Orson Card - THE CRYSTAL CITY

Alvin examined the water closer, and as he expected, it was all aswarm with tiny animals and plants and the eggs of skeeters and other kinds of insects. He knew from experience that water like this was likely to make folks sick, if they didn't boil it first to kill these things. But since they were invisible to most folks, who couldn't see so small, they wouldn't feel much urgency to do it.

He reckoned that Mama Squirrel's law against killing animals didn't apply this far from her house, and besides, what she didn't know wouldn't offend her. So he spent a few minutes working on the water, breaking down all the tiny creatures into bits so small they couldn't do no harm. Not that he broke them one by one-that would have taken half his life. He just talked to them, silently, showing them in his mind what he wanted them to do. Break themselves apart. Spill their inner parts into the water. He explained it was to keep folks from coming to harm by drinking. He wasn't sure just what these tiny creatures actually understood. What mattered was that they did Alvin's will. Even the skeeter eggs.

As if the skeeters understood that he'd just wiped out their progeny, they made him pay in blood for having cleaned the water. Well, he'd live with that, itch welts and all. He didn't use his knack to make himself comfy.

"I know you're doing something," said Arthur Stuart. "But I can't tell what."

"I'm fetching water for Mama Squirrel," said Alvin.

"You're standing there looking at the fountain like you was seeing a vision. Either that or trying real hard not to break wind."

"Hard to tell those things apart," said Alvin. "It gives visionaries a bad name."

"Get bad enough gas, though, and you can start a church," said Arthur Stuart.

They filled the jugs, taking their turns along with the other folks, some of whom looked at them curiously, the rest just minding their own business. One of the lookers, a young woman not much older than Arthur Stuart, bumped into Alvin as she reached to fill a jar. Then, her jar full, she walked up to Arthur with a bit of a swagger and, in a French accent, said, "Person rich enough to own a slave got no right to draw from this fountain. There is cisterns uptown for them with the money."

"We're not drawing for ourselves," said Arthur Stuart, mildly enough. "We're hauling this for Mama Squirrel's house."

The girl spat in the dust. "Hexy house."

An older woman joined in. "You pretty bad trained, boy," she said. "You talk to a white girl and never say ma'am."

"Sorry ma'am," said Arthur Stuart.

"Where we come from," said Alvin, "polite folks talk to the master."

The woman glared at him and moved away.

The teenage girl, though, was still curious. "That Mama Squirrel, is it true she has babies of all colors?"

"I don't know about that," said Alvin. "Seems she has some children that tan real dark in the sun, and some that just freckle."

"Personne know where they get the money to live," said the girl. "Some folks say they teach them kids to steal, send them into the city at night. Dark faces, you can't see them so good."

"Nothing like that," said Arthur Stuart. "See, they own the patent on stupid, and every time somebody in the city says something dumb, they get three cents."

The girl looked at him with squinty eyes. "They be the richest people in town, then, so I think you lie."

"I reckon you owe a dollar a day to whoever has the patent on no-sense-of-humor."

"You are not a slave," said the girl.

"I'm a slave to fortune," said Arthur Stuart. "I'm in bondage to the universe, and my only manumission will be death."

"You gone to school, you."

"I only learned whatever my sister taught me," said Arthur Stuart truthfully.

"I have a knack," said the girl.

"Good for you," said Arthur Stuart.

"This was sick water," she said, "and now is healthy. Your master healed it."

Alvin realized that this conversation had taken far too dangerous a turn. To Arthur he said, "If you're done offending everybody in the neighborhood by talking face to face with a white girl, and not looking down and saying ma'am, it's time to haul this water back."

"I was not offended," said the girl. "But if you heal the water, maybe you come home with me and heal my mama."

"I'm no healer," said Alvin.

"I think what she got," said the girl, "is the yellow fever."

If anybody had thought nobody was paying attention to this conversation, they'd have got their wake-up when she said that. It was like every nose on every face was tied to a string that got pulled when she said "yellow fever."

"Did you say yellow fever?" asked an old woman.

The girl looked at her blankly.

"She did," said another woman. "Marie la Morte a dit."

"Dead Mary says her ma's got yellow fever!" called someone.

And now the strings were pulled in the opposite direction. Every head turned to face away from the girl-Dead Mary was her name, apparently-and then all the feet set to pumping and in a few minutes, Alvin, Arthur, and Dead Mary were the only humans near the fountain. Some folks quit the place so fast their jugs was left behind.

"I reckon nobody's going to steal these jars if we don't leave them here too long," said Alvin. "Let's go see your mother."

"They will be stole for sure," said Dead Mary.

"I'll stay and watch them," said Arthur Stuart.

"Sir and ma'am," said Alvin. "And never look a white person in the eye."

"When there's nobody around, can I just set here and pretend to be human?"

"Please yourself," said Alvin.

It took a while to get to Dead Mary's house. Down streets until they ran out of streets, and then along paths between shacks, and finally into swampy land till they came to a little shack on stilts. Skeeters were thick as smoke in some spots.

"How can you live with all these skeeters?" asked Alvin.

"I breathe them in and cough them out," said Dead Mary.

"How come they call you that?" asked Alvin. "Dead Mary, I mean."

"Marie la Morte? Cause I know when someone is sick before he know himself. And I know how the sickness will end."

"Am I sick?"

"Not yet, no," said the girl.

"What makes you think I can heal your mother?"

"She will die if somebody does not help, and the yellow fever, personne who live here knows how to cure it."

It took Alvin a moment to decide that the French word she said must mean nobody. "I don't know a thing about yellow fever."

"It's a terrible thing," said the girl. "Quick hot fever. Then freezing cold. My mother's eyes turn yellow. She screams with pain in her neck and shoulders and back. And then when she's not screaming, she looks sad."

"Yellow and fevery," said Alvin. "I reckon the name kind of says it all." Alvin knew better than to ask what caused the disease. The two leading theories about the cause of disease were punishment for sin and a curse from somebody you offended. Course, if either one was right, it was out of Alvin's league.

Alvin was a healer, of a kind-that was just natural for a maker, being sort of included in the knack. But what he was good at healing was broken bones and failing organs. A man tore a muscle or chopped his foot, and Alvin could heal him up good. Or if gangrene set in, Alvin could clean it out, make the good flesh get shut of the bad. With gangrene, too, he knew the pus was full of all kinds of little animals, and he knew which ones didn't belong in the body. But he couldn't do like he did with the water and just tell everything alive to break apart-that would kill the person right along with the sickness.

Diseases that made your nose or bowels run were hard to track down, and Alvin never knew whether they were serious or something that would just get better if you left it alone or slept a lot. The stuff that went on inside a living body was just too complicated, and most of the important things was way too small for Alvin to understand what all was going on.