“And I’ve never really been sure whether or not we owned the Copper Mountains, you know? It’s not clear on the maps.” It was like Janet couldn’t hear him. “So now we do, because I annexed them on my way to the desert. It only took a couple of days. An elephant fell off a cliff, a copper cliff, which practically broke my heart. Elephants and gravity, not a great mix. But you know what? The other elephants immediately stopped and went down and found what was left of it and stood around it in a ring. I couldn’t see what they did, but when they were done—it took a day—the one that fell was all back together and up and running again. They resurrected him. I’ve never seen anything like it. Elephants, they know some shit. I don’t know why we rule them, they should rule us.”

“That’s treason,” Eliot said lightly. “True, though. What was the desert like?”

“The desert? The desert was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Having spent a lot of time around Janet, Eliot was used to the way she shifted smoothly and without warning from irony and aggression to honest expressions of actual authentic human emotion.

“You must go, Eliot. Go in winter. The Wandering Desert is like an ocean of sand, which I realize is a cliché, but it literally is like an ocean. The dunes move along like big swells in the open sea. Slowly, but you can see it. We spent a day just sitting on the slopes of the Copper Mountains watching them roll in and smash themselves against the foothills, all in silence, like humongous breakers.”

“And then,” Eliot said, “realizing that you were about to invade a beautiful but otherwise useless and wholly innocent desert, you took stock of your tactical and ethical errors and turned around . . .”

“But I didn’t. I didn’t turn around. In fact that was when I knew why I’d come.

“I sent the elephants back. Elephants—God, I don’t know what I was thinking, bringing a bunch of elephants over the mountains. Hannibal, I guess. They were nice about it, but it was no place for them. I told them they could go graze the Southern Orchards. That seemed to square it.

“I sent the regiment back too. Brigade, whatever. They were good sports, very valiant, and they didn’t want to go, but I ordered them and they had to. I guess they were hoping for a fight, but there was nobody to fight. Once they were gone I walked out into the desert alone.”

“Why,” Eliot said, “the hell would you do that?”