Riverworld03- The Dark Design (1977) Read online

  Literally, people and things formed from the air.

  Burton had sometimes wondered what would happen if the translatee should happen to be formed in an area occupied by another object. Frigate said that there would be a terrible explosion. This had never happened, at least not to Burton's knowledge. Thus, the mechanism "knew" how to avoid this intermingling of molecules.

  There was, however, as Frigate had pointed out, the volume of atmosphere which the newly formed body had to displace. How were the molecules of air kept from a fatal mingling with the molecules of the body?

  No one knew. But the mechanism must somehow remove the air, make vacuums into which the body, grail, and cloths appeared. It would have to be a perfect vacuum, too, something which the science of the late 10th century had not succeeded in making.

  And it did it silently, without the explosion of a mass of suddenly displaced air.

  The question of how bodies were recorded still did not have a satisfactory answer. Many years ago, a captured agent of the Ethicals, a man calling himself Spruce, had said that a sort of chronoscope, an instrument which could look back in time, recorded the cells of human beings. Of every person who had ever lived from about two million B.C. to 2008 A.D.

  Burton did not believe this. It did not seem possible that anything could go backward in time, bodily or visually. Frigate had expressed his disbelief, too, saying that Spruce probably had used "chronoscope" in a figurative sense. Or perhaps he had lied.

  Whatever the whole truth, the resurrection and the grail food could be explained in purely physical terms.

  "What is it, Burton?" the chief said politely. "You have been seized by a spirit?"

  Burton smiled and said, "No, I was just thinking. We too have talked to many who said that no one has been translated for a year in their areas. Of course, this may just mean that the places through which we voyaged may not have had any translatees. It is possible that there have been translatees elsewhere. After all, The River may be . . . ″

  He paused. How could he put across the concept of a River which was possibly 10,000,000 or more kilometers long to people who did not understand any number above twenty?

  "It may be so long that a man who sailed from one end of The River to the other would take as many years to do it as the combined lifetimes of your grandfather, father, and yourself on Earth.

  "Thus, even though there may be as many deaths as there are blades of grass between two grailstones, that still would not be much compared to the numbers who live along The River. Even though we have voyaged very far, we still have not gone far compared to the length of The River. So, there may be many areas where the dead have risen.

  "Also, not as many people die now as in the first twenty years here. The many, many little states have been permanently established. Few slave states now exist. People have made states which keep order among their own citizens and protect them from other states. The evil people who lusted for power and the food and goods of others were killed off. It is true they popped up elsewhere, but in other areas they found themselves without their supporters. Things are fairly well settled now, though, of course, there are still accidents, mainly from fishing, and individuals do kill, though chiefly from passion.

  "There are not so many dying nowadays. It is possible that the areas through which we went just were not the areas in which translatees appeared."

  "Do you really believe that?" the chief said. "Or are you saying that merely to make us feel happy?"

  Burton smiled again. "I do not know."

  "Perhaps," the chief said, "it is as the shamans of the Church of the Second Chance tell us. That this world is only a stepping stone, a way station, to another. A world even better than this one. The shamans say that when a person becomes a very good man here, much better than he was on Earth, he goes on to a world where the Great Spirits truly dwell. Though the shamans do insist that there is only one Great Spirit. I cannot believe that, since everybody knows that there are many spirits, born high and low."

  "That is what they say," Burton replied. "But how should they know any more than you or I know?"

  "They say that one of the spirits that made this world appeared to the man who founded their church. This spirit told the man that this was so."

  "Perhaps the man who claims this is mad or a liar," Burton said. "In any event, I would have to talk to this spirit myself. And he would have to prove that he was indeed a spirit."

  "I do not trouble myself about such matters," the chief said. "It is better to leave the spirits alone, to enjoy life as it is and to be one whom the tribe finds good."

  "Perhaps that is the wisest course," Burton said.

  He did not believe this. If he did, why was he so determined to get to the headwaters of The River and to the sea behind the mountains ringing the north pole, the sea that was said to have at its center a mighty tower in which the secret makers and rulers of this world lived?

  The chief said, "I mean no offense, Burton, but I am one who can see into a person. You smile and you tell funny stories, but you are troubled. You are angry. Why do you not quit voyaging on that small vessel and settle down? You have a good woman, all, in fact, that any man needs. This is a good place. There is peace, and thieves are unknown, except for an occasional passer-through. There are not many fights except between men who want to prove that one is stronger than the other or between a man and his woman because they cannot get along with each other. Any sensible person would enjoy this area."

  "I am not offended," Burton said. "However, for you to understand me, you would have to listen to the story of my life, here and on Earth. And even then you might not understand. How could you when I don't understand it myself?"

  Burton fell silent then, thinking of another chief of a primitive tribe who had told him much the same thing. This was in 1863 when Burton, as Her Majesty's consul for the West African island of Fernando Po and the Bight of Biafra, visited Gelele, king of Dahomey. Burton's mission was to talk the king into stopping the bloody annual human sacrifices and the slave trade. His mission had failed, but he had collected enough data to write two volumes.

  The drunken, bloody-minded, lecherous king had acted high-handedly with him, whereas when Burton had visited Benin its king had crucified a man in his honor. Still, they had gotten along rather well, considering the circumstances. In fact, on a previous visit, Burton had been made an honorary captain of the king's Amazon guard.

  Gelele had said that Burton was a good man but too angry.

  Primitive people were good at reading character. They had had to be to survive.

  Monat, the Arcturan, sensing that Burton's withdrawal was lowering the high spirits of the occasion, began to tell stories of his native planet. Monat had somewhat awed the islanders at first because of his obviously nonhuman origin. However, he had no trouble in warning them, since he knew exactly how to make a human being feel at ease. He should have; he had had to do this every day of his life on The Riverworld.

  After a while, Burton arose and said that his crew should be getting to bed. He thanked the Ganopo for their hospitality but said that he had changed his mind about staying there for several days. His original intention to rest there while he studied them was gone.

  "We would like very much for you to stay here," the chief said. "For a few days or for many years. Whichever you prefer."

  "I thank you for that," Burton said. He quoted the words of a character from The Thousand and One Nights. "Allah afflicted me with a love of travel."

  He then quoted himself, "Travelers like poets are mostly an angry race."

  That at least made him laugh, and he went to the boat feeling less gloomy. Before going to bed, he set the watches. Frigate protested that a guard wasn't needed in this isolated place where the few inhabitants seemed to be honest. He was overruled, which was no surprise to him. He knew that Burton thought that acquisitiveness was the mainspring of human action.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  Burt
on was thinking of this and other events of last night, including the dreams. He stood for a while, smoking a cigar, while Frigate stood by him. The assemblage of closely packed stars and wide-spreading gas sheets paled as they silently watched. Dawn would be coming within a half-hour. Its light would wash out most of the celestial objects, would spread out for some time before the sun finally cleared the northern mountain wall.

  They could see the fog, like a woolly blanket, covering The River and the plains on both banks. It lapped against the tree-covered hills, on the sides of which were a few lights. Beyond the hills of the valley were the mountains, inclined at an angle of forty-five degrees for the first thousand feet or 305 meters or so, then ascending straight up, smooth as a mirror, for 10,000 feet or about 3048 meters.

  During his first years here, Burton had estimated the mountains to be about 20,000 feet or 6096 meters high. He was not the only one to make that error when only the eye was available for calculation. After he had been able to construct rather crude surveying instruments, however, he had determined that the mountain walls were, generally, twice as low as he had thought. Their blue-grey or black rock created an illusion. Perhaps this was because the valley was so narrow, and the walls made the dwellers feel even more pygmyish.

  This was a world of illusions, physical, metaphysical, and psychological. As on Earth, so here.

  Frigate had lit a cigarette. He had quit smoking for a year, but now, as he put it, he had "fallen from grace." He was almost as tall as Burton. His eyes were hazel. His hair was almost as black as his companion's, though it reflected a reddish undercoating in sunlight. His features were irregular: bulging supra-orbital ridges, a straight nose of average size but with large nostrils, full lips, the upper very long, a clefted chin. The latter seemed to recede because of his unusually short jaw.

  On Earth he had been, among many other things, one of that rare but vigorous breed which collected all literature by, about, and relevant to Burton. He had also written a biography of him but had eventually novelized it as A Rough Knight for the Queen.

  On first meeting him, Burton had been puzzled when Frigate had identified himself as a science fiction writer.

  "What in Gehenna is that?"

  "Don't ask me to define science fiction," Frigate had said. "No one was ever able to give it a completely satisfactory definition. However, what it is . . . was . . . was a genre of literature in which most of the stories took place in a fictional future. It was called science fiction because science was supposed to play a large part in it. The development of science in the future, that is. This science wasn't confined to physics and chemistry but also included extrapolations of the sociological and psychological science of the author's time.

  "In fact, any story that took place in the future was science fiction. However, a story written in 1960, for instance, which projected a future of 1984, was still classified as science fiction in 1984.

  "Moreover, a science fiction story could take place in the present or the past. But the assumption was that the story was possible because it was based on the science of the author's time, and he merely extrapolated, more or less rigorously, what a science could develop into.

  "Unfortunately, this definition included stories in which there was no science or else science poorly understood by the author.

  "However (there are a lot of howevers in science fiction), there were many stories about things which could not possibly happen, for which there was no scientific evidence whatsoever. Like time travel, parallel worlds, and faster-than-light drives. Living stars, God visiting the Earth in the flesh, insects tall as buildings, world deluges, enslavement through telepathy, and more in an endless list."

  "How did it come to be named science fiction?"

  "Well, actually, it was around a long time before a man named Hugo Gernsback originated the label. You've read the Jules Verne novels and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, haven't you? Those were considered to be science fiction."

  "It sounds as if it were just fantasy," Burton had said.

  "Yes, but all fiction is fantasy. The difference between mundane fantasy, what we called mainstream literature, and science fiction was that mainstream stories were about things which could have happened. They also always took place in the past or the present.

  "Science fiction stories were about things that could not happen or were highly improbable. Some people wanted to name it speculative literature, but the term never caught on."

  Burton never thoroughly understood what science fiction was, but he did not feel bad about it. Frigate couldn't explain it clearly either, though he could give numerous examples.

  "Actually," Frigate had said, "science fiction was one of those many things that don't exist but nevertheless have a name. Let's talk about something else."

  Burton had refused to drop the subject. "Then you were in a profession which didn't exist?"

  "No, the profession of writing science fiction existed. It was just that science fiction per se was nonexistent. This is beginning to sound like a dialog in Alice in Wonderland."

  "Was the money you made from your writings also nonexistent?"

  "Almost. Well, that's an exaggeration. I didn't starve in a garret, but I also wasn't driving a gold-plated Cadillac."

  "What's a Cadillac?"

  Thinking of that now, Burton found it strange that the woman who slept with him was the Alice who had been the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's two masterpieces.

  Suddenly, Frigate said, "What's that?"

  Burton looked eastward toward the strait. Unlike the areas above and below it, the strait had no banks. High hills rose abruptly along its length, hills which were smooth walls. Below the strait something – no, two objects – were moving toward him, seemingly suspended above the fog.

  He climbed a rope ladder to get a better look. The two objects were not suspended in the air. Their lower parts were just hidden by the mists. The nearest was a wooden structure with what seemed to be a human figure on its top. The second, much farther back, was a large, round, black object.

  He called down. "Pete! I think it's a raft! A very large one! It's moving with the current, and it's headed directly toward us! There's a tower with a pilot on it. He isn't moving, though, just standing there. Surely . . ."

  No, not surely. The man on the tower had not moved. If he were awake, he would have seen that the raft was on a collision course.

  Burton hooked an arm around a rope, cupped his hands, and bellowed warnings. The figure leaning against the guardrail did not move. Burton stopped shouting at him.

  "Wake up everybody!" he thundered at Frigate. "On the double! We must get the boat out of the way!"

  He climbed swiftly down and went over the side onto the dock. Here, where his head was below the surface of the fog, he could see nothing. By running one hand along the hull, however, he could feel his way to the mooring posts. By the time he had untied two lines, he heard the others on the deck above. He shouted that Monat and Kazz should get onto the dock on the other side and untie the lines there.

  In his haste, he rammed into a post and for several seconds hopped around holding his knee. Then he resumed his work.

  Having completed his part of unloosing, he groped back along the hull. Someone had by then let down the gangway. He went up it, his hands sliding along the railing, and came aboard. Now he could see the tops of the women's heads and the American's face.

  Alice said, "What's going on?"

  "Have you gotten the poles out?" he said to Frigate.

  "Yeah."

  He swung up onto the rope ladder again. The two objects were still on a course that must end at the docks. The man on the watch tower had not moved.

  By now there were voices coming from the island. The Ganopo were awake and calling out questions.

  Monat's head and shoulders rose from the greyness. He looked like a monster sliding up out of the fog of a Gothic novel. The skull was similar to that of a human being's, but the fleshy features made him seem on
ly semi-human. Thick black eyebrows curved down alongside the face to knobbed cheekbones and flared out to cover them. Thin membranes that swung with the movement of his head hung from the lower part of his nostrils. At the end of his nose was a deeply cleft boss of cartilage. His lips were like a dog's, thin, black, and leathery. The lobeless ears were convoluted like seashells.

  Kazz bellowed somewhere near Monat. Burton could not see him since he was the second shortest of the crew, only about 5 feet or 1.5 meters tall. Then he came very close, and Burton could make out the squat figure.

  "Get the poles and push the boat from the docks!'' Burton yelled.

  "Where in hell are they?" Besst called.

  Frigate said, "I pulled them from the rack. They're on the deck below it."

  Burton said, "Follow me," and then he cursed as he stumbled over something and fell flat on his face. He was up again at once, only to bump into somebody. From the bulky shape, he thought it must be Besst.

  After some confusion, the poles were gotten and their wielders were stationed along the sides. At Burton's orders, they thrust the ends against the top of the dock, there being no room between the hull and the side of the dock for the poles to shove against the stone bottom of the underwater shelf. Since they had to fight against the current, which was strongest on the middle of the lake, they could only move the vessel very slowly. Once past the dock, they lowered the ends of the poles into the water and pushed against the rocky bottom. Even so, the poles slipped on the bare, smooth rock.

  Burton ordered that they should let the prow of the boat swing around. This was done, and then the polers on the port side moved to the starboard to help the others keep the vessel from drifting side-wise against the spire. At this point, both the beach and the underwater shelf abruptly ceased. Now they had to hold the poles horizontally and shove against the wall of the spire.

  Burton, hearing an unknown voice, looked back. The dark figure on the tower was moving now and screaming down into the fog. Other voices, fainter than the pilot's, came through the mists.