Little, Big

III.

But how could you have expected

to travel that path in thought alone;

how expect to measure the moon by

the fish? No, my neighbors, never think

that path is a short one; you must

have lions' hearts to go by that way, it

is not short and its seas are deep;

you will walk it long in wonder. some-

times smiling, sometimes weeping.

—Attar, Parliament of the Birds

It had been easier than Sophie would have thought to assemble her relatives and neighbors here on this night, though it hadn't been easy to decide to assemble them, or to decide what to tell them: for an old, old silence was being broken, a silence so old that they at Edgewood did not even remember that it had been sworn to, a silence at the heart of many stories, broken into like a locked chest to which the key is lost. That had taken up the last months of winter: that, and getting the word out then to mudbound farms and isolated cottages, to the Capital and the City, and setting a date convenient to all.


Is It Far?

They had almost all agreed, though, to come, oddly untaken-aback, when the word reached them; it had been almost as if they had long expected a summons like this. And so they had, though most of them didn't realize it until it had come.

When Marge Juniper's young visitor passed through the pentacle of five towns which, once upon a time, Jeff Juniper had connected with a five-pointed star to show Smoky Barnable the way to Edgewood, more than one of the sleeping householders had awakened, feeling someone or something go by, and a kind of expectant peace descend, a happy sense that all their lives would not end, as they had supposed, before an ancient promise was Somehow fulfilled, or some great thing anyway come to pass. Only spring, they told themselves in the morning; only spring coming: the world is as it is and not different, and contains no such surprises. But then Marge's story went from house to house, gathering details as it went, and there were guesses and supposings about that; and then they were unsurprised—surprised to be unsurprised—when they were summoned here.

For it was with them, with all those families touched by August, taught by Auberon and then by Smoky, and visited by Sophie on her endless spinster's rounds, just as Great-aunt Nora Cloud supposed it would come to be with Drinkwaters and Barnables. There had been, after all, a time, nearly a hundred years ago, when their ancestors had settled here because they knew a Tale, or its tellers; some had been students, disciples even. They had been, people like the Flowers had been or had felt themselves to be, in on a secret; and many had been wealthy enough to do little but ponder it, amid the buttercups and milkweed of the farms they bought and neglected. And though hard times had reduced their descendants, turning many of them into artisans, into odd-jobbers, pickup-truckers, hard-scrabble farmers, inextricably intermarried now with the dairymen and handymen whom their great-grandparents had hardly spoken to, still they had stories, stories told nowhere else in the world. They were in reduced circumstances, yes; and the world (they thought) had grown hard and old and desperately ordinary; but they were descended from a race of bards and heroes, and there had been once an age of gold, and the earth around them was all alive and densely populated, though the present times were too coarse to see it. They had all gone to sleep, as children, to those old stories; and later they courted with them; and told them to their own children. The big house had always been their gossip, they could have surprised its inhabitants by how much they knew of it and its history. At table and by their fires they mused on these things, having not much other entertainment in these dark days, and (though altering them in their musing into very different things) they did not forget them. And when Sophie's summons came, surprised to be unsurprised, they put down their tools, and put off their aprons, they bundled up their children and kicked up their old engines; they came to Edgewood, and heard about a lost child returned, and an urgent plea, and a journey to go on.

"And so there's a door," Sophie said, touching one of the cards (the trump Multiplicity) which lay before her, "and that's the house here. And," touching the next, "there's a dog who stands by the door." The silence wasutter in the double drawing-room. "Further on," she said, "there's a river, or something like one. . . ."

"Speak up, dear," Momdy said, who sat almost next to her. "No one will hear."

"There's a river," Sophie said again, almost shouted. She blushed. In the darkness of her bedroom, with Lilac's certainty before her, it had all seemed—not easy, no, but clear at least; the end was still clear to her, but it was the means that had to be considered now, and they weren't clear. "And a bridge to cross it by, or a ford or a ferry or anyway some way to cross it; and on the other side an old man to guide us, who knows the way."

"The way where?" someone behind her ventured timidly; Sophie thought it was a Bird.

"There," someone else said, "Aren't you listening?"

"There where they are," Sophie said, "There where the Parliament's to be."

"Oh," said the first voice. "Oh. I thought this was the Parliament."

"No," Sophie said. "That's there."

"Oh."

Silence returned, and Sophie tried to think what else she knew.

"Is it far, Sophie?" Marge Juniper asked. "Some of us can't go far."

"I don't know," Sophie said. "I don't think it can be far; I remember sometimes it seemed far, and then sometimes near; but I don't think it could be too far, I mean too far to get to; but I don't know."

They waited; Sophie looked down at her cards, and shifted them. What if it was too far?

Blossom said softly: "Is it beautiful? It must be beautiful."

Bud beside her said, "No! Dangerous. And awful. With things to fight! It's a war, isn't that so, Aunt Sophie?"

Ariel Hawksquill glanced at the children, and at Sophie. "Is it, Sophie?" she asked. "Is it a war?"

Sophie looked up, and held out empty hands. "I don't know," she said. "I think it's a war; that's what Lilac said. It's what you said," she said to Ariel, a little reproachfully. "I don't know, I don't know!" She got up, turning around to see them all. "All I know is that we have to go, we have to, to help them. Because if we don't, there won't be any more of them. They're dying, I know it! Or going away, going away so far, hiding so far that it's like dying, and because of us! And think what that would be, if there weren't any more."

They thought of that, or tried to, each coming to a different conclusion, or a different vision, or to none at all.

"I don't know where it is," Sophie said, "or how it is we're to go there, or what we can do to help, or why it is that it's us that have to go; but I know we must, we have to try! I mean it doesn't even matter if we want to or don't want to, really, don't you see, because we wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for them; I know that's so. Not to go, now—that's like, it's like being born, and growing up, and marrying and having children, and then saying well, I've changed my mind, I'd rather not have—when there wouldn't be a person there even to say he'd rather not have, unless he had already. Do you see? And it's the same with them. We couldn't refuse unless we were the ones who were meant to go, unless we were all going to go, in the first place."

She looked around at them all, Drinkwaters and Barnables, Birds, Stones, Flowers, Weeds, and Wolfs; Charles Wayne and Cherry Lake, Bud and Blossom, Ariel Hawksquill and Marge Juniper; Sonny Moon, ancient Phil Flowers and Phil's girls and boys, August's grandchildren and great- and great-great-grandchildren. She missed her aunt Cloud very much, who could have said these things so simply and incontrovertibly. Daily Alice, chin in her hand, was only looking at her smiling; Alice's daughters were sewing calmly, as though all that Sophie had said were just as clear as water, though it had seemed nonsense to Sophie even as she had said it. Her mother nodded sagely, but perhaps she hadn't heard aright; and the faces of her cousins around her were wise and foolish, light and dark, changed or unchanged.

"I've told you all I can," Sophie said helplessly. "All that Lilac said: that there are fifty-two, and that it's to be Midsummer Day, and that this is the door, as it always was; and the cards are a map, and what they say, as far as I can tell, about the dog and the river and so on. So. Now we just have to think what next."

They all did think, many of them not much used to the exercise; many, though their hands were to their brows or their fingertips together, drifted away into surmise, wild or common, or sank into memory; gathered wool, or knitted it; felt their pains, old or new, and thought what those might portend, this journey or a different one; or they simply ruminated, chewing and tasting their own familiar natures, or counting over old fears or old advice, or remembering love or comfort; or they did none of these things.

"It might be easy," Sophie said wildly. "It could be. Just a step! Or it might be hard. Maybe," she said, "yes, maybe it's not one way, not the same way for all—but there is a way, there must be. You have to think of it, each of you, you have to imagine it."

They tried that, shifting in their seats and crossing their legs differently; they thought of north, of south, east, west; they thought of how they had come to be here anyway, guessing that if a path there could be seen, then perhaps its continuation would be clear; and in the silence of their thinking they heard a sound none had heard yet this year: peepers, suddenly speaking their one' word.

"Well," Sophie said, and sat. She pushed the cards together as though their story were all told. "Anyway. We'll go step by step. We've got all spring. Then we'll just meet, and see. I can't think what else."

"But Sophie," Tacey said, putting down her sewing, "if the house is the door . . ."

"And," Lily said, putting down hers, "if we're in it . . ."

"Then," Lucy said, "aren't we traveling anyway?"

Sophie looked at them. What they had said made perfect sense, common sense, the way they said it. "I don't know," she said.

"Sophie," Smoky said from where he stood by the door. He hadn't spoken since he'd come in and the meeting had started. "Can I ask something?"

"Sure," Sophie said.

"How," Smoky said, "do we get back?"

In her silence was his answer, the one he'd expected, the one thing everyone present had suspected about the place she spoke of. She bowed her head in the silence she had made, and no one broke it; they all heard her answer, and in it, hidden, the true question that was being put to them, which Sophie could not quite ask.

They were all family, anyway, Sophie thought; or if they came, they counted, and if they didn't, they didn't, that's all. She opened her mouth to ask: Will you come? but their faces abashed her, so various, so familiar, and she couldn't frame it. "Well," she said; they had grown indistinct in the sparkling tears that came to her eyes. "That's all, I guess."

Blossom jumped from her chair. "I know," she said. "We all have to take hands, in a circle, for strength, and all say 'We will!'" She looked around her. "Okay?"

There was some laughter and some demurrers, and her mother drew her to her and said that maybe everyone didn't want to do that, but Blossom, taking her brother's hand, began to urge her cousins and aunts and uncles to come closer to take hands, avoiding only the Lady with the Alligator Purse; then she decided that perhaps the circle would be stronger if they all crossed arms and took hands with opposite hands, which necessitated an even smaller circle, and when she got this linked in one place it would break in another. "Nobody's listening," she complained to Sophie, who only gazed ather unhearing, thinking of what might become of her, of the brave ones, and unable to imagine; and just then Momdy stood up tottering, who hadn't heard the plan Blossom had urged, and said, "Well. There's coffee and tea, and other things, in the kitchen, and some sandwiches," and that broke the circle further; there was a scraping of chairs, and a general movement; they went off kitchenwards, talking in low voices.


Only Pretending

"Coffee sounds good," Hawksquill said to the ancient lady beside her.

"It does," Marge Juniper said. "Only I'm not sure whether it's worth the trouble of going for it. You know."

"Will you allow me," Hawksquill said, "to bring you a cup?"

"That's very kind," Marge said with relief. It had been quite a trouble to everyone getting her here, and she was glad to keep to the seat she'd been put in.

Good, Hawksquill said. She went after the others, but stopped at the table where Sophie, cheek in hand, stared down as in grief, or wonder, at the cards. "Sophie," she said.

"What if it's too far?" Sophie said. She looked up at Hawksquill, a sudden fear in her eyes. "What if I'm wrong about it all?"

"I don't think you could be," Hawksquill said, "in a way. As far as I understood what you meant, anyway. It's very odd, I know; but that's no reason to think it's wrong." She touched Sophie's shoulder. "In fact," she said, "I'd only say that perhaps it's not yet odd enough."

"Lilac," Sophie said.


"That," Hawksquill said, "was odd. Yes."

"Ariel," Sophie said, "won't you look at them? Maybe you could see something, some first step. . . ."

"No," Hawksquill said, drawing back. "No, they're not for me to touch. No." In the figure Sophie had laid out, broken now, the Fool did not show. "They're too great a thing now."

"Oh, I don't know," Sophie said, spreading them idly around. "I think—it seems to me I've about got to the end of them. Of what they have to tell. Maybe it's only me. But there doesn't seem to be any more in them." She rose, and walked away from them. "Lilac said they were the guidebook," she said. "But I don't know. I think she was only pretending."

"Pretending?" Hawksquill said, following her.

"Just to keep our interest up," Sophie said. "Hope."

Hawksquill glanced back at them. Like the circle Blossom had tried to make, they were linked strongly, even in disorder, by their opposite hands. The end of them . . . She looked quickly away, and signalled reassuringly to the old woman she had sat by, who didn't seem to see.

In fact Marge Juniper didn't see her, but it wasn't fading eye-sight or failing attention that blinded her. She was only absorbed in thinking, as Sophie had abjured them, how she might walk to that place, and what she might take with her (a pressed flower, a shawl embroidered with the same kind of flowers, a locket containing a curl of black hair, an acrostic valentine on which the letters of her name headed sentiments faded now to sepia and insincerity) and how she might husband her strength until the day she should set out.

For she knew what place it was that Sophie spoke of. Lately Marge's memory had grown weak, which is to say that it no longer contained the past time on deposit there, it was not strong enough to keep shut up the moments, the mornings and evenings, of her long life; its seals broke, and her memories ran together mingling, indistinguishable from the present. Her memory had grown incontinent with age; and she knew very well what place it was she was to go to. It was the place where, eighty-some years ago or yesterday, August Drinkwater had run off to; and the place also where she had remained when he had gone. It was the place all young hopes go when they have become old and we no longer feel them; the place where beginnings go when endings have come, and then themselves passed.

Midsummer Day, she thought, and made to count out the days and weeks remaining until them; but she forgot what season this was she counted from, and so gave it up.



Where Was She Headed?

In the dining room Hawksquill came upon Smoky, loitering in the corner, seeming lost in his own house and at loose ends.

"How," she said to him, "do you understand all this, Mr. Barnable?"

"Hm?" He took a time to focus on her. "Oh. I don't. I don't understand it." He shrugged, not as though in apology but as though it were a position he found himself taking, one side of a question, the other side had lots to be said for it too. He looked away.

"And how," she said then, seeing she ought not to pursue that further, "is your orrery coming? Have you got it working?"

This too seemed to be the wrong question. He sighed. "Not working," he said. "All ready to go. Only not working."

"What's the difficulty?"

He thrust his hands in his pockets. "The difficulty is," he said, "that it's circular. . . ."

"Well, so are the Spheres," Hawksquill said. "Or nearly."

"I didn't mean that," Smdky said. "I mean that it depends on itself to go around. Depends on its going around to go around. You know. Perpetual Motion. It's a perpetual motion machine, believe it or not."

"So are the Spheres," Hawksquill said. "Or nearly."

"What I can't understand," Smoky said, growing more agitated as he contemplated this, and jingling the small objects he had in his pockets, screws, washers, coins, "is how someone like Henry Cloud, or Harvey either, could have come up with such a dumb idea. Perpetual motion. Everybody knows . . ." He looked at Hawksquill. "How does yours work," he said, "by the way? What makes is go around?"

"Well," Hawksquill said, setting down the two coffee cups she carried on a sideboard, "not, I think the way yours does. Mine shows a different heavens, after all. Simpler, in many ways . . ."

"Well, but how?" Smoky said. "Give me a hint." He smiled, and Hawksquill thought, seeing him, that he had not often done so lately. She wondered how he had come among this family in the first place.

"I can tell you this," she said. "Whatever makes mine go around now, I have the definite impression that it was designed to go around by itself."

"By itself," Smoky said doubtfully.

"It couldn't, though," Hawksquill said. "Perhaps because it's the wrong heavens, because it models a heavens that never did go by themselves, but were always moved by will: by angels, by gods. Mine are the old heavens. But yours are the new, the Newtonian, self-propelling, once-wound-up-forever- ticking type of heavens. Perhaps it does move by itself."

Smoky stared at her. "There's a machine that looks like it's supposed to drive it," he said. "But it needs to be driven itself. It needs a push."

"Well, "Hawksquill said, "once properly set . . . I mean if it had the star's motions, they'd be irresistible, wouldn't they? Forever." A strange light was dawning in Smoky's eyes, a light that looked like pain to Hawksquill. She should shut up. A little learning. If she hadn't felt Smoky to be effectively outside the scheme the rest of her cousins were proposing, which Hawksquill had no intention of furthering, she would not have added: "You may well have it backwards, Mr. Barnable. Drive and driven. The stars have power to spare."

She picked up her coffee cups, and when he reached out a hand to keep her, she showed them to him, nodded and escaped; his next question would be one she couldn't answer without breaking old vows. But she wanted to have helped him. She felt, for some reason, the need of an ally here. Standing confused at a juncture of hallways (she had taken a wrong turning away from the dining room) she saw him hurrying away upstairs, and hoped she hadn't set him on fruitlessly.

Now where was it she was headed? She looked around herself, turning this way and that, the coffee cooling in her hands. Somewhere there was a murmur of voices.

A turning, a juncture where many ways could be seen at once; a Vista. No memory mansion of her own was built more overlappingly, with more corridors, more places that were two places at once, more precise in its confusions, than this house. She felt it rise around her, John's dream, Violet's castle, tall and many-roomed. It took hold of her mind, as though it were in fact made of memory; she saw, and it swept her into a fearful clarity to see, that if this were her own mind's house, all her conclusions would now be coming out quite differently; quite, quite differently.

She had sat this night smiling among them, listening politely, as though she were attending someone else's religious service, mistaken for a member of the congregation, feeling at once embarrassed at their sincerity and aloof from emotions she was glad not to share, and perhaps just a little sad to be excluded, it looked like fun to understand things so simply. But the house had meanwhile been all around them as it was all around her now, great, grave, certain and impatient: the house said it was not so, not so at all. The house said (and Hawksquill knew how to hear houses speak, it was her chief skill and great art, she only wondered how she had been deaf to this huge voice so long), the house said that it was not they, not Drinkwaters and Barnables and the rest, who had understood things too simply. She had thought that the great cards they played with had come to them by chance, a Grail stashed amusingly with the daily drinking cups, an historical accident. But the house didn't believe in accidents; the house said she had been mistaken, again, and this time for the last time. As though while sitting aloof in some humble church, among ordinary parishioners who sang corny hymns, she had witnessed some concrete and terrible miracle or grace, she trembled in denial and fear: she could not have been so horribly mistaken, reason couldn't bear it, it would turn dream and shatter, and in its shattering she would awake into some world, some house so strange, so new. . . .

She heard Daily Alice call to her, from an unexpected direction. She heard the coffee cups she still held rattling faintly in their saucers. She composed herself, took courage, and pulled herself out of the tangle of the imaginary drawing-room where she had got stuck.

"You'll stay the night, won't you, Ariel?" Alice said. "The imaginary bedroom's made up, and . . ."

"No," Hawksquill said. She delivered Marge's coffee to her where she still sat. The old woman took it abstractedly, and it seemed to Hawksquill that she wept, or had been weeping, though perhaps it was only the watering of aged eyes. "No, it's very kind of you, but I must leave. I have to meet a train north of here. I should be on it now, but I managed to get away to here first."

"Well, couldn't you . . ."

"No," Hawksquill said. "It's a Presidential train. Waiting on princes, you know. He's taking one of his tours. I don't know why he bothers. He's either shot at, or ignored. Still."

The guests were leaving, pulling on heavy coats and earflap hats. Many stopped to talk with Sophie; Hawksquill saw that one of these, an old man, wept too as he talked, and that Sophie embraced him.

"They'll all go, then?" she asked Alice.

"I think," Alice said. "Mostly. We'll see, won't we?"

Her eyes on Hawksquill, so clear and brown, so full of serene complicity, made Hawksquill look away, afraid that she too would stutter and weep. "My bag," she said. "I'll get it, then I must go. Must."

The drawing-rooms where they had all met were empty now, except for the dim figure of the old woman, drinking her coffee in tiny sips like a clockwork figure. Hawksquill took up her purse. Then she saw that the cards still lay spread out beneath the lamp.

The end of their story. But not of hers; not if she could help it.

She glanced up quickly. She could hear Alice and Sophie, saying goodbye to guests at the front door. Marge's eyes were closed. Almost without thinking she turned her back to Marge, snapped open the purse, and swept the cards into it. They burned the fingertips that touched them like ice. She snapped the purse shut and turned to leave. She saw Alice standing in the drawing-room door, looking at her.

"Goodbye, then," Hawksquill said briskly, her icy heart thudding, feeling as helpless as a naughty child in a grown-up's grip who's yet unable to quit his tantrum.

"Goodbye," Alice said, standing aside to let her pass. "Good luck with the President. We'll see you soon."

Hawksquill didn't look at her, knowing that she would read her crime in Alice's eyes, and more too that she wanted even less to see. There was an escape from this, there had to be; if wit couldn't find it, power must make it. And it was too late now for her to think of anything but escape.


Too Simple to Say

Daily Alice and Sophie watched from the front door as Hawksquill climbed quickly, as though pursued, into her car, and gunned the motor. The car leapt forward like a steed, and arrowed out between the stone gateposts and into the night and fog.

"Late for her train," Alice said.

"Do you think she'll come, though?" Sophie said.

"Oh," Alice said, "she will. She will."

They turned away from the night, and shut the door. "But Auberon," Sophie said. "Auberon, and George . . ."

"It's okay, Sophie," Alice said.

"But . . ."

"Sophie," Alice said. "Will you come sit up with me a while? I'm not going to sleep."

Alice's face was calm, and she smiled, but Sophie heard an appeal, even something like a fear. She said, "Sure, Alice."

"How about the library?" Alice said. "Nobody will go in there."

"Okay." She followed Alice into the great dark room; Alice lit a single lamp with a kitchen match and turned it low. Out the windows the fog seemed to contain dull lights, but nothing else could be seen. "Alice?" she said.

Alice seemed to wake from thought, and faced her sister.

"Alice, did you know all what I was going to say, tonight?"

"Oh; most of it, I guess."

"Did you? How long ago?"

"I don't know. In a way," she said, sitting slowly on one end of the long leather chesterfield, "in a way I think I always knew it; and it just kept getting clearer. Except when . . ."

"When?"

"When it got darker. When—well, when things didn't seem to be going as you thought they would, or even the opposite. Times when—when it all seemed taken away."

Sophie turned away, though her sister had spoken only with a deep thoughtfulness, and in no way in reproach; she knew what times it was that Alice spoke of, and grieved that she had, even for a day, for an hour, deflected her certainties. And all so long ago!

"Afterwards, though," Alice said, "when things seemed, you know, to make sense again, they made an even bigger sense. And it seemed funny that you could ever have thought it wasn't all right, that you could have been fooled. Isn't that right? Wasn't it like that?"

"I don't know," Sophie said.

"Come sit," Alice said. "Wasn't it like that with you?"

"No." She sat by Alice, and Alice pulled a multi-colored afghan, Tacey's work, over the two of them; it was cold in the fireless room. "I think it just kept making less sense ever since I was little." So hard to speak of it, after so many years of silence; once, years ago, they had chatted about it endlessly, not making sense and not caring to, mixing it with their dreams and with the games they played, knowing so surely how to understand it because they made no distinction between it and their desires, for comfort, for adventure, for wonder. Very suddenly she was visited with a memory, as vivid and as whole as though present, of her and Alice naked, and their uncle Auberon, at the place on the edge of the woods. For so long had her memories of those things come to be in effect replaced by Auberon's photographs that recorded them, beautiful pale .and still, that to have one return in all its fullness took her breath away: heat, and certainty, and wonder, in the deep real summer of childhood. "Oh, why," she said, "why couldn't we have just gone then, when we knew? When it would have been so easy?"

Alice took her hand under the comforter. "We could have," she said. "We could have gone any time. When we did go is the Tale."

She added after a time: "But it won't be easy." Her words alerted Sophie, and she took her sister's hand more tightly. "Sophie," Alice said, "you said Mid-summer Day."

"Yes."

"But—all right," Alice said. "Only. I have to go sooner."

Sophie raised her head from the sofa, not relinquishing her sister's hand, and afraid. "What?" she said.

"I," Alice said, "have to go sooner." She glanced at Sophie, and then away; a glance Sophie knew meant that Alice was telling her now a thing she had long known about and had kept a secret.

"When?" Sophie said, or whispered.

"Now," Alice said.

"No," Sophie said.

"Tonight," Alice said, "or this morning. That's why— that's why I wanted you to sit with me, because . . ."

"But why?" Sophie said.

"I can't say, Sophie."

"No, Alice, no, but . . ."

"It's okay, Soph," Alice said, smiling at her sister's bafflement. "We're all to go, all of us; only I have to go sooner. That's all."

Sophie stared at her, a very strange thought invading her, invading her wide eyes and open mouth and hollowed heart: strange, because she had heard Lilac say it, and had read it in the cards, and then spoken of it to all her cousins, but had only now come to truly think it. "We are going, then," she said.

Alice nodded, a tiny nod.

"It's all true," Sophie said. Her sister, calm or at least not shaken, ready or seeming to be, grew huge before Sophie's eyes. "All true."

"Yes."

"Oh, Alice." Alice, grown so great before her, frightened her. "Oh, but Alice, don't. Wait. Don't go now, not so soon. . . ."

"I have to," Alice said.

"But then I'll be left, and . . . everybody . . ." She threw off the comforter and stood to plead. "No, don't go without me, wait!"

"I have to, Sophie, because . . . Oh, I can't say it, it's too strange to say, or too simple. I have to go, because if I don't, there won't be any place to go to. For you, and everybody."

"I don't understand," Sophie said.

Alice laughed, a small laugh like a sob. "I don't either, yet. But. Soon."

"But all alone," Sophie said. "How can you?"

Alice said nothing to that, and Sophie bit her lip that she'd said it. Brave! A huge love, a love like deepest pity, filled her up, and she took Alice's hand again; she sat again beside her. Somewhere in the house, a clock rang a small morning hour, and the bells stabbed one by one through Sophie. "Are you afraid?" she said, unable not to.

"Just sit with me awhile," Alice said. "It's not long till dawn."

Far above them then there were footsteps, quick ones, heavy. They both looked up. The steps went overhead, down a hall, and then came rapidly and noisily down the stairs. Alice squeezed Sophie's hand, in a way that Sophie understood, though what she understood Alice to be telling her by it shocked her more deeply than anything her sister had so far said.

Smoky opened the door of the library, and gave a start seeing the two women on the sofa.

"Hey, still up?" he said. His breath was labored. Sophie was sure he would read her stricken face, but he didn't seem to; he went to the lamp, picked it up, and began going around the library, peering at the dark-burdened shelves.

"You wouldn't happen to know," he said, "whereabouts the ephemeris might be?"

"The what?" Alice said.

"Ephemeris," he said, pulling out a book, pushing it back. "The big red book that gives the positions of the planets. For every date. You know."

"You used to look at it when we were stargazing?"

"Right." He turned to them. He was still faintly panting, and seemed in the grip of a fierce excitement. "No guesses?" He held aloft the lamp. "You're not going to believe this," he said. "I don't, yet. But it's the only thing that makes sense. The ohly thing crazy enough to make sense."

He waited for them to question him, and at last Alice said, "What."

"The orrery," he said. "It'll work."

"Oh," Alice said.

"Not only that, not only that," he said in astonished triumph. "I think it'll do work. I think it was meant to. It was so simple! I never thought of it. Can you imagine if that's so? Alice, the house will be all right! If that thing will turn, it'll turn belts! It'll turn generators! Lights! Heat!"

The lamp he held showed them his face, transformed, and seeming so close to some dangerous limit that it made Sophie shrink. She supposed that he couldn't see the two of them well; she glanced at Alice, who still tightly held her hand, and thought that Alice's eyes might fill with tears, if they could, but that they could not; that Somehow they never would again.

"That's nice," Alice said.

"Nice," Smoky said, resuming his search. "You think I'm crazy. I think I'm crazy. But I think just maybe Harvey Cloud wasn't crazy. Maybe." He pulled a thick book from under others, which fell noisily to the floor. "This is it, this is it, this is it," he said, and without looking back at them, he made to leave.

"The lamp, Smoky," Alice said.

"Oh. Sorry." He had been carrying it off absently. He put it down On the table, and smiled at them, so infinitely pleased that they couldn't not smile back. He left almost at a run, the thick book under his arm.


Another Country

The two women sat without speaking for some time after he had gone. Then Sophie said: "You won't tell him?"

"No," Alice said. She began to say something further, a reason perhaps, but then didn't, and Sophie dared say nothing more. "Anyway," Alice said, "I won't be gone, not really. I mean I'll be gone, but still I'll be here. Always." She thought that was true; she thought, looking up at the dark ceiling and the tall windows, at the house around her, that what called to her, calling from the very heart of things, called to her as much from here as from any other place; and that the feeling she felt was not loss, it was only that sometimes she mistook it for loss. "But Sophie," she said, and her voice had grown rough, "Sophie, you have to take care of him. Watch out for him."

"How, Alice."

"I don't know, but—well, you must. I mean it, Soph. Do that for me."

"I will," Sophie said. "But I'm not much good at that, you know, watching out, and taking care."

"It won't be long," Alice said. That too she was sure of, or believed or hoped she was sure of; she tried, searching in herself, to find that certainty: to find the calm delight, the gratitude, the exhilaration she had felt when she had begun to understand what conclusion it was all to have, the half-scared, half-puissant sense that she had lived her whole life as a chick inside an egg, and then got too big for it, and then found a way to begin to break it, and then had broken it, and was now about to come forth into some huge, airy world she could have had no inkling of, yet bearing wings to live in it with that were still untried. She was sure that what she knew now, they would all come to know, and other things still more wonderful, and more wonderful yet; but in the cold old room at the dark end of night, she couldn't quite feel it alive within her. She thought of Smoky. She was afraid; as afraid as if . . .

"Sophie," she said softly. "Do you think it's death?"

Sophie had fallen asleep, her head resting against Alice's shoulder. "Hm?" she said.

"Do you think that dying is what it really is?"

"I don't know," Sophie said. She felt Alice trembling beside her. "I don't think so. But I don't know."

"I don't think so either," Alice said.

Sophie said nothing.

"If it is, though," Alice said, "it isn't . . . what I thought."

"You mean dying isn't? Or that place?"

"Either." She pulled the afghan more closely around them. "Smoky told me, once, about this place, in India or China, where ages ago when somebody got the death sentence, they used to give him this drug, like a sleeping drug, only it's a poison, but very slow-acting; and the person falls asleep first, deep asleep, and has these very vivid dreams. He dreams a long time, he forgets he's dreaming even; he dreams for days. He dreams that he's on a journey, or that some such thing has happened to him. And then, somewhere along, the drug is so gentle and he's so fast asleep that he never notices when, he dies. But he doesn't know it. The dream changes, maybe; but he doesn't even know it's a dream, so. He just goes on. He only thinks it's another country."

"That's spooky," Sophie said.

"Smoky said he didn't think it was so, though."

"No," Sophie said. "I bet not."

"He said, if the drug was always supposed to be fatal in the end, how would anybody know that's what its effect was?"

"Oh."

"I was thinking," Alice said, "that maybe this is like that."

"Oh, Alice, how awful, no."

But Alice had meant nothing awful; it seemed to her no dreadful issue, if you were condemned to death, to make out of death a country. That was the similarity she saw: for she had perceived, what none of the others had and Sophie only dimly and backwardly, that the place they had been invited to was no place. She had perceived in her own growing larger that there was no place there distinct from those who lived in it: the fewer of them, the smaller their country. And if there were now to be a migration to that land, each emigrant would have to make the place he traveled to, make it out of himself. It was what she, pioneer, would have to do: make out of her own death, or what just now seemed like her death, a land for the rest of them to travel to. She would have to grow large enough to contain the whole world, or the whole great world turn out to be small enough after all to fit within the compass of her bosom.

Smoky for sure wouldn't believe in that either. He'd find it hard, anyway. She thought then that he had found the whole thing hard; that however patient he had grown, however well he had learned to live with it, he had never and would never find it easy. Would he come? More than anything else she wanted to be sure of that. Could he? She was sure of so many things, but not sure of that; long ago she had seen that the very thing that had earned Smoky for her might be the cause of her losing him, that is, her place in this Tale. And there it still was, the bargain held; she felt him even now to be at the end of a long and fragile cord, that might part if she tugged it, or slip from her fingers, or from his. And she would leave now without farewell lest it be for good.

Oh Smoky, she thought; oh death. And for a long time thought nothing else, only wishing, without making the wish, that this issue were not the issue it must have, the only issue it could have or ever had.

"You will watch out for him," she whispered; "Sophie, you have to see that he comes. You have to."

But Sophie was asleep again, the afghan drawn up to her chin. Alice looked around herself, as though waking; the windows were blue. Night was passing. Like someone coming to consciousness with the cessation of pain, she gathered around herself the world, the dawn, and her future. She stood then, easing herself away from her sleeping sister. Sophie dreamed that she did so, and partly woke to say, "I'm ready, I'll come," and then other words that made no sense. She sighed, and Alice tucked the afghan around her.

Above her, there were footsteps again, coming downward. Alice kissed her sister's brow, and blew out the dim lamp; blue dawn filled the room when the yellow flame was gone. It was later than she had thought. She went out into the hall; Smoky came running down to the landing on the stairs above her.

"Alice!" he said.

"Yes, hush," she said. "You'll wake everybody."

"Alice, it works." He gripped the newel at the stair's turning, as though he might fall. "It works, you have to come see."

"Oh?" Alice said.

"Alice, Alice, come see! It's all right now. It's all right, it works, it goes around. Listen!" And he pointed upward. Far, far off, barely discernible amid the dawn noises of peepers and first birds, there was a steady metallic clacking, like the ticking of a vast clock, a clock inside which the house itself was contained.

"All right?" Alice said.

"It's all right, we don't have to leave!" He paused again to listen, rapt. "The house won't fall apart. There'll be light and heat. We don't have to go anywhere!"

She only looked up, from the bottom of the stair.

"Isn't that great?" he said.

"Great," she said.

"Come see," he said, already turning back up the stairs.

"Okay," she said. "I'll come. In a minute."

"Hurry," he said, and started upwards.

"Smoky, don't run," she said.

She heard his climbing footsteps recede. She went to the hall-mirror, and from a peg beside it took her heavy cloak, and threw it around her. She glanced once at the figure in the mirror, who looked aged in the dawn light, and went to the great front door with its oval glass, and opened it.

The morning was huge, and went on in all directions before her, and blew coldly past her into the house. She stood a long time in the open doorway, thinking: one step. One step, which will seem to be a step away, but which will not be; one step into the rainbow, a step she had long ago taken, and which could not be untaken, every other step was only further. She took one step. Out on the lawn, amid the rags of mist, a little dog ran toward her, leaping and barking excitedly.