Riverworld03- The Dark Design (1977) Read online

  Jill grinned and said, "That sounds like something Mark Twain would say, not his wife."

  Cyrano grinned back and said, "She didn't say that. I made that up, paraphrasing her. There was, of course, much more to her feeling than the accidental death of her baby. Actually, I can't blame Clemens. Being a writer, he was very absentminded when he was pondering upon a story. I am that way myself. He did not notice that the coverings of the baby had slipped aside and that the icy air was blowing full upon the unprotected infant. He was automatically driving the horse which was drawing the sledge through the snows while his mind was intent upon that other, world – his fiction.

  "However, Olivia was certain that he was not as absentminded as he believed. She insisted that he could not have been, that some part of his mind must have observed the baby's situation. He did not really want a son. Unlike most men, he preferred daughters. Besides, the baby was sickly from birth, a nuisance. To Sam, I mean.''

  "That's one thing in his favor," Jill said. "I mean, that he preferred girls. Though I suppose, to be fair, that it is as neurotic to prefer a female infant as to prefer a male. Still, he did not have that male chauvinism . . ."

  Cyrano said, "You must comprehend that Olivia did not consciously acknowledge all this during her Terrestrial existence. At least, she claimed not to have done so, though I suspect that she had such thoughts, was ashamed of them, and so put them away in the deep, dark files of her soul. But it was here, in this Valley, when she became addicted to chewing the soi-disant, the so-called dreamgum, that she perceived her true feelings.

  "And so, though she still loved Clemens, in a manner of speaking, she hated him even more."

  "Did she quit using the gum?"

  "Yes. It upset her too much. Though she now and then had some ecstatic or fantastic visions, she had too many horrible experiences."

  "She should have stuck with it," Jill said. "But under proper guidance. However . . ."

  "Yes?"

  Jill compressed her lips, than said, "Perhaps I shouldn't be too bloody critical. I had a guru, a beautiful woman, the best and wisest woman I ever knew, but she couldn't keep me from running headlong into . . . well, no need to go into it here . . . it was too . . . dismaying? No, horrifying. I chickened out. So I shan't be criticizing anyone else, shouldn't anyway. I have been considering taking it up again, but I don't trust the Second Chancers' use of it, even though they claim to have excellent, quite safe, techniques. I couldn't put full confidence in people who have their religious beliefs."

  " I was a free thinker, a libertin, as we styled ourselves," Cyrano said. "But now . . . I do not know. Perhaps there is after all a God. Otherwise, how does one account for this world?"

  "There are a score of theories," Jill said.'' And no doubt you've heard them all."

  ''Many, at any rate,'' Cyrano said." I was hoping to hear a new one from you."

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  At that moment, several people invaded the conversation.

  Jill broke off from the clump and drifted around, looking for another clump, a temporary colony, to attach herself to. In The Riverworld, as on Earth, all cocktail or after-dinner parties were alike. You spoke briefly, trying to make yourself heard above all the chatter and music, and then changed partners or groups until you had made a complete circuit. If you were intrigued or even interested in someone, you could make arrangements to see him or her some other time, when you could have a chance for an uninterrupted and quiet conversation.

  In the old days, long ago, when she was young in mind, she had often met men or women at such gatherings who enthralled her. But then she had been full of booze or pot or both and so wide open. It was easy to fall in love with a mind or body – or both at the same time. Sobering up usually meant wising up. A disappointment. Not always. Just most of the time.

  Here was a gathering all of whom had the bodies of twenty-five-year-olds. Chronologically, she was sixty-one. Some here might actually be one hundred and thirty-two or even more. The youngest could not be under thirty-six.

  The index of wisdom should be high, if it was true that age brought wisdom. She had not found that to be true about most people on Earth. Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum. Experience did not by any means give wisdom, that understanding of the basic mechanics of humanity. Most oldsters she had known had been as governed by conditioned reflexes as when they had been nineteen.

  So it was expected that people would not have benefited much from their experiences here. However, the hammer blows of death and resurrection had broken open the seals of the minds of many.

  For one thing, absolutely no one had expected this type of afterlife, if you could call this an afterlife. No religion had described such a place, such events. Though, to tell the truth, those religions which did promise paradises and hells were remarkably lacking in descriptive detail. Perhaps not so remarkably, since very few persons had actually claimed to have seen the postmortem world.

  And there certainly was nothing supernatural about this place and the raising of the dead in it. Everything – well, not everything but almost everything – could be explained in physical, not metaphysical, terms. This did not keep people from originating religious theories or reshaping old ones.

  Those religions which had no eschatology of resurrection or immortality in the Western sense, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism were discredited. Those which did have such, Judaism, Islamism, Christianity, were equally discredited. But here, as on Earth, the death of a major religion was the birth pang of a new one. And there were, of course, minorities who refused stubbornly, despite all evidence, to admit that their faith was invalid.

  Jill, standing near Samuelo, ex-rabbi, present bishop of the Church of the Second Chance, wondered what his reaction had been that first year on this world. There was no Messiah come to save the Chosen People, nor, indeed, any Chosen People assembled together at Jerusalem on Earth. No Jerusalem, no Earth.

  Apparently the shattering of his faith had not shattered him. Somehow he had been able to accept that he had been wrong. Although a superorthodox rabbi of ancient times, he had a flexible mind.

  At that moment Jeanne Jugan, who was hostess, offered Samuelo and Rahelo a dish of bamboo tips and filleted fish. Samuelo looked at the fish and said, "What is that?"

  "Toadfish," Jeanne said.

  Samuelo tightened his lips and shook his head. Jeanne looked puzzled, since the bishop was obviously hungry and his fingers were only a few centimeters from seizing the tips. These, as far as Jill knew, were not tabu according to the Mosaic laws. But they were on the same plate as the forbidden scaleless fish and so contaminated.

  She smiled. It was much easier to change a person's religion than his/her food habits. A devout Jew or Moslem could give up his creed but would still feel nauseated if offered pork. A Hindu whom Jill had known had become an atheist on The Riverworld, but he still could not abide meat. Jill, though of partial blackfellow descent, could not force herself to eat worms, though she had tried. Genetic descent had nothing to do with dietary matters, of course; it was social descent that determined food choices. Though not always. Some people could adapt easily enough. And there was always the individual taste. Jill had ceased eating mutton the moment she had quit her parents' house. She hated it. And she preferred hamburger to beef roast.

  The whole point to this reverie, she thought as she emerged from it, shedding thoughts as a surfacing diver sheds water, the whole point was that we are what we eat. And we eat what we do because of what we are. And what we are is determined partly by our environment and partly by our genetic makeup. All my family except myself loved mutton. A sister shared my indifference to beef roast and my love for hamburgers.

  All my brothers and sisters, as far as I know, are heterosexual. I am the only bisexual. And I don't want that. I want to be one way or the other, a gate that is latched, not swinging either way depending upon which way the
wind is blowing. My internal wind which shifts from east to west or vice versa, twirling the windsock this way, or that way.

  Actually, she did not want it one way or the other. If she had her choice – and why shouldn't she? – she would be a woman lover.

  Woman lover. Why didn't she say to herself: lesbian? The English language was the greatest in the world, but it had its faults. It was often too ambiguous. Woman lover could mean a man who loved women, a man or woman who loved women, or a woman who was a lover.

  There, .she'd said it. Lesbian. And she didn't feet any shame. What about Jack? She had loved him. What about . . . ?

  She had come up from the reverie only to dive down again.

  Across the room, Firebrass, though talking to others, was looking at her. Had he noticed her tendency to become a statue, slumped, her head slightly cocked to the left, her eyelids lowered, and the eyes slightly rolled up? And if he had, then had he decided she was too moody and hence untrustworthy?

  At that, she felt a slight panic. Oh, God, if he rejected her as a candidate just because she was pensive now and then! She was not that way when on duty! Never. But how could she convince Firebrass of that?

  She would have to be alert, always act as if she were on her toes, extroverted, prepared, trustworthy. As if she were a Girl Scout.

  She walked up to a circle in the center of which was Bishop Samuelo. The dark little man was telling some stories about La Viro. Jill had heard a number of them, since she had attended many Second Chancer meetings and talked with its missionaries. In Esperanto, the official language of the Church, La Viro meant The Man. He was also called La Fondinto, The Founder. Apparently, no one knew his Terrestrial name or else it was not considered important by the Second Chancers.

  Samuelo's tale concerned the stranger who had approached La Viro one stormy night in a cave high in the mountains. The stranger had revealed that he was one of the people who had reshaped this planet into one long Rivervalley and who had then resurrected the people of Earth.

  The stranger had instructed La Viro to found the Church of the Second Chance. He was given certain tenets to preach, and he was told that after he had spread these up and down the Valley, he would then be given more revelations. As far as she knew, these new "truths" had not yet been forthcoming.

  But the Church had spread everywhere. Its missionaries had traveled on foot or boat. Some, it was said, had journeyed in balloons. The fastest means of transportation had been death and resurrection.

  Actually, those who had killed the Chancer preachers were doing the Church a service. It ensured that the faith spread around The Riverworld in a much faster time.

  Martyrdom was a convenient means of travel, Jill thought. But it took great courage to die for your religion now when once dead always dead. She had heard that there had been a great falling away from the Church recently. Whether that was caused by the permanency of death now, or it was just that the movement had lost its steam, she did not know.

  One of the group was a man to whom she had not been introduced. Piscator had, however, pointed to him across the room and said, "John de Greystock. He lived during Edward I of England's reign. Thirteenth century? I have forgotten much of British history, though I studied it intensively when I was a naval cadet.''

  "Edward ruled from about 1270 to very early 1300, I think," Jill said. "I do remember that he ruled thirty-five years and died when he was sixty-eight. I remember it because that was a long life in those days, especially for an Englishman. Those chilly, drafty castles, you know."

  "Greystock was made a baron by Edward and accompanied him on his Gascon and Scottish expeditions," Piscator said. "I don't really know much about him. Except that he was governor of La Civito de La Animoj – SoulCity in English – a little state some forty-one kilometers down-River. He came here before I did, not too long after King John stole Clemens' boat. He enlisted in Parolando's army, rose rapidly in rank, and distinguished himself during the invasion of SoulCity . . ."

  "Why would Parolando invade Soul-City?" Jill said.

  "SoulCity had made a sneak attack on Parolando. It wanted to get control of the meteorite iron supply here and the Not For Hire too. It almost succeeded. But Clemens and several others blew up a big dam. This had been built to store water from a mountain stream so it could be used to generate electrical power. The blowing up of the dam released many millions of liters of water. The invaders were wiped out, along with thousands of Parolandans. It also swept the aluminum and steel mills and the factories into The River. The Riverboat, too, but that was recovered almost undamaged.

  "Clemens had to rebuild almost from scratch. During our vulnerable situation, the Soul Citizens allied with some other states and attacked again. They were repulsed but with heavy losses. The Parolanders badly needed SoulCity's bauxite, cryolite, cinnabar, and platinum. It had the only supply in the Valley. The bauxite and cryolite were needed to make more aluminum. Cinnabar is the ore of mercury, and platinum is used as electrical contacts for various scientific apparatuses, and as absolutely required catalysts in various chemical reactions."

  "I know that," Jill said with some asperity.

  "Forgive me," Piscator said, smiling slightly. "After the unsuccessful attack by the Soul Citizens, Greystock was made a colonel. And after Parolando's successful invasion of SoulCity, he was made its governor. Clemens wanted a tough, ruthless man, and like most feudal lords, Greystock was that.

  "However, several weeks ago SoulCity voluntarily became one of the states in the United States of Parolando, fully equal with the mother state.

  "Of course" – here Piscator smiled lopsidedly – "by now the supply of minerals in SoulCity is almost exhausted. Project Airship doesn't need SoulCity anymore. Also, through the process which Greystock calls attrition, a very euphemistic term, I fear, the original makeup of the population there has changed considerably. It was once a majority of mid–twentieth-century American blacks, with a minority of medieval Arabs – fanatical Wahhabis – and Dravidian speakers of ancient India. Because of the wars and Greystock's harsh governorship, its population became about half-white."

  "He sounds so savage," she said. "With due apologies to the savages."

  "He had several rebellions to put down. No one was forced to stay at SoulCity, you know. Clemens would not permit slavery. Everybody was given a chance to leave, to go peacefully and with all his possessions elsewhere. Many citizens stayed there, swore loyalty to Parolando, but then became saboteurs."

  "Guerrilla warfare?"

  "Hardly," Piscator said. "You know that the topography just isn't fined for guerrilla activity. No. It seems that a number of Soul Citizens thought that sabotage would be a method of recreation."

  "Recreation?"

  "It gave them something to do. It was better than drifting on down The River. Besides, many of them wanted revenge.

  "To give Greystock his due, he usually just kicked any saboteurs he caught out of the state. Actually, he threw them into The River. Well, that is history, and it happened before I came here. Anyway, Greystock has come here because he wants to be a member of the airship crew."

  "But he has no qualifications!"

  "True – in one sense. He does not come from a highly technological culture, relatively speaking. But he is intelligent and curious, and he can learn. And though he was once a baron of England and governor of SoulCity, he is willing to be a lowly crewman. The idea of flying fascinates him. It's akin to magic – for him. Firebrass has promised him that he can go – if there are not enough qualified airshipmen. Of course, if by chance the crew of the Graf Zeppelin or the Shenandoah should just happen to come along . . ." Piscator had smiled.

  Greystock was about 1.8 meters, a very tall height during the medieval period. His hair was black, long, and straight; his eyes, large and grey; his eyebrows, thick; his nose, slightly aquiline. His features harmonized into a ruggedly good-looking face. His shoulders were broad; his waist, narrow; his legs, thickly packed with muscle but long.


  At the moment, he was speaking to Samuelo, his grin and his tone both sarcastic. Piscator had said that Greystock hated priests, though he had been very devout during his Terrestrial existence. Apparently, he had never forgiven the clergy for falsely claiming to know the truth about the afterlife.

  Using Esperanto, Greystock said, "But surely you must have some idea of who and what La Viro was on Earth? What race was he? What nationality? When was he born, when died? Was he prehistoric, ancient, medieval, or what the later peoples called modern? What had he been on Earth, a religionist, agnostic, or atheist? What was his trade or profession? His education? Was he married? Did he have children? Was he a homosexual?

  "Was he unknown during his time? Or was he, perhaps, Christ? And is that why He is remaining anonymous, knowing that no one is going to believe His lies a second time?"

  Samuelo scowled, but he said, "I know little of this Christ; only what has been told me and that is not much. All I know of La Viro is what I have heard through word of mouth. They say that he is very tall, white skinned though very dark, and some say that they think he might have been Persian.

  "But all this is irrelevant. It is not his background or his physical appearance that matters. What does matter is his message."

  "Which I have heard from many preachers of your Church many times!'' Greystock said. "And which I believe no more than I do the stinking falsehoods the stinking priests offered me as God's own truths in my own time!"

  "That is your privilege, though not your right," Samuelo said.

  Grey stock looked puzzled. Jill did not understand what he meant either.

  Greystock said loudly, "All you priests talk mumbo-jumbo!" and he walked away scowling.