Gods of Riverworld: The Fifth Book of the Riverworld Series Page 16

  Having discovered this, Frigate indulged himself until he became dizzied and confused. He scanned The Valley on the right bank at the rate of one grailstone every two seconds, starting with the first one in the polar zone. After a while, realizing that at this rate he'd take about 232 days to get from one end to the other, he began leapfrogging every twenty grailstones and watched from the twenty-first for ten seconds each. The blur of human bodies and River and plain and mountains stopped. Even so, he got light-headed after an hour. He would have to abandon his plan to zoom by all of humanity, to take it all in two sweeps. No, he was wrong there. Eighteen billion plus were not in The Valley; they were retired, for the time being, in the Computer's records and the well of the wathans. But the number he must zip by was staggering.

  "Always too grandiose, Frigate," he told himself. "You're just not big enough. Your ambition is a lightyear ahead of your ability. Your imagination is the eight-legged steed Sleipnir, but you, as Odin, have fallen off a thousand leagues ago."

  It was hard to tell the nationality of the people he saw. Except for those who were nude, and there were plenty of them, they wore the towels as kilts or loincloths and the women used smaller, thinner cloths as brassieres. The race was usually identifiable, though sometimes he could not be sure. Some of the faces were unmistakably Mediterranean, Spanish, Italians, Greeks, Arabs and so forth. Still, one could be mistaken about that. Language was a key, but there were thousands of tongues he could not label just from listening. Besides, the majority spoke Esperanto or various dialects thereof.

  After two hours, he tired of this kind of observation. "Well, hell! From the collective to the personal." Seeing no one who caught his fancy near the stone he'd stopped at, he moved the observation points a stone at a time southward, pausing for twenty or so seconds at each one. It was now early afternoon, and the citizens of the right bank had eaten their lunch and were passing the time. Some were standing or sitting around and talking. Some were playing games. Many were swimming or fishing. A number of them would be in their huts and so out of sight. Those within three hundred feet could be seen closeup and easily overheard, however. The stone, like the TV camera, could zoom in and had built-in directional sound amplifiers.

  The Computer could also show what the citizens could not see. Frigate's screen displayed in all their many-colored splendor the wathans attached to the heads and whirling just above them. He had had enough experience by now to tell at a glance when a wathan was shot with "bad" colors or had a "bad" structure, though "bad" did not necessarily mean "evil." Broad bands of black or red could indicate character weaknesses as much as "evil" traits. Their waning and waxing and writhing — the three Ws, Frigate thought — reflected mental-emotional tensions and shifts in both the conscious and unconscious minds. In the entire nervous system, in fact. A sick person could have a lot of black in his or her wathan. That entity was not interpreted easily; it took a very skilled person or the Computer to read a wathan correctly and even then the reading could be in error.

  18

  * * *

  At this moment, his eye was caught by a man whose wathan was almost entirely black and red with a flicker of purple here and there. He was a Caucasian, about six feet tall, well-built, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and, if his face had not been so red and distorted, might have been passably good-looking. He was screaming in English at a woman who was much smaller and seemed frightened. She kept backing away, her eyes wide, while the man advanced with waving fists. Though he spoke so rapidly and in such a garbled way that Frigate could not understand him well, Frigate got the idea that the man was accusing the woman of being unfaithful. The people around the two were watching them warily but none was trying to interfere.

  Suddenly, the man's wathan became wholly black, and he grabbed the woman by her long hair and began hitting her with his right fist. She slumped to her knees and tried to put her hands over her face. Jerking at her hair viciously, he slammed his fist on top of her head, then punched her on the nose and mouth. She quit screaming and sagged, held up only by his grip on her hair. Blood ran from her gaping mouth; teeth fell out in the red pool on the grass.

  Men jumped on him and pulled him, raving, away from her. The woman lay unmoving on the ground.

  A man came running from a hut, stopped when he got to the woman, knelt down, moaning, and took the woman in his arms. He rocked her for a moment, then let her down gently, rose, and strode back to the hut. The man who had struck the woman was released, and now he was excusing himself for the attack. She was a slut, a whore, a fucking cunt, she was his woman, and no woman of his screwed another man. She deserved what she had gotten. More. As for Tracy, the man who had laid his woman, he, Bill Standish, would kill him in good time.

  If you do, one of the men who had grabbed him said, you'll hang. You may hang anyway.

  The man who had gone into the hut charged out with a long stone-tipped spear in his hand. Standish saw him and started running for The River. The man who had threatened hanging yelled at Tracy to put the spear down, but Tracy ignored him. He ran by the group and hurled his spear, and its point went into Standish's back near the right shoulder-bone. Standish fell face forward into the shallow water but struggled up and reached back and managed to get hold of the far end of the spear butt. Tracy was on him then and had knocked him down. Some of the men ran to the two and grabbed the screaming Tracy and pulled him away from Standish. By then, Standish, his skin very pale, his mouth hanging open, had wrenched the flint blade from his back. Before the others could stop him, Standish had plunged the stone tip into Tracy's belly.

  Frigate felt as if he were going to throw up, but he managed to watch the drama until its end. He had plans for Standish.

  One of the men who had run after Standish had a big oak club. He slammed Standish over the head. Standish seemed to melt into his own flesh and slumped into the water. He was dragged out onto the shore, his head lolling. A man examined him. Looking up, he said, "You shouldn't have hit him so hard, Ben. He's dead."

  "He had it coming," Ben said. "We would've hung him." "You don't know that," the man said.

  "If ever a man deserved killing, it's Standish," a man said, and most of the group agreed with him.

  Frigate had known that the man was dead before anyone else had. He had seen Standish's wathan disappear, whisked away by the magician Death.

  He turned off the scene and told the Computer to get a fix on Standish's wathan. That was not as easy as it should have been because of the recency of Standish's death. In two minutes, seventeen other wathans had entered the well after Standish's.

  Frigate asked the Computer if Standish had been killed before this. The Computer said that the man had died three times on this world.

  Had the Computer scanned and taped any of Standish's memory during these times?

  After carefully defining violence to the Computer, Frigate told it to quick-check all periods of violence in Standish's life. "Beginning when he was fifteen years old."

  That meant that the Computer would first have to determine when Standish was at that age. It made a run but took an hour to locate the period that gave definite proof. Fortunately, Standish had been given a birthday party in 1965. (Which meant that he was born in 1950, Frigate thought.) Frigate had the birthday party displayed. Standish's mother was a short, very fat slattern; his father was a big pot-bellied man with many broken veins on his face. Both were reeling drunk. So were all the guests, many of whom were Standish's schoolmates. The house was dirty, and the furniture was threadbare and broken. The father was, according to some remarks made by a guest, a carpenter who did not work as much as he could have. Standish puked up beer and pretzels and bologna sandwiches late in the evening, and the party broke up when the parents started screaming insults and obscenities at each other. It looked as if they were going to hit each other when Frigate shut the scene off.

  Frigate told the Computer that that was an example of verbal violence. What he wanted was physical violence. Frigate
then went to the evening meeting, held in Li Po's apartment. The Computer continued its search, which was for the time being limited to the ten years between 1965 and 1975.

  At the party, Frigate found out that others were also conducting searches. Alice, for instance, was trying to locate her three sons, her parents, and her brothers and sisters.

  "Do you plan on resurrecting them?" Frigate said.

  Her dark eyes seemed troubled.

  "Frankly, I don't know. I think I just wish to make sure that they're all right. Happy. Of course, they, some of them, might be dead. Then, of course . . . "

  What she meant was that any who were locked away in the records, their wathans in the central shaft, could not live again unless she raised them. But she was not certain what effect their presence would have on her, how they would circumscribe her. Or what their reactions to what she now was would be. What would they think if they knew that she had been the mate of that wicked man, Dick Burton?

  Also, the reunion of parents with children could be unhappy. The parents were used to ruling their children, were, at least, in Alice's time. But here there were no evident marks of age; the parents looked as young as their children. Moreover, after a separation of so many years and such different experiences, both parents and children had changed considerably. There was, literally, a world between them, a gap that few could cross.

  Yet Alice had loved her mother, father, sons and siblings.

  Frigate noticed that she had said nothing of her husband, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves. He was too discreet to mention it.

  "You've had no success so far?" Frigate said.

  Alice sipped from her cut-quartz goblet of wine and said, "No. I've given their names and birth and death dates to the Computer, all except the death date of my son Caryl. I don't know that, but I'm sure I can find a book or a newspaper in the records that will, and I'm looking for photographs that the Computer can match up with its files. That all takes time, you know. If any or all are dead and in the records, then they'll be found. But if they're living, the chances that they'll be located are less. The Computer can make a grailstone-scan. However, unless my people happen to be in range during the necessarily quick scan, they won't be found. Perhaps not then."

  If you can't find any, Frigate thought, you'll be relieved of the decision whether or not to resurrect them.

  "How about Lewis Carroll, Mr. Dodgson?" he said.

  "No."

  She did not offer to elaborate, and she would have been offended if he had asked her to do so.

  Frigate left the "shindig" and went to his apartment. Instead of going to bed, he ran some more scenes from Standish's past. These so troubled him that he could not get to sleep after he had shut them off. Standish was a low-life, a creep, a brutal, dirty, nasty and unintelligent man on Earth and the Riverworld. It was not until two days later, though, that Frigate became so horrified that he quit watching Standish for a while.

  Standish was out of a job, his usual circumstance, and living with his sister and her daughter in their apartment in a small Midwestern city. The sister was a twenty-year-old who would have been attractive if she had been clean and shown any signs of intelligence. Her daughter was a blonde, blue-eyed three- year- old who might have been beautiful if she had not been so fat from eating junk food and drinking enormous quantities of Coke. On this particular display, Frigate was watching through Standish's eyes the living room of the shabby apartment. Standish's sister, Maizie, was drinking beer on a broken-down sofa. The infant was playing with a ragged doll but was half-hidden by a chair in a corner. Now and then, Frigate could see the can of beer Standish held. Judging from the conversation, the two adults had been drinking beer since breakfast.

  "Where's Linda?" Standish said, looking blearily around.

  "There." Maizie waved a hand at the chair.

  "Yeah. Come here Linda!" Standish said loudly.

  Reluctantly, the little girl, holding her doll, walked out from behind the chair. Standish zipped open his pants and pulled out his erect penis.

  "Ever sheen one of those, Linda?" Standish said.

  Linda backed away. Standish yelled at her to stay where she was. Maizie got up swaying from her chair. "What in fuck are you doing?"

  "I'm going to fuck Linda."

  Frigate felt sick, but he watched, his gorge rising, as Maizie argued with her brother but finally said, "Well, what the Hell, she's gotta get fucked some day. Might as well be now."

  "Yeah, you know it. You was pronged when you was seven years old, wasn't you?"

  Maizie didn't reply. Standish said, "Come here, Linda."

  When she shook her head, he yelled, "Come here, damn it! You want a spanking like Uncle Bill gave you last night? Come here!"

  Frigate could not endure it any longer. He turned the scene off. Shaking, he told the Computer to run forward three days. And he saw, through Standish's eyes, the jail cell. Standish was with two others and bragging about how he had screwed his sister's kid.

  "The little cunt wanted it, so I gave her what she asked for. Anything wrong with that?"

  "The poor little girl," Frigate muttered. "God!"

  The Computer was locked into Standish's recording. All Frigate had to do was to order the Computer to destroy it. Standish would be forever dead except for his wathan, and that would float aimlessly and blindly through the universe.

  Biting his lip, quivering, heat seething through him, Frigate got up from the console and walked savagely back and forth, muttering "Damn, damn, damn! Damn him to Hell and back! No, not back!"

  Finally, he charged up to the console and shouted, "When I give you this codeword, destroy Standish!"

  There was more to do than that, though. He had to identify the man's recording by the Computer's code, affirm three times that he wished it destroyed, and establish the codeword.

  "But for the present, Standish is to be on hold," Frigate said.

  For no rational reason that he could find, he felt ashamed of himself a few hours later. Who was he to be the judge? Yet . . . anyone who would rape a child . . . deserved oblivion.

  The next day, hesitatingly, he told Nur what he had done. The Moor raised his eyebrows and said, "I can understand your anger. I did not see what you saw, but I, too, am sick and angry. The man seems totally unredeemable and has proved himself to be no better here than he was on Earth. But he still has time to become something better. I know that you don't think that he ever will, and you are probably right. The Ethicals, however, gave everybody a certain amount of time to save himself or herself, and Loga managed to extend that time. You must not interfere, no matter what you feel."

  "He shouldn't be loosed on people again," Frigate said.

  "He shouldn't, perhaps, be loosed on himself, either," Nur said. "But he will. What drives you just now is revenge. That's understandable. But it's not permitted, and there is a reason for that."

  "What's the reason?"

  "You know what it is," Nur said. "Some of the most unredeemable people, unredeemable by all appearances, anyway, have saved themselves, become genuine human beings. Look at Göring. And I'm sure you'll find others in your searches."

  "Standish died when he was thirty-three," Frigate said. "Drunk, drove his car through a stoplight and smashed into another car broadside. I don't know if he killed or hurt the others, but I could find out. I suppose that doesn't matter. What does is that Standish never learned a thing, never repented, never blamed himself, never thought of changing himself. Never will."

  "I know you," Nur said. "If you do this, you will suffer from guilt."

  "The Ethicals didn't suffer from guilt. They knew that the time would come when people like Standish would have sentenced themselves to oblivion."

  "Your righteous indignation and wrath are clouding your mind. You have just uttered the reason why you shouldn't interfere."

  "Yes, but . . . the Ethicals only gave us a certain amount of time. Who's to say that, given a little more time than they've allowed, some might not h
ave attained the goal? Maybe one more year, a month, a day, might have made the difference?"

  "That was Loga's reasoning, and he interfered with his fellow Ethicals' plan, and events have gone astray. Perhaps we were wrong to have sided with Loga."

  "Now you're arguing against yourself."

  Nur smiled and said, "I do a lot of that."

  "I don't know," Frigate said. "For the time being, Standish is locked up, as it were. He's not hurting anybody. But when . . . if . . . the day comes that the eighteen billion are to be raised in The Valley again, I might dissolve him."

  "If anyone should do that, it's the little girl. Ask her if she wants to do it."

  "I can't. She died of a liver disease when she was about five."

  "Then she was raised on the Gardenworld. She may be one of the Agents locked in the recordings and so unattainable."

  Why am I doing this? Frigate asked himself. Other than the obvious. Do I get a feeling of power by holding that Yahoo's fate in my hands? Do I like that sense of power? No, I never have liked power. I'm too aware of the responsibility that goes with power. Or should go with it. I've always tried to shun responsibility. Within reasonable limits, of course.

  19

  * * *

  Others might be uncertain about whom they wanted to resurrect to populate their private worlds, but Thomas Million Turpin was not one of them. He wanted Scott Joplin, Louis Chauvin, James Scott, Sam Patterson, Otis Saunders, Artie Mathews, Eubie Blake, Joe Jordan. Lots of others, those whom he knew and loved in the ragtime days, great musicians all, though the greatest were Joplin and Chauvin. Tom could play the piano like an angel, but those two were three circles of Heaven above him, and he loved them.

  The women? Most of those he'd known on Earth were whores, but some of them were easy to get along with and better to look at. When he'd been in The Valley, he'd fallen in love with a woman he'd never fallen out of love with, an ancient-Egyptian broad named Menti. Maybe she was filed away; if so, he could bring her back. It'd been thirteen years since he'd seen her, but she wasn't going to forget him. She was a Caucasian, but she was darker than he was, and she wasn't prejudiced against blacks. She was the daughter of a merchant in Memphis. Memphis, Egypt, not Tennessee. She . . . she'd be the first one he'd have the Computer look for.