Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV by Orson Scott Card Page B

both she and her beloved Alvin would rejoice to discover that she was secretly a Maker herself, so that the two of them together would be able to remake the world and fight off the evil nasty Unmaker together. Then they would have a dozen babies, all of them Makers twice over, and the love of Alvin and Amy Maker would be sung for a thousand generations throughout the whole world, or at least America, which was pretty much the same thing as far as Amy cared.
    But Amy’s parents wouldn’t let her go. “How could Alvin possibly concentrate on teaching anybody anything with you making cow-eyes at him the whole time?” her mother said, the heartless old hag. Not as cruel as her father, though, telling her, “Get some control over yourself, girl! Or I’m going to have to get you some love diapers to keep you from embarrassing yourself in public. Love diapers, do you understand me?” Oh, she understood him, the nasty man. Him of the cranks and pulleys, pipes and cables. Him of pumps and engines and machinery, who had no understanding of the human heart. “The heart’s just a pump itself, my girl,” he said, which showed him to be a deeply totally impossibly eternally abysmally ignorant machine of a man his own self but said nothing about the truth of the universe. It was her beloved Alvin who understood that all things were alive and had feelings—all things
except
her father’s hideous dead machines, chugging away like walking corpses. A steam-powered lumbermill! Using fire and water to cut wood! What an abomination before the Lord! When she and Alvin were married, she’d get Alvin to stop her father from making any more machines that roared and hissed and chugged and gave off the heat of hell. Alvin would keep her in a sylvan wonderland where the birds were friends and the bugs didn’t bite and they could swim naked together in clear pools of water and he would swim to her in real life instead of just in her dreams and he would reach out and embrace her and theirnaked bodies would touch under the water and their flesh would meet and join and . . .
    “No such thing,” said her friend Ramona.
    Amy felt herself grow hot with anger. Who was Ramona to decide what was real and what wasn’t? Couldn’t Amy tell her dreams to
somebody
without having to keep saying it was just a dream instead of pretending that it was real, that his arms had been around her? Didn’t she remember it as clearly—no, far
more
clearly—than anything that had ever happened to her in real life?
    “Did so happen. In the moonlight.”
    “When!” said Ramona, her voice dripping with contempt.
    “Three nights ago. When Alvin
said
he was going out into the woods to be alone. He was really going to be with me.”
    “Well where is there a pool of clear water like that? Nothing like that around here, just rivers and streams, and you
know
Alvin never goes into the Hatrack to swim or nothing.”
    “Don’t you know
anything!
” said Amy, trying to match her best friend’s disdain. “Haven’t you heard of the greensong? How Alvin learned from them old Reds how to run through the forest like the wind, silent and not even so much as bending a branch? He can run a hundred miles in an hour, faster than any railroad train. It wasn’t any kind of pool around
here,
it was so far away that it would take anybody from Vigor Church three days to get there on a good horse!”
    “Now I know you’re just lying,” said Ramona.
    “He can do that
any day
,” insisted Amy hotly.
    “
He
can, but
you
can’t. You screech when you brush up into a spiderweb, you dunce.”
    “I’m not a dunce I’m the best student in the school
you’re
the dunce,” said Amy all in a breath—it was an epigram she had often used before. “I held Alvin’s
hand
is what, and he carried me along, and then when I got tired he picked me up in those blacksmith’s arms of his and carried me.”
    “And then I’m
sure
he really took off all his clothes and youtook off all of