Everybody aboard the Frank Airlines flight (non-stop) to The Island of the Dance is sleeping. Tiger lays still as stone, his arms at his sides, his eyes open. Gerald lays in the back, on the floor, curled up into a small fetal ball. Yara has fitful dreams, but they're growing less fitful every day, and soon they will be changed over entirely, not yet, but soon. Both the pilot and the co-pilot nod at the controls, dreaming of more gainful employment, of not having to deal with these weirdo rock and roll people anymore. a pile of flight attendents, still sticked in the bathroom, dream of Tiger, and dream of flying, and dream of the baby born with black-glass eyes. And dbauler dreams of intent and motive, of purpose and destiny, of the blurring of certain narrative boundaries in unpleasant wayshe dreams of the things that have happened to him at Richter-Goldberg, of the free stations, of Seven Dogeater. He dreams of Qu'ael, who sleeps but does not dream, never dreams. He dreams of the island, of strange cloud formations cathering over the city, of the connections between the machine and the moeboid structure of the tarot. he dreams of the people still there, and those still in london, and those lost in space. he dreams of the dead, safely tucked in to the land of the remembered, where all that haunted their waking days is now gone, where teh echoes of previous history do not distort, only soften and fade. He dreams of the forces which have moved him, and the guidance still left in his head, sloshing around the bottom of his brain. He dreams of Aquaraza, and of Richard Raby, and of Louise, off in another time, in another place. He dreams of things he does not know, things unspoken. And in the dark, as he begins to awaken, he realizes his dreams have been, have always been, a series of prayers. and as he prays for antares, for the she, for scotto and .rez, for all the young dudes on Space Station Brighton, for any remaining moonrock and for all True-Names, for Harvey, still afloat, still unknowing, for the alien intelligences, for his enemies and his foes, for Zeus and the Lehmans and Courtney and Cohen, for the missing and the lost, for everyone, everywhere, the living and the dead. And he feels a stillness, a washing-away, a coming clean. he scribbles notes on the bag of an air-sickness bag, leaving it with Yara, and walks back, past the bathroom-hostel, past the pile of luggage, to the door.

Later, much later, after everything is over, Yara finds a postcard in her mailbox. She has recieved postcards pretty regularly since those days; she got one from Aquaraza telling her about the dream city, and bomberman sent her one from Canada where he's been runnign from the law and looking for a new van, but this one had a certain polynesian swank to it. She turned it over and found this:

     hey! all is good in the islands. i've been teaching the people here
     how to make vodka shakes and they've been teaching me secret
     indigenous love rituals, it's all good. sorry to bail but i had to 
     not be anywhere for a while, and i couldn't go back to the island. 
     i trust all went well. they don't make me bathe too often and 
     they're always taking naps! it rocks!...but i might stop back 
     up to the civilized world soon. just saying hey. as always, you
     have my love.

                                                      -dbauler

and she should probably wonder if it's real, if this is the correct dbauler, if this is an intelligence pretending to be dbauler, if there is a plot involved, if there are other forces at work, but she doesn't. all that shit's in the past now. she just smiles, pins the card up on the wall, and goes to sleep.