The Gods of Riverworld Page 9

  “We’re stymied,” Frigate said.

  “Not forever,” Burton replied. He was not as confident as he sounded.

  10

  On that perhaps forever-lost Earth, so far in distance and time, in A.D. 1880 in the city of London, England, appeared a privately printed book. It was titled The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî, A Lay of the Higher Law. Translated and annotated by His Friend and Pupil F. B. The initials stood for Frank Baker, a nom de plume of Captain Richard Francis Burton. “Frank” was from his middle name; “Baker” was his mother’s maiden surname. Not until after his death would his true name be appended to a reprint.

  The poem, set in distichs imitating the classical Arab form, was supposed to be the work of a Persian Sufi, Haji Abdu of the city of Yezdi in Persia. Haji was a title borne by any Moslem who had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton himself, having made the pilgrimage, disguised as a Moslem, could call himself a Haji. In this poem, Burton poured out his wisdom, pessimism, vast knowledge, and agnosticism, the Burtonian World-View and World-Pain. As Frank Baker, he had annotated the poem by “Abdu” and written an afterword that expressed a somewhat cynical and laughing view of himself. The laughter was, however, sad.

  The preface summed up his philosophy, formed after fifty-nine years of wandering over the only planet he would ever know—or so he thought at the time.

  TO THE READER

  The Translator has ventured to entitle a “Lay of the Higher Law” the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the “Higher Culture!” The principles which justify the name are as follows: The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.

  (Frigate’s comment on this statement was that it could be valid. But if Burton meant that individuals got an equal share of happiness and misery, he was wrong. Some people staggered along under a great burden of misery and had little happiness to lighten their load. Others had far more than their share of happiness. Anyway, Burton had not defined what he meant by happiness and misery. Though, of course, he didn’t have to do that for misery. Everybody knew what that was. Happiness, however, what was that? A mere freedom from pain and trouble? Or a positive quality? Was contentment happiness? Or did you have to be joyous to be happy?)

  He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.

  (What about your children? Alice had said. You have to cultivate them more than you do yourself so that they’ll be better, happier, and more adjusted than yourself. Every generation should be an improvement on the previous. I’ll admit, however, that it seldoms happens. Perhaps you’re right in that you can’t properly cultivate your children if you have not properly cultivated yourself. But you didn’t have any children, did you?)

  (Self-cultivation is a major and vital principle, Nur had said. We Sufis stress it, keeping in mind that it demands self-discipline, compassion, and intelligence. But most people carry it to the extreme and make self-cultivation self-centeredness. This is not surprising. Mankind always does things to excess. Most people do, that is.)

  He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the “divine gift of Pity” are man’s highest enjoyments.

  (A pinch of pity adds savor to the soup of life, Nur said. Too much spoils it. Pity may lead to sentimentality and maudlinism.)

  (Pity breeds a sense of superiority, Frigate had said. It also leads to self-pity. Not that I’m decrying that. There’s an exquisite joy in self-pity, if it’s indulged in now and then, here and there, and you end up laughing at yourself.)

  (You forgot to include sex, Aphra Behn had said. Though I suppose that sex is part of the affections and sympathies.)

  (Creating something, a painting, a poem, music, a book, a statue, a piece of furniture, childbirth, raising a child properly, these are man’s—and woman’s—highest enjoyments, Frigate had added. Though there’s much to be said for creating pristine sparkling bullshit, too.)

  He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of “Facts, the idlest of superstitions.”

  (But there comes a time when you must judge, Nur had said. First, though, you must be sure that you are qualified to judge. Who knows that?)

  (One person’s facts are another’s superstition, Frigate had said. What does that mean, by the way?)

  (You can believe only in what you see, Li Po had said. And even then you can’t be sure. Perhaps you can really believe only in what you have not seen, what you’ve imagined. Dragons and fairies exist because I believe in them. A rock is a fact, and so is my imagination.)

  Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.

  (Man is the only animal who thinks of the should-be rather than the what-is, Nur had said. Which is why man is the only animal who consciously changes the environment to suit himself. And usually spoils it because of his stupidity and excess. There are exceptions to this rule, of course.)

  (A fine statement, Alice had said. But Dick Burton has always been self-destructive. When, if ever, will he stop destroying himself?)

  For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume.

  Vienna, Nov., 1880

  F. B.

  (Has it occurred to you, Nur had said, that you are nearing the end of that book you call Richard Francis Burton? It’s been published in two volumes, Earth-Burton and Riverworld-Burton. This tower may be The End.)

  (It’s always been an excellent philosophy to live as if you’re going to die in the next hour, Frigate had said. Everybody agrees on that, but the only people who live it are those who know they’re going to die soon. And not even then.)

  (That’s why I like to go to bed whenever possible, Aphra had said. Marcelin, are you in the mood?)

  (Even the most ardent soldier needs to go to a rest camp now and then, de Marbot said. At the moment, I am an old, weary and saddlesore veteran.)

  11

  Burton also felt like a weary, saddlesore veteran. He had been riding himself—and others—too hard for too long. Now that he had crossed the last of hundreds of obstacles that had had to be dealt with at once, he needed rest and recreation. The problems to be solved, those presented by the Computer, could be tackled later.

  Yet, he thought, as he looked into a mirror, I do not look as if I had lived for sixty-nine years on Earth and sixty-seven years here. My face is not that of a 136-year-old man. It is the face I had when I was a youth of twenty-five. Minus the long Satan-black drooping moustache, a hairy crescent moon. The Ethicals had arranged that the resurrected males lack facial hair, an arrangement that Burton had always resented. It was true that men did not have to shave, but what about the feelings—the rights—of those who desired moustaches and beards?

  Now that I am in the tower, he thought, why not change those despotic arrangements? Surely there must be a way to start the hair growing again on my face.

  On Earth, he had been afflicted—perhaps afflicted was too strong a word—marked with a slight strabismus. He had a “wandering eye.” In more senses than one. This small fault had been corrected by the Computer when he had been raised from the dead in the Rivervalley.

  So, loss of beard weighed against correction of focus. But now, why could he not have both?

  He made a note to look into that question.

  “Brow of a god, jaw of a devil” some impressionable biographer had written of him. An accurate description, however. And one that described the two personae within him, the one who lusted for success and the one who lusted for defeat.

  If, that is, the books written about him were correct in their judgments.

  Some of them were on the table now. He had requested a few of the titles suggested by Frigate, and the Computer had printed and bound them for him and deposited their reproductions in a converter. The best, so Frigate said, was The Devil Drives, written by an Ame
rican woman, Fawn M. Brodie, first published in 1967.

  “I gave up my intention to write a biography of you when that came out,” Frigate had said. “But its excellence and wide inclusiveness did not keep others from writing biographies of you after hers. They lacked good judgment. However, you may not like The Devil Drives. Brodie couldn’t keep from analyzing you in Freudian terms. On the other hand, perhaps you can tell me if she was right or not. But then, you’d be the last person to know, wouldn’t you?”

  Burton had not read the text yet, but he had looked at the reproductions of photographs. There was one of him at the age of fifty-one, painted by the famous artist Sir Frederick Leighton, and displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He did look fierce, Elizabethan, buccaneerish. Leighton had posed him at such an angle as to catch the high forehead, the swelling supraorbital ridges, the thick eyebrows, the driven hungry expression of his eyes, the thrusting chin, the high cheekbones. The scar left from a Somali spear was prominent; Leighton had insisted on showing that, and Burton had not objected. A scar, if honorably gotten, was a form of medal, and he, who should have been covered with real medals, had been slighted.

  “Partly your own fault,” Frigate had said. “I can understand and sympathize with that. I, too, was, am, self-defeating.”

  “My family motto was ‘Honour, not Honours.’ ”

  Opposite the Leighton portrait was a photograph of his wife, Isabel, made in 1869, when she was thirty-eight. She looked buxom, regal, and handsome. Like a kindly but domineering mother, he thought. A few pages back was a portrait of her done by the French artist Louis Desanges in 1861, when she had married Burton. She looked young, loving, and optimistic. Beneath her was the Desanges painting of Burton done at the same time. She was thirty; he, forty. His moustache dropped almost to his shoulder bones, and he certainly looked dark and fierce. And how thick his lips were. Which had suggested to certain biographers, and others, an overly sensual nature. How thin and prim and pursed were Isabel’s lips. A flaw in an otherwise perfectly beautiful face. Thin lips. Thick lips. Love, tenderness, and cheerfulness versus fierceness, ambitiousness, and pessimism. Isabel, blond; he, dark.

  He turned the pages to a photograph of him at sixty-nine in 1890 and another of himself and Isabel in the same year, same place, Trieste. It had been taken by Doctor Baker, his personal physician, under a tree in the backyard. Burton sat on a chair, not visible in the photograph, one hand on the knob of his iron cane, the other draped over his right wrist. The fingers looked skeletal: Death’s own hand. He wore a tall gray plug hat, a stiff white collar, and a gray morning coat. The eyes in the gaunt face looked like those of a dying prisoner. Which, in a sense, he was. Little of the fierceness evident in the earlier pictures was there.

  By his side, looking down at him, one white hand held up, a finger extended as if she were chiding him, was Lady Isabel. Fat, fat, fat. While he shriveled, she expanded. Yet, according to Frigate, though she knew that he was dying, she bore in herself the seeds of death, a cancer. She had not said a word to him about it; she had not wanted to upset him.

  In her black dress and hood, she looked like a nun, a nurse nun. Kindly but firm. No nonsense.

  He contrasted the youthful face in the mirror with that in the photograph. Those old old eyes. Sunken, despairing, lost. Those of a prisoner who had no hope of bail or pardon. Moons in eclipse.

  He remembered how at Trieste in September, the last month of his life, he had purchased caged birds in the market, taken them home, and set them free. And how, one day, he had stopped before a monkey in a cage. “What crime did you commit in some other world, Jocko, that you are now caged and tormented and going through your purgatory?” And, shaking his head, walking away, he had muttered, “I wonder what he did? I wonder what he did?”

  This world, the Riverworld, was a purgatory, if what the Ethicals said was true. Purgatory was the hardest of the three afterworlds, heaven, purgatory, and hell. In heaven you were free and ecstatic and knew that the future would always be good. In hell, though you suffered, you knew for once and all what your future would be. You did not have to strive for freedom; you knew that you would never attain it. But in purgatory you knew that you were going either to hell or to heaven, and it was up to you where you went. With the joys and freedom of heaven as a carrot, you strove like hell in purgatory. You knew the theory of how to get a ticket to heaven. But the practice … ah, the practice … that eluded you. You snatched it away from yourself.

  Earth had bristled with carrots of many kinds: physical, mental, spiritual, economic, political. Of these, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, was sex.

  Frigate had once written a story in which God had made all animals, hence humans, unisex. Every species lacked males; only females existed. Women impregnated themselves by eating fruit from sperm trees. Cross-fertilization was a very intricate procedure in the story, the women shedding genes with their excretion and the trees picking these up through their roots. Thus, males were unnecessary and not included in the parallel world Frigate had imagined.

  Every three years, women were afflicted with arboreal frenzy and compulsively devoured the fruit until they became pregnant. In the meantime, women fell in love with one another, lived amicably or passionately or angrily with one another, were jealous, committed adultery, and, of course, often practiced erotic deviations. One of which, not uncommon, was falling in love with a certain tree and eating fruit out of season.

  The main plot of the story was about the insane jealousy of a woman who, thinking that she had been cuckolded by her lover’s tree, chopped it down. Grief-stricken, the lover went into a nunnery.

  A subplot of the story concerned a science-fiction writer who had imagined another world in which there were no sperm trees. Instead, woman had mates who were their counterparts physically except that they had no mammaries and were equipped with a rodlike organ that shot seeds into the uteruses of their lovers.

  This method, according to the science-fiction writer in Frigate’s story, was a much better method and also eliminated the competition for trees. The mates with the rods were much like the trees in that their vegetable nature made them subservient to the females. But, unlike the trees, they were useful for something besides reproduction. They did the housework and fieldwork and took care of the babies while women played bridge or attended political meetings.

  In the end, however, the rod-creatures, being more human than vegetable and more muscular than the females, rebelled and made the women their servants.

  Burton, hearing Frigate’s story, had suggested that a better idea would have been to make the humans of one sex, the male, and have them impregnate the trees. The males would also get most of their food from the fruit of the trees. However, being human, the males would want power, and they would war among themselves for the trees. The victors would be rewarded with vast arboreal harems. The defeated would either be killed or driven into the woods to satisfy themselves with an inferior species of vegetation, a bush which could be screwed but which could not bear children.

  “A good idea,” Frigate had said, “but who would take care of the infants? Trees can’t. Besides, the victorious male, the owner of the harem, or grove, would be so busy guarding his trees from other males that he would neglect the infants. Most of them would die. And if he were overcome by another male, his infants would be left to die or perhaps be killed by the conqueror. The victor would not want to raise the other man’s children.

  “There doesn’t seem to be any perfect means for reproduction and caretaking of the infant, does there?” Frigate had said. “Perhaps God knew what He was doing when He made us male and female.”

  “Perhaps He was limited in His choices and took the best one. Perhaps perfection is not possible in this universe. Or, if it is, perfection rules out progress. The amoeba is perfect, but it can’t evolve into something different. Or, if it does, it ceases to be an amoeba and must give up perfection for certain advantages, balanced or unbalanced with c
ertain disadvantages.”

  And so the splitting of Homo sapiens into two species in the real world and the vagaries of Fate brought together Lieutenant General Joseph Netterville Burton and Martha Baker, the prig and hypochondriac father and the child-spoiling and seductive but moralistic mother. They had gotten married after a short courtship, possibly because the retired officer on half-pay had been induced by Martha’s fortune to marry her. He had once had money, but he could not hang onto it. Though he despised gamblers, he did not think that speculation in the market was un-Christian.

  On a night circa June 19, 1820, the lieutenant general had launched millions of spermatozoa into the heiress’ womb, and one wriggler had beaten the others to the egg waiting in its lair. The chance combination of genes had resulted in Richard Francis Burton, eldest of three siblings, born March 19, 1821, in Torquay, Devonshire, England. Richard’s mother had been lucky in not being infected by puerperal fever, which killed so many women giving birth in those days. Richard was also lucky in that he caught only one of the childhood diseases that put so many in the graveyard then. Measles laid him low, but he survived unharmed.

  His mother’s father was so delighted when his daughter bore a red-headed and blue-eyed son that he considered changing his will and giving the bulk of his estate to Richard instead of Martha’s half-brother. Mrs. Burton fought against this, an act for which Richard never really forgave his mother. Finally, the grandfather decided that he would ignore his daughter’s arguments and arrange for his beloved grandson to inherit. Unfortunately, Mr. Baker died of a heart attack as he started to get into the carriage that was to take him to his solicitor. The son got the money, was cheated out of it by a sharpster, and died in poverty. A short time later, Richard’s red hair turned to jet black and his blue eyes to a deep brown. This was the first of his many disguises, though not, in this case, the first deliberately assumed.