ALVIN JOURNEYMAN

by Orson Scott Card

  He pondered that for a while until, watching a secretary rise up and rush from the room, it occurred to him that Bonaparte’s weren’t the only legs around. Now that it mattered that Calvin find out exactly which nerve did what, and that his pinch deadened pain instead of provoking it, he had to play the scientist and test many legs until he got it right.

  He started with the secretary who was next in line, a shortish fellow (smaller even than the Emperor, who was a man of scant stature) who fidgeted a little in his chair. Uncomfortable? Calvin asked him silently. Then let’s see if we can find you some relief He sent his bug into the man’s right leg, found the most obvious nerve, and pinched.

  Not a wince, not a grimace. Calvin was annoyed. He pinched harder. Nothing.

  Then the current secretary jumped to his feet and rushed from the room. It was now the turn of the short fellow Calvin had pinched. The man tried to shift his body in his chair, to adjust the position of the lapdesk, but to Calvin’s delight a look of astonishment came over the man’s face, followed by a blush as hebad to reach down and move his right leg with his hands. So. That large nerve—or was it a bundle of very fine nerves? --had nothing to do with feeling. Instead they seemed to control movement. Interesting.

  The fellow wrote in silence, but Calvin knew that all he was really thinking about was what would happen when he had to jump up and run from the room. Sure enough, when the edict ended—it was about the granting of a special tax exemption to certain vintners in southern France because of a bad harvest—the man leapt up, spun around, and sprawled on the floor, his right leg tangled with his left like the fishing lines of children.

  Every eye turned to the poor fellow, but not a word was spoken. Calvin watched with amusement as he got up on his hands and his left knee, while the right leg hung useless. The knee bent well enough, of course, and the man got it under his body so it looked like it might work, but twice he tried to put weight on it and twice he fell again.

  Bonaparte, looking annoyed, finally spoke to him. “Are you a secretary, sir, or a clown?”

  “My leg, sir,” said the miserable clerk. “My right leg seems not to work just now.”

  Bonaparte turned sharply to the guards detaining Calvin. “Help him out of here. And fetch someone to clean up the spilled ink.”

  The guards hauled the man to his feet and started to move him toward the door. Now it was time for Little Napoleon to Assert himself. “Take his desk, fools,” said the Emperor’s nephew. “And the inkwell, and the quill, and the edict, if it isn’t spoiled.”

  “And how will they do all that?” asked Bonaparte testily. “Seeing they have to hold up this one-legged beggar?” Then he looked expectantly at Little Napoleon’s face.

  It took a moment for Little Napoleon to realize what the Emperor wanted of him, and an even longer moment for him to swallow his pride enough to do it. “Why, of course, Uncle,” he said, with careful mildness. “I shall gladly pick it up myself, sir.”

  Calvin suppressed a smile as the proud man who had arrested him, now knelt down and gathered up papers, lapdesk, quill, and inkwell, carefully avoiding getting a single drop of ink on himself. By now the secretary Calvin had pinched was out of the room. He thought of sending out his bug to find the man and unpinch the nerve, but he wasn’t sure where he had gone, and anyway, what did it matter? It was just a secretary.

  When Little Napoleon was gone, Bonaparte resumed dictating, but now his delivery was not rapid and biting. Rather he halted, corrected himself now and then, and sometimes lapsed into silence for a time, as the secretary sat with pen poised. At such moments Calvin would cause the ink on the quill to flow to the tip and drop off suddenly onto the paper—ah, the flurry of bloitting! And of course this only served to distract the Emperor all the more.

  There remained, however, the matter of legs. Calvin explored each secretary in turn, finding other nerves to pinch, ever so slightly. He left the nerves of movement alone now; it was the nerves of pain that he was finding now, charting his progress by the widened eyes, flushed faces, and occasional gasps of the unfortunate secretaries. Bonaparte was not unaware of their discomfort—it distracted him all the more. Finally, when a man gasped at a particularly sharp pinch—Calvin’s touch was not always precise with such slender things as nerves—Bonaparte turned himself in his chair, wincing at the pain in his own leg, and said, as best Calvin could understand his French, “Do you mock me with these pains and moans? I sit here in agony, making no sound, while you, with no more pain than that of sitting too long to take letters, moan and gasp and wince and sigh until I can only imagine I am trapped with a choir of hyenas!”

  At that moment Calvin finally got it right, giving just the right amount of pressure to a secretary’s pain nerve that all feeling vanished, and instead of the man wincing, his face relaxed in relief. That’s it, thought Calvin. That’s how it’s done.

  He almost sent his bug right into Bonaparte’s leg to do that same little twist and make the Emperor’s pain go away. Fortunately he was distracted by the opening of the door. It was a scullery maid with a bucket and rags to clean up the ink from the marble floor. Bonaparte glared at her, and she almost dropped her things and fled, except that he at once softened his expression, “My rage is at my pain, girl,” he said to her. “Come in and do your work, no one minds.”

  With that she gathered her courage, scurried to the drying ink, set down the bucket with a clank and a slosh, and set to work scrubbing.

  By now Calvin had come to his senses. What good would it do to take away Bonaparte’s pain if the Emperor didn’t know that it was Calvin doing it? Instead he practiced the soothing twist of the nerves on all the secretaries, to their undoubted relief, and as he did he began to sense a sort of current, a humming, a vibration on the nerves that were actually carrying pain at the instant he twisted them, so that he could get even more precise, taking away not all the feeling in a leg, but just the pain itself. Finally he got to the scullery maid, to the pain she always felt in her knees as she knelt on hard cold floors to do her, work. So sudden was the relief, and so sharp and constant had been the pain, that she cried aloud, and again Bonaparte glared at the interruption.

  “Oh sir,” she said, “forgive me, but I suddenly felt no pain in my knees.”

  “Lucky you,” said Bonaparte. “Along with this miracle, do you also find that you see no ink on the floor?”

  She looked down. “Sir, with all my scrubbing, I can’t get up the whole stain. I’m afraid it’s gone down into the stone, sir.”

  Calvin at once sent his doodling bug into the surface of the marble and discovered that the ink had, indeed, penetrated beyond the reach of her scrubbing. Now was the chance to have Bonaparte notice him, not as a prisoner—even his guards were gone—but as a man of power. “Perhaps I can help,” he said.

  Bonaparte looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, though Calvin was quite aware that the Emperor had sized him up several times over the past half-hour. Bonaparte spoke to him in accented English. “Was it for scullery work you came to Paris, my dear American friend?”

  “I came to serve you, sir,” said Calvin. “Whether with a stained floor or a pained leg, I care not.”

  “Let’s see you with floors first,” said Bonaparte. “Give him the rags and bucket, girl.”

  “I don’t need them,” said Calvin. “I’ve already done it. Have her scrub again, and this time the stain will come right up.”

  Bonaparte glowered at the idea of serving as interpreter for an American prisoner and a scullery maid, but his curiosity got the better of his dignity and he gave the girl the order to scrub again. This time the ink came right up, and the stone was clean again. It had been child’s play for Calvin, but the awe in the girl’s face was the best possible advertisement for his wondrous power. “Sir,” she said, “I had only to pass the rag over the stain and it was gone!”

  The secretaries were eyeing Calvin carefully now—they weren’t fools, and they clearly suspected him of causi
ng both their discomfort and their relief, though some of them were pinching the legs to try to restore feeling after Calvin’s first, clumsier attempts at numbing pain. Now Calvin went back into their legs, restored feeling, and then gave the more delicate twist that removed pain. They watched him warily, as Bonaparte looked back and forth between his clerks and his prisoner.

  “I see you have been busy playing little jokes on my secretaries.”

  Without an answer, Calvin reached into the Emperor’s leg and, for just a moment, removed all pain. But only for a moment; he soon let it come back.

  Bonaparte’s face darkened. “What kind of man are you, to take away my pain for a moment and then send it back to me?”

  “Forgive me, sir,” said Calvin. “It’s easy to cure the pain I caused myself, in your men. Or even the pain from hours of kneeling, scrubbing floors. But the gout—that’s hard, sir, and I know of no cure, nor of any relief that lasts more than a little while.”

  “Longer than five seconds, though—I’ll wager you know how to do that.”

  “I can try.”

  “You’re the clever one,” said Bonaparte. “But I know a lie. You can take away the pain and yet you choose not to. How dare you hold me hostage to my pain?”

  Calvin answered in mild tones, though he knew he took his life in his hands to say such a bold thing in any tone: “Sir, you have held my whole body prisoner this whole time, when I was free before. I come here and find you already a prisoner of pain, and you complain to me that I do not set you free?”

  The secretaries gasped again, but not in pain this time. Even the scullery maid was shocked—so much so that she knocked her bucket over, spilling soapy, inky water over half the floor.

  Calvin quickly made the water evaporate from the floor, then made the residue of ink turn to fine, invisible dust.

  The scullery maid went screaming from the room.

  The secretaries, too, were on their feet. Bonaparte turned to them. “If I hear any rumor of this, you will all go to the Bastille. Find the girl and silence her—by persuasion or imprisonment, she deserves no torture. Now leave me alone with this extortionist, while I find out what he wants to get from me.”

  They left the room. As they were going, Little Napoleon and the guards returned, but Bonaparte sent them away as well, to his nephew’s ill-concealed fury.

  “All right, we’re alone,” said Bonaparte. “What do you want?”

  “I want to heal your pain.”

  “Then heal it and have done.”

  Calvin took the challenge, twisted the nerves just right, and saw Bonaparte’s face soften, losing the perpetual wince. “Such a gift as that,” murmured the Emperor, “and you spend it cleaning floors and taking stones from prison walls.”

  “It won’t last,” said Calvin.

  “You mean you choose not to make it last,” said Bonaparte.

  Calvin took the unusual step of telling the plain truth, sensing that Bonaparte would know if anything he said was a lie. “It’s not a cure. The gout is still there. I don’t understand the gout and I can’t cure it. I can take away the pain.”

  “But not for long.”

  Truthfully, Calvin answered, “I don’t know how long.”

  “And for what payment?” asked Bonaparte. “Come on, boy, I know you want something. Everyone does.”

  “But you’re Napoleon Bonaparte,” said Calvin. “I thought you knew what every man wanted.”

  “God doesn’t whisper it in my ear, if that’s what you think. And yes, I know what you want but I have no idea why you’ve come to me for it. You’re hungry to be the greatestman on Earth. I’ve met men with ambition like yours before—and women, too. Unfortunately I can’t easily bend such ambition into subservience to my interests. Generally I have to kill them, because they’re a danger to me.”

  Those words went like a knife through Calvin’s heart.

  “But you’re different,” said Bonaparte. “You mean me no harm. In fact, I’m just a tool to you. A means of gaining advantage. You don’t want my kingdom. I rule all of Europe, northern Africa, and much of the ancient East, and yet you want me only to tutor you in preparation for a much greater game. What game, on God’s green Earth, might that be?”

  Calvin never meant to tell him, but the words came blurting out. “I have a brother, an older brother, who has a thousand times my power.” The words galled him, burned his throat as he said them.

  “And a thousand times your virtue, too, I think,” said Bonaparte. But those words had no sting for Calvin. Virtue, as Alvin defined it, was waste and weakness. Calvin was proud to have little of it.

  “Why hasn’t your brother challenged me?” asked Bonaparte. “Why hasn’t he shown his face to me in all these years?”

  “He’s not ambitious,” said Calvin.

  “That is a lie,” said Bonaparte, “even though in your ignorance you believe it. There is no such thing as a living human being without ambition. St. Paul said it best: Faith, ambition, and love, the three driving forces of human life.”

  “I believe it was hope,” said Calvin. “Hope and charity.”

  “Hope is the sweet weak sister of ambition. Hope is ambition wishing to be liked.”

  Calvin smiled. “That’s what I’ve come for,” he said.

  “Not to heal my gout.”

  “To ease your pain, as you ease my ignorance.”

  “With powers like yours, what do you need with my small world-conquering gifts?” Bonaparte’s irony was plain and painful.

  “My powers are nothing compared to my brother’s, and he is the only teacher I can learn them from. So I need other powers that he doesn’t have.”

  “Mine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how do I know that you won’t turn on me and try to take my empire?”

  “If I wanted it I could have it now,” said Calvin.

  “It’s one thing to terrify people with displays of power,” said Bonaparte. “But terror only gets you obedience when you’re there. I have the power to hold men obedient to me even when my back is turned, even when there’s no chance I’d ever catch them in wrongdoing. They love me, they serve me with their whole hearts. Even if you sent every building in Paris crashing to the street, it wouldn’t win the people’s loyalty.”

  “That’s why I’m here, because I know that.”

  “Because you want to win the loyalty of your brother’s friends,” said Bonaparte. “You want them to spurn your brother and put you in his place.”

  “Call me Cain if you want, but yes,” said Calvin. “Yes.”

  “I can teach you that,” said Bonaparte. “But no pain. And no little games with the pain, either. If the pain comes back, I’ll have you killed.”

  “You can’t even hold me in a prison if I don’t want to stay there.”

  “When I decide to kill you, boy, you won’t even see it coming.”

  Calvin believed him.

  “Tell me, boy—“

  “Calvin.”

  “Boy, don’t interrupt me, don’t correct me.” Bonaparte smiled sweetly. “Tell me, Calvin, weren’t you afraid that I would win your loyalty and put your gifts to use in my service?”

  “As you said,” Calvin answered, “your powers have scant effect on people with ambition as great as your own. It’s only really the goodness in people that you turn against them to control them. Their generosity. Isn’t that right?”

  “In a sense, though it’s much more complicated than that. But yes.”

  Calvin smiled broadly. “Well, then, you see? I knew I was immune.”

  Bonaparte frowned. “Are you so sure of that? So proud to be a man utterly devoid of generosity?”

  Calvin’s smile faded just a little. “Old Boney, the terror of Europe, the toppler of empires—Old Boney is shocked at my lack of compassion?”

  “Yes,” said Bonaparte. “I never thought I’d see the like. A man I’ll never have power over... and yet I will let you stay with me, for the sake of my leg,
and I’ll teach you all that can be taught. For the sake of my leg.”

  Calvin laughed and nodded. “Then you’ve got a deal.”

  Only later, as he was being shown to a luxurious apartment in the palace did it occur to Calvin to wonder if, perhaps, Bonaparte’s admission that Calvin could not be controlled might not be just a ploy; if, perhaps, Bonaparte already had control over Calvin but, like all the Emperor’s other tools, Calvin continued to think that he was free.

  No, he told himself. Even if it’s true, what good will it do me to think about it? The deed’s done or it’s not done, and either way I’m still myself and still have Alvin to deal with. A thousand times more powerful than me! A thousand times more virtuous! We’ll see about that when the time comes, when I take your friends away from you, Alvin, the way you stole my birthright from me, you thieving Esau, you pit-digging Reuben, you jealous taunting Ishmael. God will give me my birthright, and has given me Bonaparte to teach me how to accomplish something with it.

  Alvin didn’t realize he was doing it. Daytimes he thought he was bearing his imprisonment right well, putting on a cheerful face for his visitors, singing now and then—harmonizing with the jailors when they knew the song and joined in. It was a jaunty sort of imprisonment, and everyone was saying that it was a shame for Alvin to be all cooped up, but wasn’t he taking it like a soldier?

  In his sleep, though, his hatred for the jail walls, for the sameness and lifelessness of the place, it came out in another kind of song, an inward music that harmonized with the greensong that once had tilled this part of the world. It was the music of the trees and the lesser plants, of the insects and spiders, of the furred and finny creatures that dwelt in the leaves, on the ground, in the earth, or in the cold streams and unstoppable rivers. And Alvin’s inner voice was tuned to it, knew all the melodies, and instead of harmonizing with jailors his heart sang with free creatures.