【正文】 Dad was still around, and when I noticed that he was getting into one of his grumpy moods, I decided it was time to take a walk. A long one. I had often noticed that his fondness for me tended to increase as an inver se function of my proximity. He gave me a fancy riding crop for a goingaway presentto hasten the process of affection, I suppose. Still, it was a very nice cropsilverchased, beautifully tooledand I made good use of it. I had decided to go looking for an assemblage of all my simple pleasures in one small nook of Shadow. It was a long rideI will not bore you with the detailsand it was pretty far from Amber, as such things go. This time, I was not looking for a place where I would be especially important. That can get either boring or difficult fairly quickly, depending on how responsible you want to be. I wanted to be an irresponsible nonentity and just enjoy myself. Texorami was a wide open port city, with sultry days and long nights, lots of good music, gambling around the cloc k, duels every morning and inbetween mayhem for those who couldn39。 d go find some action, women, or cards, usually. A nd that was it for the rest of the night. Damn Eric, anywayl That reminds me again . . . He once accused me of cheating at cards, did you know that? And that39。t cheat at. I ta ke my card playing seriously. I39。m also luc ky. Eric was neither. The trouble with him was that he was good at so many things he wouldn39。s gliding and not much sleep the night before. I decided later that it must be our mental quir k associated w ith the Trumps that made me see it that way when someone was trying to reach me and I had cards in my handany cards. Ordinarily, of course, we get the message empty handed, unless we are doing the calling. It could have been that my subconsciouswhich was kind of footloose at the timejust seized on the available props out of habit Later, though, I had cause to wonder. Really, I just don39。m here, I said. What39。t make out. Where? I asked. He shook his head at that. Can39。t be sure. It was far from Amber, somewhere where the shadows go mad. Far ther than I like to go. Star k, w ith shifting colors. Fiery. Day without a sun in the sky. Rocks that glided like sailboats across the land. Brand there in some sort of towera small point of stability in that f lowing scene. I remembered it, all right. A nd I remembered the presence coiled about the base of tha t tower. Br illiant. Prismatic. Some sort of watchthing, it seemedtoo bright for me to make out its outline, to guess its proper size. Then it all just went away. Instant off. And there I was, staring at the Jac k of Diamonds again, with the guy across from me not knowing w hether to be mad at my long distraction or concerned that I might be having some sort of sick spell. I closed up shop with that hand and went home. I lay stretched out on my bed, smoking and thinking. Brand had still been in A mber when I had departed. Later, though, w hen I had asked after him, no one had any idea as to his whereabouts. He had been having one of his melancholy spells, had snapped out of it one day and ridden off. And that was that. No messages eithereither way. He wasn39。t talking. I tried to figure every angle. He was sm art, damn smart. Possibly the best mind in the family. He was in trouble and he had called me. Eric and Gerard were more the heroic types and would probably have weled the adventure. Caine w ould have gone out of curiosity, I think. Julian, to look bette r than the rest of us and to score points w ith Dad. Or, easiest of all, Brand could have called Dad himself. Dad would have done something about it. But he had called me. Why? It occurred to me then that maybe one or more of the others had been responsible for his circumstances. If, say, Dad was beginning to favor him . . . Well. You know. Eliminate the positive. And if he d id call Dad, he would look like a weakling. So I suppressed my impulse to yell for reinforcements. He had called me, and it was quite possible that I would be cutting his throat by letting anyone back in Amber in on the fact that he had gotten the message out. Okay. What was in it for me? If it involved the succession and he had truly bee fairhaired, I figured that I could do a lot w orse than give him this to remember me by. And if it did not . . . There were all sorts of other possibilities. Perhaps he had stumbled onto something going on back home, something it would be useful to know about. I was even curious as to the means he had employed for bypassing the Trumps. So it was curiosity, I39。s sleep then and tried one more time in the morning. Again, nothing. O kay, no sense waiting any longer. I cleaned up my blade, ate a big meal, and got into some rugged clothes. I also pic ked up a pair of dark, polaroid goggles. D idn39。d take good care of them. Then I went on down to the hangar, got the sail plane ready, went aloft, and caught a proper curre nt. It seemed a neat way to do it. I don39。ve ever glided through Shadow, butNo? Well, I headed out over the sea till the land was only a dim line to the north. T hen I had the waters go cobalt beneath m e, rear up and shake sparkly beards. The wind shifted. I turned. I raced the waves shoreward beneath a dar kening sky. Texorami was gone when I returned to the rivermouth, replaced by miles of swamp. I rode the currents inward, crossing and recrossing the river at new twists and kinks it had acquired. Gone were the piers, the trails, the traffic. The trees were high. Clouds massed in the west, pink and pearl and yellow. The sun phased from orange through red to yellow. You sha ke your head? T he sun was the price of the cities, you see. In a hurry, I depopulateor, rather, go the elemental route. At that altitude artifacts would have been distracting. Shading and texture bees everything for me. Tha