To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat Page 10

  “Perhaps,” Burton said.

  He stopped. There was thunder and lightning in the distance. A minute later, a rushing sound came, and then the patter of drops on the roof. It had rained about this time last night, about three in the morning, he would guess. And this second night, it was raining about the same time. The downpour became heavy, but the roof had been packed tightly, and no water dripped down through it. Some water did, however, come under the back wall, which was uphill. It spread out over the floor but did not wet them, since the grass and leaves under them formed a mat about ten inches thick.

  Burton talked with Monat until the rain ceased approximately half an hour later. Monat fell asleep; Kazz had never awakened. Burton tried to get back to sleep but could not. He had never felt so alone, and he was afraid that he might slip back into the nightmare. After a while, he left the hut and walked to the one which Wilfreda had chosen. He smelled the tobacco before he got to the doorway. The tip of her cigarette glowed in the dark. She was a dim figure sitting upright in the pile of grass and leaves.

  “Hello,” she said. “I was hoping you would come.”

  “IT’s the instinct to own property,” Burton said.

  “I doubt that it’s an instinct in man,” Frigate said. “Some people in the ’60s—1960s, that is—tried to demonstrate that man had an instinct which they called the territorial imperative. But….”

  “I like that phrase. It has a fine ring to it,” Burton said.

  “I knew you’d like it,” Frigate said. “But Ardrey and others tried to prove that man not only had an instinct to claim a certain area of land as his own, he also was descended from a killer ape. And the instinct to kill was still strong in his heritage from the killer ape. Which explained national boundaries, patriotism both national and local, capitalism, war, murder, crime, and so forth. But the other school of thought, or of the temperamental inclination, maintained that all these are the results of culture, of the cultural continuity of societies dedicated from earliest times to tribal hostilities, to war, to murder, to crime, and so forth. Change the culture, and the killer ape is missing. Missing because he was never there, like the little man on the stairs. The killer was the society, and society bred the new killers out of every batch of babies. But there were some societies, composed of preliterates, it is true, but still societies, that did not breed killers. And they were proof that man was not descended from a killer ape. Or I should say, he was perhaps descended from the ape but he did not carry the killing genes any longer, any more than he carried the genes for a heavy supraorbital ridge or hairy skin or thick bones or a skull with only 650 cubic centimeters capacity.”

  “That is all very interesting,” Burton said. “We’ll go into the theory more deeply at another time. Let me point out to you, however, that almost every member of resurrected humanity comes from a culture which encouraged war and murder and crime and rape and robbery and madness. It is these people among whom we are living and with whom we have to deal. There may be a new generation someday. I don’t know. It’s too early to say, since we’ve only been here for seven days. But, like it or not, we are in a world populated by beings who quite often act as if they were killer apes.

  “In the meantime, let’s get back to our model.”

  They were sitting on bamboo stools before Burton’s hut. On a little bamboo table in front of them was a model of a boat made from pine and bamboo. It had a double hull across the top of which was a platform with a low railing in the center. It had a single mast, very tall, with a fore-and-aft rig, a balloon jib sail, and a slightly raised bridge with a wheel. Burton and Frigate had used chert knives and the edge of the scissors to carve the model of the catamaran. Burton had decided to name the boat, when it was built, The Hadji. It would be going on a pilgrimage, though its goal was not Mecca. He intended to sail it up The River as far as it would go. (By now, the river had become The River.)

  The two had been talking about the territorial imperative because of some anticipated difficulties in getting the boat built. By now the people in this area were somewhat settled. They had staked out their property and constructed their dwellings or were still working on them. These ranged all the way from lean-tos to relatively grandiose buildings that would be made of bamboo logs and stone, have four rooms, and be two stories high. Most of them were near the grailstones along The River and at the base of the mountain. Burton’s survey, completed two days before, resulted in an estimate of about 260 to 261 people per square mile. For every square mile of flat plain on each side of The River, there were approximately 2.4 square miles of hills. But the hills were so high and irregular that their actual inhabitable area was about nine square miles. In the three areas that he had studied, he found that about one-third had built their dwellings close to the Riverside grailstones and one-third around the inland grailstones. Two hundred and sixty-one persons per square mile seemed like a heavy population, but the hills were so heavily wooded and convoluted in topography that a small group living there could feel isolated. And the plain was seldom crowded except at mealtimes, because the plains people were in the woods or fishing along the edge of The River. Many were working on dugouts or bamboo boats with the idea of fishing in the middle of The River. Or, like Burton, of going exploring.

  The stands of bamboo had disappeared, although it was evident that they would be quickly replaced. The bamboo had a phenomenal growth. Burton estimated that a fifty-foot-high plant could grow from start to finish in ten days.

  His gang had worked hard and cut down all they thought they would need for the boat. But they wanted to keep thieves away, so they used more wood to erect a high fence. This was being finished the same day that the model was completed. The trouble was that they would have to build the boat on the plain. It could never be gotten through the woods and down the various hills if it were built on this site.

  “Yeah, but if we move out and set up a new base, we’ll run into opposition,” Frigate had said. “There isn’t a square inch of the high-grass border that isn’t claimed. As it is, you have to trespass to get to the plain. So far, nobody has tried to be hard-nosed about their property rights, but this can change any day. And if you build the ship a little back from the high-grass border, you can get it out of the woods okay and between the huts. But you’d have to set up a guard night and day, otherwise your stuff will be stolen. Or destroyed. You know these barbarians.”

  He was referring to the huts wrecked while their owners were away and to the fouling of the pools below the cataract and the spring. He was also referring to the highly unsanitary habits of many of the locals. These would not use the little outhouses put up by various people for the public.

  “We’ll erect new houses and a boatyard as close to the border as we can get,” Burton said. “Then we’ll chop down any tree that gets in our way and we’ll ram our way past anybody who refuses us right-of-way.”

  It was Alice who went down to some people who had huts on the border between the plain and the hills and talked them into making a trade. She did not tell anybody what she intended. She had known of three couples who were unhappy with their location because of lack of privacy. These made an agreement and moved into the huts of Burton’s gang on the twelfth day after Resurrection, on a Thursday. By a generally agreed upon convention, Sunday, the first, was Resurrection Day. Ruach said he would prefer that the first day be called Saturday, or even better, just First Day. But he was in an area predominantly Gentile—or ex-Gentile (but once a Gentile always a Gentile)—so he would go along with the others. Ruach had a bamboo stick on which he kept count of the days by notching it each morning. The stick was driven into the ground before his hut.

  Transferring the lumber for the boat took four days of heavy work. By then, the Italian couples decided that they had had enough of working their fingers to the bone. After all, why get on a boat and go someplace else when every place was probably just like this? They had obviously been raised from the dead so they could enjoy themselves. Otherwise,
why the liquor, the cigarettes, the marihuana, the dreamgum, and the nudity?

  They left without ill feelings on the part of anybody; in fact, they were given a going-away party. The next day, the twentieth of Year 1, A.R., two events occurred, one of which solved one puzzle and the other of which added one, though it was not very important.

  The group went across the plain to the grailstone at dawn. They found two new people near the grailstone, both of them sleeping. They were easily aroused, but they seemed alarmed and confused. One was a tall brown-skinned man who spoke an unknown language. The other was a tall, handsome, well-muscled man with gray eyes and black hair. His speech was unintelligible until Burton suddenly understood that he was speaking English. It was the Cumberland dialect of the English spoken during the reign of King Edward I, sometimes called Longshanks. Once Burton and Frigate had mastered the sounds and made certain transpositions, they were able to carry on a halting conversation with him. Frigate had an extensive reading vocabulary of Early Middle English, but he had never encountered many of the words or certain grammatical usages.

  John de Greystock was born in the manor of Greystoke in the Cumberland country. He had accompanied Edward I into France when the king invaded Gascony. There he had distinguished himself in arms, if he was to be believed. Later, he was summoned to Parliament as Baron Greystoke and then again went to the wars in Gascony. He was in the retinue of Bishop Anthony Bec, Patriarch of Jerusalem. In the 28th and 29th years of Edward’s reign, he fought against the Scots. He died in 1305, without children, but he settled his manor and barony on his cousin, Ralph, son of Lord Grimthorpe in Yorkshire.

  He had been resurrected somewhere along The River among a people about ninety percent early fourteenth-century English and Scottish and ten percent ancient Sybarites. The peoples across The River were a mixture of Mongols of the time of Kubla Khan and some dark people the identity of which Greystoke did not know. His description fitted North American Indians.

  The nineteenth day after Resurrection, the savages across The River had attacked. Apparently they did so for no other reason than they wanted a good fight, which they got. The weapons were mostly sticks and grails, because there was little stone in the area. John de Greystoke put ten Mongols out of commission with his grail and then was hit on the head with a rock and stabbed with the fire-hardened tip of a bamboo spear. He awoke, naked, with only his grail—or a grail—by this grailstone.

  The other man told his story with signs and pantomime. He had been fishing when his hook was taken by something so powerful that it pulled him into the water. Coming back up, he had struck his head on the bottom of the boat and drowned.

  The question of what happened to those who were killed in the afterlife was answered. Why they were not raised in the same areas as in which they died was another question.

  The second event was the failure of the grails to deliver the noonday meal. Instead, crammed inside the cylinders were six cloths. These were of various sizes and of many different colors, hues, and patterns. Four were obviously designed to be worn as kilts. They could be fastened around the body with magnetic tabs inside the cloth. Two were of thinner almost transparent material and obviously made as brassieres, though they could be used for other purposes. Though the cloth was soft and absorbent, it stood up under the roughest treatment and could not be cut by the sharpest chert or bamboo knife.

  Mankind gave a collective whoop of delight on finding these “towels.” Though men and women had by then become accustomed, or at least resigned, to nudity, the more aesthetic and the less adaptable had found the universal spectacle of human genitalia unbeautiful or even repulsive. Now, they had kilts and bras and turbans. The latter were used to cover up their heads while their hair was growing back in. Later, turbans became a customary headgear.

  Hair was returning everywhere except on the face.

  Burton was bitter about this. He had always taken pride in his long mustachios and forked beard; he claimed that their absence made him feel more naked than the lack of trousers.

  Wilfreda had laughed and said, “I’m glad they’re gone. I’ve always hated hair on men’s faces. Kissing a man with a beard was like sticking my face in a bunch of broken bedsprings.”

  13

  Sixty days had passed. The boat had been pushed across the plain on big bamboo rollers. The day of the launching had arrived. The Hadji was about forty feet long and essentially consisted of two sharp-prowed bamboo hulls fastened together with a platform, a bowsprit with a balloon sail and a single mast, fore-and-aft rigged, with sails of woven bamboo fibers. It was steered by a great oar of pine, since a rudder and steering wheel were not practicable. Their only material for ropes at this time was the grass, though it would not be long before leather ropes would be made from the tanned skin and entrails of some of the larger river fish. A dugout fashioned by Kazz from a pine log was tied down to the foredeck.

  Before they could get it into the water, Kazz made some difficulties. By now, he could speak a very broken and limited English and some oaths in Arabic, Baluchi, Swahili, and Italian, all learned from Burton.

  “Must need…wacha call it?…wallah!…what it word?…kill somebody before place boat on river…you know…merda…need word, Burton-naq…you give, Burton-naq…word…word…kill man so god, Kabburqanaqruebemss…water god…no sink boat…get angry…drown us…eat us.”

  “Sacrifice?” Burton said.

  “Many bloody thanks, Burton-naq. Sacrifice! Cut throat…put on boat…rub it on wood…then water god not mad at us….”

  “We don’t do that,” Burton said.

  Kazz argued but finally agreed to get on the boat. His face was long, and he looked very nervous. Burton, to ease him, told him that this was not Earth. It was a different world, as he could see at a quick glance around him and especially at the stars. The gods did not live in this valley. Kazz listened and smiled, but he still looked as if he expected to see the hideous green-bearded face and bulging fishy eyes of Kabburqanaqruebemss rising from the depths.

  The plain was crowded around the boat that morning. Everybody was there for many miles around, since anything out of the usual was entertainment. They shouted and laughed and joked. Though some of the comments were derisive, all were in good humor. Before the boat was rolled off the bank into The River, Burton stood up on its “bridge,” a slightly raised platform, and held up his hand for silence. The crowd’s chatter died away, and he spoke in Italian.

  “Fellow lazari, friends, dwellers in the valley of the Promised Land! We leave you in a few minutes….”

  “If the boat doesn’t capsize!” Frigate muttered.

  “.…to go up The River, against the wind and the current. We take the difficult route because the difficult always yields the greatest reward, if you believe what the moralists on Earth told us, and you know now how much to believe them!”

  Laughter. With scowls here and there from die-hard religionists.

  “On Earth, as some of you may know, I once led an expedition into deepest and darkest Africa to find the headwaters of the Nile. I did not find them, though I came close, and I was cheated out of the rewards by a man who owed everything to me, a Mr. John Hanning Speke. If I should encounter him on my journey upriver, I will know how to deal with him….”

  “Good God!” Frigate said. “Would you have him kill himself again with remorse and shame?”

  “.…but the point is that this River may be one far, far greater than any Nile, which as you may or may not know, was the longest river on Earth, despite the erroneous claims of Americans for their Amazon and Missouri-Mississippi complexes. Some of you have asked why we should set out for a goal that lies we know not how far away or that might not even exist. I will tell you that we are setting sail because the Unknown exists and we would make it the Known. That’s all! And here, contrary to our sad and frustrating experience on Earth, money is not required to outfit us or to keep us going. King Cash is dead, and good riddance to him! Nor do we have to fill out hundre
ds of petitions and forms and beg audiences of influential people and minor bureaucrats to get permission to pass up The River. There are no national borders….”

  “.…as yet,” Frigate said.

  “.…nor passports required nor officials to bribe. We just build a boat without having to obtain a license, and we sail off without a by-your-leave from any muckamuck, high, middle, or low. We are free for the first time in man’s history. Free! And so we bid you adieu, for I will not say good-bye….”

  “.…you never would,” Frigate muttered.

  “.…because we may be back a thousand years or so from now! So I say adieu, the crew says adieu, we thank you for your help in building the boat and for your help in launching us. I hereby hand over my position as Her British Majesty’s Consul at Trieste to whomever wishes to accept it and declare myself to be a free citizen of the world of The River! I will pay tribute to none, owe fealty to none; to myself only will I be true!”

  “Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause;

  “He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws,” Frigate chanted.

  Burton glanced at the American but did not stop his speech. Frigate was quoting lines from Burton’s poem, The Kasidah of Haji Abdu Al-Yazdi. It was not the first time that he had quoted from Burton’s prose or poetry. And though Burton sometimes found the American to be irritating, he could not become too angry at a man who had admired him enough to memorize his words.

  A few minutes later, when the boat was pushed into The River by some men and women and the crowd was cheering, Frigate quoted him again. He looked at the thousands of handsome youths by the waters, their skins bronzed by the sun, their kilts and bras and turbans wind-moved and colorful, and he said,