To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat Page 9

  Burton was upset but he could do nothing about it. The only hope for regaining the quiet retreat was that the lack of water would drive the intruders away. That hope went quickly. A woman told him that there was a small cataract about a mile and a half to the west. It fell from the top of the mountain down the tip of an arrowhead-shaped canyon and into a large hole which it had only half-filled. Eventually, it should spill out and take a course through the hills and spread out on the plain. Unless, of course, stone from the mountain base was brought down to make a channel for the stream.

  “Or we make water pipes out of the big bamboo,” Frigate said.

  They put their grails on the rock, each carefully noting the exact location of his, and they waited. He intended to move on after the grails were filled. A location halfway between the cataract and the grailstone would be advantageous, and they might not be so crowded.

  The blue flames roared out above the stone just as the sun reached its zenith. This time, the grails yielded an antipasto salad, Italian black bread with melted garlic butter, spaghetti and meatballs, a cupful of dry red wine, grapes, more coffee crystals, ten cigarettes, a marijuana stick, a cigar, more toilet paper and a cake of soap, and four chocolate creams. Some people complained that they did not like Italian food, but no one refused to eat.

  The group, smoking their cigarettes, walked along the base of the mountain to the cataract. This was at the end of the triangular canyon, where a number of men and women had set up camp around the hole. The water was icy cold. After washing out their containers, drying them, and refilling the buckets, they went back in the direction of the grailstone. After a half mile, they chose a hill covered by pines except for the apex, on which a great irontree grew. There was plenty of bamboo of all sizes growing around them. Under the direction of Kazz and of Frigate, who had spent a few years in Malaysia, they cut down bamboo and built their huts. These were round buildings with a single door and a window in the rear and a conical thatched roof. They worked swiftly and did not try for nicety, so that by dinnertime everything except the roofs was finished. Frigate and Monat were picked to stay behind as guards while the others took the grails to the stone. Here they found about 300 people constructing lean-tos and huts. Burton had expected this. Most people would not want to walk a half mile every day three times a day for their meals. They would prefer to cluster around the grailstones. The huts here were arranged haphazardly and closer than necessary. There was still the problem of getting fresh water, which was why he was surprised that there were so many here. But he was informed by a pretty Slovene that a source of water had been found close by only this afternoon. A spring ran from a cave almost in a straight line up from the rock. Burton investigated. Water had broken out from a cave and was trickling down the face of the cliff into a basin about fifty feet wide and eight deep.

  He wondered if this was an afterthought on the part of Whoever had created this place.

  He returned just as the blue flames thundered.

  Kazz suddenly stopped to relieve himself. He did not bother to turn away; Loghu giggled; Tanya turned red; the Italian women were used to seeing men leaning against buildings wherever the fancy took them; Wilfreda was used to anything; Alice, surprisingly, ignored him as if he were a dog. And that might explain her attitude. To her, Kazz was not human and so could not be expected to act as humans were expected to act.

  There was no reason to reprimand Kazz for this just now, especially when Kazz did not understand his language. But he would have to use sign language the next time Kazz proceeded to relieve himself while they were sitting around and eating. Everybody had to learn certain limits, and anything that upset others while they were eating should be forbidden. And that, he thought, included quarreling during mealtimes. To be fair, he would have to admit that he had participated in more than his share of dinner disputes in his lifetime.

  He patted Kazz on top of the breadloaf-shaped skull as he passed him. Kazz looked at him and Burton shook his head, figuring that Kazz would find out why when he learned to speak English. But he forgot his intention, and he stopped and rubbed the top of his own head. Yes, there was a very fine fuzz there.

  He felt his face, which was as smooth as ever. But his armpits were fuzzy. The pubic area was, however, smooth. That might be a slower growth than scalp hair, though. He told the others, and they inspected themselves and each other. It was true. Their hair was returning, at least, on their heads and their armpits. Kazz was the exception. His hair was growing out all over him except on his face.

  The discovery made them jubilant. Laughing, joking, they walked along the base of the mountain in the shadow. They turned east then and waded through the grass of four hills before coming up the slope of the hill they were beginning to think of as home. Halfway up it, they stopped, silent. Frigate and Monat had not returned their calls.

  After telling them to spread out and to proceed slowly, Burton led them up the hill. The huts were deserted, and several of the little huts had been kicked or trampled. He felt a chill, as if a cold wind had blown on him. The silence, the damaged huts, the complete absence of the two, was foreboding.

  A minute later, they heard a halloo and turned to look down the hill. The skin-heads of Monat and Frigate appeared in the grasses and then they were coming up the hill. Monat looked grave, but the American was grinning. His face was bruised over the cheek, and the knuckles of both hands were torn and bloody.

  “We just got back from chasing off four men and three women who wanted to take over our huts,” he said. “I told them they could build their own, and that you’d be back right away and beat hell out of them if they didn’t take off. They understood me all right, they spoke English. They had been resurrected at the grailstone a mile north of ours along the river. Most of the people there were Triestans of your time, but about ten, all together, were Chicagoans who’d died about 1985. The distribution of the dead sure is funny, isn’t it? There’s a random choice operating along here, I’d say.

  “Anyway, I told them what Mark Twain said the devil said. You Chicagoans think you’re the best people here whereas the truth is you’re just the most numerous. That didn’t go over very well; they seemed to think that I should be buddy-buddies with them because I was an American. One of the women offered herself to me if I’d change sides and take their part in appropriating the huts. She was the one who was living with two of the men. I said no. They said they’d take the huts anyway, and over my dead body if they had to.

  “But they talked more brave than they were. Monat scared them just by looking at them. And we did have the stone weapons and spears. Still, their leader was whipping them up into rushing us, when I took a good hard look at one of them.

  “His head was bald so he didn’t have that thick straight black hair, and he was about thirty-five when I first knew him, and he wore thick shell-rimmed glasses then, and I hadn’t seen him for fifty-four years. But I stepped up closer, and I looked into his face, which was grinning just like I remembered it, like the proverbial skunk, and I said, “Lem? Lem Sharkko! It is Lem Sharkko, isn’t it?”

  “His eyes opened then, and he grinned even more, and he took my hand, my hand, after all he’d done to me, and he cried out as if we were long-lost brothers, “It is, it is! It’s Pete Frigate! My God, Pete Frigate!”

  “I was almost glad to see him and for the same reason he said he was glad to see me. But then I told myself, ‘This is the crooked publisher that cheated you out of $4,000 when you were just getting started as a writer and ruined your career for years. This is the slimy schlock dealer who cheated you and at least four other writers out of a lot of money and then declared bankruptcy and skipped. And then he inherited a lot of money from an uncle and lived very well indeed, thus proving that crime did pay. This is the man you have not forgotten, not only because of what he did to you and others but because of so many other crooked publishers you ran into later on.’”

  Burton grinned and said, “I once said that priests, politicians,
and publishers would never get past the gates of heaven. But I was wrong, that is, if this is heaven.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Frigate said. “I’ve never forgotten that you said that. Anyway, I put down my natural joy at seeing a familiar face again, and I said, ‘Sharkko…’”

  “With a name like that, he got you to trust him?” Alice said.

  “He told me it was a Czech name that meant trustworthy. Like everything else he told me, it was a lie. Anyway, I had just about convinced myself that Monat and I should let them take over. We’d retire and then we’d run them out when you came back from the grailstone. That was the smart thing to do. But when I recognized Sharkko, I got so mad! I said, grinning, ‘Gee, it’s really great to see your face after all these years. Especially here where there are no cops or courts!’

  “And I hit him right in the nose! He went over flat on his back, with his nose spouting blood. Monat and I rushed the others, and I kicked one, and then another hit me on the cheek with his grail. I was knocked silly, but Monat knocked one out with the butt of his spear and cracked the ribs of another; he’s skinny but he’s awful fast, and what he doesn’t know about self-defense—or offense! Sharkko got up then and I hit with my other fist but only a glancing blow along his jaw. It hurt my fist more than it hurt his jaw. He spun around and took off, and I went after him. The others took off, too, with Monat beating them on the tail with his spear. I chased Sharkko up the next hill and caught him on the downslope and punched him but good! He crawled away, begging for mercy, which I gave him with a kick in the rear that rolled him howling all the way down the hill.”

  Frigate was still shaking with reaction, but he was pleased.

  “I was afraid I was going to turn chicken there for a while,” he said. “After all, all that had been so long ago and in another world, and maybe we’re here to forgive our enemies—and some of our friends—and be forgiven. But on the other hand, I thought, maybe we’re here so we can give a little back of what we had to take on Earth. What about it, Lev? Wouldn’t you like a chance to turn Hitler over a fire? Very slowly over a fire?”

  “I don’t think you could compare a crooked publisher to Hitler,” Ruach said. “No, I wouldn’t want to turn him over a fire. I might want to starve him to death, or feed him just enough to keep him alive. But I wouldn’t do that. What good would it do? Would it make him change his mind about anything, would he then believe that Jews were human beings? No, I would do nothing to him if he were in my power except kill him so he couldn’t hurt others. But I’m not so sure that killing him would mean he’d stay dead. Not here.”

  “You’re a real Christian,” Frigate said, grinning.

  “I thought you were my friend!” Ruach said.

  12

  This was the second time that Burton had heard the name Hitler. He intended to find out all about him, but at the moment everybody would have to put off talking to finish the roofs on the huts. They all pitched in, cutting off more grass with the little scissors they had found in their grails, or climbing the irontrees and tearing off the huge triangular green and scarlet-laced leaves. The roofs left much to be desired. Burton meant to search around for a professional thatcher and learn the proper techniques. The beds would have to be, for the time being, piles of grass on top of which were piles of softer irontree leaves. The blankets would be another pile of the same leaves.

  “Thank God, or Whoever, that there is no insect life,” Burton said.

  He lifted the gray metal cup which still held two ounces of the best scotch he had ever tasted.

  “Here’s to Whoever. If he had raised us just to live on an exact duplicate of Earth, we’d be sharing our beds with ten thousand kinds of biting, scratching, stinging, scraping, tickling, bloodsucking vermin.”

  They drank, and then they sat around the fire for a while and smoked and talked. The shadow darkened, the sky lost its blue, and the gigantic stars and great sheets, which had been dimly seen ghosts just before dusk, blossomed out. The sky was indeed a blaze of glory.

  “Like a Sime illustration,” Frigate said.

  Burton did not know what a Sime was. Half of the conversation with the non-nineteenth-centurians consisted of them explaining their references and he explaining his.

  Burton rose and went over to the other side of the fire and squatted by Alice. She had just returned from putting the little girl, Gwenafra, to bed in a hut.

  Burton held out a stick of gum to Alice and said, “I just had half a piece. Would you care for the other half?”

  She looked at him without expression and said, “No, thanks.”

  “There are eight huts,” he said. “There isn’t any doubt about who is sharing which hut with whom, except for Wilfreda, you, and me.”

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” she said.

  “Then you’re sleeping with Gwenafra?”

  She kept her face turned away from him. He squatted for a few seconds and then got up and went back to the other side and sat down by Wilfreda.

  “You can move on, Sir Richard,” she said. Her lip was curled. “Lord grab me, I don’t like being second choice. You could of asked ’er where nobody could of seen you. I got some pride, too.”

  He was silent for a minute. His first impulse had been to lash out at her with a sharp-pointed insult. But she was right. He had been too contemptuous of her. Even if she had been a whore, she had a right to be treated as a human being. Especially since she maintained that it was hunger that had driven her to prostitution, though he had been skeptical about that. Too many prostitutes had to rationalize their profession; too many had justifying fantasies about their entrance into the business. Yet, her rage at Smithson and her behavior toward him indicated that she was sincere.

  He stood up and said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “Are you in love with her?” Wilfreda said, looking up at him.

  “I’ve only told one woman that I ever loved her,” he said.

  “Your wife?”

  “No. The girl died before I could marry her.”

  “And how long was you married?”

  “Twenty-nine years, though it’s none of your business.”

  “Lord grab me! All that time, and you never once told her you loved her!”

  “It wasn’t necessary,” he said, and walked away. The hut he chose was occupied by Monat and Kazz. Kazz was snoring away; Monat was leaning on his elbow and smoking a marijuana stick. Monat preferred that to tobacco, because it tasted more like his native tobacco. However, he got little effect from it. On the other hand, tobacco sometimes gave him fleeting but vividly colored visions.

  Burton decided to save the rest of his dreamgum, as he called it. He lit up a cigarette, knowing that marijuana would probably make his rage and frustration even darker. He asked Monat questions about his home, Ghuurrkh. He was intensely interested, but the marijuana betrayed him, and he drifted away while the Cetan’s voice became fainter and fainter.

  “.…cover your eyes now, boys!” Gilchrist said in his broad Scots speech.

  Richard looked at Edward; Edward grinned and put his hands over his eyes, but he was surely peeking through the spaces between his fingers. Richard placed his own hands over his eyes and continued to stand on tiptoe. Although he and his brother were standing on boxes, they still had to stretch to see over the heads of the adults in front of them.

  The woman’s head was in the stock by now; her long brown hair had fallen over her face. He wished he could see her expression as she stared down at the basket waiting for her, or for her head, rather.

  “Don’t peek now, boys!” Gilchrist said again.

  There was a roll of drums, a single shout, and the blade raced downward, and then a concerted shout from the crowd, mingled with some screams and moans, and the head fell down. The neck spurted out blood and would never stop. It kept spurting and spurting while the sun gleamed on it, it spurted out and covered the crowd and, though he was at least fifty yards from her, the blood s
truck him in the hands and seeped down between his fingers and over his face, filling his eyes and blinding him and making his lips sticky and salty. He screamed…

  “Wake up, Dick!” Monat was saying. He was shaking Burton by the shoulder. “Wake up! You must have been having a nightmare!”

  Burton, sobbing and shivering, sat up. He rubbed his hands and then felt his face. Both were wet. But with perspiration, not with blood.

  “I was dreaming,” he said. “I was just six years old and in the city of Tours. In France, where we were living then. My tutor, John Gilchrist, took me and my brother Edward to see the execution of a woman who had poisoned her family. It was a treat, Gilchrist said.

  “I was excited, and I peeked through my fingers when he told us not to watch the final seconds, when the blade of the guillotine came down. But I did; I had to. I remember getting a little sick at my stomach but that was the only effect the gruesome scene had on me. I seemed to have dislocated myself while I was watching it; it was as if I saw the whole thing through a thick glass, as if it were unreal. Or I was unreal. So I wasn’t really horrified.”

  Monat had lit another marijuana. Its light was enough so that Burton could see him shaking his head. “How savage! You mean that you not only killed your criminals, you cut their heads off! In public! And you allowed children to see it!”

  “They were a little more humane in England,” Burton said. “They hung the criminals!”

  “At least the French permitted the people to be fully aware that they were spilling the blood of their criminals,” Monat said. “The blood was on their hands. But apparently this aspect did not occur to anyone. Not consciously, anyway. So now, after how many years—sixty-three?—you smoke some marijuana and you relive an incident which you had always believed did not harm you. But, this time, you recoil with horror. You screamed like a frightened child. You reacted as you should have reacted when you were a child. I would say that the marijuana dug away some deep layers of repression and uncovered the horror that had been buried there for sixty-three years.”