Then he turned and looked at her, his new wife, just waking from slumbering beside him in the overland sleeper, as the pullcar rattled gruntingly southward.
Outside, the woods were thinning to wide blue fields, while overhead, the blue-pink sky was prettily decorated by birds.
He knew now where he was, just as he knew the language. For a moment he studied her, too, making certain that she, as he, was not entirely bemused.
But she only kneeled up by the window and said, “The sky is always that color. Am I right, Zeh?”
“Yes, Zaeli.”
“How do we know?” she inquired, but then she looked at him, and they moved into each other’s arms, and were, to each other, the flawless completion of all known havens, lands, and states. One exquisite constant in an ever-dismantling chaos.
Over there, some clothes of an inventive cut awaited them. And some luggage lay in its cubby that he, and she too, instinctively recognized. Just as they did the quaint trees and the blue-blossoming fields and the sky like a painting on china. But only as if they had been briefed on such things a few minutes before arrival.
None of this would matter anyway. They knew
“We speak
“I suppose it will seem less odd quite soon,” she sagely assured him.
“Or more so?”
“Zeh, is
“Or milk. Or beer…”
They ceased to talk about the
They had met only recently, and were soon married, in some city to the north.
The train rattled on the hard rails, real as all reality.
It was carrying them home, to her tall old house by the blue and ever-tidal lake. With every second, they remembered more—and forgot more, too. Already they had almost forgotten their former lives, those other things they had lost, since both heart and mind had been refilled to the brim. They were changing smoothly into those people that now they were. This now was the reality, and everything else, any other lives, quite likely some sort of dream.
Peter S. Beagle
Kaskia