The Gods of Riverworld Read online

  “Those were the happiest years of my life. There ’twas always spring, always April, May, and June. The trees bore at once all degrees of leaves and fruits. There were groves of oranges, lemons, citrons, figs, nutmegs, and noble aromatics continually exuding fragrances. Gaily colored macaws, parrots, and canaries flashed above the water lilies in the lagoons and trenches. The twa-twa bird had a cry like a silver gong. The kiskadee called ‘Qu’est-ce que dit? Qu’est-ce que dit?’ I became versed in the strange language of the blacks, half-African, half-English, and heard of Gran Gado, the Grand God, his wife Maria, and his son Jesi Kist. Indians came down from the mountains carrying bags full of gold dust.

  “It was not all lovely and paradisical, of course, I fell sick with malaria once and almost died.”

  In 1658, at the age of eighteen, she returned to London. At nineteen she was married to a much older man, a wealthy Dutch merchant, Jans Behn. Though she had no money, her good looks and wit and learning had inspired love in Mr. Behn. Through his connections, he introduced his wife into the court of Charles II.

  “And is it true,” Frigate had said, “that you were the king’s mistress?”

  “His Majesty did ask me to bed with him,” she had said, “but at that time I was married. I had the conception then, which I later abandoned, that adultery was sinful. Moreover, I loved my husband, no Dutch lump he, and I knew that he would be terribly hurt if I betrayed him.”

  By 1665, her husband had lost his immense fortune because of the sinking by storms or capture by pirates of the ships bearing his merchandise. He died from a heart attack in early 1666, leaving his widow with only fifty pounds. By the time she had gotten employment, she had only forty pounds left. Through friends at the court, she became an espionage agent and went to Antwerp. She was told that any information she could get on the Dutch fleet would be welcome. But her main assignment was to spy on renegade Englishmen living in Holland. There were many there who had fled England and were conspiring to overthrow the present monarchy.

  “A female James Bond,” Frigate had said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I was especially charged to make friends with an exile, William Scott, and endeavor to get him to return to England. He wouldn’t do so until he got a full pardon, but toward that end he agreed to collaborate with me. By then, I was broke. I sent a letter to James Halsall, the king’s cupbearer, my immediate superior. I asked him for funds to continue my spying. I got no answer, so I wrote a second missive, telling him how expensive Antwerp was and that I had only been able to feed myself and keep a roof over my head by pawning a ring. Again, no reply. Once more I wrote to Halsall and, at the same time, to Thomas Killigrew, a friend who was also in the secret service. I stated that I needed fifty pounds to pay debts. I also sent news of the number and disposition of the Dutch ships, of the Dutch army, and of my progress with Scott. After receiving no replies, I wrote in utter despair to the secretary of state, Lord Arlington. I told him all that I had done, how impoverished I was, and that soon I’d be in a Dutch debtor’s prison. But he did not answer.”

  “Did you then think about going over to the Dutch?” Burton had asked.

  “I? Never!”

  “Even then, the British government was mistreating and neglecting its soldiers and spies,” Burton had said.

  “I wrote again to Lord Arlington and begged him to send one hundred pounds to pay off my debts and return to England. Again, silence. So, there I was, not a penny of pay for my services, not a single word from my chiefs. What was I doing there but making a piteous fool of myself, a poverty-stricken dunce? Finally, I succeeded in getting a loan of one hundred and fifty pounds from a friend in England, Edward Butler, and I sailed back home in January, year of Our Lord 1667.”

  Weary, sick, and heavily in debt, Aphra crossed the Channel from Antwerp to London. Here she saw the ruins of the city laid low by the Great Fire. Yet the terrible blaze had not been without its good. It had consumed the hundreds of thousands of rats and millions of lice that had spread the Great Plague. Aphra, however, had little time to think about either the fire or the plague. Mr. Butler pressed her for repayment, and Lord Arlington and the king kept on ignoring her just requests for her back pay. The inevitable came; she was thrown into debtors’ prison.

  “Where,” Aphra had said, “if you had no money to buy food, you starved to death. That is, if the diseases running through the prisons like wild redskins on a raid did not strike you down first. The plagues were democratic, however. They killed you, high or low, poor or with money in your purse, young or old.”

  All the City prisons had been burned down or made useless by the Great Fire. Newgate was hastily repaired, but Aphra was sent to Caronne House in South Lambeth. The filth and overcrowding had been bad enough before the fire. They were ten times worse now because of the lack of prisons and the great numbers of citizens whose houses and property had been destroyed. Unable to pay their debts, they, too, went to jail.

  “I lived through it, though there were times when I wished that I would die. The stench of unwashed bodies and clothes, the stink from the sick suffering from the bloody flux, the noisome odor of the open sewers, the wailing of frightened and sick children, the stealing, the screaming of the mad and the furious, the coughing and retching, the fights, the brutality, the utter lack of privacy … if you would piss or shit you must do it in a cell with a dozen others watching or laughing at you … if my mother had not borrowed money to send me food, half of which was confiscated by the guards for their own benefit … I would have wasted away until I was too weak to resist the diseases floating in the sickening air of that hellhole. Whatever sins I had sinned, before I was in jail or after, I paid for them. ’Twas a purgatory without flames, flames that we would have welcomed to keep us warm.”

  Two of the guards offered to give her a meal a day with meat, vegetables, and wine if she would have intercourse with them both at the same time.

  “If my mother had not sent me enough to keep me from completely starving, I suppose I would have consented to their demands sooner or later, probably sooner. My empty belly was sucking wind, and I told myself, though I did not really believe it, that the guards were preferable to starvation. However, one of the guards, in addition to being unusually filthy, one-eyed, humpbacked, and rotten-toothed, had the French disease. I don’t know…”

  “Syphilis or gonorrhea?” Frigate had said.

  “Both, I think. What did it matter? Anyway, thanks to my mother, not God, I escaped them. And, eventually, Killigrew did pay me enough to discharge my debts and to live on for a while. A very short while.”

  She had paused, then said, smiling, and she looked beautiful when smiling, “I lied when I said that I wanted to die when in prison. Oh, perhaps I did briefly consider the benefits of suicide. No, I have always believed passionately that life is worthwhile, and I was not one who hoisted the white flag at the first discouragement. Nor did I ever acknowledge defeat. Not until the last breath came, and then not then. Death had not defeated me any more than life had. It just retired me.

  “There I was, just out of prison, thin and wan, my debts paid except for what I owed my mother and not a penny to pay her unless I went without food and lodging and cosmetics and clothes and books.”

  She was nearing thirty in a time when a woman of thirty looked—usually—much older than the woman of thirty of the late 1900s. Most had lost many teeth, and their breaths stank of rotten teeth. A woman without a husband, father, brother, uncle, or cousin to protect her was considered fair prey. If wronged, she could resort to a law that was far on the side of the wealthy and privileged. The judges, the lawyers, the bailiffs, the jurors, were open to bribery—very few exceptions—and were easily impressed by the rich and the titled. Women writers were not unknown, but these were not professionals. They were the daughters of country vicars who wrote in their spare time or noblewomen who wanted to get a “name” for themselves. No woman in England had tried to get
her livelihood from her pen.

  Aphra knew that she could write flowingly, wittily, and charmingly, and she had imagination. She was well-read, and she thought that she could do as well as any man in creating novels, poems, and plays. But she would start with a handicap in the literary race because she was a woman.

  However, somewhat compensating for the handicap, she looked better than most women her age. She had all her teeth, possibly because she had spent the first part of her life in Surinam and the minerals in the foods there helped preserve them. Possibly heredity was partly her dental savior. She was, though short, long-legged, though the skirts of her time kept most from observing that. She had full buoyant breasts, which the dress of her time did not conceal. She had beautiful yellow hair and large blue eyes with thick black brows that set off a face that was very attractive despite her long nose and somewhat short lower jaw. She had great charm, and she had a will with the momentum of a carriage and six horses galloping downhill.

  Moreover, she had determined that she would remain single. As she had once written: “Marriage is as certain a bane to love as lending is to friendship; I’ll neither ask nor give a vow.”

  She also wrote:

  According to the strict rules of honor,

  Beauty should still be the reward of love,

  Not the vile merchandize of fortune,

  Or the cheap drug of a church-ceremony.

  She’s only infamous, who to her bed

  For interest takes some nauseous clown she hates;

  And though a jointure or vow in public

  Be her price, that makes her but the dearer whore.…

  Take back your gold, and give me current love,

  The treasure of your heart, not of your purse.

  Despite which, she gave her heart to the wrong man, a barrister named John Hoyle, who ill-used her, took her love and money, gave her back mostly unfaithfulness and contempt, and came close to but did not quite succeed in breaking her heart. (Hoyle was murdered in a tavern brawl in 1692, after she had died. Frigate had told her of this.) “Hoyle was said by someone, I forget by whom, to be ‘an atheist, a sodomite professed, a corrupter of youth, and a blasphemer of Christ.’ ”

  “Socrates was also accused of all of that but the last,” Aphra had said. “I did not mind that he was that and much more. It was … he did not love me as I loved him … loved me not all except in the beginning.”

  “What would you do now if you met him?” Frigate had said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t hate him. Yet … perhaps I would kick him in the balls and then kiss him. Who knows? I hope I never see him again.”

  Aphra became famous, or infamous, and she was dubbed Astraea after the star maiden of ancient Greek mythology, daughter of Zeus and Themis, or perhaps of Astraeus the Titan and Eos. Astraea, during the golden age, distributed blessings. But when the iron age began, she left earth in disgust, and the gods placed her among the stars as the constellation Virgo.

  Great literary figures and their hangers-on and young playwrights and poets flocked to her court. Some of them were lucky enough to be her lovers.

  “However, many men, as I’ve said, resented my success, and many critics condemned my plays because they were written by a woman. Damn their rum-soaked brains and wine-bleared eyes and poxrunny pricks, they said my plays were bawdy and obscene. So they were, but if a man wrote such, the carpers would not’ve opened their mouths. Why should bawdiness and obscenity be strictly a man’s preserve? Are women angels or Eves?”

  Nevertheless, she made a fortune, which somehow boiled away under the pressure of her high living and generosity, and she had many lovers, though, as she said, not much true love from them. When she was forty-six, she suffered from the violent and painful attacks of arthritis which were to kill her.

  “Though I think that the effects of the pox were as fatal, though more insidious.”

  Though her writing hand hurt her and there were times when the pen slipped from her feeble grasp, she wrote furiously, and the novel that was to assure her a respectable place in English literature, Oroonoko, was published before she died. The sixteenth of April, 1689, her battle against prejudice, jealousy, gossip, and the hatred of the puritanical and hypocritical was over.

  William of Orange, the Dutch prince who had become monarch of England, did not like Mrs. Behn. Yet, somehow, though she was regarded as a wicked and scandalous woman, she was buried in Westminster Abbey.

  “How did that happen? I was interred among the greatest of the great? I?”

  “No one in my time knew why,” Frigate said.

  “Nor in mine,” Burton said. “We will have to resurrect one of your contemporaries to determine that.”

  “Byron was refused a grave in Westminster Abbey,” Frigate said. “He was thought to be too blasphemous and wicked to be given that honor. Yet you made it.”

  “And I,” Burton said, “I was also refused. I had deserved it more than many who rested there, but Nigger Dick would not be allowed within the hallowed walls.”

  Aphra had many miserable and frightening times on the Riverworld, but life was almost always worthwhile. No fun being dead. So, here she was in the tower and she had just parted with another lover. She might live with de Marbot again, though it did not seem likely just now. Never mind. She did not intend to be alone for long.

  17

  While waiting for his little world to be built, Peter Jairus Frigate was not idle. He decided that he did not wish to cut off the “memory movie” entirely. He was too curious about his past; he had many questions about it that he had thought would never be answered. Though he’d be pained seeing it, he was going to force himself to endure the pain. Now and then. So he removed a square of the paint from a wall of a room in his suite, and he spent an hour each day in that room. The moment he appeared in it, the past sprung to life as seen through his eyes and heard through his ears.

  Experimenting, he found that the Computer did not insist on showing him everything according to the program. If he requested a certain time area, then he got it.

  Also, the Computer had a clock synchronized with the time of its subject’s memory. If Frigate had known in the past what date it was because he’d looked at a calendar that day or someone had mentioned the date, the Computer could flash to that event. Otherwise, it had to estimate the approximate time and would scan its track for the area of time first, then the particular date.

  There were, as he soon found out, many gaps in the “movie.” He asked for a date at random, October 27, 1923. At that time, he was playing around and trying to do some spot-checking. That day was a blank; he had nothing in his memory about it.

  The Computer told him why.

  There was not enough space in his memory cells to store his entire life. A mechanism in the mnemonics complex erased what was to him insignificant, thus making more room for the meaningful. Often, though, what his conscious considered unimportant, his unconscious considered worth storing.

  The wathan was supposed to have stored the entire life experiences of the individual. Nothing was left unrecorded. This theory could not be validated, since, so far, no wathan could be tapped. Its bright many-colored exterior remained invulnerable to probing. Like the Sphinx, it was beautiful and awe-inspiring but silent.

  The Computer figured out for him that he had lived 55,188,000 minutes so far. Of this, 22,075,200 minutes were available at that moment. That was the total, but that did not mean that every one of those minutes could be run off in its entirety. There were many fragments of minutes in the storage. If Frigate cared to know just how many fragments and how long each was, he could get the numbers from the Computer. But he did not care to know.

  “Sixty percent of the movie of my life went onto the cutting-room floor,” he muttered. “Jesus! If I sit down and watch the whole movie from beginning to end, it’ll take me 15,330 days of twenty-four-hour periods to see it. Forty-two years of just sitting watching.”

  How could the human brain, that sm
all gray mass, contain so many memories, so much data, so many millions, maybe billions, of miles of film?

  Frigate asked if the Computer could show him the container unit that contained the “movie.” Obligingly, the Computer did so, and Frigate saw on the screen a yellow sphere the size of a cranberry. And that was only half-full.

  What he most wanted to see—and also did not want to see—was a very early period. He would have been about a year old, living in a house in North Terre Haute, Indiana. His mother’s mother was visiting them then, having come from Kansas City, Missouri, to help his mother with her infant. Frigate had the idea that his grandmother had mistreated him when she babysat him. He believed that it was not because she was cruel or sadistic but because she easily lost her temper. He based this speculation on the visions of her he had had during some sessions with a psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills. There, while trying to probe his infantile memories, he had become convinced that his grandmother had treated him in such a fashion that he had become subdued, submissive and fearful while a baby. Or that she had laid the foundation for these attitudes, which flowered when he became an adolescent.

  The psychoanalyst obviously had not put much credence in this, but he had allowed Frigate to make the effort. Probably, the analyst was pondering the significance of his attempt to fix the blame on his grandmother.