“Hey,” Smoky said through the open double doors. “What are you doing frowsting in here?” The word was Cloud’s. “Have you been outside? What a day.” He got no response but a slowly turned page. From where he stood Smoky saw only the back of his son’s cropped head (Smoky’s own haircutting) with two pronounced tendons, a vulnerable hollow between them; and the top of the book; and two crossed big-sneakered feet. He didn’t have to look to know Auberon wore a flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists—he never wore any other kind, or unbuttoned the wrists, no matter how hot the weather. He felt a kind of impatient pity for the boy. “Hey,” he said again.
“Dad,” Auberon said, “is this book true?”
“What book is that?”
Auberon held it up, waggling it to show the covers. Smoky felt a dense rush of feeling: it had been a day like this one— perhaps this very day of the year, yes—on which long ago he had opened that book. He hadn’t looked at it since. But he knew its contents very much better now. “Well, ‘true’,” he said, “ ‘true’, I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘true’.” Each time he said it the invisible doubt-quotes around the word became clearer. “Your great-great-grandfather wrote it, you know,” he said, coming to sit on the end of the sofa. “With some help from your great-great-grandmother—and your great-great-great grandfather.”
“Hm.” This didn’t intrigue Auberon. He read: “ ‘There, is a realm by definition precisely as large as. this one, which should not be—’ ” he stumbled “ ‘—reducible by any expansion, or enlargeable by any contraction, of this one, Here; and yet it must be that inroads have been made on that kingdome of late, that what are called by us Progress, and the growth of Commerce, and the enlargement of the bounds of Reason, have caused a flight further within their borders of that people; so that (though they have—by the nature of things must have—infinite room in which to retreat) their ancient holdings have been reduced by much. Are they angry at this? We cannot tell. Do they plan revenge? Or are they, like the Red Indian, like the African savage, now so debilitated, made so spiritless, so reduced in number, that they will at last be—’ ” another hard one “ ‘—extirpated entirely; not because they have nowhere left to flee, but because the losses, both of place and sovereignity, which our rapacity has inflicted on them are griefs too great to be borne? We cannot tell; not yet…’”
“What a sentence,” Smoky said. Three mystics talking at once made for a thickish prose.
Auberon lowered the book from before his face. “Is it so?” he said.
“Well,” Smoky said, feeling the trapped embarrassment of a parent before a child demanding to be told the facts of sex or death, “I don’t know, really. I don’t know if I really understand it. Anyway, I’m not the one to ask about it…”
“But is it made up,” Auberon insisted. A simple question.
“No,” Smoky said. “No, but there are things in the world that aren’t made up but which aren’t exactly true either, not true like the sky is up and the ground is down, and two and two make four, things like that…” The boy’s eyes regarding him took no comfort from this casuistry, Smoky could see that. “Listen, why don’t you ask your mother or Aunt Cloud? They know a lot more about that stuff than I do.” He grasped Auberon’s ankle. “Hey. You know the big picnic’s today.”
“What’s this?” Auberon said, having discovered the chart or map on onion-skin paper tipped into the back of the book. He began to unfold it—turning it wrongly at first so that an old fold tore—and just for a moment Smoky saw into his son’s consciousness: saw the expectation of revelations which any chart or diagram promises, and this one more than any; saw the greed for clarity and knowledge; saw the apprehension (in all senses) of the strange, the heretofore-hidden, the about-to-be-seen.
Auberon at last had to climb off the couch and put the book down on the floor in order to open the chart fully out. It crackled like a fire. Time had punched tiny holes in it where folds crossed one another. To Smoky it looked far older and fainter than it had looked fifteen or sixteen years ago when he had first seen it, and burdened with figures and features he didn’t remember, complex as it had then seemed to him. But it was (it must he) the same. As he came to kneel beside his son (who was already intently studying it, eyes alight and fingers tracing lines) he saw that he could understand it no better now, though in the intervening years he had learned (had he learned anything else? Oh, much) how best to go about not understanding it.
“I think I know what this is,” Auberon said.
“Oh yes?” Smoky said.
“It’s a battle.”
“Hm.”
In old history books Auberon had studied the maps: the oblong blocks labeled with little flags, disposed across a zebra landscape of topographical lines; gray blocks facing a roughly symmetrical disposition of black blocks (the bad guys). And on another page the same landscape hours later: some of the blocks bent aside, penetrated by the opposing blocks, pierced by the broad-arrow of their advance; others reversed entirely and following the broad-arrow of a retreat; and the diagonally-striped blocks of some belated ally appearing on one side. The great pale chart on the library floor was harder to figure out than those; it was as though the entire course of an immense battle (Positions at Dawn; Positions at 2:30 PM; Positions at Sunset) had been expressed here all at once, retreats superimposed on advances and orderly ranks on broken ones. And the topographical lines not squiggled and bent along the rises and declivities of any battleground but regular, and crossing: so many geometries, subtly altering each other as they interlaced, that the whole shimmered like moire silk and led the eye into mazes of false appraisaclass="underline" Is this line straight? Is this one curved? Are these nested circles, or a continuous spiral?
“There’s a legend,” Smoky said, feeling weary.
There was. There were also, Auberon saw, blocks of minute type placed explanatorily here and there (lost allies’ regiments), and the hieroglyphs of the planets, and a compass rose, though not of directions, and a scale, though not of miles. The legend said that the thick lines bounded Here, and the thin lines There. But there was no way to be sure which lines on the chart were truly thick, which thin. Below the legend, in italic type underscored to emphasize its importance, was this note: “Circumference = nowhere; center point = everywhere.”
In deep difficulties, and in what suddenly seemed like danger as well, Auberon looked up at his father. He seemed to see in Smoky’s face and downcast eyes (and it was this face of Smoky’s that in after years Auberon would most often see when he dreamt of him) a sad resignation, a kind of disappointment, as though he would say, “Well, I tried to tell you; tried to keep you from going this far, tried to warn you; but you’re free, and I don’t object, only now you know, now you see, now the milk’s spilt and the eggs broken, and it’s partly my fault and mostly yours.”
“What,” Auberon said, feeling a thickness in his throat, “what… what is…” He had to swallow, and found himself then with nothing to say. The chart seemed to make a noise over which he couldn’t hear his own thoughts. Smoky gripped his shoulder and rose.
“Well, listen,” he said. Perhaps Auberon had mistaken his expression: as he stood and brushed rug lint from his trouserknees he looked only bored, perhaps, probably. “I really really don’t think this is the day for this, you know? I mean come on. The picnic’s on.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and bent slightly over his son, taking a different air: “Now maybe you don’t feel terrifically enthusiastic about that, but I think your mother would appreciate a little help, getting things ready. Do you want to go in the car, or bike?”