Gods of Riverworld: The Fifth Book of the Riverworld Series Page 14

  "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'11 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.

  "1 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 vines 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 roc
oco 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 slingstones 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.

  "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, hi 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 endeavour 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 Garonne 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 gaol.

  "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 gaol 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! 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.