Gods of Riverworld: The Fifth Book of the Riverworld Series Page 15

  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 honour,

  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 small 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.

  Hesitantly, Frigate ran the movie at high speed until he located the exact area of time in which his grandmother had taken care of him.

  It took a week to convince him that he had been wrong. Certainly, there was nothing in his grandmother's behavior to justify even faintly his fantasy. Because it was a fantasy. His grandmother had not shaken or yelled at or spanked him to keep him from crying or mistreated him in any way. She had complained a lot to herself because of his crying, but Frigate did not understand more than a quarter of what she said, because she usually talked to herself in German. He could have asked the Computer to translate for him but did not bother. At that age, he would not have been affected by what was said but by the way it was said. The tone of complaint would not have meant much to him since she did not make it plain to the baby that she was displeased with him. And she did sing German lullabies to him, though she certainly had not held him much.

  "Well, hell!" Frigate said to himself. "There goes another theory. Probably I'll find out that my character deficiencies were due to genetic disposition far more than to the environment."

  He told Nur about his search. The little Moor laughed and said, "It's not the past that counts. It's the present. You cannot charge the past for your present failures and weaknesses. The present is here for you to change what you have been and are."

  "Yes, but the memory-movie is a great psychoanalytic tool," Frigate said. "Too bad they didn't have it on Earth. The patient and the doctor could have gone over any areas in doubt and cleared everything up. The patient could have seen what really happened, and he could have separated the truth from fantasy, the unimportant from the really significant."

  "Perhaps. But it's not necessary. You know what you are now. At least, you should, unless you're still fooling yourself about yourself, and that's highly possible. One good thing about the movie is that it would destroy your self-image, would demonstrate that you may have been wrong many times when you thought you were right. Or convince you that others were not entirely monsters or egoistic when they dealt with you. Or show you the times when they truly were so.

  "However, aside from satisfying your curiosity, and that may be very painful and humiliating, or satisfying your desire to see the faces of those you once loved or hated, the movies are time wasted. It is now that matters, now is the cliff edge on which you stand and must leap from into the future. What you have been and are is not what you must be. You are avoiding taking action on the now by immersing yourself in the past. The past should be only a light to the future. Or a measuring stick of your progress. That and that only."

  "You don't watch your movie?" Frigate said.

  "No. I'm not interested in it."

  "You don't care to see your parents when they were young, your playmates?"

  Nur tapped his head. "They're all in there. I can summon them up when I wish."

  "If the movie is a waste of time, then why did the unknown fix it so that it would be with us every second of waking time?"

  "The unknown did not arrange just that. The unknown fixed it so that we could see the movie if we wished to. She wasn't unaware of the possibility that we'd paint the walls and so block out the movie. Perhaps, by painting, we failed a test."

  "And what would the penalty for flunking it be?"

  Nur shrugged.

  "I'd guess that the penalty would be self-inflicted. It'd be a failure to progress."

  "But you said that you didn't need to see your past."

  "I don't. But I am not you or the others."

  "Isn't that arrogant?"

  "One man's arrogance is another's realism."

  "You Sufis like to proverb your way through life," Frigate said.

  Nur only smiled. This made the American feel as if he had failed to pass a test. For some time, Frigate had suffered from the belief that he had let Nur down — and himself — because he had quit being Nur's disciple. He had lost faith in his own ability ever to attain to Nur's lofty stature as a complete master of himself, free from neurosis and weakness, always logical yet compassionate. He just could not make it. So, rather than not succeed and be humiliated when Nur discharged him, flunked him, as it were, Frigate had resigned as Nur's disciple. "A Sufi does not fear failure," Nur had said. "What if I change my mind and ask you to take me as your pupil again?" "We'll see."

  "I've quit a lot of things or been forced to quit," Frigate said. "But I always went back and tried them again."

  "Perhaps it's time that you got rid of this start- and- stop habit. You need to form a psychic momentum that won't run out so quickly."

  "The great perhaps." "What does that mean?"

  Frigate did not know, and that made him angry. "You haven't yet learned, after one hundred and thirty-two years, to meld your opposites into a smooth cooperating whole," Nur had said. "You have always had within you a conservative, which isn't always bad by any means, and a liberal, which isn't always good by any means. You have within you a coward and a brave man. You detest and fear violence, yet there is someone violent within you, a person you've tried to repress. You don't know how to make your violence creative, how to control it so that it discharges into the right paths. You —"

  "Tell me something I don't know," Frigate had said and had walked away.

  He sometimes got the same sort of philosophical drum-beating from Li Po. The Chinese liked to tell him about the process of becoming "round," that is, making one's self into a "whole" man. Balancing his yin and yang, his negative and positive qualities. But Li Po, in Frigate's estimation, was very unbalanced. He admired Li Po's energy and poetical creativeness and compassion and self-confidence and linguistic mastery and courage untainted by fear. On the other hand — people were bimanual in more than one sense — Li Po had an excessive drive to dominate, was too self-absorbed, and utterly failed to see that these qualities often made him tiresome and offensive. He also was a drunk, though unlike any Frigate had ever known.

  Frigate believed that Li Po, despite his apparent superiority, had no more chance of Going On than he. Indeed, of the eight, only Nur and perhaps Aphra Behn and Alice were at this moment promising candidates for Going On. Which might or might not be desirable. The theory was that such a state was the end-all and be-all because it could be attained only if you were ethically perfect or near-perfect. The wathan of such a person just disappeared from all detectors and thus, so the reasoning went, was absorbed into the Godhead or God or Allah or What- Do- You- Call- It.

  The theory also claimed that the wathan then became part of the Creator, lost its individuality, and experienced from then on an eternity of ecstasy. Ecstasy undescribable, unknown in the physical state.

  "How do I know," Frigate thought, "that the wathan doesn't just disappear? Evaporate like an
ectoplasmic bubble? Become nothing, nada, nil, zero? Is that something to be hotly wished for? How does that differ from just being dead? Not that there aren't some good things to be said about just being dead. Past knowing, past caring, past torment physical and mental, past frustration and defeat, past loneliness. Oh, Death, where is thy sting?"

  Death had no sting. On the other hand, death had no zing.

  Gain something, lose something. That was the unchangeable law, the unchanged economy of the universe.

  "Am I paranoiac? Is all this a big con game? For what purpose? A con man expects to gain something. Who could gain in this situation? What could be gained?"

  Sometimes, his turmoiling thoughts swelled his brain, or seemed to do so, until it seemed that his skull, like a balloon under too much pressure, would burst. Maybe because his thoughts were just too much hot air.

  "After a hundred and thirty-two years, I ought to know better than to drive myself into such a state. Will I ever graduate from the sophomore class?"

  Life's sophomore, the wise-foolish, could not follow Nur's advice to rid himself of such thoughts, to dump them as if they were ballast on a balloon. Instead, he shunted them, put them on a sidetrack of the Great P.J.F. Railroad, and became for a while an engineer of the G.B.R., the Grailstones- on- the- banks- of- the- River express.

  He had found out something that the Ethical, Loga, had not mentioned, though doubtless he would have if he'd lived longer. That was that the grailstones lining both banks of The River were more than just electrical discharge devices to supply the grails with energy converted into food and liquor and various goodies for the Valleydwellers. They were also observation equipment, window-peeping and eavesdropping machines. A person in the tower could see and hear the people within detection range of the grailstones.