How They Were Found by Matt Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

the others in the day-to-day work of constructing the machine, but even then he continues to watch her, to notice her. This is how he observes the way she sees Randall, the talented young worker who will have his pick of trades when the time comes. Metalworking, carpentry, even the doing of figures and interpretation of the diagrams come easy to Randall, the boy's aptitudes speaking well of his deeper, better qualities. Spear has often been impressed with the boy, but now, watching the quick glances and quicker smiles that pass between Randall and Abigail, he knows he will have to study him even closer.
    He tells himself that it is not the girl he cares about, but the Motor. After she gives birth to his machine, Randall can have her. But not before. Spear is sure that, like Mary, Abigail must be a virgin to bring the Motor to life, and he cannot risk Randall ruining that. He decides that he will take the girl home to live with him, just until summer. She will become part of his household, and he himself will keep her safe. Although he trusts all those he surrounds himself with, it is only himself that he can vouch is above reproach.
     
    Spear is no engineer, but he knows enough to understand that the New Motor is different. Where most machines are built in pieces, one component at a time, the Motor is being built from the inside out. It is being grown, with the sweat and effort of these great Spiritualist men, all excellent workers, excellent minds. Tsesler and Voichenko especially seem given to the task; their ability to translate the complexities of the diagrams and explanations into their own language is almost uncanny. The others work nearly as hard, including Randall. Despite Spear's misgivings about the boy, he knows the young man is as dedicated as any other to the completion of their work. Six days a week, for ten or twelve or fourteen hours, they slave together in the forge-heated shed to fulfill the task handed down to them by the Electricizers. By the time snow covers the hill, the machine has enough moving parts that a once useless flywheel becomes predictive, turning cogs that foretell the other cogs and gears and pulleys not yet known to Spear. The first gliding panel is set in the innermost groove of the table's concentric circles, moved all the way around the Motor once to ensure that it works the way it is intended to. The panel's copper face is inscribed with words that Spear does not know, but which he believes are the long-hidden names of God, revealed here in glory and in grace.
    On the day of the fall equinox, the men work and work. When they finish after dark, Spear gathers them all around himself. He is covered in sweat and dirt and grease and grime. They all are, and Spear smiles, prouder than he has ever allowed himself to be.
    He looks over his men, and he says, It took a quarter of a million years for God to design our last messiah, and even then, he could only come in our form, created in our image, a fallen man. Our new messiah will take only nine months to build, and when it is done it will show us who our own children will be, what they will become in the new kingdom.
    This New Motor, it will be the beginning of a new race, unfallen and perfect, characterized by a steamwork perfection our world is only now capable of creating. God has shown the Electricizers and they have shown me and I have shown you, and now you are making it so.
     
    The New Motor is his task, but Spear knows that there are others working too, all of them assigned their own tasks somewhere out in America. He knows this because even on the nights when the others fail to materialize, Franklin comes and takes Spear from his bed and out into the night. The two men walk the empty streets, Spear shivering in his long wool coat and hat and boots, Franklin unaffected by the cold. The specter tells him of other groups sent to help, of other spirits in need of a medium: the Healthfulizers, the Educationalizers, the Agriculturalizers,