Alvin nodded.

  Arthur Stuart chuckled a little.

  “Nothing funny here,” said Alvin.

  “I was just thinking,” said Arthur Stuart, “that it’s a dang good thing nobody around here knows that you’re a miller’s son.”

  “Well, now Enos Walker, lecturer, is privy to that information, thanks to you and your mouth,” said Alvin cheerfully.

  “But Enos Walker, lecturer, doesn’t believe a word of Professor Rea’s theory about mill-invited flooding, so he’s not likely to accuse you of anything,” said Arthur Stuart.

  Enos Walker raised an eyebrow. “In these parts, where Professor Rea is so well respected, it can be a perilous thing to say that a man doesn’t ‘believe a word’ of his hydrological theories.”

  “Wouldn’t want to be a naysayer,” said Arthur Stuart, still chuckling.

  “I’m not a naysayer,” said Enos Walker. “Though it might be that in private, I might admit to sometimes being a naythinker.”

  “You’re a man of science,” said Alvin. “You know that Professor Rea can’t possibly have a lick of evidence.”

  “It’s a remarkable thing,” said Enos Walker. “His best evidence is the absence of evidence. Meaning that whenever anybody points out that there are a lot of mills on a lot of rivers that never had a flood of any size, he just shakes his head and looks worried and says, ‘Things have built up dangerously far, I’m afraid. Dangerously far. When the flood breaks loose, there’ll be hell to pay wherever men have built these monstrous watermills to torture the water, to enslave the water. How it longs to break free and wreak havoc over the land!’”

  When he spoke for Professor Rea, his voice took on a different tone, and since Arthur Stuart was a perfect mimic, he repeated the whole speech word for word, and Enos Walker laughed. “You don’t really sound like him,” he said, “but you sound exactly like me trying to sound like him.”

  “So who’s in that jail?” Alvin asked.

  “Well, all the millers, of course, because they weren’t even allowed to leave town. They’re all bound over for trial, though the trial won’t happen till the flood actually occurs, because until there’s harm, there’s no crime.”

  “Sounds like a life sentence,” said Arthur Stuart. “Since I’m pretty sure that flood ain’t coming.”

  “The rest in that jail are naysayers like you. Doesn’t take much. Just a laugh or even a cough while Professor Rea is holding forth on the evils of ‘damaging the balance of the elements with monstrous wheels stabbing into the hydrous heritage of humankind, three thousand times a day, a million times a year.’”

  Arthur Stuart had to repeat that, too, only now he wasn’t imitating Enos Walker, he was going for the voice that Walker seemed to be trying to imitate. “How do you do that?” asked Enos Walker, dabbing at his eyes. “You never met the man, you never heard him, but now you sound just like him.”

  “It’s his knack,” said Alvin.

  “He imitates people’s voices?”

  “Much deeper than that,” said Alvin. “Arthur Stuart never says so, but I think he understands the soul, and the voice just floats on top, so to speak.”

  “Mr. Walker,” said Arthur Stuart, “since you know Professor Rea’s theory doesn’t hold water, so to speak, how can you keep silence and not correct him?”

  Enos Walker nodded sadly. “I accept your accusation, my lad, and I confess my shame. I have a wife and two lovely daughters who are somewhat sought after by young men of this town. If I were to say my nays, I would lose my situation, so that even if by some oversight I were not locked up with the others, I would be forced to move elsewhere to seek my livelihood. I’d have no letter of recommendation to carry with me, and I’d have two weeping daughters and a scolding wife to contend with. So it is not fear of the jail that silences me, but weariness of life, weariness of my imagined life if I earned the lamentations and imprecations of that fearsome covey of females.”

  “I am delighted,” said Arthur Stuart, “at how your language gets much more formal and buttside upmost when you’re saying something that you know is perfectly dishonest.”

  “I try to teach the boy manners,” said Alvin, “but seeing as how I haven’t good manners myself, I fail regular.”

  “Here’s how I see it,” said Enos Walker. “Not one of Professor Rea’s predictions has come true. Not a one. And people have gone to an enormous amount of trouble trying to prepare for those predictions to be fulfilled. Professor Rea has also forbidden the digging of wells, since pumps are as pernicious as mill wheels, so all these citizens will have to walk all the way to Turkey Creek every day and haul water. How long before the sheer weariness of it makes naysayers of them all?”

  “People can go to a powerful lot of trouble for a pretty long time before they weary of it,” said Alvin, “as long as they’ve got some kind of expert telling them they have no choice, and there’s no other expert telling them that it’s all just empty chinwag.”

  “But I can’t speak against it,” said Enos Walker, “because he’s the expert on the elements, and I’m only a wanderer between math and metaphysics.”

  “So they all believe that you believe it,” said Alvin, “because you go along with it.”

  “I and the other four teachers at this college,” said Enos. “And when any men of science make a pilgrimage to this place, to learn at the professor’s feet, they quickly realize that questions aren’t welcomed here. It’s an inconvenient thing, to be called a naysayer. So of course the regular folks here think that all the men of science are in agreement with Professor Rea.”

  Alvin smiled. “I respect your self-knowledge, sir,” he said. “And I appreciate your dilemma, because when you’re in the devil’s pay, it’s best not to contradict the devil’s dogma.”

  “Oh, no,” said Enos Walker, with a twinkle in his eye and an edge to his voice. “It’s the naysayers who are all in the pay of a conspiracy of millers, to try to cause people to doubt the danger so the millers can go on laboring to bring the floodwaters down upon us.”

  “Without mills,” said Alvin, “where do they grind their corn?”

  “They take it farther by wagon, and it costs them more,” said Enos Walker, “and a good many businesses are failing because people lack the money to pay for what they used to buy. And it’s hard to sell land here, so far back from the creek, so when people leave, they leave with almost nothing.”

  “But that’s only money,” said Arthur Stuart, “and scientists and professors, they don’t care about such things.”

  “They don’t when their wife has a very rich father, as Professor Rea’s wife has,” said Enos Walker. “But mine doesn’t.”

  “I’m a miller’s son,” said Alvin, “and I’ve traveled this land a bit. I never saw nor heard of a flood caused by mills. I’m also a journeyman blacksmith by trade, with my anvil in this poke I carry with me.”

  “Your arms and shoulders proclaimed your trade from the moment I saw you. Except that you don’t have one arm markedly stronger than the other.”

  “I use my arms equally, so my shirtmakers don’t have trouble with their measurements. And as a blacksmith, I’m right glad there’s no elementologist claiming that smithery brings down lightning strikes.”

  Enos Walker leaned forward. “Keep that thought to yourself, sir,” he said. “Because it’s only a matter of time before he realizes that the other elements shouldn’t be neglected.”

  “Here’s what I think,” said Alvin. “In fact, I’ll make a prediction.”

  “As a blacksmith or a miller’s son?”

  “As a man of science,” said Alvin, “because I’m a bit more learned than most folks think. Here’s my prediction. There will never be a flood of Turkey Creek, mills or no mills. And people will stop hauling water from Turkey Creek by tomorrow morning, and will all be moved away within a couple of weeks. This town will be empty, and this college will be out of business, and your daughters will have to go elsewhere to find eager young men, though I doubt they’ll lack for offers wherever they go.”

  “An interesting prediction,” said Enos Walker.

  “I’ll go farther. I daresay that wherever Professor Rea finds believers, and mills are shut and their waterwheels broken up, the water will cease to flow at all, until all the people of Irrakwa and the United States live in terror of a visit from the Professor, and will refuse to let him open up his mouth.”

  “I beg only to know the evidence that leads to your predictions,” said Enos Walker.

  “I think this man is a denier of every theory,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “All true men of science are skeptical,” said Enos Walker.

  “The difference between your Professor Rea and me,” said Alvin, “is that he predicts what water is going to do at some vague future time, while I predict what I’m going to do while folks are sleeping in the town tonight.”

  Enos Walker looked as skeptical as a true man of science.

  Alvin nodded to him, and passed his hand across the surface of the chair beside him. Then he caused water to condense out of the air onto the wooden seat of the chair until there was a bit of a puddle there.

  Enos Walker raised an eyebrow.

  Then Alvin caused the water to soak into the wood all at once, and it was instantly gone.

  “I have a knack with voices,” said Arthur Stuart, “and Alvin Maker has a knack with elements.”

  “Professor Rea and I work with the same subject matter,” said Alvin, “though I don’t believe he’d respect my credentials.”

  Enos Walker nodded gravely, then smiled. “Inconvenient as some of your predictions are to me personally, since moving is always hard work, it seems to me that even my wife can’t blame me for causing my family to move away from a failed creek.”

  They took their leave of Enos Walker soon after, had supper in the tavern in the town, and then, when it was full dark, they walked out to the banks of the river.

  Alvin’s doodlebug felt its way upstream to the natural springs that gave rise to Turkey Creek. Then he plunged down into the bedrock, into the aquifer that fed the spring, and found a new channel for the water, bringing it to the surface where it would flow into Raccoon Creek, more than a mile to the east, and with a good rise of ground between them. Within a few minutes, the water in Turkey Creek slowed to a trickle, then a seep, then a series of puddles.

  Only when the bed of the creek was dry did Alvin turn his attention to the college-turned-jail. He found all the locked doors and dissolved the locks so the doors wouldn’t stay shut. But he sealed up the door where the guard slept, so he couldn’t get out till somebody broke through the wall come morning.

  Soon the prisoners discovered that their doors were open, and not long afterward they began to wander out through the back wall, where Alvin had peeled off the entire façade of brick. By morning, the prisoners would all be far to the west, having crossed Turkey Creek without dampening the soles of their shoes.

  “This is hard on the folks downstream,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “If they want water, they can build a mill and call for it to come,” said Alvin.

  “It’s not their fault that they believed in a fool who called himself a scientist.”

  “It’s their fault when they believe in anybody whose predictions always fail, and whose ideas violate common sense and experience. It’s their fault when they punish folks for a difference of opinion. And the lesson of not falling for every hoax that calls itself science will be worth more than what they’ll lose on their property value.”

  Alvin Smith and Arthur Stuart went overland by night, and this time they moved with haste, hearing the greensong and running like the wind, faster than deer, as fast as Reds once ran these lands when they were forest down to the shores of the lake.

  Over the next few weeks the stories reached them of a goodly town, which had a college in it, that had to be abandoned because Turkey Creek dried up one night and never had water in it again, not even when it rained. And the strangest thing of all, according to these tales, was the fact that the millers had already left the place, tearing down their waterwheels.

  “So if you ever hear of millers deserting a steady stream, look to your wells!” said the gossips. “Because that’s a stream that’s going to fail, and a town that’s going to die.”

  In 1965, National Review published “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian story about forced equality. Harking back to that milestone, this issue presents a new story by Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender’s Game and many other books. Mr. Card’s story continues his six-volume series The Tales of Alvin Maker, an epic fantasy of the American frontier.

  Orson Scott Card—Mr. Card wrote Ender’s Game, Pathfinder, The Lost Gate, and the forthcoming Lost and Found, among other books. He and his wife live in Greensboro, N.C., with a constant stream of patio visitors ranging from finches, chickadees, and bluebirds to opossums, raccoons, and squirrels.

  2016

  The War of Gifts

  (An Ender Story)

  Zeck Morgan sat attentively on the front row of the little sanctuary of the Church of the Pure Christ in Eden, North Carolina. He did not fidget, though he had two itches, one on his foot and one on his eyebrow. He knew the eyebrow itch was from a fly that had landed there. The foot itch, too, probably, though he did not look down to see whether anything was crawling there.

  He did not look out the windows at the falling snow. He did not glance to left or right, not even to glare at parents of the crying baby in the row behind him—it was for others to judge whether it was more important for the parents to stay and hear the sermon, or leave and preserve the stillness of the meeting.

  Zeck was the minister’s son, and he knew his duty.

  Reverend Habit Morgan stood at the small pulpit—really an old dictionary stand picked up at a library sale. No doubt the dictionary that had once rested on it had been replaced by a computer, just one more sign of the degradation of the human race, to worship the False God of Tamed Lightning. “They think because they have pulled the lightning from the sky and contained it in their machines they are gods now, or the friends of gods. Do they not know that the only thing written by lightning is fire? Yea, I say unto you, it is the fire of hell, and the gods they have befriended are devils!”

  It had been one of Father’s best sermons. He gave it when Zeck was three, but Zeck had not forgotten a word of it. Zeck did not forget a word of anything. As soon as he knew what words were, he remembered them.

  But he did not tell Father that he remembered. Because when Mother realized that he could repeat whole sermons word for word, she told him, very quietly but very intensely, “This is a great gift that God has given you, Zeck. But you must not show it to anyone, because some might think it comes from Satan.”

  “Does it?” Zeck had asked. “Come from Satan?”

  “Satan does not give good gifts,” said Mother. “So it comes from God.”

  “Then why would anyone think it comes from Satan?”

  She frowned her forehead, though her lips kept their smile. Her lips always smiled when she knew anyone was looking. It was her duty as the minister’s wife to show that the pure Christian life made one happy.

  “Some people are looking so hard to find Satan,” she finally said, “that they see him even where he isn’t.”

  Naturally, Zeck remembered this conversation word for word. So it was there in his mind when he was four, and Father said, “There are those who will tell you that a thing is from God, when it’s really from the devil.”

  “Why, Father?”

  “They are deceived,” said Father, “by their own desire. They wish the world were a better place, so they pretend that polluted things are pure, so they don’t have to fear them.”

  Ever since then, Zeck had balanced these two conversations, for he knew that Mother was warning him about Father, and Father was warning him about Mother.

  It was impossible to choose between them. He did not want to choose.

  Still . . . he never let Father see his perfect memory. It was not a lie, however. If Father ever asked him to repeat a conversation or a sermon or anything at all, Zeck would do it, and honestly, showing that he knew it word for word. But Father did not ask anybody anything, except when he asked God.

  Which he had just done. Standing there at the pulpit, glaring out at the congregation, Father said, “What about Santa Claus! Saint Nick! Is he the same thing as ‘Old Nick’? Does he have anything to do with Christ? Is our worship pure, when we have this ‘Old Saint Nick’ in our hearts? Is he really jolly? Does he laugh because he knows he is leading our children down to hell?”

  He glared around the congregation as if waiting for an answer. And finally someone gave the only answer that was appropriate for this point in the sermon:

  “Brother Habit, we don’t know. Would you ask God and tell us what he says?”

  Whereupon Father roared out, “God in heaven! Thou knowest our question! Tell us thine answer! We thy children ask thee for bread, O Father! Do not give us a stone!”

  Then he gripped the pulpit—the dictionary stand, which trembled under his hands—and continued glaring upward. Zeck knew that when Father looked upward like that, he did not see the roof beams or the ceiling above them. He was staring into heaven, demanding that all those hurrying angels get out of his way so his gaze could penetrate all the way to God and demand his attention, because it was his right. Ask and it shall be given, God had promised. Knock and it shall be opened! Well, Habit Morgan was knocking and asking, and it was time for God to open and give. God could not break his word—at least not when Habit Morgan was holding him to it.

  But God took his own sweet time. Which was why Zeck was sitting there on the front row, with Mother and his three younger siblings beside him, all perched on chairs so wobbly they showed the slightest trace of movement. The other children were young, and their fidgets were forgiven. Zeck was determined to be pure, and his wobbly chair might have been made of stone for all the movement it made.