building, then into an elevator all made of glass that climbed the inside wall almost like an ant, starting and stopping like an ant did.
“We should buy one of these,” Little Tib said. “Then we wouldn’t have to climb the steps.”
He looked up and saw that his father was crying. He took out his, Little Tib’s, own card and put it in the machine, then made Little Tib sit down in the seat and look at the bright light. The machine was a man in a white coat who took off his glasses and said, “We don’t know who this child is, but he certainly isn’t anyone.”
“Look at the bright light again, Little Tib,” his father said, and something in the way he said it told Little Tib that the man in the white coat was much stronger than he was. He looked at the bright light and tried to catch himself from falling.
And woke up. It was so dark that he wondered for a minute where the bright light went. Then he remembered. He rolled over a little and put his hand out toward the fire until he could feel some heat. He could hear it too when he listened. It crackled and snapped, but not very much. He lay the way he had been before, then turned over on his back. A train went past, and after a while an owl hooted.
He could see here too. Something inside him told him how lucky he was, seeing twice in one night. Then he forgot about it, looking at the flowers. They were big and round, growing on long stalks, and had yellow petals and dark brown centers, and when he was not looking at them, they whirled around and around. They could see him, because they all turned their faces toward him, and when he looked at them they stopped.
For a long way he walked through them. They came a little higher than his shoulder.
Then the city came down like a cloud and settled on a hill in front of him. As soon as it was there it pretended that it had been there all the time, but Little Tib could feel it laughing underneath. It had high, green walls that sloped in as they went up. Over the top of them were towers, much taller, that belonged to the city. Those were green too, and looked like glass.
Little Tib began to run, and was immediately in front of the gates. These were very high, but there was a window in them, just over his head, that the gate man talked through. “I want to see the king,” Little Tib said, and the gate man reached down with a long, strong arm and picked him up and pulled him through the little window and set him down again inside. “You have to wear these,” he said, and took out a pair of toy glasses like the ones Little Tib had once had in his doctor set. But when the gate man put them on Little Tib, they were not glasses at all, only lines painted on his face, circles around his eyes joined over his nose. The gate man held up a mirror to show him, and he had the sudden, dizzying sensation of looking at his own face.
A moment later he was walking through the city. The houses had their gardens sidewise—running up the walls so that the trees thrust out like flagpoles. The water in the birdbaths never ran out until a bird landed in it. Then a fine spray of drops fell to the street like rain.
The palace had a wall too, but it was made by trees holding hands. Little Tib went through a gate of bowing elephants and saw a long, long stairway. It was so long and so high that it seemed that there was no palace at all, only the steps going up and up forever into the clouds, and then he remembered that the whole city had come down out of the clouds. The king was coming down those stairs, walking very slowly. She was a beautiful woman, and although she did not look at all like her, Little Tib knew that she was his mother.
He had been seeing so much while he was asleep that when he woke up he had to remember why it was so dark. Somewhere in the back of his mind there was still the idea that waking should be light and sleep dark, and not the other way around.
Nitty said, “You ought to wash your face. Can you find the water all right?”
Little Tib was still thinking of the king, with her dress all made of Christmastree stuff, but he could. He splashed water on his face and arms while he thought about how to tell Nitty about his dream. By the time he had finished, everything in the dream was gone except for the king’s face.
Most of the time Mr. Parker sounded like he was important and Nitty was not, but when he said, “Are we going to eat this morning, Nitty?” it was the other way around.
“We eat on the train,” Nitty told him.
“We are going to catch a train, George, to Martinsburg,” Mr. Parker told Little Tib.
Little Tib thought that the trains went too fast to be caught, but he did not say that.
“Should be one by here pretty soon,” Nitty said. “They got to be going slow because there’s a road crosses the tracks down there a way. They won’t have no time to get the speed up again before they get here. You won’t have to run—I’ll just pick you up an’ carry you.”
A rooster crowed way off somewhere.
Mr. Parker said, “When I was a young man, George, everyone thought all the trains would be gone soon. They never said what would replace them, however. Later it was believed that it would be all right to have trains, provided they were extremely modern in appearance. That was accomplished, as I suppose you learned last year, by substituting aluminum, fiberglass, and magnesium for much of the steel employed previously. That not only changed the image of the trains to something acceptable, but saved a great deal of energy by reducing the weight —the ostensible purpose of the cosmetic redesign.” Mr. Parker paused, and Little Tib could hear the water running past the place where they were sitting, and the sound the wind made blowing the trees.
“There only remained the awkward business of the crews,” Mr. Parker continued. “Fortunately it was found that mechanisms of the same type that had already displaced educators and others could be substituted for railway engineers and brakemen. Who would have believed that running a train was as routine and mechanical a business as teaching a class? Yet it proved to be so.”
“Wish they would do away with those railroad police,” Nitty said.
“You, George, are a victim of the same system,” Mr. Parker continued. “It was the wholesale displacement of labor, and the consequent nomadism, that resulted in the present reliance on retinal patterns as means of identification. Take Nitty and me, for example. We are going to Macon—”
“We’re goin’ to Martinsburg, Mr. Parker,” Nitty said. “This train we’ll be catching will be going the
“I was hypothesizing,” Mr. Parker said. “We are going—say—to Macon. There we can enter a store, register our retinal patterns, and receive goods to be charged to the funds which will by then have accumulated in our social relief accounts. No other method of identification is so certain, or so adaptable to data-processing techniques.”
