I remember the earth waking up that year and the transcendent feeling that I was waking up with it. But still no Conduction.
We sat at the table and continued our conversation until we had exhausted all the small things. And then Corrine said, “Hiram, the truth is that by the lights of any other standard, you have made yourself into a fine agent. This will be a particular boon to us, because you shall be deployed according to our needs, and not your limits. Perhaps this means nothing to you—but it should. Not everyone makes it here, you know.”
In fact the compliment did mean something to me. I had lived the whole of my life in service of my father and brother. Every step I took, any accomplishment fulfilled by me, even those made possible by my father, was received as a threat to the rightful order of things. For the first time in my life, I was aligned with the world around me.
But I wondered what became of those who did not make it, those who’d been entrusted with all the secrets of the Virginia Underground but revealed themselves to be liabilities. I knew so much now—too much, I thought, to ever be released back into the world.
“The truth is we expected none of this,” she continued. “We knew you were read. We knew of your gift of memory. We knew you had been raised proximate to society. But we had not counted on how easily you would assume the mask. We knew you had been hunted. But we had not known how much guile you’d truly taken up in your time down under.”
She paused here, and I knew that we were entering into the darker portion of her conversation. She was looking down, struggling for her words. I thought then of the mastery she once displayed over me, back at Lockless, back in my father’s library, and how it had, in this moment especially, fled from her, and it occurred to me then that it really was all an illusion, that this entire order was engineering, was sorcery, all of it held up by elaborate display, by rituals and race-day, by fancies and parades, by powders and face-paint, it was all device, and now stripped of it I saw that we really were just two people, a man and woman, sitting here. I suddenly wanted to alleviate her obvious discomfort, and so I did that which I so often declined. I spoke.
“And that is not enough,” I said. “The running, the reading, the writing, it is not why I was brought here. So it is not enough.”
“No,” said Corrine. “It is not. Hiram, there are enemies in this world that cannot simply be outrun. And there are a whole assortment of our own held deep in the coffin of slavery, too deep for us to reach—Jackson, Montgomery, Columbia, Natchez. But this power—this ‘Conduction’—this is the railroad that might turn a week’s journey into an instant. Without it, we can menace our enemy. With it, distance is nothing to us and we might strike at him wherever. In short, we need you, Hiram—not just as Hiram the forger of letters and Hiram the running man, but as one who can return these people, our people, to the freedom given to all.”
I understood her well. But I was still thinking of those who failed to meet the expectations.
“And what will you do with me should I never again achieve it?” I asked. “Hold me here forever amongst your forgeries? Haul me back down into the hole?”
“Of course not,” Corrine said. “You are free.”
Free. There was something in how she said this that caught me. It rankled, though I could not then quite say why.
“ ‘Free,’ you say. But I will serve. You said it yourself—and serve as you decide and determine. I do what you want. I go where you say.”
“You assume too much of me,” she said.
“Who else is there?” I asked. “What is this Underground beyond what I have seen here? Who is being moved? I have not seen them. What about my people? What about Sophia? What about Pete? What about Thena? What about my mother?”
“We have rules,” she said.
“Rules for what?” I said.
“Rules for who can be gotten out and how,” she said.
“Right,” I replied. “Then let me see them.”
“The rules?” she replied, puzzled.
“No,” I said. “Let me see the action. Let me see these people we are bringing out. No. Much better. You say