“Our heads are usually not worth much the day after a big party,” Burton said. “I’ll call you and the others tomorrow about ten in the morning for the big powwow.”
Nur and his woman entered the anteroom, halted, looked around, and then made their way through the crowd to Burton. Nur introduced Ayesha bint Yusuf, a thin brown woman even shorter than Nur. Though she was not pretty, she looked quite charming when she smiled.
Burton said to Nur, “I’ll explain later. We have to get out of this noisy mess.”
As he turned to sit down in his chair, he saw Gull and a score of Dowists, all dressed in long flowing white robes, enter. They looked as if they were stunned.
Burton lifted the chair up and shot it through the wide doorway. He climbed until he was two hundred feet high and sped over the massive oak and pine forest, the Tulgey Wood, and the river Issus toward the huge clearing at the foot of the high hill on which Alice’s mansion stood. The field was three hundred yards square, perfectly flat, and covered with a bright green grass that never needed mowing. The field held a huge ferris wheel and a roller-coaster on one side and a merry-go-round and a small skating rink and many tables on which were placed food and drinks and white open-sided tents and a bandstand on which androids were playing a waltz and small buildings like tiny Roman villas, which he supposed were comfort stations, and a croquet field and badminton nets and equipment and a dance floor of polished wood and many android servants, almost all of them looking like characters from Lewis Carroll’s two famous books.
Under a giant oak at the edge of the field was a house with chimneys shaped like a rabbit’s ears and with a roof covered with rabbit fur. Before it was a large table set for tea-time and many chairs around it. A man-sized March Hare and Mad Hatter and a little girl sat at the table. Though she was dressed as Tenniel had illustrated Alice, she did not have her long blonde hair. Alice had ordered an android that looked as she did when she was ten.
“Alice has certainly done herself proud,” he muttered as he steered the chair toward the foot of the hill.
She stood there by a chair that looked like the coronation chair in Westminster Hall. There was another and similar chair by it; a tall yellow-haired man stood by it.
“Her surprise!” he said. “I knew it!”
He was hurt, and he was also angry with himself because he could be hurt. So, he had been lying to himself when he had told himself that he felt nothing for her any more.
She certainly looked beautiful. She was wearing her favorite, the flapper’s garments of the 1920s. She should have been wearing a hat, since this was an afternoon affair, but Terrestrial rules did not hold now. Her bobbed hair shone black and glossy in the sun. The man, judging by Alice’s height, was about six feet four inches tall. He wore the uniform of a Scots chief, kilt, tartan, sporran, and all. As Burton descended, he could make out the black and red checks of the Rob Roy clan on the kilt. The man was a descendant of the famous Scots outlaw, which made him a distant relative of Burton’s. He was broad-shouldered and well-muscled, and his face was handsome but very strong. He smiled on seeing the turbaned and robed Burton, and, like a sword cutting a rope and releasing a drawbridge, the smile opened Burton’s memory. He was Sir Monteith Maglenna, a Scots baronet and laird. Burton had met him in 1872 when Burton spoke in London before the British National Association of Spiritualists. Burton had upset his audience because of his firm declaration that he did not believe in ghosts and would have no use for them if they did exist. The young baronet had talked with him for a while at the party following the lecture’. Both had traveled in the American West, and the Scot was, like Burton, an amateur archaeologist. They had spent an interesting half-hour while others, hoping to get a chance to defend spiritualism, fretted by them.
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