The Crystal City Part 36

"I don't look beyond this town now," said Margaret. "I try to forget that the world outside is maneuvering itself toward war. I pretend that somehow it will stay beyond the borders of our little county."

"Not so little. Very and Abe got us good boundaries. Lots of room to grow."

"I'm more concerned about how much our people grow inside them."

"Can't make them," said Alvin.

"I know."

Vigor was done with breakfast, and now Alvin cracked the boiled eggs and sliced them onto a plate for his and Margaret's breakfast.

"Mayor of the fastest-growing city in Noisy River, and you have to fix your own breakfast."

"I'm fixing your your breakfast, and that's all the difference." breakfast, and that's all the difference."

"My but we're in love," said Margaret.

Old pain and ancient loneliness hung in the air between them.

"Alvin," said Margaret. "I always tried to do what was best."

"I know," said Alvin.

"And sometimes what was best was not to tell you all that I knew."

Alvin said nothing.

"You never would have gone to Barcy," she said. "We never would have had all these people, the core of this City of Makers."

"Might have gone to Barcy all the same," said Alvin.

"But you would never have gone near Rien."

"You sure that saving her was what spread the fever?"

"In all the paths where you never met her, she died without a single other soul catching the disease."

Alvin smiled a wan smile and stuffed an entire egg into his mouth. "At least I've got good manners," he said, spraying bits of yolk onto the table.

"Yes, I can see that all those lessons I gave you have paid off. I can't take you out in company."

"Guess we'll just have to stay in."

"You'll never listen to me again, will you?" she said.

"I'm listening right now."

"But you'll never do something just because I tell you that you ought to."

"Have you changed?" asked Alvin. "Or do you still think you're the one best able to decide whether I should know the consequences of my deeds?"

"I've already promised a dozen times over."

"But I don't believe you," said Alvin. "I believe you mean it now, but in the moment, when you're deciding what to tell me and what not to tell, I think you'll hold back the things I most want to know, if you're afraid that knowing will cause me harm."

"You're not the most important thing in the world to me now, you know," said Margaret.

"Am so," said Alvin.

"The baby is."

"The baby's just little and he can't get into much trouble yet."

"You did."

"You got the habit of looking out for me too deep set. I can't trust you to let me decide for myself."

"Yes you can," said Margaret. "Besides, you don't need me to tell you everything now."

"I can't control what the crystal ball shows me. It's not like your knack."

"It's better."

"I think the blood and water make more of a mirror than a window."

"I think it shows good people how to do good, and bad people how to do bad. You won't come asking me what to do, when you can see what's good and right in the walls of the house you're building."

"Don't know if we should rightly call it a house," said Alvin.

"It's not a chapel-n.o.body's going to preach."

"A factory, maybe," said Alvin. "Or a house of mirrors, like in that carnival in New Amsterdam."

"Then it's a house after all," said Margaret. "And I was right." right."

"Didn't say you weren't right," right," said Alvin. "Just said I'd like to have chosen for myself." said Alvin. "Just said I'd like to have chosen for myself."

"You'd rather have chosen wrong, knowing, than chosen right, not knowing."

"Well, when you put it that way, it makes me sound like a dunce on purpose."

"Indeedy," said Margaret.

"Do I have to be mayor?" said Alvin. "I'd rather just spend my time building the ... crystal."

"They all look to you, anyway, whether you have the t.i.tle or not. You're the one who looks out for them, who watches the borders. You're the one who causes the slave-catchers who come near here to keep losing their way. You're the one who figured out that draining the swamp would stop the malaria."

"It was Measure who suggested it," said Alvin.

"You're the one who watches over everybody like a mother hen."

"Then let me run for mother hen."

"Alvin," said Margaret. "So what if you don't care for the t.i.tle? You're going to be doing the job anyway, and it would be quite unkind of you to make someone else take the t.i.tle, when everybody will know you're the real leader. Take the name upon you, and don't burden someone else with it, when they'll never have the authority."

"Didn't think of someone else having to do it," said Alvin.

"I know you didn't," said Margaret primly. "Because you're still a hopelessly ignorant journeyman smith."

"I am, you know," said Alvin.

"You know I was teasing," said Margaret.

"But I am," said Alvin. "'Cause the thing I'm building, it's not some cathedral made of visionary crystal. It's the city. It's the people. And I can make the blocks of crystal water as pure as can be, I can make the webs of blood that hold them up strong and true, we can plumb the walls straight, we can dwell inside it all the livelong day and see great visions and small memories according to our own desires. But I can't make one bad person good."

"You can make many a good person better."

"Can't," said Alvin. "They have to do it their own selves."

"Well, of course, but you help."

"I'm trying to knit everybody together as one people, and I don't think it can be done. Now that the journey's over, the French folks suddenly don't want much to do with the former slaves. And the former house slaves lord it over the former field slaves, and the blacks who were already free in Barcy lord it over all of them, and the ones who still remember Africa think they're the kings of creation-"

"The queens, more likely," said Margaret.

"And then there's all the folks who've been close to me for years, they come here and think they know everything, but they weren't on the journey, they didn't cross over Pontchartrain on that crystal bridge, they didn't camp in a circle of fog, they didn't run before the face of the Mizzippy dam, they didn't live being fed by reds on the far side of the river. You see? They think they're closest to me, but they went down a different road and there's nothing but divisions among the people and I can't make it right. Even Verily can't do more than patch up some of the tears in the fabric here and there, and that's his knack!"

"Give it time."

"Will it last, Margaret?" asked Alvin. "Will the things I'm building outlast me?"

"I haven't looked," said Margaret.

"And you expect me to believe you?"

"I can't always see, when it comes to you and your works."

"You've looked, and you've seen. You just don't want to tell me."

A single tear spilled over one eyelid, and Margaret looked away. "Some of the things you're building will outlast you."

"Which ones?"

"Arthur Stuart," said Margaret. "You're building him, and you've done a fine job."

"He builds himself."

"Alvin," she said sharply. Then softer: "Alvin, my love, if there's anyone in the world who understands this, it's you. Everything you make builds itself, or thinks it does. That's what making is, isn't it? To persuade things to want want to be the way they need to be. People are the hardest to persuade, that's all." to be the way they need to be. People are the hardest to persuade, that's all."

"Is Arthur Stuart the only thing I've created that outlasts me?"

She shook her head. "I see now that you were right. I can't keep my promise. I can't tell you everything." She faced him, and now her cheeks were striped with tears, and her eyes were full of longing and regret. "But not because I'm trying to manipulate you or control you or get you to do something you wouldn't otherwise do, I promise that, and I'm keeping that promise."

"So why won't you tell me?"

"Because I hate knowing the future," said Margaret. "It robs the present of its joy. And I won't make you live the way I do, seeing the end of everything when it's still young and hopeful to everyone else."

"So the city fails."

"Your life," said Margaret, "is a life of great accomplishments, and the best things you make will last for as many lifetimes as I can see." Then she raised the baby higher in her arms, and though little Vigor was sleeping, she buried her face in the blanket he was wrapped in and wept.

Alvin knelt beside her and put an arm around her and nuzzled her shoulder. "I'm a bad husband, to plague you like this."

"No you're not," she said, her voice m.u.f.fled by the baby, by weeping.

"Am so."

"You're the husband I want."

"Your bad judgment."

"I know."

"You tell me what I need to know to be a good man," said Alvin.

"But you are one, always, whether I tell you anything or not."

"You tell me that much, and I won't ask for more." He kissed her. "And I'm sorry that you carry the burden that you do."

"I'm not sorry for it," she said. "It's who I am. But I wouldn't wish it on anyone else, that's all."

Arthur Stuart watched the men digging the foundation of the observatory-for so Verily insisted on calling it, and Arthur liked the name. They dug deep to bedrock all the way around the outcropping of stone where the water came out. That would not be touched-it would remain inside, forever pouring its water out to flow in a clear, cold stream down the bluff and into the Mizzippy. It was the dry season now and other streams had slackened or gone dry, but this one flowed exactly as it had all summer.

The men digging the foundation trench-did they know that Alvin could have cleared this all away in just a few minutes? That he could have made the topsoil and the rocky subsoil flow upward and pour out onto the outside of the trench just by showing the dirt what he wanted it to do?

It was one of the perverse things Alvin had always done, making Arthur Stuart labor with his hands to make things that Alvin could have made in a moment. Like the time Alvin made him work half the summer making a canoe, burning and digging at a thick log until it was hollowed out. Now Arthur had learned enough makery that he could do it in ten minutes; it hardly mattered that Alvin could do it in ten seconds, ten minutes was good enough for Arthur Stuart.

But now Arthur was beginning to see what Alvin had been after, all that time. It wasn't that digging the canoe helped Arthur learn how to use the hidden powers of makery, not at all. It was the deeper, truer lesson: That the maker is the one who is part of what he makes. If Alvin had simply made the canoe, then it would have been Alvin's canoe. But because Arthur Stuart worked so hard to make it, it was his his canoe, too. He was part of it. And if he had not gotten to know the wood-the shape of it inside the tree, the hard and soft of it, the way it burned slow and held its strength and even got harder where it had been scorched-then would he now be able to send his doodlebug through it and understand the virtue of the living wood? Could he be the maker that he was, if he had not been the clumsy boy with sweat pouring down his face and back, laboring with his hands? canoe, too. He was part of it. And if he had not gotten to know the wood-the shape of it inside the tree, the hard and soft of it, the way it burned slow and held its strength and even got harder where it had been scorched-then would he now be able to send his doodlebug through it and understand the virtue of the living wood? Could he be the maker that he was, if he had not been the clumsy boy with sweat pouring down his face and back, laboring with his hands?

These men who were putting in their day, digging the foundation, they couldn't drip their blood into the Mizzippy and come up with blocks of visionary crystal. But they could dig into the earth, so when the finished observatory rose into the sky and people went inside to see what they could see, to learn what they might be, these men would be able to say, that building stands on the foundation I dug. I helped make that miraculous place. It has my sweat in it, along with Alvin Maker's blood.

There was a man standing on the far side of the cleared land, watching, not the diggers, but Arthur Stuart. It took a moment for Arthur to realize who it was.

"Taleswapper!" he cried, and he ran full tilt right toward him, leaping over the trench just as a man was about to pitch a spadeful of earth, earning Arthur an irritated curse as the man had to stop himself in midswing and spill half the dirt back into the hole. "Taleswapper, I thought that you were dead!"