The Gods of Riverworld Page 13

  Book-learning a language was a step toward mastering it. But he should resurrect an Etruscan and imbibe the living speech. However—there was always a however—what would he do with the Etruscan after he had finished with her?

  It was then that he thought of the possibility of reading the recordings of the dead in the files. Why not have the Computer unreel their memories? Perhaps the dead could speak.

  Using a codeword, he asked the Computer to form a screen on the floor. It did so, and Burton put his question to it. The Computer replied that the memories of the recordings could be extracted and displayed. However, some recordings were not available because of overrides.

  He looked at his wristwatch. Time for the androids to have finished their job.

  By then the display of his past had leaped to Naples, where the family was staying for a while during its never-ending wandering through southern Europe. Once more, he was being whipped by a tutor, this time by DuPré, an Oxford graduate.

  As Frigate had said, their lives were movies, but, before being shown the main feature, they were seeing “previews.”

  It would be embarrassing when the Computer got to the events of the day before this particular incident. He and an Italian playmate had masturbated before each other.

  It was also going to be embarrassing when the innumerable excretions were shown, and the sexual scenes would be downright intolerable. These were why Burton had decided that the idea for painting an apartment where all might meet was not enough. His own apartment was to be painted, and, if the others had any sense, they would follow his example.

  He entered the doorway, and the screen was hidden beneath the paint. The androids, sweating, were just finishing up his bedroom. He had not told them to paint every room, since there were several into which he would not go. That is, unless he wished to see his past, and he knew that there would be many times when he would not be able to resist the temptation. He could, however, now view it only when he wished to.

  He swore and snapped his fingers.

  Perhaps not.

  He went to the console of the auxiliary computer, which had not been painted over. Activating it, he stared at the screen. He smiled. The Computer was not displaying the loathed pictures there. Apparently it had been ordered only to use the walls for the memory projections.

  The Outram android reported that they were through. Burton told them to store the ladders and the unused cans in a bedroom and to put the used cans in a converter. He disintegrated the cans, then ordered the androids into the converter. They walked into the huge cabinet; he secured the door; energy flashed; not even a speck of ash was left.

  It had to be his imagination that made him think that their eyes looked pleading. They had neither self-consciousness nor instinct for self-preservation.

  The walls, floor, and ceilings were an appalling egg-white, but he would paint murals over these.

  Frigate called him via the console screen.

  “I’ve been exploring the little worlds on that second level down from the top,” he said. “I found out that the Computer doesn’t show the past there. I don’t know why, but I think that the Ethicals had some limitations there that the Snark couldn’t override. Anyway, besides that, there are other reasons why we should move into them. They give the illusion of the great outdoors; I felt much freer than I do in my apartment. I’m going to suggest that we move into them, and that anyone who wishes to do so remodel them. I’m going to do it whether or not anyone else does, but it would be nice if everybody did it. We’d be close together and could use the central area for social meetings or whatever.”

  They met in the central area of the “pie-in-the-sky” level that evening to talk about Frigate’s proposal.

  “You’ll have to see those places for yourselves,” Frigate said. “They’re fabulous.”

  The American reminded them that the circular section was divided into segments of thirty degrees each. The points of these twelve segments ended in the huge circular central area.

  “It occurred to me that, from a bird’s-eye view, the circle looks like a zodiac chart. It’s divided into twelve parts, twelve houses, Aquarius, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and so forth—if you want to look at it that way. I was thinking that maybe each of us could pick the area that corresponds to his or her birth date.”

  “Why?” de Marbot said.

  “It’s a conceit of mine. However, since the birth date could determine the particular area in which to live, it’ll avoid argument if we use the zodiacal method. Of course, there’s no reason for disagreement, since they’ll all look alike once the original paraphernalia is cleared out. It’s just an idea.”

  The others said that it seemed as good a way of choosing the areas as any.

  “But you don’t believe in that astrological crap, do you?” Turpin said.

  “No. Not really. However, I do know something about it. Now, Po, you were born, according to the Western calendar, on April 19, A.D. 701. That makes you Aries the Ram, the first house, the principle of which is energy. You certainly are energetic.”

  “And much more!” the Chinese said.

  “Yes. The first house also pioneers, and you were a pioneer. Your positive qualities are outgoing, original, and dynamic.”

  “Very true! I must learn more about this Occidental astrology.”

  “Your negative qualities,” Frigate said, smiling, “are that you’re foolhardy, have low self-sufficiency, and are deceitful.”

  “What? I? Perhaps I might be foolhardy, though I would prefer to call it absolutely courageous. But how could you say that I have low self-sufficiency, you who know me so well?”

  “I’m just telling you what astrology says about your sign. Anyway, negative qualities are to be overcome, and evidently you conquered yours, if you ever had them.”

  “One might say that he overcompensated in his conquest,” Burton said drily.

  “The house of Aries is OK with you?” Frigate said.

  “Why not! It is the first!”

  Frigate spoke to Alice. “You were born May 4, 1852. That makes you Taurus the Bull. Ruled by Venus, the emotions.”

  “Hah!” Burton said. Alice glared at him.

  “Taurus builds. Your positive qualities make you loyal, dependable, and patient. But you have to battle against excessive pride, self-indulgence, and greediness.”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Alice said quietly.

  “The second house OK with you?”

  “Of course.”

  Frigate spoke to Thomas Million Turpin, who was smoking a panatela and holding a glass of bourbon.

  “You were born on May 21, 1873, under the sign of Gemini, the Twins. You’re ruled by Mercury, and you’re strong on communication. You’re versatile, genial, and creative.”

  “Keep talking, man!”

  “But your negative qualities … uh … you’re two-faced, superficial, and unstable.”

  “That’s a damn lie! I never been two-faced, I always been straightforward. Where’d you get that shit?”

  “Nobody said that you were,” Frigate said. “What that indicates is that you have had to overcome those tendencies.”

  “I ain’t two-faced. I’m just discreet and polite. No use hurting someone’s feelings if you don’t have to. It don’t pay.”

  “The third house agreeable with you?”

  “One’s good as another and maybe better.”

  “We don’t have anybody born under Cancer,” Frigate said. “Not yet, anyway. The fifth house is Leo the Lion, representing vitality and ruled by the sun. Leo dramatizes. That’s you, Marcelin. Born August 18, 1782.”

  “So far, excellent,” de Marbot said. “I am all those.”

  “A Leo is regal…”

  “True!”

  “… entertaining…”

  “Doubly true!”

  “… and commanding.”

  “Triply true.”

  “The bad qualities, alas, are that Leo is pompous, domineering, and conceited.”r />
  The Frenchman reddened and scowled; the others burst out laughing.

  “He got you there!” Turpin said.

  “Leo, the fifth house, OK?” Frigate said.

  “If it is understood that we are merely amusing ourselves with this parlor game of astrology and that, though I may be a leader, I am not domineering, and though I have much to boast about but do not, I am not conceited, and that never, never am I pompous!”

  “Nobody’ll argue with you,” Frigate said ambiguously. “Now we come to the sixth house, Virgo, the virgin. Ruled also by Mercury, the communicator. Virgo analyzes. That’s you, Aphra, born September 22, 1640. Virgo is practical, analytical, intellectual.”

  “I’ve never been any of those,” Aphra said.

  “Virgo is also critical, hypochondriacal, and prim.”

  She laughed uproariously.

  “I, with my reputation and my bawdy dramas?”

  “The sixth house OK?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” de Marbot said. “I ask, why not? We have been living together, my little cabbage, and I am delighted and content. Now … sacrebleu … we will no longer share a bed and a roof. Have you not thought of that? If not, why not? Are you tired of me?”

  She patted him on the arm. “Not at all, my bantam cock, not at all. But … well … we are always with each other, never out of each other’s sight. It’s possible, only possible, I say, after all, we’re human, that such close and continuous intimacy may pall after a while. Besides … I like the idea of having my own world. We can build our own, each to our own desire, and still be with each other whenever we wish. I will stay one night in your world. You, the next night, in mine. We can pretend that we are a king and a queen making state visits to each other’s monarchy.”

  “I do not know about that,” he said.

  Aphra shrugged. “Well, if it doesn’t work out, we can live together as before. Surely, Marcelin, you are not afraid of this venture?”

  “I? Afraid? Never! Very well, Peter, I will take up residence in the fifth house and Aphra in the sixth. After all, we will be next-door neighbors.”

  “With a thick wall between you. Walls make good neighbors.”

  “But poor lovers,” Burton said.

  “You are too cynical, my friend,” de Marbot said.

  “Libra and Scorpio, the seventh and eighth houses, will have to be empty for the time being,” Frigate said. “The ninth is Sagittarius, the archer, ruled by Jupiter, the dominant mode being expansion. Sagittarius philosophizes. Which is appropriate, since you, Nur, are Sagittarius. You are, according to the ancient science, jovial, prophetic, and logical.”

  “And more,” Nur said.

  “You have the negative qualities of bluntness, fanaticism, and intolerance.”

  “Had. I conquered those in my late youth.”

  “We must skip Capricorn. Aquarius, my sign,” Frigate said, “is the eleventh house. Aquarius the Waterbearer is ruled by Saturn, which symbolizes lessons, and by Uranus, which stands for opportunities. Aquarius humanizes. Aquarius is diplomatic, altruistic, and inventive. Unfortunately, on the negative side, he is selfish, eccentric, and impulsive.”

  “Do you plead guilty?” Burton said.

  “More or less. Now, Dick, we come to you, Pisces, since you were born March 19, 1821. Pisces the Fish. Harmonizes, haw! haw! Ruled by Neptune or idealism and Jupiter or expansion. No argument there. Positive qualities: intuitive, sympathetic, artistic.”

  “You’ve told me, more than once, that I was a self-made martyr,” Burton said.

  “And so,” Nur said, “carrying our baggage of good and bad qualities, we go to our new homes. If we could only leave the suitcases containing the bad at the door.”

  16

  Moving into the “pie-in-the-sky” chambers demanded much preparation. The tenants had to tour their little worlds and decide whether they should keep the present decor or “environment” or make their own. Except for Nur, who was intrigued by the chamber of dark mirrors, each finally had his or her place stripped. While the hordes of androids and robots were doing this, the tenants decided on what kind of private world they wanted. After that, they had to instruct the Computer down to the minutest details about their specifications.

  Nur changed his mind. He would remain in his suite though he would visit the mirror-world now and then to meditate.

  Burton surprised everybody by his unaccountable reluctance to change homes. He had always been a wanderer who grew restless if he stayed in one place more than a week. Yet he now refused to move until he had made his world exactly as he wished. Halfway through the building of his first world, he stopped the work and had it stripped again. After a long time, he started on a second design but abandoned that after two weeks.

  “Perhaps he’s so unwilling to go there,” Nur said, “because it will be his last home. Where else can he go after he moves into that?”

  The afternoon that the six were to move, all eight held a big going-away party in the central area. It was not entirely a joyous occasion because de Marbot and Behn quarreled just before they were to take occupancy. The Frenchman was burned up at Aphra’s refusal to live with him in his world, and, after drinking more wine than he was accustomed to, he accused her of not loving him.

  “I am entitled to my own world, the world I made,” she said loftily.

  “A woman’s place is by the man she loves. She should go where he goes.”

  “We’ve been through this too many times,” she said. “I’m weary of it.”

  “You should be under my roof. It is my right. How can I trust you?”

  “I don’t have to be in your sight every minute. If you can’t trust me, if you think I’ll hop into another man’s bed the moment I go around the corner … Is it just me or don’t you trust any woman? You were often absent for many months from your wife when you were a soldier. Did you trust her? You must have, you didn’t—”

  “My wife was above suspicion!” de Marbot shouted.

  “Hail, Caesar!” Aphra said scornfully. “The real Caesar’s wife, my precious little piece of shit, put horns on him. So, if your wife was as good as Caesar’s wife…”

  Aphra walked away from him while he yelled at her, and she went through the doorway to the sixth house.

  Weeping, she let the door close behind her. She felt as if she were also closing off her lover forever, though she had had enough experience to know that her emotions, not her reason, were speaking. How many men had she parted from and never expected to see again? It seemed like a hundred, but, actually, it must be only twenty. And she could not remember the names of some. She would, though, when the dogging screen of her past showed up again. Here, at least, she could get away from it.

  She went up the steps, the door opening for her at the top, and she stepped into her world. There was another flying chair there; she got into it and soared to an altitude of a hundred feet and headed inward. Below her was South American low-altitude tropical jungle, with winding narrow rivers gleaming in the light of the false moon. The cries of night birds rang and clanged below her; a bat shot by near her and dipped toward the dark tops of the trees a few feet below her. The moon was full because she had arranged for one every night, and its light was twice as powerful as that of Earth’s. And the stars, also those of equatorial South America, were three times as bright as the real ones. In this luminous night, she saw a shape slip across a glade. A jaguar. And she heard the bellowings of alligators.

  The wind cooled her and fluttered her robe as she headed toward the big lake in the middle of the jungle. Its waters sparkled around the floating palace in its center. She had reconstructed this from her memory of an apparition she had seen while voyaging from Antwerp to London. It had appeared suddenly ahead of the ship as if placed there by magic and had startled and frightened everybody aboard. This magical building was square, four stories high, made of marble of various colors, and surrounded by rows of fluted and twisting pillars with climbing v
ines and flowers and streamers waving in the breeze. Each pillar was carved with hundreds of little Cupids who seemed to be climbing them with the aid of their fluttering wings.

  The palace had been seen by everybody aboard the ship. Where had it come from? If it was a mirage, what building did it reflect? There was nowhere in England or the Continent such a rococo fantastic palace.

  That unexplainable vision had haunted her the rest of her life on Earth and still did on the Riverworld. She had asked the Computer to explain it to her, but its searches had turned up only the reference to it in the biography of her by John Gildon. This posthumous work had both intrigued and disgusted her because of its inaccuracies and lies. She had then asked for all available literature concerning her and had read Montague Summers’, Bernbaum’s, and Sackville-West’s accounts. These authors had been mainly occupied in trying to sift the truth from the romance and speculations and had usually failed. They could not be blamed. The official records and documents about her were scarce, and getting the historical facts about her from her novels, plays, and poems was hopeless.

  Aphra knew, or had been told, that she was the daughter of a barber, James Johnson of Canterbury. Her mother had died a few days after Aphra’s birth, and she and her sister and brother had been adopted by relatives, John and Amy Amis. Neither she nor the Amises, of course, had any prescience that the little girl would some day be the first Englishwoman to support herself wholly by writing. Nor that one of her poems would be included in anthologies for centuries afterward and one novel would survive as a minor classic.

  Her successful intrusion into the hitherto all-male literary field had shocked and affronted many. The deepest shock was felt by the male writers and critics. Their biased and vindictive remarks and politicking made her furious, and she responded in kind, and justly so. She suffered all the hardships, the sling-stones and fiery crosses, of the pioneer, but she blazed the path for a host of women who earned their living by the pen.

  As a child, she had been nervous and imaginative and often ill. Nevertheless, she survived the six-thousand-mile rough and dangerous voyage to Surinam, an English possession in north South America on the Atlantic Ocean. Her adopted father, John Amis, was not so lucky. He died en route, a victim of a “fever.” He had been appointed lieutenant general of Surinam through the influence of a relative, Lord Willoughby of Parham. Despite the loss of her father, she enjoyed her life, and she took full advantage of the exotic land. Here she met a black slave who had been stolen from his tribe in West Africa and brought to Surinam. His stories of his homeland and his exalted position there, whether true or not, were the source of that romantic novel she was to write years later, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave.