Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III

by Orson Scott Card

  Alvin held the plow between his hands. He knew that he could turn it all to gold—he’d seen gold enough in his life to know the pattern, so he could show the bits of iron what they ought to be. But he also knew that it wasn’t no ordinary gold that he wanted. That would be too soft, and as cold as any ordinary stone. No, he wanted something new, not just iron to gold like any alchemist could dream of, but a living gold, a gold that could hold its shape and strength better than iron, better than the finest steel. Gold that was awake, aware of the world around it—a plow that knew the earth that it would tear, to lay it open to the fires of the sun.

  A golden plow that would know a man, that a man could trust, the way Po Doggly knew Horace Guester and each trusted the other. A plow that wouldn’t need no ox to draw, nor added weight to force it downward into the soil. A plow that would know which soil was rich and which was poor. A sort of gold that never had been seen in all the world before, just like the world had never seen such a thin invisible string as Alvin spun between Arthur Stuart and himself today.

  So there he knelt, holding the shape of the gold inside his mind. “Be like this,” he whispered to the iron.

  He could feel how atoms came from all around the plow and joined together with those already in the iron, forming bits much heavier than what the iron was, and lined up in different ways, until they fit the pattern that he showed them in his mind.

  Between his hands he held a plow of gold. He rubbed his fingers over it. Gold, yes, bright yellow in the firelight from the forge, but still dead, still cold. How could he teach it to be alive? Not by showing it the pattern of his own flesh—that wasn’t the kind of life it needed. It was the living atoms that he wanted to waken, to show them what they were compared to what they could be. To put the fire of life in them.

  The fire of life. Alvin lifted the golden plow—much heavier now—and despite the heat of the slacking fire, he set it right amid the glowing charcoal of the forge.

  They were back on their horses now, them Finders, walking them calmly up the road to Hatrack River, looking into every house and hut and cabin, holding up the cachet to match it with the heartfires that they found within. But nary a match did they find, nary a body did they recognize. They passed the smithy and saw that a heartfire burned inside, but it wasn’t the runaway mixup boy. It was bound to be the smith what made the manacles, they knew it.

  “I’d like to kill him,” whispered the black-haired Finder. “I know he put that spell in the manacles, to make them so that boy could slip right out.”

  “Time enough for that after we find the pickaninny,” said the white-haired Finder.

  They saw two heartfires burning in the old springhouse, but neither one was like what they had in the cachet, so they went on, searching for a child that they might recognize.

  The fire was deep within the gold now, but all it was doing was melting it. That wouldn’t do at all—it was life the plow needed, not the death of metal in the fire. He held the plowshape in his mind and showed it plain as can be to every bit of metal in the plow; cried out silently to every atom, It ain’t enough to be lined up in the little shapes of gold—you need to hold this larger shape yourselves, no matter the fire, no matter what other force might press or tear or melt or try to maim you.

  He could sense that he was heard—there was movement in the gold, movement against the downward slipping of the gold as it turned to fluid. But it wasn’t strong enough, it wasn’t sure enough. Without thinking, Alvin reached his hands into the fire and clung to the gold, showing it the plowshape, crying to it in his heart, Like this! Be like this! This is what you are! Oh, the pain of it burned something fierce, but he knew that it was right for his hands to be there, for the Maker is a part of what he makes. The atoms heard him, and formed themselves in ways that Alvin never even thought of, but the result of it all was that the gold now took the heat of the fire into itself without melting, without losing shape. It was done; the plow wasn’t alive, exactly, not the way he wanted—but it could stand in the forgefire without melting. The gold was more than gold now. It was gold that knew it was a plow and meant to stay that way.

  Alvin pulled his hands away from the plow and saw flames still dancing on his skin, which was charred in places, peeling back away from the bone. Silent as death, he plunged his hands into the water barrel and heard the sizzle of the fire on his flesh as it went out. Then, before the pain could come in full force, he set to healing himself, sloughing away the dead skin and making new skin grow.

  He stood there, weakened from all his body had to do to heal his hands, looking into the fire at the gold plow. Just setting there, knowing its shape and holding to it—but that wasn’t enough to make the plow alive. It had to know what a plow was for. It had to know why it lived, so it could act to fulfill that purpose. That was Making, Alvin knew it now; that was what Redbird come to say three years ago. Making wasn’t like carpentry or smithy work or any such, cutting and bending and melting to force things into new shapes. Making was something subtler and stronger—making things want to be another way, a new shape, so they just naturally flowed that way. It was something Alvin had done for years without knowing what it was he was doing. When he thought he was doing no more than finding the natural cracks in stone, he was really making those cracks; by imagining where he wanted them to be, and showing it to the atoms within the bits within the pieces of the rock, he taught them to want to fulfill the shape he showed them.

  Now, with this plow, he had done it, not by accident, but on purpose; and he’d taught the gold to be something stronger, to hold better to its shape than anything he’d ever Made before. But how could he teach it more, teach it to act, to move in ways that gold was never taught to move?

  In the back of his mind, he knew that this golden plow wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was the Crystal City, and the building blocks of that weren’t going to be simple atoms in a metal plow. The atoms of a city are men and women, and they don’t believe the shape they’re shown with the simple faith that atoms have, they don’t understand with such pure clarity, and when they act, their actions are never half so pure. But if I can teach this gold to be a plow and to be alive, then maybe I can make a Crystal City out of men and women; maybe I can find people as pure as the atoms of this gold, who come to understand the shape of the Crystal City and love it the way I did the moment I saw it when I climbed the inside of that twister with Tenskwa-Tawa. Then they’ll not only hold that shape but also make it act, make the Crystal City a living thing much larger and greater than any one of us who are its atoms.

  The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes.

  Alvin ran to the bellows and pumped up the fire till the charcoal was glowing hot enough to drive any regular smith outside into the night air to wait till the fire slacked. But not Alvin. Instead he walked right up to the forge and climbed right into the heat and the flame. He felt the clothes burning right off his body, but he paid no mind. He curled himself around that plow and then commenced to healing himself, not piecemeal. not bit by bit, but healing himself by telling his whole body, all at once, Stay alive! Put the fire that bums you into this plow!

  And at the same time, he told the plow, Do as my body does! Live! Learn from every living bit of me how each part has its purpose, and acts on it. I can’t show you the shape you’ve got to be, or how it’s done, cause I don’t know. But I can show you what it’s like to be alive, by the pain of my body, by the healing of it, by the struggle to stay alive. Be like this! Whatever it takes, however hard it is for you to learn, this is you, be like me!

  It took forever, trembling in the fire as his body struggled with the heat, finding ways to channel it the way a river channels water, pouring it out into the plow like it was an ocean of golden fire. And within the plow, the atoms struggled to do what Alvin asked, wanting to obey him, not knowing how. But his call to them was strong, too strong not to hear; and it was more than a matter of hearing him, too. It was like they could tell that what he
wanted for them was good. They trusted him, they wanted to be the living plow he dreamed of, and so in a million flecks of time so small that a second seemed like eternity to them, they tried this, they tried that, until somewhere within the golden plow a new pattern was made that knew itself to be alive exactly as Alvin wanted it to be; and in a single single moment the pattern passed throughout the plow and it was alive.

  Alive. Alvin felt it moving within the curve of his body as the plow nestled down into the coals of the fire, cutting into it, plowing it as if it were soil. And because it was a barren soil, one that could bear no life, the plow rose quickly out of it and slipped outward, away from the fire toward the lip of the forge. It moved by deciding to be in a different place, and then being there; when it reached the brink of the forge it toppled off and tumbled to the smithy floor.

  In agony Alvin rolled from the fire and also fell, also lay pressed against the cold dirt of the floor. Now that the fire no longer surrounded him, his body gained against the death of his skin, healing him as he had taught it to do, without him having to tell it what to do, without need of direction at all. Become yourself, that had been Alvin’s command, and so the signature within each living bit of him obeyed the pattern it contained, until his body was whole and perfect, the skin new, uncallused, and unburned.

  What he couldn’t remove was the memory of pain, or the weakness from all the strength his body had given up. But he didn’t care. Weak as he was, his heart was jubilant, because the plow that lay beside him on the ground was living gold, not because he made it, but because he taught it how to make itself.

  The Finders found nothing, nowhere in town—yet the black-haired Finder couldn’t see anyone running away, neither, not within the farthest distance that any natural man or horse could possibly have gone since the boy got taken back. Somehow the mixup boy was hiding from them, a thing they knew full well was pure impossible—but it must be so.

  The place to look was where the boy had lived for all these years. The roadhouse, the springhouse, the smithy—places where folks were up unnatural late at night. They rode to near the roadhouse, then tied up their horses just off the road. They loaded their shotguns and pistols and set off on foot. Passing by the roadhouse they searched again, accounting for every heartfire; none of them was like the cachet.

  “That cottage, with that teacher lady,” said the white-haired Finder. “That’s where the boy was when we found him before.”

  The black-haired Finder looked over that way. Couldn’t see the springhouse through the trees, of course, but what he was looking for he could see, trees or not. “Two people in there,” he said.

  “Could be the mixup boy, then,” said the white-haired Finder.

  “Cachet says not.” Then the black-haired Finder grinned nastily. “Single teacher lady, living alone, got a visitor this time of night? I know what kind of company she’s keeping, and it ain’t no mixup boy.”

  “Let’s go see anyhow,” said the white-haired Finder. “If’n you’re right, she won’t be putting out any complaint on how we broke in her door, or we’ll just tell what we saw going on inside when we done it.”

  They had a good little laugh about that, and set off through the moonlight toward Miss Larner’s house. They meant to kick in the door, of course, and have a good laugh when the teacher lady got all huffy about it and made her threats.

  Funny thing was, when they actually got near the cottage, that plan just clean went out of their heads. They forgot all about it. Just looked again at the heartfires within and compared them to the cachet.

  “What the hell are we doing up here?” asked the white-haired Finder. “Boy’s bound to be at the roadhouse. We know he ain’t here!”

  “You know what I’m thinking?” said the black-haired one. “Maybe they killed him.”

  “That’s plain crazy. Why save him, then?”

  “How else do you figure they made it so we can’t see him, then?”

  “He’s in the roadhouse. They got some hex that hides him up, I’ll bet. Once we open the right door there, we’ll see him and that’ll be that.”

  For a fleeting moment the black-haired Finder thought-well, why not look in this teacher lady’s cottage, too, if they got a hex like that? Why not open this door?

  But he no sooner had that thought than it just slipped away so he couldn’t remember it, couldn’t even remember having a thought. He just trotted away after the white-haired Finder. Mixup boy’s bound to be in the roadhouse, that’s for sure.

  She saw their heartfires, of course, as the Finders came toward her cottage, but Peggy wasn’t afraid. She had explored Arthur Stuart’s heartfire all this time, and there was no path there which led to capture by these Finders. Arthur had dangers enough in the future—Peggy could see that—but no harm would come to the boy tonight. So she paid them little heed. She knew when they decided to leave: knew when the black-haired Finder thought of coming in; knew when the hexes blocked him and drove him away. But it was Arthur Stuart she was watching, searching out the years to come.

  Then, suddenly, she couldn’t hold it to herself any longer. She had to tell Alvin, both the joy and sorrow of what he had done. Yet how could she? How could she tell him that Miss Larner was really a torch who could see the million newborn futures in Arthur Stuart’s heartfire? It was unbearable to keep all this to herself. She might have told Mistress Modesty, years ago, when she lived there and kept no secrets.

  It was madness to go down to the smithy, knowing that her desire was to tell him things she couldn’t tell without revealing who she was. Yet it would surely drive her mad to stay within these walls, alone with all this knowledge that she couldn’t share.

  So she got up, unlocked the door, and stepped outside. No one around. She closed the door and locked it; then again looked into Arthur’s heartfire and again found no danger for the boy. He would be safe. She would see Alvin.

  Only then did she look into Alvin’s heartfire; only then did she see the terrible pain that he had suffered only minutes ago. Why hadn’t she noticed? Why hadn’t she seen? Alvin had just passed through the greatest threshold of his life; he had truly done a great Making, brought something new into the world, and she hadn’t seen. When he faced the Unmaker while she was in far-off Dekane, she had seen his struggle-now, when she wasn’t three rods off, why hadn’t she turned to him? Why hadn’t she known his pain when he writhed inside the fire?

  Maybe it was the springhouse. Once before, near nineteen years ago, the day that Alvin was born, the springhouse had damped her gift and lulled her to sleep till she was almost too late. But no, it couldn’t be that—the water didn’t run through the springhouse anymore, and the forgefire was stronger than that.

  Maybe it was the Unmaker itself, come to block her. But as she cast about with her torchy sight, she couldn’t see any unusual darkness amid the colors of the world around her, not close at hand, anyway. Nothing that could have blinded her.

  No, it had to be the nature of what Alvin himself was doing that blinded her to it. Just as she hadn’t seen how he would extricate himself from his confrontation with the Unmaker years ago, just as she hadn’t seen how he would change young Arthur at the Hio shore tonight, it was just the same way she hadn’t seen what he was doing in the forge. It was outside the futures that her knack could see, the particular Making he performed tonight.

  Would it always be like that? Would she always be blinded when his most important work was being done? It made her angry, it frightened her—what good is my knack, if it deserts me just when I need it most!

  No. I didn’t need it most just now. Alvin had no need of me or my sight when he climbed into the fire. My knack has never deserted me when it was needed. It’s only my desire that’s thwarted.

  Well, he needs me now, she thought. She picked her way carefully down the slope; the moon was low, the shadows deep, so the path was treacherous. When she rounded the corner of the smithy, the light from the forgefire, spilling out onto the grass, was almost
blinding; it was so red that it made the grass look shiny black, not green.

  Inside the smithy Alvin lay curled on the ground, facing toward the forge, away from her. He was breathing heavily, raggedly. Asleep? No. He was naked; it took a moment to realize that his clothing must have burned off him in the forge. He hadn’t noticed it in all his pain, and so had no memory of it; therefore she hadn’t seen it happen when she searched for memories in his heartfire.

  His skin was shockingly pale and smooth. Earlier today she had seen his skin a deep brown from the sun and the forgefire’s heat. Earlier today he had been callused, with here and there a scar from some spark or searing burn, the normal accidents of life beside a fire. Now, though, his skin was as unmarked as a baby’s, and she could not help herself; she stepped into the smithy, knelt beside him, and gently brushed her hand along his back, from his shoulder down to the narrow place above the hip. His skin was so soft it made her own hands feel coarse to her, as if she marred him just by touching him.

  He let out a long breath, a sigh. She withdrew her hand.

  “Alvin,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  He moved his arm; he was stroking something that lay within the curl of his body. Only now did she see it, a faint yellow in the double shadow of his body and of the forge. A golden plow.

  “It’s alive,” he murmured.

  As if in answer, she saw it move smoothly under his hand.