coming back again.
"It's true, you know," said Horace. "Little Peggy told me. That little black slave girl, she diddled with some ash and blackbird feathers and such, and flew straight up here. That's what killed her. I couldn't believe it the first time I realized the boy remembers, and we always kept our mouths shut about it hoping he'd forget. But I got to tell you, Alvin, it'd be a pure shame if that girl died just so you could give up on us at this same spot in the river seven years later."
Alvin closed his eyes. "Just shut your mouth and let me think," he said.
"I said that's what we'd do," said Horace.
"So do it," said Po Doggly.
Alvin hardly even heard them. He was looking back inside Arthur's body, inside that patch that Alvin changed. The new signature wasn't bad in itself - only where it bordered on the skin with the old signature, that was the only place the new skin was getting sick and dying. Arthur'd be just fine if Alvin could somehow change him all at once, instead of bit by bit.
The way that the string came all at once, when Alvin thought of it, pictured where it started and where it ended and what it was. All the atoms of it moving into place at the same time. Like the way Po Doggly and Horace Guester fit together all at once, each doing his own task yet taking into account all that the other man did.
But the string was clean and simple. This was hard - like he told Miss Larner, turning water into wine instead of iron into gold.
No, can't think of it that way. What I did to make the string was teach all the atoms what and where to be, because each one of them was alive and each one could obey me. But inside Arthur's body I ain't dealing with atoms, I'm dealing with these living bits, and each one of them is alive. Maybe it's even the signature itself that makes them alive, maybe I can teach them all what they ought to be - instead of moving each part of them, one at a time, I can just say, Be like this, and they'll do it.
He no sooner thought of it than he tried it. In his mind he thought of speaking to all the signatures in Arthur's skin, all over his chest, all at once; he showed them the pattern he held in his mind, a pattern so complex he couldn't even understand it himself, except that he knew it was the same pattern as the signatures in this patch of skin he had changed bit by bit. And as soon as he showed them, as soon as he commanded them - Be like this! This is the way! - they changed. It all changed, all the skin on Arthur Stuart's chest, all at once.
Arthur gasped, then howled with pain. What had been a soreness in a patch of skin was now spread across his whole chest.
"Trust me," Alvin said. "I'm going to change you sure now, and the pain will stop. But I'm doing it under the water, where an the old skin gets carried off at once. Plug your nose! Hold your breath!"
Arthur Stuart was panting from the pain, but he did what Alvin said. He pinched his nose with his right hand, then took a breath and closed his mouth. At once Alvin gripped Arthur's wrist in his left hand and put his right hand behind the boy and plunged him under the water. In that instant Alvin held Arthur's body whole in his mind, seeing all the signatures, not one by one, but all of thenr, he showed them the pattern, the new signature, and this time thought the words so strong his lips spoke them. "This is the way! Be like this!"
He couldn't feel it with his hands - Arthur's body didn't change a whit that he could sense with his natural senses. But Alvin could still see the change, all at once, all in an instant, every signature in the boy's body, in the organs, in the muscles, in the blood, in the brain; even his hair changed, every part of him that was connected to himself. And what wasn't connected, what didn't change, that was washed away and gone.
Alvin plunged himself under the water, to wash off any part of Arthur's skin or hair that