He didn’t fool himself, and there was nobody else down here to fool.

  It was bitter. He’d spent a lot of years thinking about bars of gold or bags of it. He’d always pictured it hidden behind a curtain. He’d pull on the curtain and it would billow out in the water, and there would be the bags of gold, and he’d just take them out and that would be it. But there weren’t any curtains, weren’t any hidey-holes, there was nothing at all, and if he had a future, he’d have to find it somewhere else.

  He swam back to the door leading to the stairway. Now he could see the pile of garbage better, and it occurred to him to wonder how it got there. Every other room was completely empty. The garbage couldn’t have been carried in by the water, because the only windows that were open were in the steeple, and they were above the water line. He swam close and picked up a piece. It was metal. They were all metal, except a few stones, and it occurred to him that this might be it after all. If you’re hiding a treasure, you don’t put it in bags or ingots, you leave it around looking like garbage and people leave it alone.

  He gathered up as many of the thin metal pieces as he could carry in one hand and swam carefully up the stairwell. Lehi would have to come down and help him carry it up; they could make bags out of their shirts to carry lots of it at a time.

  He splashed out into the air and then walked backward up the last few steps and across the submerged floor. Lehi was still sitting on the sill, and now Rain was there beside him, her bare feet dangling in the water. When he got to them he turned around and held out the metal in his hands. He couldn’t see their faces well, because the outside of the facemask was blurry with water and kept catching sunlight.

  “You scraped your knee,” said Rain.

  Deaver handed her his flashlight, and now that his hand was free, he could pull his mask off and look at them. They were very serious. He held out the metal pieces toward them. “Look what I found down there.” Lehi took a couple of the metal pieces from him. Rain never took her eyes from Deaver’s face.

  “It’s old cans, Deaver,” Lehi said quietly.

  “No it isn’t,” said Deaver. But he looked at his fistful of metal sheets and realized it was true. They had been cut down the side and pressed flat, but they were sure enough cans.

  “There’s writing on it,” said Lehi. “It says, Dear Lord heal my girl Jenny please I pray.”

  Deaver set down his handful on the sill. Then he took one, turned it over, found the writing. “Forgive my adultery I will sin no more.”

  Lehi read another. “Bring my boy safe from the plains O Lord God.” Each message was scratched with a nail or a piece of glass, the letters crudely formed.

  “They used to say prayers all day in the temple, and people would bring in names and they’d say the temple prayers for them,” said Rain. “Nobody prays here now, but they still bring the names. On metal so they’ll last.”

  “We shouldn’t read these,” said Lehi. “We should put them back.” There were hundreds, maybe thousands of those metal prayers down there. People must come here all the time, Deaver realized. The Mormons must have a regular traffic coming here and leaving these things behind. But nobody told me.

  “Did you know about this?”

  Rain nodded.

  “You brought them here, didn’t you.”

  “Some of them. Over the years.”

  “You knew what was down there.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “She told you not to come,” said Lehi.

  “You knew about this too?”

  “I knew people came, I didn’t know what they did.”

  And suddenly the magnitude of it struck him. Lehi and Rain had both known. All the Mormons knew, then. They all knew, and he had asked again and again, and no one had told him. Not even his friends.

  “Why’d you let me come out here?”

  “Tried to stop you,” said Rain.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  She looked him in the eye. “Deaver, you would’ve thought I was givin’ you the runaround. And you would have laughed at this if I told you. I thought it was better if you saw it. Then maybe you wouldn’t go tellin’ people how dumb the Mormons are.”

  “You think I would?” He held up another metal prayer and read it aloud. “Come quickly, Lord Jesus, before I die.” He shook it at her. “You think I’d laugh at these people?”

  “You laugh at everything, Deaver.”

  Deaver looked at Lehi. This was something. Lehi had never said before. Deaver would never laugh at something that was really important. And this was really important to them, to them both.

  “This is yours,” Deaver said. “All this stuff is yours.”

  “I never left a prayer here,” said Lehi.

  But when he said yours he didn’t mean just them, just Lehi and Rain. He meant all of them, all the people of the Mormon Sea, all the ones who had known about it but never told him even though he asked again and again. All the people who belonged here. “I came to find something here for me, and you knew all the time it was only your stuff down there.” Lehi and Rain looked at each other, then back at Deaver.

  “It isn’t ours,” said Rain.

  “I never been here before,” said Lehi.

  “It’s your stuff.” He sat down in the water and began taking off the underwater gear.

  “Don’t be mad,” said Lehi. “I didn’t know.”

  “You knew more than you told me. All the time I thought we were friends, but it wasn’t true. You two had this place in common with all the other people, but not with me. Everybody but me.”

  Lehi carefully took the metal sheets to the stairway and dropped them. They sank at once, to drift down and take their place on the pile of supplications.

  Lehi rowed them through the skyscrapers to the east of the old city, and then Rain started the motor and they skimmed along the surface of the lake. The Lake Patrol didn’t see them, but Deaver knew now that it didn’t matter much if they did. The Lake Patrol was mostly Mormons. They undoubtedly knew about the traffic here, and let it happen as long as it was discreet. Probably the only people they stopped were the people who weren’t in on it.

  All the way back to Magna to return the underwater gear, Deaver sat in the front of the boat, not talking to the others, not letting them see how his eyes kept welling up. Where Deaver sat, the bow of the boat seemed to curve under him. The faster they went, the less the boat seemed to touch the water. Just skimming over the surface, never really touching deep; making a few waves, but the water always smoothed out again.

  Those two people in the back of the boat, he felt kind of sorry for them. They still lived in a drowned city, they belonged down there, and the fact they couldn’t go there broke their hearts. But not Deaver. His city wasn’t even built yet. He blinked, and his eyes cleared. His city was tomorrow.

  He’d driven a salvage truck and lived in a closet long enough. Maybe he’d go south into the New Soil Lands. Maybe qualify on a piece of land. Own something, plant in the soil, maybe he’d come to belong there. As for this place, well, he never had belonged here, just like all the foster homes and schools along the way, just one more stop for a year or two or three, he knew that all along. Never did make any friends here, but that’s how he wanted it. Wouldn’t be right to make friends, ’cause he’d just move on and disappoint them. Didn’t see no good in doing that to people.

  Hatrack River

  Orson Scott Card has just become the recipient of a Nebula for his novel, Ender’s Game, and Tor books has recently published an excellent sequel to that novel, Speaker for the Dead. The following fantasy is set in eastern Ohio in 1805, and Mr. Card tells us that it uses authentic frontier magic practices.

  Little Peggy was very careful with the eggs. She rooted her hand through the straw till her fingers bumped something hard and heavy. She gave no never mind to the chicken drips. After all, Mama never even crinkled her face to open up Cally’s most spetackler diapers. Even when the chicken drips were wet and stringy and made her fingers stick together, little Peggy gave no never mind. She just pushed the straw apart, wrapped her hand around the egg, and lifted it out of the brood box. All this while standing tip-toe on a wobbly stool, reaching high above her head. Mama said she was too young for egging, but little Peggy showed her. Every day she felt in every brood box and brought in every egg, every single one, that’s what she did.

  Every one, she said in her mind, over and over. I got to reach into every one.

  Then little Peggy looked back into the northeast corner, the darkest place in the whole coop, and there sat Bloody Mary in her brood box, looking like the devil’s own bad dream, hatefulness shining out of her nasty eyes, saying Come here little girl and give me nips. I want nips of finger and nips of thumb and if you come real close and try to take my egg I’ll get a nip of eye from you.

  Most animals didn’t have much heartfire, but Bloody Mary’s was strong and made a poison smoke. Nobody else could see it, but little Peggy could. Bloody Mary dreamed of death for all folks, but most specially for a certain little girl five years old, and little Peggy had the marks on her fingers to prove it. At least one mark, anyway, and even if Papa said he couldn’t see it, little Peggy remembered how she got it and nobody could blame her none if she sometimes forgot to reach under Bloody Mary who sat there like a bushwhacker waiting to kill the first folks that just tried to come by. Nobody’d get mad if she just sometimes forgot to look there.

  I forgot forgot forgot. I looked in every brood box, every one, and if one got missed then I forgot forgot forgot.

  Everybody knew Bloody Mary was a lowdown chicken and too mean to give any eggs that wasn’t rotten anyway.

  I forgot.

  She got the egg basket inside before Mama even had the fire het, and Mama was so pleased she let little Peggy put the eggs one by one into the cold water. Then Mama put the pot on the hook and swung it right on over the fire. Boiling eggs you didn’t have to wait for the fire to slack, you could do it smoke and all.

  “Peg,” said Papa.

  That was Mama’s name, but Papa didn’t say it in his Mama voice. He said it in his little-Peggy-you’re-in-dutch voice, and little Peggy knew she was completely found out, and so she turned right around and yelled what she’d been planning to say all along.

  “I forgot, Papa!”

  Mama turned and looked at little Peggy in surprise. Papa wasn’t surprised though. He just raised an eyebrow. He was holding his hand behind his back. Little Peggy knew there was an egg in that hand. Bloody Mary’s nasty egg.

  “What did you forget, little Peggy?” asked Papa, talking soft.

  Right that minute little Peggy reckoned she was the stupidest girl ever born on the face of the earth. Here she was denying before anybody accused her of anything.

  But she wasn’t going to give up, not right off like that. She couldn’t stand to have them mad at her and she just wanted them to let her go away and live in England. So she put on her innocent face and said, “I don’t know, Papa.”

  She figgered England was the best place to go live, cause England had a Lord Protector. From the look in Papa’s eye, a Lord Protector was pretty much what she needed just now.

  “What did you forget?” Papa asked again.

  “Just say it and be done, Horace,” said Mama. “If she’s done wrong then she’s done wrong.”

  “I forgot one time, Papa,” said little Peggy. “She’s a mean old chicken and she hates me.”

  Papa answered soft and slow. “One time,” he said.

  Then he took his hand from behind him. Only it wasn’t no single egg he held, it was a whole basket. And that basket was filled with a clot of straw—most likely all the straw from Bloody Mary’s box—and that straw was mashed together and glued tight with dried-up raw egg and shell bits, mixed up with about three or four chewed-up baby chicken bodies.

  “Did you have to bring that in the house before breakfast, Horace?” said Mama.

  “I don’t know what makes me madder,” said Horace. “What she done wrong or her studying up to lie about it.”

  “I didn’t study and I didn’t lie!” shouted little Peggy. Or anyways she meant to shout. What came out sounded espiciously like crying even though little Peggy had decided only yesterday that she was done with crying for the rest of her life.

  “See?” said Mama. “She already feels bad.”

  “She feels bad being caught,” said Horace. “You’re too slack on her, Peg. She’s got a lying spirit. I don’t want my daughter growing up wicked. I’d rather see her dead like her baby sisters before I see her grow up wicked.”

  Little Peggy saw Mama’s heartfire flare up with memory, and in front of her eyes she could see a baby laid out pretty in a little box, and then another one only not so pretty cause it was the second baby Missy, the one what died of pox so nobody’d touch her but her own Mama, who was still so feeble from the pox herself that she couldn’t do much. Little Peggy saw that scene, and she knew Papa had made a mistake to say what he said cause Mama’s face went cold even though her heartfire was hot.

  “That’s the wickedest thing anybody ever said in my presence,” said Mama. Then she took up the basket of corruption from the table and took it outside.

  “Bloody Mary bites my hand,” said little Peggy.

  “We’ll see what bites,” said Papa. “For leaving the eggs I give you one whack, because I reckon that lunatic hen looks fearsome to a frog-size girl like you. But for telling lies I give you ten whacks.”

  Little Peggy cried in earnest at that news. Papa gave an honest count and full measure in everything, but most especially in whacks.

  Papa took the hazel rod off the high shelf. He kept it up there ever since little Peggy put the old one in the fire and burnt it right up.

  “I’d rather hear a thousand hard and bitter truths from you, Daughter, than one soft and easy lie,” said he, and then he bent over and laid on with the rod across her thighs. Whick whick whick, she counted every one, they stung her to the heart, each one of them, they were so full of anger. Worst of all she knew it was all unfair because his heartfire raged for a different cause altogether, and it always did. Papa’s hate for wickedness always came from his most secret memory. Little Peggy didn’t understand it all, because it was twisted up and confused and Papa didn’t remember it right well himself. All little Peggy ever saw plain was that it was a lady and it wasn’t Mama. Papa thought of that lady whenever something went wrong. When baby Missy died of nothing at all, and then the next baby also named Missy died of pox, and then the barn burnt down once, and a cow died, everything that went wrong made him think of that lady and he began to talk about how much he hated wickedness and at those times the hazel rod flew hard and sharp.

  I’d rather hear a thousand hard and bitter truths, that’s what he said, but little Peggy knew that there was one truth he didn’t ever want to hear, and so she kept it to herself. She’d never shout it at him, even if it made him break the hazel rod, cause whenever she thought of saying aught about that lady, she kept picturing her father dead, and that was a thing she never hoped to see for real. Besides, the lady that haunted his heartfire, she didn’t have no clothes on, and little Peggy knew that she’d be whipped for sure if she talked about people being naked.

  So she took the whacks and cried till she could taste that her nose was running. Papa left the room right away, and Mama came back to fix up breakfast for the blacksmith and the visitors and the hands, but neither one said boo to her, just as if they didn’t even notice. She cried even harder and louder for a minute, but it didn’t help. Finally she picked up her Bugy from the sewing basket and walked all stiff-legged out to Oldpappy’s cabin and woke him right up.

  He listened to her story like he always did.

  “I know about Bloody Mary,” he said, “and I told your papa fifty times if I told him once, wring that chicken’s neck and be done. She’s a crazy bird. Every week or so she gets crazy and breaks all her own eggs, even the ones ready to hatch. Kills her own chicks. It’s a lunatic what kills its own.”

  “Papa like to killed me,” said little Peggy.

  “I reckon if you can walk somewhat it ain’t so bad altogether.”

  “I can’t walk much.”

  “No, I can see you’re nigh crippled forever,” said Oldpappy. “But I tell you what, the way I see it your mama and your papa’s mostly mad at each other. So why don’t you just disappear for a couple of hours?”

  “I wish I could turn into a bird and fly.”

  “Next best thing, though,” said Pappy, “is to have a secret place where nobody knows to look for you. Do you have a place like that? No, don’t tell me—it wrecks it if you tell even a single other person. You just go to that place for a while. As long as it’s a safe place, not out in the woods where a Red might take your pretty hair, and not a high place where you might fall off, and not a tiny place where you might get stuck.”

  “It’s big and it’s low and it ain’t in the woods,” said little Peggy.

  “Then you go there, Maggie.”

  Little Peggy made the face she always made when Oldpappy called her that. And she held up Bugy and in Bugy’s squeaky high voice she said, “Her name is Peggy.”

  “You go there, Piggy, if you like that better—”

  Little Peggy slapped Bugy right across Oldpappy’s knee.

  “Someday Bugy’ll do that once too often and have a rupture and die,” said Oldpappy.

  But Bugy just danced right in his face and insisted, “Not piggy, Peggy!”

  “That’s right, Puggy, you go to that secret place and if anybody says, We got to go find that girl, I’ll say, I know where she is and she’ll come back when she’s good and ready.”

  Little Peggy ran for the cabin door and then stopped and turned. “Oldpappy, you’re the nicest grown-up in the whole world.”