“So do all of us, except Marcelin, and maybe Nur,” Turpin said. “Man, it’s been a long, hard time!”
“What about Alice?” Aphra Behn said. “She needs a man.”
“Don’t speak for me,” Alice said sharply.
Burton slammed the tabletop with a fist. “First things first!” he bellowed. Then, more softly, “We must have a common front, band together, no matter what the inconvenience. We can work out the other matters, trifling, if I may say so, at this moment. We’ve been through a lot together, and we can cooperate. We make a good team, despite some differences that have caused some abrasion recently. We must work together, be together, or we may be cut down one at a time. Is there anyone who won’t cooperate?”
Nur said, “If anyone insists on living apart, that one is under suspicion.”
There was an uproar then, stilled when Burton hit the table again.
“This bottling-up will be scratchsome, no doubt of that. But we’ve been ridden gallsore by worse things, and the better we work together, the sooner we’ll be free to pursue our own interests.”
Alice was frowning, and he knew what she was thinking. Since their final breakup, she had avoided him as much as possible. Now …
“If we’re in jail, we’re in the best one in two worlds,” Frigate said.
“No jail’s any good,” Turpin said. “You ever been in the slammer, Pete?”
“Only the one that I made for myself all my life,” Frigate said. “But it was portable.”
That was not true, Burton thought. Frigate has been a prisoner several times on the Riverworld, including being one of Hermann Goring’s slaves. But he spoke metaphorically. A most metaphorical man, Frigate. Shifty, a verbal trickster, ambiguous, which he would cheerfully admit, quoting Emily Dickinson to justify himself.
“Success in circuit lies.”
Quoting himself, he would say, “The literal man litters reality”
“Well, Captain, what do we do next?” Frigate said.
The first priority was to go to their individual apartments and bring their few possessions to the large apartment down the hall. They went in a body, since it would not do to go alone, and then they picked out their bedrooms. Alice took one as far from Burton’s as possible. Peter Frigate chose the apartment next to hers. Burton smiled ferociously on noting this. It was an acknowledged but mostly unspoken fact that the American was “in love” with Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves. He had been ever since, in 1964, he had seen the photographs of her at the ages of ten and eighteen in a biography of Lewis Carroll. He had written a mystery story, The Knave of Hearts, in which thirty-year-old Alice had played the amateur detective. In 1983, he had organized a public subscription drive to erect a monument to her on her unmarked grave in the Hargreaves family plot at Lyndhurst. Times were hard, however, and little money had been given. Then Frigate had died, and he still had not learned if his project had been completed. If it had, above Alice’s body there was now a carved marble monument of Alice at the tea table with the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat’s head above and behind her.
Meeting her had not lessened his love for her, as a cynic might expect, but had heated it. The literary attractions had become fleshly. Yet he had never said a word to her or Burton about his passion. He loved, or had loved, Burton too much to make what he would have called a dishonorable move toward her. Alice had never shown the slightest sign of feeling toward him as he did toward her. That did not necessarily mean anything. Alice was a master at concealing her feelings in certain situations. There was the public Alice, and there was the private Alice. There might also be an Alice whom even Alice did not know. Whom she would not at all want to know.
4
Two hours before lunchtime, they were settled in, though still unsettled by the morning’s events. Burton had chosen not to use the control console, which could be slid from a wall recess. Instead, he had asked the Computer to simulate the screen and the keyboard on the wall. This could have been reproduced in light on the ceiling or the floor if required. The floor, however, was covered with a thick rug, which the unlearned would have thought was a very expensive Persian. Its model had, in fact, been woven on the Gardenworld, a recording of it had been brought to the tower, and the Computer had reproduced the original by energy-mass conversion.
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