The Dark Design Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

  RIVERWORLD

  “Farmer’s blend of intellectual daring and pulp-fiction prose found a worldwide audience.…Sprawling, episodic works gave him room to explore the nuances of a provocative premise while indulging his taste for lurid, violent action.”

  —The New York Times

  To Your Scattered Bodies Go

  “One of the most imaginative worlds in science fiction!”

  —Booklist

  “From the beginning, To Your Scattered Bodies Go gripped me in a way few books have been able to match.”

  —SF Site

  The Dark Design

  “Its publication is an event with a capital E!”

  —Parade of Books

  The Magic Labyrinth

  “A wide-screen adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse, and educate…His imagination is of the first rank…his velocity breathtaking.…Charts a territory somewhere between Gulliver’s Travels and The Lord of the Rings.”

  —Time

  “This book, like the series as a whole, offers delight to the sense of wonder and storytelling flow as irresistible as the river itself.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Lovers

  Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life

  Lord Tyger

  Strange Relations

  Tarzan Alive

  Time’s Last Gift

  Traitor to the Living

  The Stone God Awakens

  Flesh

  Behind the Walls of Terra

  Image of the Beast

  Blown

  A Feast Unknown

  The Gates of Creation

  The Maker of Universes

  Night of Light

  A Private Cosmos

  The Wind Whales of Ishmael

  The Lavalite World

  Jesus on Mars

  Dark Is the Sun

  The Unreasoning Mask

  Inside-Outside

  The Alley God

  The Book of Philip José Farmer

  Dayworld

  Dayworld Rebel

  THE RIVERWORLD SERIES

  To Your Scattered Bodies Go

  The Fabulous Riverboat

  The Dark Design

  The Magic Labyrinth

  The Gods of Riverworld

  Riverworld and Other Stories

  Riverworld: Including To Your Scattered Bodies Go

  and The Fabulous Riverboat

  Red Orc’s Rage

  The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel

  THE

  DARK DESIGN

  PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and

  events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE DARK DESIGN

  Copyright © 1977 by The Estate of Philip José Farmer

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor ® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2654-6

  First Tor Edition: June 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Though some of the names in the Riverworld series are fictional, the characters are or were real. You may not be mentioned, but you’re here.

  To Sam Long and my godson David,

  son of Doctor Docter

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man

  Weaving th’ unpattern’d dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan.

  —The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû al-Yazdi

  Sentence first—verdict afterwards.

  —Alice in Wonderland

  PREFACE

  The book at hand is volume III of the Riverworld series. Originally, it was to be the conclusion of a trilogy. However, the MS was more than 400,000 words long. Published under one cover, it would be too heavy and unwieldy for the reader.

  Therefore, the publisher and myself decided to cut it into two. Volume IV, The Magic Labyrinth, will follow this book. It will definitely conclude this phase of the series, explain all the mysteries set forth in the first three volumes, tie up all ends in a knot, Gordian or otherwise.

  Any novels about the Riverworld after volume IV are not to be considered as part of the mainstream of the series. These will be the “sidestream,” stories not directly concerned with mystery and the quests of the first three. My decision to write these is based on my belief—and that of many others—that the Riverworld concept is too big to compress within four volumes. After all, we have a planet on which a single river, or a very long and narrow sea, runs for 16,090,000 kilometers, or about 10,000,000 miles. More than thirty-six billion people live along its banks, human beings who existed from the Old Stone Age through the first part of the Electronic Age.

  There is not room in the first four volumes to chronicle many events which might interest the reader. For instance, the resurrectees were not distributed along The River according to the chronological sequence in which they had been born on Earth. There was a considerable mixture of races and nationalities from different centuries. Take as an example one of the many thousands of blocs along the banks. This would be in an area ten kilometers long, and the people comprising it would be 60 percent third-century a.d. Chinese, 39 percent seventeenth-century a.d. Russians, and 1 percent men and women from an
ywhere and any time.

  How would these people manage to form a viable state from anarchy? How would they succeed, or fail, in their efforts to get along with each other and to form a body which could defend itself against hostile states? What problems would they have?

  In the book at hand, Jack London, Tom Mix, Nur ed-din el-Musafir, and Peter Jairus Frigate sail on the Razzle Dazzle II up The River. There is considerable characterization of Frigate and Nur in volumes III and IV. However, there was not enough space to fully develop the characters of the others. So, the “sidestream” stories will give me scope to do this.

  These will also relate how the crew of the Razzle Dazzle meet some major and minor representatives of various fields of human endeavor. These should include da Vinci, Rousseau, Karl Marx, Rameses II, Nietzsche, Bakunin, Alcibiades, Eddy, Ben Jonson, Li Po, Nichiren Daishonin, Asoka, an Ice Age cavewife, Joan of Arc, Gilgamesh, Edwin Booth, Faust et al.

  It’s been apparent to some that Peter Jairus Frigate remarkably resembles the author. It is true that I am the basis for that character, but Frigate has approximately the similarity to me that David Copperfield has to Charles Dickens. The author’s physical and psychic features are only a springboard for propelling reality into that parareality—fiction.

  I apologize to the readers for the cliffhanger endings of the first three volumes. The structure of the series was such that I could not emulate that of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. In these each volume seemed to have a definite conclusion, the mystery seemingly solved, only to reveal in the sequel that the previous ending was false or misleading.

  I hope to finish the series, volumes I through V (or possibly VI), before it’s my time to lie down and rest while waiting to board the fabulous riverboat.

  Dreams haunted The Riverworld.

  Sleep, night’s Pandora, was even more generous than on Earth. There, it had been this for you and that for your neighbor. Tomorrow, that for you and this for next door.

  Here in this endless valley, along these unceasing Riverbanks, she dumped her treasure chest, showering everybody with all gifts: terror and pleasure, memory and anticipation, mystery and revelation.

  Billions stirred, muttered, groaned, whimpered, laughed, cried out, swam to wakefulness, sank back again.

  Mighty engines battered the walls, and things wriggled out through the holes. Often, they did not retreat but stayed, phantoms who refused to fade at cockcrow.

  Also, for some reason, dreams recurred more frequently than on the mother planet. The actors of the nocturnal Theater of the Absurd insisted on return engagements, performances which they, not the patrons, commanded. The attendees were powerless to jeer or applaud, to throw eggs and cabbages or walk out, to chatter with their seatmates or doze.

  Among this captive audience was Richard Francis Burton.

  Fog, gray and swirling, formed the stage and the backdrop. Burton stood in the pit like an Elizabethan too poor to afford a seat. Above him were thirteen figures, all in chairs which floated in the mist. One of them faced the others, who were arranged in a semicircle. That man was the protagonist—himself.

  There was a fourteenth person there, though it stood in the wings and could be seen only by the Burton in the pit. It was a black, menacing shape which, now and then, chuckled hollowly.

  A not quite similar scene had happened before, once in reality and many times in dreams, though who could be sure which was which? There he was, the man who’d died seven hundred and seventy times in a vain effort to elude his pursuers. And there sat the twelve who called themselves the Ethicals.

  Six were men; six, women. Except for two, all had deeply tanned or heavily pigmented skins and black or dark brown hair. The eyes of two men and a woman had slight epicanthic folds, which made him think that they were Eurasians. That is, they were if they had originated on Earth.

  Only two of the twelve had been named during the brief inquisition—Loga and Thanabur. Neither name seemed to be of any language he knew, and he knew at least a hundred. However, languages change, and it was possible that they might be from the fifty-second century A.D. One of their agents had told them that he came from that time. But Spruce had been under threat of torture and might have been lying.

  Loga was one of the few with comparatively pale skins. Since he was sitting and there was (and had been) nothing material to measure him against, he could be short or tall. His body was thick and muscular, and his chest was matted with red hair. The hair on his head was fox-red. He had irregular and strong features: a prominent, deeply clefted chin; a massive jaw; a large and aquiline nose; thick pale-yellow eyebrows; wide, full lips; and dark green eyes.

  The other light-skinned man, Thanabur, was obviously the leader. His physique and face were so much like Loga’s that they could be brothers. His hair, however, was dark brown. One eye was green, though a rare leaf-green.

  The other eye had startled Burton when Thanabur had first turned his face toward him. Instead of the green mate he had expected, he saw a jewel. It looked like an enormous blue diamond, a flashing, multifaceted precious stone set in his eye socket.

  He felt uneasy whenever that jewel was turned on him. What was its purpose? What did it see in him that a living eye could not see?

  Of the twelve, only three had spoken: Loga, Thanabur, and a slim but full-breasted blonde with large blue eyes. From the manner in which she and Loga spoke to each other, Burton thought that they could be husband and wife.

  Watching them offstage, Burton noted again that just above the heads of each, his other self included, was a globe. They whirled, were of many changing colors, and extended six-sided arms, green, blue, black, and white. Then the arms would shrink into the globe, only to be replaced by others.

  Burton tried to correlate the rotating spheres and the mutation in the arms with the personalities of the three and of himself, with their physical appearances, with the tones of their voices, with the meanings of their words, with their emotional attitudes. He failed to find any significant linkages.

  When the first, the real, scene had taken place, he had not seen his own aura.

  The spoken lines were not quite the same as during the actual event. It was as if the Dream-Maker had rewritten the scene.

  Loga, the red-haired man, said, “We had a number of agents looking for you. They were a pitifully small number, considering the thirty-six billion, six million, nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven candidates that are living along The River.”

  “Candidates for what?” the Burton on the stage said.

  In the first performance, he had not uttered that line.

  “That’s for us to know and you to find out,” Loga said.

  Loga flashed teeth that seemed inhumanly white. He said, “We had no idea that you were escaping us by suicide. The years went by. There were other things for us to do, so we pulled all agents from the Burton Case, as we called it, except for some stationed at both ends of The River. Somehow, you had knowledge of the polar tower. We found out how later.”

  Burton, the watcher, thought, But you didn’t find out from X.

  He tried to get nearer to the actors so he could look at them more closely. Which one was the Ethical who had awakened him in the preresurrection place? Which one had visited him during the stormy, lightning-racked night? Who was it that had told him that he must help him? Who was the renegade whom Burton knew only as X?

  He struggled against the wet, cold mists, as ethereal yet as strong as the magic chains which had bound the monster wolf Fenrir until Ragnarok, the doom of the gods.

  Loga said, “We would have caught you, anyway. You see, every space in the restoration bubble—the place where you unaccountably awakened during the preresurrection phase—has an automatic counter. Any candidate who has a higher than average number of deaths is a subject for study sooner or later. Usually later, since we’re short-handed.

  “We had no idea it was you who had racked up the staggering number of seven hundred and seventy-seven deaths. Y
our space in the PR bubble was empty when we looked at it during our statistical investigation. The two technicians who had seen you when you woke up in the PR chamber identified you by your… photograph.

  “We set the resurrector so that the next time your body was to be recreated, an alarm would notify us, and we would bring you here to this place.”

  But Burton had not died again. Somehow, they had located him while he was alive. Though he had run away again, he had been caught. Or had he? Perhaps, as he ran through the night, he had been killed by lightning. And they were waiting for him in the PR bubble. That vast chamber which he supposed was somewhere deep under the surface of this planet or in the tower of the polar sea.

  Loga said, “We’ve made a thorough search of your body. We have also screened every component of your… psychomorph. Or aura, whichever word you prefer.”

  He pointed at the flashing, whirling globe above the Burton who sat in the chair facing him.

  Then the Ethical did a strange thing.

  He turned and looked out into the mists and pointed at Burton, the watcher.

  “We found no clues whatsoever.”

  The dark figure in the wings chuckled.

  The Burton in the pit called out, “You think there are only twelve of you! There are thirteen! An unlucky number!”

  “It’s quality, not quantity, that matters,” the thing offstage said.

  “You won’t remember a thing that occurs down here after we send you back to the Rivervalley,” Loga said.

  The Burton in the chair said something that he had not said in the original inquisition.

  “How can you make me forget?”

  “We have run off your memory as if it were a tape recording,” Thanabur said. He talked as if he were lecturing. Or was he warning Burton because he was X?

  “Of course, it took a long time to run your memory track for the seven years since you’ve been here. And it required an enormous amount of energy and materials. But the computer Loga monitored was set to run your memory at high speed and stop only when you were visited by that filthy renegade. So, we know what happened then exactly as you knew what happened. We saw what you saw, heard what you heard, felt what you touched, what you smelled. We even experienced your emotions.