The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (35 page)

“Just wishful thinking on your part,” said Alvin.

“Bulletholes!” said Calvin. “What a cheerful mural to put on public display, Alvin.”

They reached the end of the corridor where Arthur Stuart was waiting.

“Howdy, Calvin,” said Arthur. “I see you made it out of Mexico City after all.”

“No thanks to you,” said Calvin. “Leaving me there to die like the others.”

Arthur didn’t bother to argue. He knew Alvin already knew the truth, and would not be inclined to believe Calvin’s version, which was naturally designed to pick a fight between Alvin and Arthur Stuart.

“I know Alvin’s glad you lived,” said Arthur Stuart. No need to say that Alvin was about the only one, apart from their mother and father.

“And I’ve forgiven Jim here for leaving me to have my heart ripped out.”

Jim Bowie didn’t rise to the bait, either. His attention was directed entirely toward Alvin. “Calvin told me what you’re building here,” said Bowie. “I want to be part of it.”

“Yes,” said Calvin. “If it’s a city of makers, how could you think to do it without the only other living maker.” He grinned at Arthur.

“We’re all makers here,” said Alvin, ignoring the fact that Calvin already knew how offensive his words were. “Come on along, my house is just down here.”

They met the women on the way, and Alvin introduced everybody to everybody. Jim Bowie was, to Arthur’s surprise, quite a charmer, able to put on elegant Camelot manners when there was someone to impress. Calvin was his normal saucy self—but Rien seemed to enjoy his banter, much to Arthur’s disgust, and when Calvin showered flattery on Marie d’Espoir, Arthur Stuart thought about causing him a subtle but permanent internal injury—but of course did nothing at all. You don’t start a duel with a maker who has more power and fewer scruples than you.

They got to the house and Alvin invited them inside to sit down. The furniture, except for Peggy’s rocking chair, was all rough-hewn benches and stools, but they were good enough to sit on—and Arthur had heard Peggy say that she didn’t wish for more comfortable furniture, because if the chairs were softer, company would be inclined to stay longer.

Calvin seemed to want to talk about his narrow escape from Mexico City, but since Tenskwa-Tawa had already told Alvin and Arthur Stuart all about it as soon as Arthur got back from his mission there, they were not inclined to hear a version of the story that made Calvin out to be something of a hero. “I’m glad you got out all right,” said Alvin—and meant it, which was more than Arthur Stuart could say for himself. “And Jim, I think you know that your going along with Arthur Stuart here probably saved the lives of all the other men who went with you, since they might not have gone if you had refused.”

“I don’t plan to die for any cause,” said Jim Bowie. “Nor any man, excepting only myself. I know that ain’t noble, but it prolongs my days, which is philosophy enough for me.”

He expected, Arthur thought, a bit more amusement or admiration for his attitude—but this wasn’t a saloon, and nobody here was drunk, and so it rang a little hollow. There were people here who
would
die for a cause, or for someone else’s sake.

It was Peggy, bless her heart, who came right to the point. “So where will you go now, Calvin?”

“Go?” said Calvin. “Why, this is the city of makers, and here I am. I had some experiences—I was just about to get to them, but I know when it’s not time for a tale—I had some experiences that made me realize how much I wished I’d paid more attention to Alvin back when he was trying to teach me stuff. I’m an impatient pupil, I reckon, so no wonder he kicked me out of school!”

Even this was a lie, and everyone there knew it, and it occurred to Arthur Stuart once again that Calvin seemed to lie just because he liked the sound of it, and not to be believed.

“I’m glad to have you,” said Alvin. “Whatever you’re willing to learn, I’ll be happy to teach, if I know it, or someone else will, if it’s something they know better than me.”

“
That’s
a short list,” said Calvin, chuckling. It should have been a compliment to the breadth of Alvin’s knack—but it came out sounding as if it were an accusation of vanity.

Arthur didn’t have to be told that his sister was furious that Calvin was staying and Alvin was welcoming him. He knew Peggy thought that Calvin would one day cause his brother’s death. But she said nothing about that, and instead turned to Jim Bowie. “And you, sir? Whither now?”

“I reckon I’ll stay, too,” said Bowie. “I liked what I saw up there. Well, no, not what I saw in the glass—don’t misunderstand me, Alvin—but the manner of seeing. What an achievement! There’s kings and queens would give up their kingdoms for an hour in that place.”

“I’m afraid,” said Alvin, “that you won’t be welcome inside when the tabernacle is built.”

Bowie’s expression darkened. “Why, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Might I ask why?”

“There’s some as finds the future in there,” said Alvin. “But a man who kills his enemies shouldn’t have access to a place that might show him where his future victims might be.”

Bowie barked out a laugh. “Oh, I’m too much of a killer for your tabernacle, is that it? Well, here’s a thought. Everybody here who has ever killed a man in anger, stand up with me!” Bowie rose to his feet and looked around. “What, am I the only one?” Then he grinned at Alvin. “Am I?”

Reluctantly, Alvin rose to his feet.

“Ah,” said Bowie. “Glad to know you admit it. I saw it in you from the start. You’ve killed, and killed with relish. You enjoyed it.”

“He killed the man who killed my mother!” cried Peggy.

“And he enjoyed it,” Bowie said again. “But it’s your place for visions, Al, I won’t dispute you about it. You can invite whoever you please. But that only applies to the building, Al. This is a free country, and a citizen of it can move to any town or county and take up residence and there ain’t a soul can stop him. Am I right?”

“I thought you were a subject of the King, from the Crown Colonies,” said Peggy.

“You know that an Englishman has only to cross the border and he’s a citizen of the U.S.A.,” said Bowie. “But I’ve gone them one better, and taken the oath just like a…Frenchman.” He grinned at Rien. “I think I know you, ma’am,” he said to her.

She looked at him with eyes like stones.

“I’ll be your neighbor like it or not,” said Bowie. “But I hope you like it, because I intend to be a peaceable citizen and make a lot of friends. Why, I might even run for office. I have a bent for politics, having once made a try at being emperor of Mexico.”

“As you said,” Alvin answered quietly. “It’s a free country.”

“I will admit I thought I’d get a warmer welcome from old friends.” He grinned at Arthur Stuart. “This lad saved my life in Mexico. Even though he surely would rather not have done it. I’ll never forget that.”

Arthur Stuart nodded. He knew which part Bowie would never forget.

“Well,” said Bowie. “The good cheer and bonhomie in this room is just too much for me. I’ll have to find a place where I find less cheer and more alcohol, if you catch my drift. I hear it may take going into Warsaw County to get that particular thirst satisfied. But I’ll be back to build me a cabin on some plot of land. Good day to you all.”

Bowie got up and left the cabin.

“An obnoxious fellow,” said Calvin loudly—Bowie could certainly hear him, even outside the door. “I don’t know how I managed the journey from Barcy to here without quarreling with him. Maybe it was his big knife that kept the peace.” Calvin had a remarkable ability to laugh at his own jokes with such gusto that one could miss the fact that he was the only one laughing.

Calvin turned to Arthur Stuart. “Of course, I could have got here sooner if somebody had bothered to take me along the way you did with Jim and his crew. He says you were able to make them run like they were flying, as if the ground rose up to meet their feet and trees got right out of their way. But I suppose I’m not worthy of such transportation.”

“I offered to let you come along,” said Arthur Stuart—and then immediately regretted it. Arguing with Calvin’s lies just made him more enthusiastic.

“If you’d told me about this—greensong, was it?—I’d have come with you in a second. But to come along just because the Red Prophet was making threats—well, I reckon he wanted to conquer Mexico as bad as we did, and he got there first. Now he’s got the empire, and I’m just an ordinary fellow—well, as ordinary as a maker can ever be. You, Alvin, you pretend to be ordinary, don’t you? But you always manage to let people see a bit of what you can do. I understand! You want to be thought modest, but at the same time, nobody thinks a man’s modest unless they know what great things he’s being modest about, eh?” He laughed and laughed at that one.

The baby was fussy tonight, and since Margaret had already fed him and Alvin had changed his diaper, there was nothing for it but to carry him around and sing to him. Alvin had long since learned that it was his voice that Vigor wanted—something about the deep male tones vibrating in Alvin’s chest, right next to the baby’s head. So he let Margaret go back to sleep and walked outside in the air of a warm September evening.

He expected to be the only person abroad in the night, except for the night watchmen with their lanterns, and they’d be more on the outskirts of town, one along the river and the other along the edge of the bluff. But to Alvin’s surprise, someone else soon fell into step beside him. His brother, Measure.

“Evening, Al,” said Measure.

“Evening yourself,” said Alvin. “Baby was fussy.”

“I was the fussy one in my house. I sent myself out so I wouldn’t cause any trouble.”

“Calvin’s staying with you, then?”

“I never could figure out why Ma and Pa felt the need to have the one more child. Not like there was a shortage.”

“They didn’t know what he’d be,” said Alvin. “There’s never too many children in the house, Measure. But you’re not responsible for what they want, only for what you teach them.”

“Alvin, I’m afraid,” said Measure.

“Big man like you,” said Alvin. “That’s just silly.”

“What we’re doing here, it’s wonderful. But how folks hate us and fear us and talk against us, that’s pretty fierce. The law’s against us—oh, I know, that charter is mighty fine, but it’ll never stand up, not with us resisting the fugitive slave law. And with Calvin here—I don’t know how, but he’s going to cause trouble.”

“It’s the Unmaker,” said Alvin. “It always is. No matter how fast you build things up, he’s there, trying to tear it down even faster.”

“Then he’s bound to win, isn’t he?”

“That’s the funny thing,” said Alvin. “All my life, I’ve seen that all I can build is just a little bit, and he tears down so much. And yet…things keep getting built, don’t they? Good things. And I finally realized, here in this town, watching all these people—the reason the Unmaker is gonna lose, in the long run, isn’t because somebody like me or you does some big heroic deed and knocks him for a loop. It’ll be because of all these people, hundreds of them, thousands of them, each building something in his own way—a family, a marriage, a house, a farm, a sturdy machine, a tabernacle, a classroom full of students just a little wiser than they were. Something. And after a while, you come to realize that all those somethings, they add up to everything, and all the Unmaker’s nothings, you put them all together and they’re still nothing. You see what I mean?”

“You must be smarter than Plato,” said Measure, “because I can understand
him
.”

“Oh, you understood me,” said Alvin. “The question is, when we go down this dangerous road, with so many hands against us, will you be there with me, Measure? Will you stand beside me?”

“I will, to the end,” said Measure. “And not just because you saved my life that time, you know.”

“Oh, that wasn’t much. You were trying to save mine, as I recall, so it was a fair trade on the spot.”

“That’s how I see it,” said Measure.

“So why
will
you stand beside me? Because you love me so much?” He said it jokingly, but he thought that it was true.

“No,” said Measure. “I love all my brothers, you know. Even Calvin.”

“Why, then?”

“Because the things you make, I want them to be made. You see? I love the work. I want it to
be
.”

“And you’re willing to pay for it, right along with me?”

“You’ll see,” said Measure.

They stood facing the rows of crystal blocks, ready to become the gleaming tabernacle of the Crystal City. The baby was asleep. But Alvin tilted him up anyway, just enough that his little sleeping face was pointed toward the blocks. “Look at this place,” he said to Vigor—and to Measure, too. “I didn’t choose this place. I didn’t choose my life, or the powers I have, or even most of the things that have happened to me. But for all the things that have been forced on me, I’m still a free man. And you know why? Because I choose them anyway. What was forced on me, I choose just the same.” He turned and faced Measure. “Like you, Measure. I choose to be a maker, because I love the making.”

So much of what a novelist does is made up at the moment of composition—details of milieu and character, questions that need to be answered, a secondary character’s hopes and fears—that it is impossible, over the years between volumes of an ongoing series like this, to remember everything. As a result, there are contradictions between volumes (or even within a volume), threads that are left dangling, questions that remain unanswered.

Unless the novelist is fortunate enough to have a group of readers who are willing to collaborate by checking the current composition against what went before. In the online community that has formed at our Hatrack River Web site (
http://www.hatrack.com
) there were several generous and careful readers who volunteered to vet this manuscript for just such problems.

Undoubtedly there are still problems remaining. During my years as a professional proofreader and copy editor I learned that no matter how careful you are and no matter how many proofreaders and editors go over it, in a work of any length some problems will always get through. The errors that remain are entirely my fault, but the errors you don’t see were corrected because of the work of Michael Sloan (“Papa Moose” on Hatrack), Noah Siegel (“Calvin Maker”), Adam Spieckermann, Anna Jo Isabell (“BannaOj”), “Kayla,” and the most dedicated of all, Andy Wahr (“Hobbes”).

In addition, Michael Sloan won a trivia contest at EnderCon in July of 2002, and the prize was to have a character named after you in a future book of mine. My intention—which everyone understood—was that this would be a “cameo,” a momentary appearance of a character with the contest winner’s name. But it happened that Michael Sloan wrote a fascinating autobiographical note as his “thousandth post” on the Hatrack River forum that triggered some interesting possibilities in my mind, and as a result the character named for him—“Papa Moose,” his online identity at Hatrack—became considerably more important in the story than either he or I had expected. Since his wife has long been nicknamed Squirrel, as a reference by the two of them to the famous moose and squirrel of television cartoon fame, I naturally gave that name to the character’s wife. So the characters of Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel in this book are named, not for Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle Moose, but for two longtime readers of my work and contributors to the life of the Hatrack River community.

Oh, all right, I admit that I enjoyed having Rocky and Bullwinkle references in the book. If I could have George Washington beheaded in the first volume and have Alvin dream the plot of
Lord of the Rings
in a later one, why shouldn’t I welcome a chance to allude to a masterpiece of comic fantasy from my childhood?

Roland Brown read the novel just after it was finished, and offered wise suggestions on the character of Old Bart and several other points, which I gratefully accepted.

My editor, Beth Meacham, and my publisher, Tom Doherty, deserve great thanks for their patience with my unpredictable delivery dates and for the wonderful things they do for and with my books after I turn them in. It was because Tom and Beth took a chance on this strange American fantasy series back in 1983—based on, of all things, an epic poem I wrote—that I was able to leave fulltime employment for the second time and return to the freelance writing life for the past twenty years.

Barbara Bova, my agent since 1978, has watched over my career assiduously, and she and her husband, Ben Bova—the
Analog
editor who discovered me back in 1976—have been dear friends all this time. This book, like all my others, exists because Barbara won for me a place in the commerce of books that allows me time enough to write.

Family members and friends have also read this book, chapter by chapter, as I wrote it, catching errors, reminding me of questions still unanswered, and making occasional suggestions that opened doors to my imagination. Erin and Phillip Absher, Kathryn H. Kidd, and my son Geoffrey were all of great help to me.

My wife, Kristine, remains my first reader, the one who receives my pages at her bedside when I finally crawl downstairs at three or five or seven
A.M.
after yet another late-night writing session. She also tends to the family and business matters that would, if I had to attend to them, seriously interfere with my ability to concentrate on my writing. The most important work of my life has been and continues to be my family, and she is my collaborator and partner in every aspect of that oeuvre.

And to Zina, our nine-year-old, my thanks for her patience with a father who vanishes for hours and days at a time, only to emerge with books she does not yet enjoy reading. So I’ll leave her to the pleasures of Lemony Snicket, Harry Potter,
Avalon
, and the many other books that accompany her throughout her life, hoping someday to earn a place on that illustrious list.

I began writing this book on my laptop while my daughter Emily drove along I-40 toward Los Angeles. I continued writing at my cousin Mark’s house in L.A., at my home in Greensboro, North Carolina, and on the highway between Greensboro and Buena Vista, Virginia, while Kristine drove the car. I finished the book in Avon, a town on Hatteras Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I crossed a lot of water, but always on bridges.