Little, Big

In other places the time of its showing varied; it was no longer in many places a daytime drama, often it was a post-midnight one. But shown it was, broadcast or cabled or—where that wasn’t possible, where lines had been cut or transmission interdicted—smuggled into small local stations, or copied and carried overland by hand to hidden transmitters, the precious tapes beamed feebly to far small snowy towns. A walker on this night through such a town could pass along its single street and glimpse, in every living room, the bluish glow of it; might see, in one house, Mrs. MacReynolds carried to her bed, in the next, her children gathered, in the next, her parting words spoken; in the last house before the town ran out and the silent prairie began, her dead.

In the Capital, the Emperor-President watched too, his eagle-browed but soft brown eyes dimmed. Never long; longing is fatal. A cloud of pity, of self-pity, rose in him, and took (as clouds can do) a form: the form of Ariel Hawksquill’s aloof, amused and unyielding face.

Why me? he thought, raising his hands as though to exhibit shackles. What had he ever done that this awful bargain should have been struck with him? He had been earnest and hard-working, had written a few cutting letters to the Pope, had married his children well. Little else. Why not his grandson, Frederick II, now there was a leader; why not him? Had not the same story after all been told of him, that he was not dead but slept, and would awake to lead his people?

But that was legend only. No, he was here, it was his to suffer this, insufferable though it seemed.

A king in Fairyland: Arthur’s fate. Could it be true? A realm no larger than the ball of his thumb, his earthly kingdom nothing but wind, the wind of his passage from here to there, from sleep to sleep.

No! He drew himself up. If there had been no war so far, or only a phony war, well, that time was over. He would fight; he would extract from them every jot of the promises so long ago made to him. For eight hundred years he had slept, doing battle with dreams, laying siege to dreams, conquering dream Holy Lands, wearing dream crowns. He had hungered eight hundred years for the real world, the world he could just sense but not see beyond all the dissolving kingdoms of dream. Hawksquill might be right, that they had never intended him to have it. She might (might well, oh yes, it was all coming quite, quite clear to him) have been in league with them from the beginning to deprive him of it. He almost laughed, a dreadful laugh, to think that there had been a time when he had trusted her, leaned on her even. No more. He would fight. He would get those cards from her by whatever means, yes, though she unleashed her terrible powers on him, he would. Alone, helpless it might be, he would fight, fight for his great, dark, snow-burdened new-found-land.

“Only hope,” Mrs. MacReynolds said, dying; “only have patience.” The lone walker (refugee? salesman? police spy?) passed the last house on the outskirts, and stepped out along the empty highway. In the houses behind, one by one the bluish eyes of sets were closed; a news broadcast had begun, but there was no news any longer. They went to bed; the night was long; they dreamed of a life that wasn’t theirs, a life that could fill theirs, a family elsewhere and a house that could make the dark earth once again a world.

It was still snowing in the Capital. The snow whitened the night, obscuring the far monuments that could be seen through the President’s mullioned windows, piling up at the feet of heroes, choking the entrances to underground garages. Somewhere a stuck car was crying rhythmically and helplessly to escape a drift.

Barbarossa wept.

Just About Over

“What do you mean,” Smoky asked, “just about over?”

“I mean I think it’s just about over,” Alice said. “Not over, not yet; but just about.”

They had gone to bed early—they did that often nowadays, since their big bed with its high-piled quilts and comforters was the only place in the house they could be truly warm. Smoky wore a nightcap: draughts were draughts, and no one could see how foolish he looked. And they talked. A lot of old knots were untangled in those long nights: or at least shown to be for sure unentanglable, which Smoky supposed was more or less the same thing.

“But how can you say that?” Smoky said, rolling over toward her, lifting as on a big wave the cats who sailed the foot of the bed.

“Well, good heavens,” Alice said, “it’s been long enough, hasn’t it?”

He looked at her, her pale face and nearly white hair just distinguishable in the dark against the white pillowcase. How did she always come up with these un-answers, these remarks struck off with such an air of logical consequence, that meant nothing, or as good as nothing? It never ceased to amaze him. “That’s not what I meant, exactly. I guess I meant how do you know it’s just about over? Whatever it is.”

“I’m not sure,” she said, after a long pause. “Except that after all it’s happening to me, partly anyway; and I feel about over, some ways; and…”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “Don’t even joke about it.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t mean dying. Is that what you thought I meant?”

He had; he saw now that he didn’t understand at all, and rolled over again. “Well, hell,” he said. “It never really had anything to do with me anyway.”

“Aw,” she said, and moved closer to him, putting an arm around him. “Aw, Smoky, don’t be that way.” She placed her knees up behind his, so that they lay together like a double S.

“What way.”

She said nothing for a long time. Then: “It’s a Tale, is all,” she said; “and tales have beginnings and middles and ends. I don’t know when the beginning was, but I know the middle…”

“What was the middle?”

“You were in it! What was it? It was you!”

He drew her familiar hand around him closer. “What about the end?” he said.

“Well that’s what I mean,” she said. “The end.”

Quick, before a looming something he saw darkly huge in her words could steal over him, he said, “No no no no. Things don’t have ends like that, Alice. Any more than they have beginnings. Things are all middles in life. Like Auheron’s show. Like history. One damn thing after another, that’s all.”

“Tales have ends.”

“Well, so you say, so you say, but…”

“And the house,” she said.

“What about the house?”

“Couldn’t it have an end? It seems like it will, not long from now; if it did…”

“No. It’ll just get older.”

“Fall apart…”

He thought of its cracked walls, its vacant rooms, the seep of water in its basements; its paintless clapboards growing warped, masonry rotting; termites. “Well, it’s not its fault,” he said.

“No, sure.”

“It’s supposed to have electricity. Lots of it. That’s how it was made. Pumps. Hot water in the pipes, hot water in the heaters. Lights. Ventilators. Things freeze and crack, because there’s no heat, because there’s no electricity.”

“I know.”

“But that’s not its fault. Not our fault either. Things have gotten so bad. Russell Eigenblick. How can you get things fixed when there’s a war on? His domestic policy. Crazy. And so things run out, and there’s no electricity, and so…”

“And whose fault,” she said, “do you think Russell Eigenblick is?”

For a moment, just for a moment, Smoky allowed himself to feel the Tale closing around him, and around all of them; around everything that was. “Oh, come on,” he said, a charm to banish the idea, but it persisted. A Tale: a monstrous joke was more like it: the Tyrant installed, after God knows how many years’ preparation, amid bloodshed and division and vast suffering, just so that one old house could be deprived of what it needed to live on, so that the end of some convoluted history, which coincided with the house’s end, could be brought about, or maybe only hastened; and he inheriting that house, maybe lured there in the first place by love only so that