”
“The cards,” he said. “You bitch.”
“There’s a matter I must speak to you about,” she said, getting up. “I’m sorry I was delayed boarding last night until late, but…”
He was lunging around the room, eyes shifting rapidly, nostrils flaring. “Where,” he said. “Where.”
“Sir,” she said, drawing up but feeling hopelessness swim up in her, “sir you must listen.”
“The cards.”
“You’re acting on the wrong side.” She blurted it out, unable to frame it cleverly, feeling horribly drawn to stare at the purse which he had not seen on the luggage rack. He was tapping the walls for hiding places. “You must listen. Those who made promises to you. They have no intention of keeping them. Even if they could. But I…”
“You!” he said, turning to her. “You!” He laughed hugely. “That’s rich!”
“I want to help you.”
He paused in his search. He looked at her, depths of sad reproach in his brown eyes. “Help,” he said. “You. Help. Me.”
It had been an unfortunate choice of words. He knew— she could see it in his face—that helping him had never been what Hawksquill had intended, nor was it her intention now. Mad he might be, but he wasn’t stupid. The betrayal in his face made her look away. It was apparent that nothing she could say would move him. All he wanted from her now was what was useless to him without her, though even that she couldn’t think how to explain.
She found herself staring at them, in their purse on the luggage rack. She could almost see them looking back at her.
She snatched her look away, but the Tyrant had seen her. He made to shove her aside, reaching up.
“Stop!” she said, flinging into the word powers she had once vowed never to use except at deepest need, and for good ends only. The Emperor stopped. He was still in mid-grasp; his bull’s strength struggled against Hawksquill’s command, but he couldn’t move. Hawksquill grabbed the alligator purse and fled from the room.