Red Prophet Page 0,77
the shore through the crystal wall. Instead he saw other things.
He saw a wagon caught in a flooding river, a tree floating down like a battering ram, and a young man leaping out onto the tree, rolling it over, turning it from the wagon. And then the man tangling in the roots of the tree, getting smashed against a boulder, then rolling and tumbling downstream, all the time struggling to live, to breathe just a while longer, keep breathing, keep breathing -
He saw a woman bearing a baby, and a little girl who stood nearby reached out and touched her belly. She shouted something, and the midwife reached in her hand and took the baby's head, pulled it out. The mother tore and bled. The little girl reached under and pulled something off the baby's face; the baby cried. The man in the river heard that cry, somehow, knew that he had lived long enough, and so he died.
Al didn't know what to make of it. Until he heard the Prophet whisper in his ear: "The first thing you see in here is the day you are born."
The baby was Alvin Junior; the man who died was his brother, Vigor. Who was the girl who took the birth caul off his face? Al never saw her before in his life.
"I will show you," said the Prophet. "This stays only a little while, and I have things to see for myself, but I will show you." He took Alvin by the hand and together they rose upward through the column of glass.
It didn't feel like flying, not like the soaring of a bird; it was as if there wasn't no up or down. The Prophet pulled him upward, but Al couldn't figure how the Prophet pulled himself. Didn't matter. There were so many things to see. Wherever he hung in the air, he could look in any direction and see something else through the wall of the tower. Until he realized that every moment of time, every human life must be visible through this tower wall. How could you find your way through here? How could you look for any one particular story in the hundreds, thousands, millions of moments of past time?
The Prophet stopped, hoisted the boy up until he could see what the Prophet was seeing, their cheeks pressed together, their breath mingling, the Prophet's heartbeat loud in Alvin's ear.
"Look," said the Prophet.
What Alvin saw was a city, shining in sunlight. Towers of ice, it looked like, or clear glass, because when the sun set behind the city its light didn't so much as dim, and the city cast no shadow on the meadowland around it. Inside that city there were people, like bright shadows moving here and there, going up and down the towers without stairs or wings. More important than what he saw, though, was what he felt, looking at that place. Not peace, no, there was nothing quiet about what he felt. It was excitement, his heart pumping fast as a horse in full gallop. The people there, they weren't perfect - they were sometimes angry, sometimes sad. But nobody was hungry, and nobody was ignorant, and nobody had to do something just because somebody else made them do it. "Where is that city!" whispered Alvin.
"I don't know," said the Prophet. "Every time I come here, I see it in a different shape. Sometimes these tall thin towers, sometimes big crystal mounds, sometimes just people living on a sea of crystal fire. I think this city was built many times in the past. I think it will be built again."
"Are you going to build it? Is that what Prophetstown is for?"
Tears came from the Prophet's eyes - spilling from his one good eye, oozing out of the slack lid of the other. "Red man can't build this place alone," he said. "We are part of the land, and this city is more than the land alone. The land is good and bad, life and death all together, the green silence."
Alvin thought of his sense of green music, but he didn't say nothing, cause the Prophet was saying things he wanted to hear, and Al was smart enough to know that sometimes it's better to listen than to talk.
"But this city," said the Prophet, "the crystal city is light without dark, clean without dirty, healthy without sick, strong without weak, plenty without hungry, drink without thirst, life without death."
"The people in that place, they