“And break your fingers or your brain trying to spell them,” said Calvin with a smile.

  Hubbard gave a little smile in return.

  “You know who my brother is,” said Calvin.

  “I know who you want me to think your brother is.”

  “Test me.”

  By the time the test was set up, there was a bit of a crowd. The HHH Showboat had played in Paducah last night and was supposed to chug back up the Hio River today, heading for Carthage, the biggest city on the Hio. If they stayed a second night in Paducah, they’d do a different show, and everybody wanted to see it, if only to ridicule it, because some people think that’s how you show you’re smarter than everybody. Of course, thought Calvin, I am smarter than everybody, so I don’t have to ridicule it.

  Then he thought of his sister-in-law, Margaret, and realized that it was stupid to brag on himself inside his own head. And Margaret wasn’t the only person smarter than him. But Alvin wasn’t one of them, Calvin thought bitterly. Why does he let people walk all over him? It’s going to get him killed someday.

  Calvin sat behind a stack of crates, with the captain on the other side. “It’s not a test if you just stand there,” said Calvin, loud and clear.

  “Ha! If you could really see you’d know that I was walking to and fro!”

  Calvin could only sigh. “Well, I suppose all these lookers-on saw you moving when I said you weren’t, so—”

  The onlookers protested loudly. “He wasn’t moving at all!” “Such a liar!”

  “I am not a liar,” said Hubbard. “I am an actor.”

  “Maybe we should test you!” called out one of the fine citizens of Paducah.

  “Walk around. Do stuff,” said Calvin. “You’ll prove I’m a liar pretty quick. Unless I’m not a liar.”

  The captain covered his eyes with his hands. Maybe he could still see a little, maybe not. Didn’t matter. Calvin could sense with his doodlebug what Hubbard was doing relative to his surroundings. “Crate in front of you, don’t fall.… I know you can smell how close you are to the water, so I’m tempted to see if you’ll fall in the water just to prove I’m a liar.” And so on until the game was boring. “Are you ready to have a serious conversation with me?”

  The crowd murmured their insistence, and Hubbard came around the crates and shook Calvin’s hand. “So you have a useful knack. It still means nothing—I’m not taking my boat on that cursèd river.”

  Calvin sat down on a crate and the captain sat beside him. Calvin looked at the crowd and smiled. “Show’s over for now, but I bet Captain Hubbard here wants you to come to his company’s show tonight.”

  “Only a nickel a person,” said Hubbard.

  “You sell yourself short,” said Calvin, doing the arithmetic in his head.

  “I sell hard liquor to the people at the show,” said Hubbard. “The nickel is just to show they have earnest money.”

  “You sell other things, too,” said Calvin, but then quickly began explaining how this showboat ran without burning anything.

  ”I burn through the muscles on some good strong men here,” said Hubbard.

  “You’re from Hio, you can’t legally own slaves.”

  “They’re all freedmen. I buy them as discards because they’re too old, too cantankerous, too stupid, or too smart to make a good slave. I ask for a year on the boat after I free them, and then they can go their way—with a set of huge, strong muscles to recommend them to future employers.”

  “Or terrify them. ‘Hello, sir, do you want to hire a dockworker who can tear you in half with his bare hands?’”

  “I’d like to see that,” said Hubbard.

  “No you wouldn’t,” said Calvin. “I wish I could unsee it.” Of course he had never seen any such thing, but it made a good story.

  Hubbard leaned in and, still with a smile, said, “Who told you how my steamless steamboat works? Because I’m going to show him how his headless body works.”

  “I just looked at it, my friend. It’s plain to see—if you know how to see deeply enough. Using human labor to run those bellows pumps and make the paddlewheel turn—ingenious.”

  “I was tired of getting cheated by colliers.”

  “As good a reason as any.”

  “The paddlewheel is still machinery.”

  “Not to the Red Prophet and his family,” said Calvin, hoping he didn’t get quizzed any further, seeing as how he didn’t know a thing about the Prophet or his family. That’s where Alvin’s power comes from, Calvin figured. The Red Prophet puts ideas in his head.

  Hubbard nodded. “How good is your knack? Can you keep my boat from sinking?”

  “Never tried,” said Calvin. “Depends on how many and how big the leaks are.”

  “Got no leaks in my boat! That’s my livelihood.”

  “I mean whatever new leaks the Red Prophet might put in the boat.”

  Hubbard stood right up. “You said that you—”

  “I said I could keep us from bumping into rocks and sandbars and islands. I didn’t say I could fend off any Red magicking.”

  “So you don’t have the Red Prophet’s permission.”

  “I’m hiring you, because you have the best chance of not running afoul of his curse.”

  “Aroint thee!” cried Hubbard. “Aroint thee, get thee hence!”

  “Shakespeare?” asked Calvin.

  “You know the bard?”

  “He died a bit before I was born,” said Calvin. “But I know the Puritans hated him when he was alive, and they never want a play of his performed again.”

  “On my boat we do whatever plays I want,” said Hubbard. “Just with a different title and with my name up as author.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t ask for permission, either,” said Calvin.

  “He’s dead,” said Hubbard.

  “Not when you’re playing his characters on stage, he’s not,” said Calvin. So easy to flatter this man.

  Hubbard stood a little taller, gave a little bow with his head and shoulders, then sat back down. “Tell me what you do if there are leaks.”

  “Fix them,” said Calvin. “And if I can’t do it fast enough, I’ll pay you in gold for the price of a new boat.”

  “What about my actors who drown? How can you replace them?”

  “Captain Hubbard, I know I can save folks from drowning. I’ve done it about a hundred times, and besides, we’re never getting more than twenty feet from the righthand shore.”

  “Stabboard,” said Hubbard.

  “We’re not at sea and you never were a sailor. No need for port and starboard here. It’s left and right. Upstream on the Mizzippy, the safe shore is the righthand shore.”

  “If there’s a safe shore.”

  “Do we have a deal?” asked Calvin.

  “You ain’t even pitched a deal.”

  “You go up and put on shows for the folks of Crystal City,” said Calvin. “You charge what you charge, you make what you make, you take it home and divvy it out with your cast and your crew.”

  “We don’t divvy,” said Hubbard.

  “You keep it all?” asked Calvin.

  “They draw off funds whenever they need them,” said Hubbard. “I don’t steal from my people. And can’t nobody else steal from them, either.”

  Calvin wondered how much of a stash Hubbard had built up over the years, and where he kept it.

  Not my business. It’s between him and his people. And between him and the law—if there was any law out here so close to the Mizzippy. Outlaws couldn’t get over the river—or if they did, none of them came back to tell about it. But they could cluster up in the miles of woods where nobody wanted to farm—except the people of Crystal City, because they knew the Red Prophet had no quarrel with them.

  And they could fish in the Mizzippy, long as they kept their feet dry. And if they fell in, they could climb right out, no harm done, no body parts falling off or huge catfish swallowing your leg. Calvin had tested those boundaries himself.

  “You’re going to put me on the Mizzippy and not pay me no premium?” asked Hubbard, disgusted.

  “If all goes right, which it will,” said Calvin, “you’ll be making money from a city of people, bigger than that hogtown Chicago, who’ve been hoping for a show for a long time. You charge them what you think the market will bear, and you should make a good showing, financially.”

  “Financially,” muttered Hubbard. “Boat underwater, cast and crew all drownded.”

  “Won’t happen that way,” said Calvin. “And why do you say idiotic things like ‘drownded’ when you have the words of Shakespeare in your mouth?”

  Hubbard spoke very quietly. “But soft. What light from yonder window breaks? It is the east, and…”—just realizing—“Juliet is the sun!”

  It was so quiet, not bombastic like the way the French performed in Paris, or the actors in the Crown Colonies. Perfectly natural. A young man in love, just realizing how much in love he is. He was talking to himself; he was talking to the love of his life; he was speaking so quietly that nobody could hear him.

  Hubbard had a knack, yes sir. He could talk soft and yet everybody could hear him. It meant he didn’t have to shout every word like other actors did.

  “If you fell in the water and whispered for help,” said Calvin, “I bet boatmen from Carthage would leap onto their rafts to rush down to save you.”

  “I have the good fortune of knowing how to project my voice without shouting.”

  Calvin didn’t bother to call it a knack. Hubbard already knew that Calvin knew. As much as admitted it. This man just might decide to stay. What use could I make of him? A town crier that nobody realizes is shouting? A voice on stage saying, gently, whatever savage thing Calvin wanted him to put into people’s thoughts?

  Hubbard isn’t a bad man, so I’ll have to persuade him that he’s doing good. But that’s how you get good men to go bad. The worse it is, the nobler you make him feel about it.

  “How soon can you give it a try with me?” asked Calvin.

  “You promised Paducah a show tonight,” said Hubbard.

  “First thing in the morning then?” asked Calvin.

  “Have to talk to the cast and the crew,” Hubbard said. “I don’t put their lives at risk without asking.”

  “They were all there at the dock today,” said Calvin. “They all saw what I can do.”

  “What they can’t see is whether that’s all you can do.”

  The show that night was filled with excitement. The audience because they were getting a second show, and with a lower cost of admission tonight. Hubbard and his people because they were going to go up against a Red curse and try to trick their way through it, but if Calvin was the real thing, it should go all right. And Calvin because—because he was doing something Alvin wouldn’t even think to do, and doing it better, and nobody was going to be hurt by it because it was all good. Like watching that middle-aged man play Romeo as a youth and believing in it. All good.

  Calvin didn’t watch that second show in Paducah, however. He lay down on the floor of the pilot’s box and sent his doodlebug out of himself and into the water of the river, working his way from the wharf out in a straight line for the turning of the stream. He was moving rapidly upstream, but felt no resistance from the water.

  The only resistance came when he was hugging the right bank of the Mizzippy and he came to a tangle of tree roots, trunks, and logs that stuck out like a nose into the stream. The steamboat could never get past this, thought Calvin. So his bug moved away from the righthand shore and out toward the middle of the Mizzippy. That’s when he felt resistance. His doodlebug was moving slower and slower until it wasn’t moving at all.

  Stopped in the river. Calvin felt it like an icy worm inside his chest, making it harder and harder to breathe, getting colder and colder. And then he was moving faster than he could have imagined, back to the right bank and fifteen feet into the mud of that shore. In utter darkness.

  All right, Mr. Prophet, Calvin said inside his mind. I won’t venture away from the right bank again. And thank you for letting me make as much progress as I already have. Thank you for stopping your curse at the midpoint of the river. Now may I please get back into the water so I can finish clearing a channel along the east bank?

  No answer, of course. The Prophet probably didn’t even know who it was that he just spanked. Or maybe the Red Prophet didn’t even know that it had happened. Maybe it was like a jack-in-the-box, you just wind it and wind it and then pop! Like a bit of machinery. So any White man’s doodlebug would have been repulsed the same. Other people had knacks involving doodlebugs—the river was set up so that any doodlebug could get only so far before getting repulsed.

  Calvin began to move toward the river, through the mud. He knew that for Alvin, there was no darkness underground. Alvin explained how he just always knew where he was and what he was surrounded by. Soil, with fallen leaves and the hulls of long-dead nuts. Then a layer that was often damp or even wet with underground moisture, and then bedrock, the solid stone that supposedly wasn’t no barrier to their doodlebugs. Speak for yourself, Alvin.

  Calvin got his bug down to bedrock and then scooted along just above it till he could feel the mass of earth above him make way for something fluid and relentless in its motion. He rose up then into the river, located the right bank, and then returned to the tangle that had moved him out into the Mizzippy. He found where and how the mass was stuck to the shore, and then loosened a log here, broke off a root there.

  Then, like a floating island, the tangle slipped gently and silently into the flow of the river. Calvin pushed it toward the middle of the stream as far as he could, and then trusted that it wouldn’t fetch up on the right bank again.

  His doodlebug went swiftly again, looking for obstructions that might block the upstream progress of that human-powered steamboat. The distance wasn’t all that long before he came to a wharf that he recognized. He lifted his bug to the surface and saw in the east the rising towers of the water-blocks, shimmering in the last rays of the sun. The riverbank was clear all the way from Paducah to Crystal City. His job was done.

  He was so exhausted that he thought he must have been all night in dredging and clearing the right bank. But when he struggled to his feet, he wasn’t even sore. He hadn’t been lying in that pilot’s box all night. He could hear a chorus singing a cheerful ditty that he didn’t recognize. And then the rushing, crashing sound of applause. The show had just ended.

  When he came down from the top levels of the boat he realized that it hadn’t even been that long. The audience was crowded to the three bars along the sides of the seating area, ordering things to drink and eat. Calvin mingled with them, annoyed that his actual body couldn’t move among people as fluidly as his doodlebug could move through water and wood and rock.

  He heard what folks was ordering and he was pleased to know that Captain Hubbard was earning money hand over fist. The comedy had put people into a good mood, a convivial mood, and they had whiskey spilling down their throats as fast as the bartenders could fill their glasses.

  Then the boat whistle tooted—right as the last customers were getting their last drinks—and they all went back to their seats. Or to somebody else’s seat, didn’t matter, they knew there was chairs enough for all, cause hadn’t they been in them during the first two acts of the play?

  The curtain was drawn up again, and there stood the actors and actresses, all in their foolish cumbersome costumes and their heavy, unreal-looking makeup. The voices began, talking louder than real people ever talked, but immediately getting the audience laughing again. The whiskey and corn liquor and barley beer all helped the audience have a wonderful time laughing at the foolish folks on the stage.

  When the show ended, Calvin was asleep on the backmost chair and had to be wakened by one of the actors, an old woman with makeup caked on her face to pretend she was a smooth-cheeked girl, or a young lady, anyway. With perfect diction she said, “Are you not the Smith boy who’s supposed to pilot us up the river?”

  Calvin growled, “That smith is my brother, but I’m Calvin Miller, seventh son of a seventh son, every bit as smart and knacky as my brother, as anyone can tell you.”

  “Well, your nap didn’t cheer you up very much, did it?”

  Soon Calvin stood in front of the cast, them in the audience chairs, him on the stage. The fine folk of Paducah had gone ashore, the sober ones helping the drunks to get home. It was just him and the show people, along with the few members of the boat’s crew who could be spared to attend.

  “The sun’s only just gone,” said the man with a hero’s voice. “And there’s a big moon. We’ve got us a magical pilot, don’t we? One who can see through solid objects? What’s to stop us from going upriver tonight?”

  “You don’t got you a magical pilot,” said Calvin. All fell silent, looked at him.

  Captain Hubbard looked vexed. “But you promised us to—”

  “I promised to clear the way for your boat to go upstream as far as Crystal City. You’ll know the place when you see it, because on the brow of a hill no more than half a mile from the wharf, you’ll see the Crystal City.”

  “What does that look like?” asked a skeptical-sounding woman, whose costume and demeanor showed that she must play a prostitute. If she was in the play at all. Calvin hadn’t been with a prostitute since Paris, and then he was too young to know what he was doing.

  But no, he had work to do. “When you see something that makes you say, ‘That has to be the Crystal City,’ that’ll be the Crystal City. Tie up your boat to the wharf and put down your gangplank.”

  “And you’ll be with us,” said the captain.

  “I’m with you now, and I’m telling you that twenty feet out from the shore you’ll have clear passage, with a deep enough unobstructed channel that you’ll have no delays or difficulties. Twenty feet out from the shore. Can you pilot your vessel well enough to maintain that distance?”

  Hubbard scoffed and several cast members said things like, “The captain can do it. The captain can steer straight as a clothesline.”

  “Will we see you there in Crystal City?”