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But Matty was not going to be diverted by reminders of the schoolteacher’s pretty daughter. “When’s the next Trade Mart?” he asked, when they were both seated.
“You’re too young.”
“I heard that there was one coming soon.”
“Pay no attention to what you hear. You’re too young.”
“I won’t be always. I ought to watch.”
The blind man shook his head. “It would be painful,” he said. “Eat your fish now, Matty, while it’s warm.”
Matty poked at the salmon with his fork. He could tell that there was to be no more discussion of trading. The blind man had never traded, not one single time, and was proud of it. But Matty thought that someday he himself would. Maybe not for a Gaming Machine. But there were other things that Matty wanted. He ought to be allowed to know how the trading worked.
He decided he would find out. But first he had the other thing to worry about, and the troubling awareness that he had not dared to tell the blind man of it.
* * *
There were no secrets in Village. It was one of the rules that Leader had proposed, and all of the people had voted in favor of it. Everyone who had come to Village from elsewhere, all of those who had not been born here, had come from places with secrets. Sometimes — not very often, for inevitably it caused sadness — people described their places of origin: places with cruel governments, harsh punishments, desperate poverty, or false comforts.
There were so many such places. Sometimes, hearing the stories, remembering his own childhood, Matty was astounded. At first, having found his way to Village, he had thought his own brutal beginnings — a fatherless hovel for a home; a grim, defeated mother who beat him and his brother bloody — were unusual. But now he knew that there were communities everywhere, sprinkled across the vast landscape of the known world, in which people suffered. Not always from beatings and hunger, the way he had. But from ignorance. From not knowing. From being kept from knowledge.
He believed in Leader, and in Leader’s insistence that all of Village’s citizens, even the children, read, learn, participate, and care for one another. So Matty studied and did his best.
But sometimes he slipped back into the habits of his earlier life, when he had been a sly and deceitful boy in order to survive.
“I can’t help it,” he had argued glumly to the blind man, in the beginning of their life together, when he had been caught in some small transgression. “It’s what I learnt.”
“Learned.” The correction was gentle.
“Learned,” Matty had repeated.
“Now you are relearning. You are learning honesty. I’m sorry to punish you, Matty, but Village is a population of honest and decent people, and I want you to be one of us.”
Matty had hung his head. “So you’ll beat me?”
“No, your punishment will be no lessons today. You will help me in the garden instead of going to school.”
It had seemed, to Matty then, a laughable punishment. Who wanted to go to school, anyway? Not him!
Yet, when he was deprived of it, and could hear the other children reciting and singing in the schoolhouse, he felt woefully lost. Gradually he had learned to change his behavior and to become one of Village’s happy children, and soon a good student. Now half grown and soon to finish school, he slipped only occasionally into old bad habits and almost always caught himself when he did.
It bothered Matty greatly, now, having a secret.
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LEADER HAD SUMMONED Matty for message-running.
Matty enjoyed going to Leader’s homeplace, because of the stairs — others had stairs, though Matty and the blind man did not, but Leader’s stairs were circular, which fascinated Matty, and he liked going up and down — and because of the books. Others had books, too. Matty had a few schoolbooks, and he often borrowed other books from the library so that he could read stories to the blind man in the evenings, a time they both enjoyed.
But Leader’s homeplace, where he lived alone, had more books than Matty had ever seen in one place. The entire ground floor, except for the kitchen to one side, was lined with shelves, and the shelves were filled with volumes of every sort. Leader allowed Matty to lift down and look at any one he wanted. There were stories, of course, not unlike the ones he found in the library. There were history books as well, like those he studied at school, the best ones filled with maps that showed how the world had changed over centuries. Some books had shiny pages that showed paintings of landscapes unlike anything Matty had ever seen, or of people costumed in odd ways, or of battles, and there were many quiet painted scenes of a woman holding a newborn child. Still others were written in languages from the past and from other places.
Leader laughed wryly when Matty had opened to a page and pointed to the unknown language. “It’s called Greek,” Leader said. “I can read a few words. But in the place of my childhood, we were not allowed to learn such things. So in my spare time, I have Mentor come and help me with languages. But …” Leader sighed. “I have so little spare time. Maybe when I’m old, I will sit here and study. I’d like that, I think.”
Matty had replaced the book and run his hand gently over the leather bindings of the ones beside it.
“If you weren’t allowed to learn,” he asked, “why did they let you bring the books?”
Leader laughed. “You’ve seen the little sled,” he said.
“In the Museum?”
“Yes. My vehicle of arrival. They’ve made such a thing of it, it’s almost embarrassing. But it is true that I came on that sled. A desperate boy, half dead. No books! The books were brought to me later. I have never been as surprised in my life as I was the day those books arrived.”
Matty had looked around at the thousands of books. In his own arms — and Matty was strong — he could have carried no more than ten or twelve at a time.
“How did they come to you?”
“A river barge. Suddenly there it was. Huge wooden crates aboard, and each one filled with books. Until that time I had always been afraid. A year had passed. Then two. But I was still afraid; I thought they would still be looking for me, that I would be recaptured, put to death, because no one had ever fled my community successfully before.
“It was only when I saw the books that I knew that things had changed, that I was free, and that back there, where I had come from, they were rebuilding themselves into something better.
“The books were a kind of forgiveness, I think.”
“So you could have gone back,” Matty said. “Was it too late? Had Forest given you Warnings?”
“No. But why would I go back? I had found a home here, the way everyone has. That’s why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.”
* * *
Today Matty admired the books, as he always did in Leader’s homeplace, but he didn’t linger to touch or examine them. Nor did he stop to admire the staircase, with its intricate risers of crafted, polished wood that ascended in a circle to the next level. When Leader called, “Up here, Matty,” he bounded up the stairs to the second floor, into the spacious room where Leader lived and worked.
Leader was at his desk. He looked up from the papers in front of him and smiled at Matty. “How’s the fishing?”
Matty shrugged and grinned. “Not too bad. Caught four yesterday.”
Leader laid his pen aside and leaned back in his chair. “Tell me something, Matty. You and your friend are out there a lot, fishing. And you’ve been doing it for a long time — since you came to Village as a little boy. Isn’t that so?”
“I don’t remember exactly how long. I was only about this high when I came.” Matty gestured with his hand, placing it level with the second button of his own shirt.
“Six years,” Leader told him. “You arrived six years ago. So you’ve been fishing for all that time.”
Matty nodded. But he stiffened. He was wary. It was too soon for his true name to be bestowed, he thought. Surely it was not going to be Fisherman! Was that why Leader had called him here?
Leader looked at him and began to laugh. “Relax, Matty! When you look like that, I can almost read your mind! Don’t worry. It was only a question.”
“A question about fishing. Fishing’s a thing I do just to get food or to fool around. I don’t want it to turn into something more.” Matty liked that about Leader, that you could say what you wanted to him, that you could tell him what you felt.
“I understand. You needn’t worry about that. I was asking because I need to assess the food supply. Some are saying there are fewer fish than there once were. Look here, what I’ve been writing.” He passed a paper over to Matty. There were columns of numbers, lists headed “Salmon” and “Trout.”
Matty read the numbers and frowned. “It might be true,” he said. “I remember at first I would pull fish after fish from the river. But you know what, Leader?”
“What?” Leader took the paper back from Matty and laid it with others on his desk.
“I was little then. And maybe you don’t remember this, because you’re older than I am …”
Leader smiled. “I’m still a young man, Matty. I remember being a boy.” Matty thought he noticed a brief flicker of sadness in Leader’s eyes, despite the warm smile. So many people in Village — including Matty — had sad memories of their childhoods.
“What I meant was, I remember all the fish, the feeling that they would never end. I felt that I could drop my line in again and again and again and there would always be fish. Now there aren’t. But, Leader …”
Leader looked at him and waited.
“Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther. The first time I came here through Forest? The journey seemed forever.”
“It does take days, Matty, from where you started.”
“Yes, I know. It still takes days. But now it doesn’t seem as far or as long. Because I’m older, and bigger, and I’ve gone back and forth again and again, and I know the way, and I’m not scared. So it seems shorter.”
Leader chuckled. “And the fish?”
“Well,” Matty acknowledged, “there don’t seem to be as many. But maybe it’s just that I was a little boy back then, when the fish seemed endless.”
Leader tapped the tip of his pen on the desk as he thought. “Maybe so,” he said after a moment. He stood. From a table in the corner of the room he took a stack of folded papers.
“Messages?” Matty asked.
“Messages. I’m calling a meeting.”
“About fish?”
“No. I wish it were just about fish. Fish would be easy.”
Matty took the stack of message papers he would be delivering. Before he turned to the staircase to leave, he felt compelled to say, “Fish aren’t ever easy. You have to use just the right bait, and know the right place to go, and then you have to pull the line up at just the right moment, because if you don’t, the fish can wiggle right off your hook, and not everybody is good at it, and …”
He could hear Leader laughing, still, when he left.
* * *
It took Matty most of the day to deliver all of the messages. It wasn’t a hard task. He liked the harder ones better, actually, when he was outfitted with food and a carrying pack and sent on long journeys through Forest. Although he hadn’t been sent to it in almost two years, Matty especially liked trips that took him back to his former home, where he could greet his boyhood pals with a somewhat superior smile, and snub those who had been cruel to him in the past. His mother was dead, he had been told. His brother was still there, and looked at Matty with more respect than he ever had in the past, but they were strangers to each other now. The community where he had lived was greatly changed and seemed foreign, though less harsh than he remembered.
Today he simply made his way around Village, delivering notice of the meeting that would be held the following week. Reading the message himself, he could understand Leader’s questioning about the supply of fish, and the concern and worry that Matty had felt from him.
There had been a petition — signed by a substantial number of people — to close Village to outsiders. There would have to be a debate, and a vote.
It had happened before, such a petition.
“We voted it down just a year ago,” the blind man reminded Matty when the message had been read to him. “There must be a stronger movement now.”
“There are still plenty of fish,” Matty pointed out, “and the fields are full of crops.”
The blind man crumpled the message and dropped it into the fire. “It’s not the fish or crops,” he said. “They’ll use that, of course. They argued dwindling food supply last time. It’s …”
“Not enough housing?”
“More than that. I can’t think of the word for it. Selfishness, I guess. It’s creeping in.”
Matty was startled. Village had been created out of the opposite: selflessness. He knew that from his studies and from hearing the history. Everyone did.
“But in the message — I could have read it to you again if you hadn’t burned it — it says that the group who wants to close the border is headed by Mentor! The schoolteacher!”
The blind man sighed. “Give the soup a stir, would you, Matty?”
Obediently Matty moved the wooden ladle around in the pot and watched beans and chopped tomatoes churn in the thick mixture as it simmered. Thinking still of his teacher, he added, “He’s not selfish!”
“I know he isn’t. That’s why it’s puzzling.”
“He welcomes everyone to the school, even new ones who have no learning, who can’t even speak properly.”
“Like you, when you came,” the blind man said with a smile. “It couldn’t have been easy, but he taught you.”
“He had to tame me first,” Matty acknowledged, grinning. “I was wild, wasn’t I?”
Seer nodded. “Wild. But Mentor loves teaching those who need it.”
“Why would he want to close the border?”
“Matty?”
“What?”
“Has Mentor traded, do you know?”
Matty thought about it. “It’s school vacation now, so I don’t see him as often. But I stop by his homeplace now and then …” He didn’t mention Jean, the widowed schoolteacher’s daughter. “I haven’t noticed anything different in his household.
“No Gaming Machine,” he added, laughing a little.
But the blind man didn’t chuckle in reply. He sat thinking for a moment. Then he said, in a worried voice, “It’s much more than just a Gaming Machine.”
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THE SCHOOLTEACHER’S DAUGHTER told me that her dog has three puppies. I can have one when it’s big enough, if I like.”
“Isn’t she the one who promised you a kiss? Now a dog as well? I’d settle for the kiss if I were you, Matty.” The blind man smiled, loosened a beet from the earth, and placed it in the basket of vegetables. They were in the garden together.
“I miss my dog. He wasn’t any trouble.” Matty glanced over to the corner of their homeplace’s plot of land, beyond the garden, to the small grave where they had buried Branch two years before.
“You’re right, Matty. Your little dog was a good companion for many years. It would be fun to have a puppy around.” The blind man’s voice was gentle.
“I could train a dog to lead you.”
