The Talisman

taxi and his fingers were as cold as if it were of ice, not English steel.

“That’s Dexter Gordon, is who that is,” his father answered. His voice was as lazy and friendly as it always was, and Jack slipped his hand around the heavy taxi.

“Good record.”

“Daddy Plays the Horn. It is a nice old record, isn’t it?”

“I’ll have to look for it.” And then Jack thought he knew what that strangeness in Uncle Morgan’s voice was all about—Uncle Morgan didn’t really like jazz at all, he just pretended to in front of Jack’s father. Jack had known this fact about Morgan Sloat for most of his childhood, and he thought it was silly that his father couldn’t see it too. Uncle Morgan was never going to look for a record called Daddy Plays the Horn, he was just flattering Phil Sawyer—and maybe the reason Phil Sawyer didn’t see it was that like everyone else he never paid quite enough attention to Morgan Sloat. Uncle Morgan, smart and ambitious (“smart as a wolverine, sneaky as a courthouse lawyer,” Lily said), good old Uncle Morgan deflected observation—your eye just sort of naturally slid off him. When he was a kid, Jacky would have bet, his teachers would have had trouble even remembering his name.

“Imagine what this guy would be like over there,” Uncle Morgan said, for once fully claiming Jack’s attention. That falsity still played through his voice, but it was not Sloat’s hypocrisy that jerked up Jacky’s head and tightened his fingers on his heavy toy—the words over there had sailed straight into his brain and now were gonging like chimes. Because over there was the country of Jack’s Daydreams. He had known that immediately. His father and Uncle Morgan had forgotten that he was behind the couch, and they were going to talk about the Daydreams.

His father knew about the Daydream-country. Jack could never have mentioned the Daydreams to either his father or his mother, but his father knew about the Daydreams because he had to—simple as that. And the next step, felt along Jack’s emotions more than consciously expressed, was that his dad helped keep the Daydreams safe.

But for some reason, equally difficult to translate from emotion into language, the conjunction of Morgan Sloat and the Daydreams made the boy uneasy.

“Hey?” Uncle Morgan said. “This guy would really turn em around, wouldn’t he? They’d probably make him Duke of the Blasted Lands, or something.”

“Well, probably not that,” Phil Sawyer said. “Not if they liked him as much as we do.”

But Uncle Morgan doesn’t like him, Dad, Jacky thought, suddenly clear that this was important. He doesn’t like him at all, not really, he thinks that music is too loud, he thinks it takes something from him. . . .

“Oh, you know a lot more about it than I do,” Uncle Morgan said in a voice that sounded easy and relaxed.

“Well, I’ve been there more often. But you’re doing a good job of catching up.” Jacky heard that his father was smiling.

“Oh, I’ve learned a few things, Phil. But really, you know—I’ll never get over being grateful to you for showing all that to me.” The two syllables of grateful filled with smoke and the sound of breaking glass.

But all of these little warnings could not do more than dent Jack’s intense, almost blissful satisfaction. They were talking about the Daydreams. It was magical, that such a thing was possible. What they said was beyond him, their terms and vocabulary were too adult, but six-year-old Jack experienced again the wonder and joy of the Daydreams, and was at least old enough to understand the direction of their conversation. The Daydreams were real, and Jacky somehow shared them with his father. That was half his joy.

2

“Let me just get some things straight,” Uncle Morgan said, and Jacky saw the word straight as a pair of lines knotting around each other like snakes. “They have magic like we have physics, right? We’re talking about an agrarian monarchy, using magic instead of science.”

“Sure,” Phil Sawyer said.

“And presumably they’ve gone on like that for centuries. Their lives have never changed very much.”

“Except for political upheavals, that’s right.”

Then Uncle Morgan’s voice tightened, and the excitement he tried to conceal cracked little whips within his consonants. “Well, forget about the political stuff. Suppose we think about us for a change. You’ll say—and I’d agree with you, Phil—that we’ve done pretty well out of the Territories already, and that we’d have to be careful about how we introduce changes there. I have no problems at all with that position. I feel the same way myself.”

Jacky could feel his father’s silence.

“Okay,” Sloat continued. “Let’s go with the concept that, within a situation basically advantageous to ourselves, we can spread the benefits around to anybody on our side. We don’t sacrifice the advantage, but we’re not greedy about the bounty it brings. We owe these people, Phil. Look what they’ve done for us. I think we could put ourselves into a really synergistic situation over there. Our energy can feed their energy and come up with stuff we’ve never even thought of, Phil. And we end up looking generous, which we are—but which also doesn’t hurt us.” He would be frowning forward, the palms of his hands pressed together. “Of course I don’t have a total window on this situation, you know that, but I think the synergy alone is worth the price of admission, to tell you the truth. But Phil—can you imagine how much fucking clout we’d swing if we gave them electricity? If we got modern weapons to the right guys over there? Do you have any idea? I think it’d be awesome. Awesome.” The damp, squashy sound of his clapping hands. “I don’t want to catch you unprepared or anything, but I thought it might be time for us to think along those lines—to think, Territories-wise, about increasing our involvement.”

Phil Sawyer still said nothing. Uncle Morgan slapped his hands together again. Finally Phil Sawyer said, in a noncommittal voice, “You want to think about increasing our involvement.”

“I think it’s the way to go. And I can give you chapter and verse, Phil, but I shouldn’t have to. You can probably remember as well I can what it was like before we started going there together. Hey, maybe we could have made it all on our own, and maybe we would have, but as for me, I’m grateful not to be representing a couple of broken- down strippers and Little Timmy Tiptoe anymore.”

“Hold on,” Jack’s father said.

“Airplanes,” Uncle Morgan said. “Think airplanes.”