The Crystal City Page 0,80

tree that had been swept downstream on the Hatrack River flood the day that he was born. What killed my brother Vigor is now my vehicle to cross.

But thinking about the past reminded him of all those years of childhood, when it seemed that every bad accident that befell him was related somehow to water. His father had remarked upon it, and not as some kind of superstition about coincidence, either. Water was out to get him, that's what Alvin Senior said.

And it wasn't altogether false. No, the water itself had no will or wish to harm him or anything. But water naturally tore and rusted and eroded and melted and mudded up everything it passed over or under or through. It was a natural tool of the Unmaker.

At the thought of his ancient enemy, who had so often brought him to the edge of death, he got that old feeling from his childhood. The sense that something was watching him from just out of sight, just on the edge of vision. But when he turned his head, the watcher seemed to flee to where the new edge of his vision was. Nothing was ever there. But that was the problem-the Unmaker was nothing, or at least was a lover of nothing, and wished to make everything into nothing, and would not rest until it all was broken down and swept away and gone.

Alvin stood against him. A futile, pathetic weakling, that's what I am, thought Alvin. I can't build up faster than the Unmaker tears down. Yet he still hates me for trying.

Or maybe he doesn't hate me. Maybe he's a wild creature, hungry all the time, and I simply smell like his prey. No malice in it. Wasn't tearing down just a part of building up? All part of the same great flow of nature. Why should he be the enemy of the Unmaker, when really they worked together, the maker and unmaker, the maker making things out of the rubble of whatever the unmaker tore down.

Alvin shuddered. What had he been about to do? What had he been thinking about?

There was a heartfire near him. A hungry one indeed. That gator that he had told to stay away. Apparently it changed its mind, what with Alvin standing there thigh-deep in the Mizzippy, resting his hands on a floating log and burdened with a heavy poke slung over his shoulder.

Alvin felt the jaws snap shut on his leg and immediately drag him downward, a sharp tug that jerked his feet out from under him and put him under the water.

He fought to keep his body's reflexes from taking over- flailing arms all panicking to try to swim up for air wouldn't do him much good with a gator holding onto one leg.

The gator jerked its head this way and that, and Alvin felt his thigh bone pull hard away from the hip socket. Next try and the gator would have him disjointed.

Alvin reached into the mind of the gator to persuade it to let go. A simple thing, to tell some feeble-brained animal how to see the world. Not food, not prey, danger, go away.

Only the gator had no interest in his story. What Alvin felt there in its heartfire was something old and malicious. It wasn't hungry. It just wanted Alvin dead. He could feel it hungering to tear him apart, a frenzy building inside it.

And he could feel other heartfires coming. More gators, drawn by the thrashing in the water.

Why wouldn't this gator respond?

Because you're in the water, fool.

No, I've been in water a thousand times with no danger, and-

No time to settle this now. If I can't do it by persuasion, I'll do it another way.

Alvin reached down with his doodlebug and stopped up the gator's nostrils and told it that it needed air and couldn't breathe.

Didn't matter. The gator didn't care.

And now Alvin knew that he was fighting something a good deal more dangerous than a gator. Animals wanted to live, and they never forgot that. So when this gator didn't care that it couldn't breathe...

Another jerk. Alvin felt his hip joint come apart inside. Now it was just some ligaments and muscles and his skin holding his leg onto his body. The gator would have those torn apart in no time.

The pain was terrible, but Alvin shut his mind to that. He hadn't come all this way, through all the dangers that he'd faced, to die in a river the way the Unmaker