Burton could see and hear what was happening to him, to the newborn, rather, but he could not feel its, his, reactions. He felt no pain, except emphatically, when his cord was clipped. Indeed, he did not see the operation, but, when he was picked up, he glimpsed the umbilicus on a towel. Nor did he know that he was being cleaned off until a towel pressed down on his, the baby's eyes. Then he was wrapped in a blanket arid placed in his mother's arms. Of this he saw only the nurse approaching with the blanket, her stiff white pinafore, the upper, part of his mother, and then her face from underneath.
Presently, his father entered. How young that dark sallow Roman face was! And his father was smiling. This usually happened only when Mr. Burton had made a profit in the stock market, and that was not often.
He shuddered when he saw the doctor's hands. They were being wiped on a towel, not given a thorough scrubbing. Doubtless, the doctor had not bothered to wash his hands before ! delivering him. It was strange, though, unusual, anyway, that the doctor had personally delivered him. If he remembered correctly, most doctors at that time instructed the nurses or midwives but did not touch the woman in labor. Some did not even see the mother's lower parts, which were hidden by a sheet, but heard the details of the delivery from the midwife and then gave their instructions.
A huge hand, his father's, came down and lifted something from him. The blanket.
"A fine son you've given me, my dear," his father said.
"He’s beautiful, beautiful,” a croaking voice said. His mother's.
"Now, now," a deep voice said. The doctor's face hove into view. "We mustn't tire Mrs. Burton. Besides, the little devil seems to be hungry.”
At this point, he must have fallen asleep. His next view was of an enormous breast, a swollen, pale red nipple, and his little hands reaching out. Then he saw with one eye a field of pink flesh and the underpart of his wetnurse's face. Mrs. Burton, being a genteel lady, would not have nursed the baby herself.
"I wonder who she was?" Burton muttered. "Some Irishwoman?”
He had a vague memory of his mother having mentioned the nurse's name once. A Mrs. Riley? Kiley?
He was shocked but not so much that he could not think clearly. The Computer had read his memory from his body-recording, reeling it up as a fisherman did a trout. After storing it in a separate file, the Computer was feeding it back to him via the wall-screen. The showing of the whole of it, if done in the same time as that in which the events had occurred, would take a lifetime. However, no one's memory held everything that the person had seen, heard, tasted, felt and thought. Memory was selective and there were great gaps when the person was sleeping, except when he was dreaming, of course. Thus, it did not take as much time as might have been expected to display all that was in the subject's memory bank.
The film, it was a film of sorts, could be speeded up or slowed down or run backward. The Computer might be doing this now. On the other hand, he could have fallen asleep shortly after birth.
Burton, now watching his diapers being changed by another servant, a maid, wondered why this memory display had been commanded. And by whom?
Before he could question the Computer, several small screens whitened wall areas. Frigate's, Turpin's, and de Marbot's faces appeared. They looked shocked.
"Yes," he said before they could begin talking, "I'm being visited by the past, too. From bloody birth onward.”
"It's terrible," Alice said. "And wonderful, too. Awesome. I feel like crying.”
Frigate said, "I'll call the others and see if they're going through the same thing." His screen dimmed to gray.
Tom Turpin was weeping.
"I'm telling you, seeing my own momma and poppa and that old shack ... I don't think I can take it.”
Burton glanced at the big screen. There he was again, being lifted towards that titanic breast. He could hear his infant's cry of hunger. The scene faded and was replaced by a view of a blue canopy, and the room rocking. No, a great hand was rocking his cradle.
The screens of the others came on. Seven faces with various emotions looked at him.
Li Po, grinning, said, "It is something indescribable, except for a poet, of course, to see yourself suckled by your mother. But ... who ordered this?”
"Wait a moment," Burton said, "and I'll ask the Computer.”
"I have done that," Nur said. "It says that the who and the why are unavailable. But it did not refuse to tell me the when. The order was given two days ago to start the memory-display this morning.”
"Then it must have been given by the woman you killed," Burton said.
"She's the most likely candidate.”
"I'm completely at sea about why she ordered this memory-display," Burton said.
"Obviously," Nur said, "it was done to accelerate our ethical advancement. If we're forced to know our past, how we behaved, how others behaved, we'll see our weaknesses, faults, and vices in all their details. Like it or not, we'll have what we were, exactly what we were, rubbed into our noses. Ground into our souls. By watching that inescapable drama and comedy, we might be so strongly affected that we'll take steps to eliminate our undesirable character traits. And then become better human beings.”
"Or it might drive us mad," Frigate said.
"More likely it will drive us to ingenious methods to shut it out," Burton said. "Nur, did you ask the Computer to stop the display?”
"Yes. The Computer did not reply. Obviously, the woman's command is another override.”
"Just a minute," Burton said.
He walked out of the room into the corridor. The screen had slid along the wall of the big room until he left the room. Now it appeared on the corridor wall opposite him. He cursed and spun on his heels and walked back into the room. The screen accompanied him.
He told the others what had happened. "Apparently, we can't get rid of it. It's like the albatross around the ancient mariner's neck.”
Burton shut his eyes. He heard himself screaming. Opening his eyes, he saw the canopy above him and then heard, faintly, the maid's voice. "Saints presarve us! What is it now?”
"I think," he said slowly, "that if we're going to shut this out, we'll have to paint our walls. We can't use the Computer in our apartments, though I suppose we can use the auxiliary computers. And we'll have to wear ear plugs if we want to sleep. There's no way of getting away from this outside the apartments.”
"We'll go crazy!" Frigate said.
Nur said, "Surely, the woman must have realized that. Perhaps we'll get relief during certain hours of the day. And at night, too.”
Burton asked de Marbot and Behn about the locations of their screens.
"One is on one wall and the other on the wall opposite it," the Frenchman said. "We can take turns, my little diamond and I, watching each other's so charming infancies.”
"How the "devil can I get any research done with that going on?" Burton muttered.
He said so-long to the others after agreeing to meet them at the swimming pool. The Computer did not refuse to make him a pair of earphones that blocked off the sounds. The only way he could escape the sight on the wall was to stare at the display screen of the auxiliary computer. And he found that he could not concentrate on his work. He was too curious. He could not resist looking at scenes that he did not remember. Yet, after a minute, he got bored. Not much happened to a baby outside of routine, and seeing his parents when they were young quickly lost its interest. They did not talk of anything except him when they were together, and his mother only spoke baby talk. Which he, of course, had been too undeveloped to understand, though he must have responded to her face and the tones of her voice. Now he became sick of them. Not that she was with him much. The people he mostly saw were the wetnurse and the two maids who took turns cleaning him or carrying him around.
At 11:00 a.m. he went to the swimming pool. The screen followed him along the walls. The pasts of the others accompanied them, too. The screens were at first on one of the long walls, then they were on all the walls.
"Familiarity, I hope, will breed deafness and blindness," Aphra said as she came up out of the water next to Burton.
"It'll never be familiar, even though it now has mostly to do with the family," he said. "What it will breed will be shame, grief and anger. And humiliation. Do you want to see yourself when you were mean, childish, degraded?”
"Oh, I was never mean. And I was never degraded, though others tried to degrade me.”
He did not think that she was as unperturbed as she seemed to be. No one could be.
It was difficult to swim and talk and have fun. He could not keep from glancing at the screens.
Frigate bobbed up from the surface of the pool beside Burton.
"Look at that," he said. "I can see myself now.”
His mother, a slim woman with Indian-black hair, dark brown eyes, and high cheekbones, was holding her baby up to a mirror. The infant Peter was nude and grinning, his mouth so wide that he looked froglike.
"It's a jolt to see yourself at that age. And I can expect many thousands of mirror images, from the puling baby to the old man of sixty-five. Jesus H. Christ!”
That evening, Frigate asked the Computer when the life-recordings started. It replied that they started from the moment of conception. The Computer could not answer Frigate's question about why the display had not started then. But Frigate and some of the others decided that that was because the nine months in the womb were mostly darkness and silence. They could learn little from it and could easily ignore it.
However, when Frigate asked the Computer to run off his gestation period and show only those moments when sound did penetrate to the embryo, he was astounded. Many times, though the sounds were muffled, he could clearly hear those close to his mother, and his mother's voice. There were other sounds, too, car motors, locomotive whistles and escaping steam, firecrackers, excretory noises, crashings of fallen glasses or dishes, loud laughter, and, embarrassingly, his parents making love. After two hours of this, Frigate ordered the Computer to stop the recording.
"I suppose that the woman who started this did not do it out of malice," he said. "Its purpose must be to show us, whether or not we want to see it, our weaknesses, vanities, pettinesses, meannesses, selfishnesses, stupid thinking, prejudices, you name it, everything undesirable in us. With, I suppose, an end in mind, a goal. That we should be able to change ourselves for the better. Ethical advancement.”
"That's probably true," Nur said. "But ... why the secrecy on her part? Why did she kill Loga?”
"That's something we'll have to find out," Burton said. "If we can.”
The woman who had ordered the merciless recordings had had some compassion, however. At 8:00 p.m. the screens' displays faded out, and they did not reappear until 8:00 a.m. There would be some respite.
Burton left early that evening for his apartment. However, a sufferer from insomnia all his life, he was unable to sleep. After two hours of tossing and turning, his mind filled with scenes from the past-displays, he rose, dressed and left the apartment. For three hours, he rode his chair through many corridors and into many rooms and up and down many shafts. His wanderings were aimless until he decided to organize his explorations. Why not get a diagram from the Computer and start from the top and work every level thoroughly down to the bottom? He had no goal in mind, no thought that he'd find something new. He was restless, he wanted to keep moving, and, perhaps, he might come across something novel or useful or both.
On the way up to the hangar, his starting point, he changed his mind again. The twelve vast rooms that had been the private worlds of the Council of Twelve beckoned him. They, at least, would offer a variety, something different from the monotonous sameness of corridor and rooms. His tour lasted four hours. When finished with all of them, he knew that he would tell the others that they, too, should explore these fascinating worlds.
Burton visited the hangar again and found it, as far as he could see, unchanged. He counted the craft to make sure that none were missing. That did not mean that the woman Agent had not used one since his last visit.
He returned to his apartment at four in the morning and slept from 4:30 to 7:30. After showering, he decided to go for breakfast at Li Po's. First, he called him to make sure that the Chinese would be his host for today. The handsome, somewhat Mephistophelian face was smiling.
"Yes, I am eager to have you as my guest. I have a surprise for you.”
He turned his head and said something in Chinese.
Another face appeared by his. Burton was startled. It was a stranger's, a beautiful Chinese woman's.
Some men and women seem to be steam locomotives chug-chugging steadily on their tracks, slowing down uphill but working steadily and running freely downhill. Others are like internal combustion automobiles that take different roads but now and then run out of gas and wait to be refueled.
Li Po seemed to be a rocket with inexhaustible fuel. He was always exploding, propelled here and there, noisy, sometimes obnoxious, but always letting you know that he was not to be ignored. His face, expressions, and gesticulations reminded Burton of the final stanza in Coleridge's Kubla Khan: And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Li Po, also known as Li T'ai-Po and Tai-Peng, had been born in a.d. 701 in the oasis town of Yarkand. At the time he was born, the vast desert territory did not belong to any Chinese kingdom. Yarkand was on the trade route between Persia and China, and Li Po's great-great-grandfather had come there from China. According to family tradition, he had been banned for some political reason. He brought his wife and children with him, and his oldest son married a Turkic-speaking woman, a Uigur. Their eldest son had married a Chinese woman; the second son of this marriage had taken for wife an Afghani-Uigur woman.
The family had become well-to-do, and, five years after Li Po was born, he went with his parents to the southwest Chinese province of Szechwan. They settled in a city that harbored many foreigners, Zoroastrian Persians, Hindus, Jews, Nestorian Christians, and Muslims from Persia, Afghanistan, and the Mesopotamian area. Li Po knew the languages of all of these and was later to add Korean and some Japanese to his stock.
He was almost an inch over six feet, a height attributed by the Chinese to his foreign blood. At an early age, he began composing poetry and drinking wine. Though he had a great reputation as a drunkard later in life, he was not condemned for this. Heavy drinking was endemic among the upper classes; liquor was regarded as an aid to opening the gate to divine inspiration. The speed with which he could compose poetry while drunk dazzled his contemporaries. Strangely, much was great enough to make many rank him as China's foremost poet.
In his twenties, he began the roving that so many Chinese poets, statesmen and artists were famous for. For a while, he became a knight-errant, a wanderer who tried to right wrongs by his sword. During this time, he killed several warriors in duels and was widely known as a demon with the blade. Once, he was jailed for killing a man in a tavern brawl but escaped before a sentence could be passed.
Yet, he was very studious and had learned, among other things, the physics and chemistry of his time.
In many respects, he was not only the Byron of his age but also the Burton. Like the latter, he roamed everywhere, became a scholar and a fine swordsman, was politically naive, was very angry at all types of suffering, was versed in many tongues, and was not very discreet or polite.
Unlike most Chinese males, he had empathy for the slavelike bondage and sufferings of the Chinese women. This, however, did not keep him from exploiting them. Even discounting his boasting, he was extraordinarily virile. "Three women at one time are not enough!”
After his knight-errantry days, he lived for a time with a hermit named Tung Yen-tsu on Mount Min in Shu Land. Here he furthered his knowledge and love of Taoist philosophy and became a sort of St. Francis. He and Tung tamed and raised wild birds and taught them to come at the sound of their voices to be fed from their hands.
Chinese "hermits," however, were not like Western anchorites. They were usually men who had retired from public life but lived with their families and retinues of servants and often entertained friends and travelers.
When twenty-five, Li Po'left Shu Land to travel through the eastern and northern provinces. He stayed longest at Anlu in Hubei because he had fallen in love with a woman named Hu. She became his first wife and bore him several children before she died.
Once, he traveled with a friend to a famous lake, but the friend died there. Li Po buried the body near the lake, but, since his friend wanted to be buried in his ancestral lot, Li Po dug him up, wrapped him and carried the corpse on his back for a hundred miles to Wuchang in Hubei.
"I had no money to buy a horse. I had given it all away to the poor.”
Li Po's reputation as a poet caused the T'ang emperor, Hsiian Tsung, to summon him to his court in a.d. 742, although the arrogant poet had refused to take the examinations for the civil service. Li Po became disgusted with the laziness and lechery of Hsiian, with the corruption of the court officials, and with the consequent impoverishment and great suffering of the people. Once, commanded to appear before the king to recite his poems, Li Po showed up drunk at the palace and insisted that the chief eunuch, a very powerful official, take off his boots for him. This insured that he would have no friends in court and that the emperor's spies would watch him closely.
It also insured that Li Po would have to travel many places to look for patrons. He did not mind that, since he loved to wander.
His second wife died, and he and his third wife got a divorce by mutual agreement after a very short marriage. His fourth wife would outlive him.
In a.d. 757, the emperor's sixteenth son, the prince of Lin, collected an army and fleet, supposedly to fight the rebel An Lu-shan. Li Po, not knowing that Lin intended to revolt against his father, joined him.
"I was fifty-seven years old then but very strong and agile for my age. I thought that it was not too late to gain glory for myself as a warrior, and the emperor might change his mind about me and raise me to some high post. At least, he might give me a pension.”
Unfortunately, Lin's treason was exposed by an older brother, and his forces were slaughtered. Li Po was sentenced to death—guilty by association—but the emperor decided that Li Po was too great a poet to kill. He was banished, but he was pardoned when he was sixty. On his way home to his fourth wife, he got drunk in a boat and tried to grab his reflection in the water. He fell overboard, caught pneumonia, and died shortly thereafter.
"Were you really convinced at that moment that you could seize your image in the river?" Frigate had said.
"Yes. Had I had one more cup of wine, I could have done it. No one else could, but I would have managed it.”
"And what would you have done with it?" Nur had said drily.
"I would have made it emperor! One Li Po is unconquerable by any fifty men! Two Li Pos would have conquered all of China!”
He had laughed so loudly and long then that the others were convinced that he knew that his boasting was ridiculous. Still, they could not quite be sure.
"The world's greatest wino," Frigate had said.
Li Po had awakened from death on the bank of The River. There he had started his wanderings again, but, as he said, he was used to such a life. On Earth, he had been up and down all of China's great rivers and many of the lesser.
One night, he was aroused in his hut by a masked and hooded man. That stranger was the one who had also wakened Burton and many others to enlist them in his cause. Of the many recruited by the renegade Ethical, Loga, Li Po had been one of the very few to get to the tower.
"And what have you learned during your sojourn here?" Nur had said. "How has it changed you for better or worse, if it has?”
"Unlike you, my Muslim if heretical friend, I did not believe in a hereafter. I did agree with The Sage that the spiritland was none of our business. I thought that when I died, I would become rotten flesh and then dust and that would be that. Awakening by The River was a great shock, the worst in my life. Where were the gods who had raised me from the dead, the gods in whom I had not believed? There were no gods or demons here, only human beings like myself who, though in another world, knew no more about the why and wherefore of it than they had of Earth's. Poor wretches! Poor ignoramuses stumbling in the dark. Where were those who had lit us up once again so that we'd be little flames looking for the mother flame?”
"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" Frigate said. "Easy to answer. They melted and became clouds and became snow again, today's.”
At the end of wandering on Earth and the Riverworld, Li Po had reached the tower. He seemed not to have changed, which, Nur said, was regrettable. The Riverworld was designed to make people change. The tall, lean, handsome, devil-faced man with the green eyes and his black hair coiled in a topknot only laughed at that.
"Perfection can change only for the worse.”
He had redecorated his suite so that it looked like the palace of the Glorious Emperor. From the Computer's files he had had reproduced many famous Chinese paintings and was painting some of his own works. These were not duplicates of his Terrestrial creations but scenes from the Riverworld.
"I have everything the emperor had and much more. Except, of course, millions of subjects and many wives and concubines. In fact, I have not one wife and so am poorer and more miserable than the lowliest peasant. Not for long, though.”
There was one woman whom the historians knew nothing of, though Li Po had written two hundred poems about her. These, however, were among his nine thousand lost works.
In Eastern Lu, a part of twentieth-century Shantung in north China, Li Po had built a house attached to a tavern owned by his fourth wife's family. And in the tavern was a slave girl who served the patrons; her name was Hsing Shih. In English, Star Spoon.
"The most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You will pardon me, Alice, Aphra, when I say that. You two are indeed surpassingly beautiful, but you will surely agree with me, since you're fair-minded for your sex, that you just possibly may not be the most beautiful.
"Star Spoon was quiet and soft-spoken and had elegant manners quite out of place in that tavern and unappreciated by the customers. She was no peasant girl. Her mother had been a concubine of the Glorious Monarch, and Star Spoon was supposed to be his daughter. That paternity, however, was questioned when Star Spoon's mother was caught in adultery with a palace guard. The mother and the lover were beheaded, and Star Spoon, then nine years old, was sold to a wealthy merchant. He took her to his bed when she was ten. After he tired of her, his six sons took their turns with her as they became juveniles. When the merchant lost his fortune and died shortly thereafter, Star Spoon was sold to my father-in-law, the tavern owner. She became his concubine, and she was treated well, relatively speaking anyway, though she had to work in the tavern. After I married his daughter, I came to know Star Spoon well. I fell passionately in love with her. Of course, I do everything passionately. She had a child by me, but he died a few days after birth from a fever. Though I am afraid of nothing, I did not want to cause trouble under my roof. My wife was very jealous and prone to violence. I had a scar on my shoulder from her knife to prove it. So neither Star Spoon nor I ever told anyone who the father was.”
If it was only intimate companionship that Li Po wanted, he would have chosen a man. But he needed a female, and his thoughts turned to Hsing Shih. He would find his old comrades later for masculine warmth and uproariousness and mental stimulation.
The first question in locating Star Spoon was: Was she available in the Computer's files?
These began in 97,000 b.c when the predecessors of the Ethi-cals had landed on Earth. (Loga had said that they started in about 100,000 b.c, but he was speaking loosely, rounding off the figure.) The Computer listed 97,000 b.c as Year One in its chronology. Thus, since Star Spoon had been born in a.d. 721, by Western reckoning, her birth year was 97,724 by computer reckoning.
Li Po had ordered that the search start in that year and in the area where she had been born. Since the Glorious Monarch's palace was a very important place in China, it was probable that Ethical agents had photographed it and its tenants.
The recordings were far from complete, however. It was possible that there were very few films made at this place during the T'ang dynasty. Li Po had, however, reconstructed Star Spoon's features with the aid of the Computer and his memory, which, like Burton's and Nur's, gripped like an eagle's talon.
The Computer had then extrapolated the woman's face backward, as it were, shaping her features as they would have been in childhood.
With this as a model, the Computer had scanned its files for this area and period. And it had located her, not just once but three times. Li Po had been very lucky—so far.
Her wathan was now identified from the films, which photographed more than her body. Using this as reference, the Computer scanned the eighteen billion plus wathans in the great central well of the tower. If Star Spoon was alive in The Valley, her wathan would not be in the well, and Li Po was out of luck. But the Computer found it. Fifteen minutes later, it delivered Star Spoon via the e-m converter to Li Po's apartment.
She was shocked and confused. She had been killed in those horrible days when the east bank of grailstones had failed to provide food for the east bank's inhabitants. She, with hordes of others, had crossed The River in boats to fight for the food supplied to the west bank dwellers. She had not known then that resurrection of the dead had ceased, and so she had expected to awake somewhere along The River.
Instead, here she was in a strange place, one obviously not in The Valley. And who was this fellow countryman grinning like a demon at her?
"Truly, she thought I was a devil at first," Li Po was to say. "She was half-mistaken." He added, "She did not even recognize me until I spoke. Then everything flooded in on her, and she wept for a long time.”
It had taken most of the night for him to explain to her just what had happened to him and to her. Then he had allowed her to sleep, though he lusted to get her into bed with him.
"I am not one to force myself upon a Woman. She must be willing.”
Everyone came to his suite to meet the newcomer. She was indeed beautiful and delicate, about five feet tall, slim-boned and slim-fleshed but well rounded and long-legged. Her eyes were huge and dark brown, and she was dressed in the same kind of clothes she had worn on Earth. She was not as shy as Li Po had portrayed her. The Riverworld had changed her in that respect. Her voice was, however, low and husky as she spoke to them in Esperanto. She was fluent in a dozen or more languages, but English was not one of them.
Burton was enraged, but, for once, he controlled himself. Star Spoon was a deed done. Reproaching the Chinese for breaking the agreement not to resurrect anybody as yet would upset the woman and only cause Li Po to argue with him or, worse, challenge him to a duel. Burton had lost whatever authority he had. Now that the situation was changed, the danger over, he could no longer be captain of this group of strong individualists. They would pretty much do what they wished.
Burton managed to smile, but his voice betrayed him. He growled, "How many more are you planning to raise?”
"Not many. I am no maniac.”
Burton snorted.
"The Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove, my immortal companions. You'd like them. Women for them and perhaps a few more for me. My honorable parents, my sisters and brothers and an aunt whom I greatly loved. My children. Of course, I have to find them first." , Frigate groaned and said, "An invasion. The Yellow Peril all over again.”
"What?" Li Po said.
"Nothing. I'm sure that we'll all be happy and pleased.”
"I look forward to meeting those you will bring back," Li Po said.
Frigate grinned and clapped Li Po on the shoulder. He was very fond of the poet, though, like the others, he was sometimes irritated by him.
Peter Jairus Frigate was born in 1918 in North Terre Haute, Indiana, near the banks of the Wabash River. Though he called himself a rationalist, he believed, or claimed to believe, that each Earthly area had its unique psychic properties. Thus, Vigo County soil had absorbed the peculiar qualities of the Indians who had lived there and of the pioneers who had driven them away and settled there. His own psyche, soaked with the effluvia of Amerindianness and Hoosierness, would never get rid of these no matter how much they evaporated in other climes and times.
"In a sense, I contain redskins and frontiersmen.”
His voice reminded people of that of the Montana movie actor, Gary Cooper, but now and then the Hoosier twang appeared in it. He sometimes pronounced "wash" as "warsh," and a "bucket" was sometimes a "pail.”
“Illinois" more often than not was "Ellinois.”
In his childhood, he had been subjected to Christian Science, that mélange of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy transmuted into Western religion by the woolly-minded and neurotic Mary Baker Eddy. His parents had originally been Methodist Episcopalian and Baptist, but a "miracle" had occurred when his father's aunt was sent home from a hospital to die of incurable cancer. A friend had talked her into reading The Key to the Scriptures and, while she was doing this, the aunt's cancer had remissed. Most of the Frigate family in Terre Haute had become devout disciples of Eddy and of Jesus Christ as Scientist.
The child Peter Frigate had somehow confused the figure of Jesus with those of scientists he read about at the age of seven, Doctors Frankenstein and Doolittle and Van Hesling. Two of these were involved with dead people come to life, and Doolittle, who fused with St. Francis later on, was involved with talking animals. The precocious and highly imaginative youngster visualized the bearded and robed Christ as working in a laboratory when he was not roaming the countryside and preaching. "Shall we operate now, Judas? I think that that leg goes there, but I don't have the least idea where that eye came from or where it goes.”
This conversation would take place when Jesus was trying to raise Lazarus. The problem was complicated by the other bodies that had been put in Lazarus' tomb, before his interment. After lying three days in a hole in a cliff in this hot climate, Lazarus was pretty much decayed and fallen apart, hence the confusion. Hence, also, the gas masks that Jesus and his assistants, Judas and Peter, wore over their surgical masks.
Near them were giant retorts with bubbling liquids and a static generator shooting twisting electrical currents from node to node and other impressive-looking Hollywoodish laboratory equipment. These came, not from the Frankenstein motion picture, which did not appear until 1931, but from a silent movie serial Frigate saw when he was six.
Judas, the treasurer of Dr. Christ's organization, which depended entirely upon voluntary contributions, was nervous about the expense. "This operation will wipe us out," he said hoarsely to the great scientist.
"Yes, but think of the publicity. When the millionaire, Joseph of Arimathea, hears of this, he'll kick in with plenty of shekels. Besides, it's deductible on his income tax.”
In later years, when thinking of this scene, Frigate was sure that he had not known about such things as publicity and income tax deductions. He must be reconstructing his childhood imagination. But imagination works backward as well as forward, better in fact.
Perhaps it was this version of Christ as scientist that veered young Frigate toward the reading of science fiction. Though reading heavily in Swift, Twain, Doyle, London, Dumas, Baum, and Homer, he also read the Bible, and an edition of John Bunyan illustrated by Dore. Somewhere, deep in the boiling muddy depths of his unconscious, his religious impulses were mixed with his worship of science as savior of mankind. The early science-fiction magazines and books he read were based on the premise that rationality, logic and science would get Homo sapiens out of the mess it had made during the past hundred thousand years. He had not learned then that, though he lived in a high-technology civilization, the Old Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, the New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Dark Ages were in every newborn infant. Baggage that went with every person throughout his or her life. Few there were who would rid themselves of this impedimenta, and no one would ever shuck all of it.
Well, Nur might be an exception.
"There are certain things about those ages that are desirable," Nur had said. "I have not rid myself of them, I am sure.”
When Frigate was eleven, his parents slid into religious apathy. They stopped going, for a while, to the First Church of Christ Scientist on Hamilton Boulevard in Peoria. But though they did not want their eldest son to stop attending church, they did not want to transport him every morning to the Christ Scientist Church. So they enrolled him in the Sunday school of the Arcadia Avenue Presbyterian Church, which was within walking distance.
It was here that he ran head on and at full theological speed into predestination. He had not as yet recovered from the concussion of soul and philosophical trauma resulting from the collision.
"The whole world became for me a convalescent ward after that," Frigate had once told Burton. "Of course, I'm exaggerating somewhat.”
Until then, Frigate had been convinced that you were rewarded with Heaven if you lived a life full of good deeds and thoughts and of unshaken doubt in the existence of God and the validity of the Bible.
"The Presbyterians maintained that it did not make any difference whether you thought you were full of grace and were an exemplary Christian. God had decreed thousands of years before you were born, before the making of the universe, in fact, that this unborn person would be saved and that unborn person would be damned. Their belief was like Twain's theory of pre-determinism. From the moment that the first primal atom bumped into the second created atom, a chain of motion was set up the directions of which were fixed by whether the primal atom collided with the second at this angle or that angle and the velocity it was traveling at when it bumped the other. If the angle and velocity had been different, everything that happened from then on would have been different. Your course through life was set. Nothing you did could change it. Everything you did was predetermined. To use twentieth-century computerese, preprogrammed.”
The catch was that you could not then say to yourself, "What the hell?" and live a dissolute godless life. You had to behave as if you were a complete Christian. What was worse, you had to be one. You had to truly believe; you could not be a hypocrite.
But you would not know until after you'd died whether God had chosen you to fly up to Paradise or to fall into the eternal flames of Hell.
"Actually, if the Presbyterians were right, you could be a wicked person all your life. But if God had marked you as one of the saved, you would repent at the last moment and rise up to eternal bliss. Who, however, was going to take the chance that that would happen?
"I should have told my parents about my spiritual agonies over this. They would have straightened me out by telling me that there was no such thing as predestination and a literal Hell. At least, they would have tried to ease my mind. But I said nothing to them—which gives you an idea of my communicativeness—and I suffered. They, of course, had no idea what I was being taught there in that church within walking distance. A short walk to Despair, Doubt, and Hell.”
"Did you really suffer that much?" Burton had said.
"Not all the time. Just now and then, here and there. After all, I was an active healthy boy. And I observed that, if the adults in the church really believed in predestination, they did not behave as if they did. They certainly weren't obsessed with doubts and griefs about their strange doctrine. They paid it lip service in church and forgot about it as soon as they walked out. Maybe sooner.
"Also, reading "about Twain's life, I saw that he did not believe in his godless and strictly mechanical universe. He acted as if he had free will even though he talked a lot about its absence from human beings.”
At the age of twelve, Frigate became an atheist.
"Rather, I should say, a devout believer in science as our savior. Science as used by rational people. However, I had forgotten that Swift had said, implied, anyway, that most people were Yahoos.”
He had hastened to amend and modify his statement. Most people were only Yahooish; only a minority were genuine, dyed-in-the-wool Yahoos. Too big a minority, though.
"Science could only be our savior in a limited sense and then only if not abused. But everything is abused and misused. I did not really learn that I was until thirty-five, though. Midway in my life, like Dante, I was just outside the Gates of Hell.”
"It took him a long time to realize that people are irrational most of the time and usually more than that," Nur had said. "What an astounding revelation!”
"Not only the Paleolithic Age but also the bipedal ape lives in us," Burton had said. "I'm not sure, though, that that is not an insult to the apes.”
Frigate had maintained for many years that there was no such thing as a soul. But it came to him that if God had not given Homo sapiens a soul, then it must make its own soul. He wrote a story based on the idea of artificial souls that insured people the immortality that God, if there was one, had neglected to create.
As far as he knew, no one had ever thought of this, and it made a very good premise for a science-fiction novel. It also made him conscious that, somewhere in him, he still believed that only humanity could save itself. There was no savior to come from Heaven or another planet and redeem humankind.
"I was wrong, yet right," Frigate had said. "Our salvation was the synthetic soul, but it was invented by an extra-Terrestrial species.”
"That soul, the wathan, is not our salvation," Nur had said. "It is only a means to an end. Salvation must still come from ourselves.”
Science and the religious impulse had combined to make the Riverworld and the wathan, but these could carry you only so far. At that point, science faded away like a sunset and metaphysics took over.
In the meantime, you had to live one second after the-other, move with the flow of time. Like it or not, you had to sleep and eat and excrete and, as Burton said, cultivate your self with due regard to others. You might ask questions, but if you did not get answers just now, you could hope that you would someday.
Frigate was introduced to Star Spoon and talked with her for a while, though he had some difficulty understanding her. She spoke Esperanto, but since she had lived in an area occupied mainly by eighth-century a.d. Chinese and Italic Sabines of the fifth century b.c, her Esperanto had many unfamiliar loan words. After a while, he excused himself and went to his apartment. Like Burton, he was troubled because Li Po had not consulted his companions about Star Spoon. The group did need new members; eight was not enough to give the variety and freshness needed. They were close because of the hardships suffered while struggling to reach their goal, but this very intimacy had made them a family, and like most families, they got on one another's nerves at times and quarreled about trivialities. Nur excepted.
Frigate thought it was both right and necessary to raise others. But these should be carefully considered before being admitted. They did not need troublemakers.
Li Po had opened the floodgates. The rest of the group would want to raise their own dead, and there was, as yet, no limit on the numbers that could be brought in or any qualifications for them.
Burton felt as Frigate and, doubtless, most of the group did. Yet he was helpless, so far, to control these individualists. He was brave, strong and dashing, but he was not a good leader except in situations that called for immediate and violent action. He just was not a peacetime administrator.
Nur el-Musafir should be the one whom the group should follow and obey now, but he had not volunteered for the office and probably would not. Of them all, he was the most foresighted. He knew that no one could control the inevitable movement to anarchy.
Burton saw how shocked Star Spoon was when a screen displayed her birth. He had expected that she would be, but he was surprised that she showed so much emotion about it. Like most Westerners, he regarded the Chinese as a sternly self-controlled nation, the "inscrutable Oriental." Li Po was uninhibited, close to manic, but then he was the exception that tested the rule. In an aside to Li Po, Burton spoke of this. The Chinese laughed loudly and said, "It may be that the Chinese of your time were inexpressive—when around strangers or in threatening situations. But Star Spoon and I are of what you call the seventh century. Do you think that we are the same as the Chinese of your time, any more than Englishmen of the seventh century were like those of your time?”
"I am sufficiently rebuked and chastened," Burton said.
Nur said, "She may be disturbed not so much by what she sees now as by what she knows she is going to see.”
It was impossible to be at ease when their pasts were being shown. Burton proposed that they choose an empty apartment for their communal meals from now on. They would paint its walls so that the screens Could not be seen. They agreed that that was an excellent idea, after which Burton returned to his apartment. He ordered two androids, protein robots, from the Computer, gave the specifications, then waited exactly thirteen seconds for them to appear in the converters. It had amused him to give one the face of Colonel Henry Corsellis, late of the Native Eighteenth Bombay Infantry, and the other the face of Sir James Outram, late hero of the Indian Mutiny and Her Majesty's Resident at Aden. Corsellis had become Burton's enemy when, during officer's mess, Burton had been improvising poems rhyming with his fellows' names. He had ignored Cor-sellis' because he knew how hot-tempered and sensitive his" commander was. But, when the colonel had demanded that Burton make a couplet based on his name, Burton had recited: Here lieth the body of Colonel Corsellis; The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.
As expected, the colonel had become angry, and they had quarreled. From then on, Corsellis did Burton every disservice that he could.
"Which I should have anticipated. Perhaps I did.”
Burton had come into disfavor with Outram, then a general in the Indian army, when Sir Charles Napier, whom Burton greatly admired, got into a long and bitter feud with Outram. Burton had defended Napier with articles and letters for the Karachee Advertiser, a private publication devoted to Napier's defense. Outram had resented these and marked Burton down for attack if he ever had an opportunity. Years later, when Burton, then a captain in the Indian army, had requested permission to explore Somalia in Africa, Outram had refused his request. Though overridden by his superiors, Outram had then limited Burton's plans for exploration.
Now the androids, whom he called Corsellis and Outram, stood before him. The former was in the uniform of a colonel; the latter, in civilian clothes. Their faces were expressionless; they would smile only at request and then only if they had been programmed to do so.
"You two arseholes will, as required, paint the rooms with the materials you'll find in that converter there," he said, pointing.
The androids did not follow his gesture, so he said, "Look over there. Where my finger is pointing. That cabinet is the converter I mean. The paint's in sprayers. You know how to use those. The ladders are also in there. You know how to put the sections together and how to use them.”
Burton had thought of programming them to kiss his ass before they started the job, but he had rejected the childish and essentially meaningless act. If he resurrected the real Outram and Corsellis and got them to kiss his ass, that would be different. But they would refuse, of course. Besides, he could not just bring them to life for a while, even if he would have liked them to do menial labor for him. They were human beings, and he could not have them disintegrated when he was through with them.
Nevertheless, he did get some satisfaction, even chuckled, when he saw the two walk to the converter. If only he could arrange it so that the real men, the models, could at least see his androids. They would be outraged, furiously indignant.
He sighed. That form of revenge was petty, and he knew it. If Nur could see this, he would say, "It is beneath you. You have become no better than they.”
"I should turn the other cheek?" Burton muttered, continuing aloud the imaginary conversation. "I am not a Christian. Moreover, I never met a Christian who turned the other cheek when slapped.”
He would have to keep the identity of the simulacra to himself and that deprived him of the pleasure he had in this. Alice could get away with giving her androids the faces of Gladstone and Disraeli because she had no animus toward them. It was, to her, merely amusing to be waited on by two prime ministers.
He left his apartment for a while, though he was not sure that he should leave the androids unattended. If they had a problem that a sentient painter could have solved, they would either ignore it and go on or stop and wait for orders. He, however, was angered by the events on the past-display screen, not yet covered over. Its sequence was not in proper chronology; it had jumped to when he was three years old and being whipped savagely by his tutor. "All I did was tell him that he had a breath like a sick dog's," Burton said. "And that he farted overmuch. That's all.”
Burton could not read at that age, but the tutor had started to teach him to speak Latin. At the age of ten, Burton would know far more Latin than his tutor and speak it fluently.
"But that was in spite of him, not because of him. I had a natal love for languages that no brutal pedant could scourge from me. Unfortunately, most boys hated the subject as much as they hated their teachers' rods. In their minds, one was the other.”
The screen displaying his past appeared on the wall beside the door after it had been shut. Burton sat down in the flying chair parked by the door and turned it so that his back was to the wall. Immediately, the screen appeared on the wall opposite him. Burton put soundproof devices over his ears and a long eyeshade on his head. While he kept his eyes lowered, he could not see the screen. Apparently, the Computer had not had orders to shift the screen to the floor. Thus, Burton could read the book he held close to his chest without seeing or hearing the display.
The book was the Roman emperor Claudius' grammar of the Etruscan language, located and reproduced for Burton by the Computer. It had been lost sometime during the Dark Ages of Earth, but an Ethical agent had photographed a copy of it shortly after Claudius had finished it. While Earth linguists were bemoaning its loss, it had been sitting in the records of the Ethicals for a thousand years.
Despite his absorption in the book, he could not keep from glancing at the screen. Now he, as the child, had been swung around to face the red angry features of McClanahan, the tutor. Though Burton could not hear the man, he could read the writhing lips. And he suddenly remembered other occasions when McClanahan had hurled invective and accusations at him, and the prophecy that he would go to Hell when he died—if not sooner.
Burton could not see his own lips, but he was screaming, "I'll meet you there!" His view shifted. He was facing the other way, and the tutor was thrashing him again. He would not be crying or yelling; he kept his lips stubbornly locked so that the tutor would not have the satisfaction of knowing how much he was hurting him. That only made McClanahan' angrier, and he increased the severity of his strokes. But he was afraid to whip him as much as he would have liked to. Though Burton's father approved of instilling love of learning and obedience with the rod, he would not have stood for a whipping near to death. The tutor knew that the child would not scream until he was almost dead, and perhaps not then.
Burton turned his head away and focused his intentness into a sword, the tip of which raked across the words of the grammar. He finished two pages, then closed his eyes and projected the pages, as if they had been a film, on the screen of his mind. After which, he opened his eyes to check his accuracy. He smiled. His memory had been one hundred percent perfect.
Book-learning a language was a step toward mastering it. But he should resurrect an Etruscan and imbibe the living speech. However—there was always a however—what would he do with the Etruscan after he had finished with her?
It was then that he thought of the possibility of reading the recordings of the dead in the files. Why not have the Computer unreel their memories? Perhaps the dead could speak.
Using a codeword, he asked the Computer to form a screen on the floor. It did so, and Burton put his question to it. The Computer replied that the memories of the recordings could be extracted and displayed. However, some recordings were not available because of overrides.
He looked at his wristwatch. Time for the androids to have finished their job.
By then the display of his past had leaped to Naples, where -the family was staying for a while during its never-ending wandering through southern Europe. Once more, he was being whipped by a tutor, this time by DuPre, an Oxford graduate.
As Frigate had said, their lives were movies, but, before being shown the main feature, they were seeing "previews.”
It would be embarrassing when the Computer got to the events of the day before this particular incident. He and an Italian playmate had masturbated before each other.
It was also going to be embarrassing when the innumerable excretions were shown, and the sexual scenes would be downright intolerable. These were why Burton had decided that the idea for painting an apartment where all might meet was not enough. His own apartment was to be painted, and, if the others had any sense, they would follow his example.
He entered the doorway, and the screen was hidden beneath the paint. The androids, sweating, were just finishing up his bedroom. He had not told them to paint every room, since there were several into which he would not go. That is, unless he wished to see his past, and he knew that there would be many times when he would not be able to resist the temptation. He could, however, now view it only when he wished to.
He swore and snapped his fingers.
Perhaps not.
He went to the console of the auxiliary computer, which had not been painted over. Activating it, he stared at the screen. He smiled. The Computer was not displaying the loathed pictures there. Apparently it had been ordered only to use the walls for the memory projections.
The Outram android reported that they were through. Burton told them to store the ladders and the unused cans in a bedroom and to put the used cans in a converter. He disintegrated the cans, then ordered the androids into the converter. They walked into the huge cabinet; he secured the door; energy flashed; not even a speck of ash was left.
It had to be his imagination that made him think that their eyes looked pleading. They had neither self-consciousness nor instinct for self-preservation.
The walls, floor and ceilings were an appalling egg-white, but he would paint murals over these.
Frigate called him via the console screen.
"I've been exploring the little worlds on that second level down from the top," he said. "I found out that the Computer doesn't show the past there. I don't know why, but I think that the Ethicals had some limitations there that the Snark couldn't override. Anyway, besides that, there are other reasons why we should move into them. They give the illusion of the great outdoors; I felt much freer than I do in my apartment. I'm going to suggest that we move into them, and that .anyone who wishes to do so remodel them. I'm going to do it whether or not anyone else does, but it would be nice if everybody did it. We'd be close together and could use the central area for social meetings or whatever.”
They met in the central area of the "pie-in-the-sky" level that evening to talk about Frigate's proposal.
"You'll have to see those places for yourselves," Frigate said. "They're fabulous.”
The American reminded them that the circular section was divided into segments of thirty degrees each. The points of these twelve segments ended in the huge circular central area.
"It occurred to me that, from a bird's-eye view, the circle looks like a zodiac chart. It's divided into twelve parts, twelve houses, Aquarius, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and so forth—if you want to look at it that way. I was thinking that maybe each of us could pick the area that corresponds to his or her birth date.”
"Why?" de Marbot said.
"It's a conceit of mine. However, since the birth date could determine the particular area in which to live, it'll avoid argument if we use the zodiacal method. Of course, there's no reason for disagreement, since they'll all look alike once the original paraphernalia is cleared out. It's just an idea.”
The others said that it seemed as good a way of choosing the areas as any.
"But you don't believe in that astrological crap, do you?" Turpin said.
"No. Not really. However, I do know something about it. Now, Po, you were born, according to the Western calendar, on April 19, a.d. 701. That makes you Aries the Ram, the first house, the principle of which is energy. You certainly are energetic.”
"And much more!" the Chinese said.
"Yes. The first house also pioneers, and you were a pioneer. Your positive qualities are outgoing, original and dynamic.”
"Very true! I must learn more about this Occidental astrology.”
"Your negative qualities," Frigate said, smiling, "are that you're foolhardy, have low self-sufficiency, and are deceitful.”
"What? I? Perhaps I might be foolhardy, though I would prefer to call it absolutely courageous. But how could you say that I have low self-sufficiency, you who know me so well?”
"I'm just telling you what astrology says about your sign. Anyway, negative qualities are to be overcome, and evidently you conquered yours, if you ever had them.”
"One might say that he overcompensated in his conquest," Burton said drily.
"The house of Aries is OK with you?" Frigate said.
"Why not! It is the first!”
Frigate spoke to Alice. "You were born May 4, 1852. That makes you Taurus the Bull. Ruled by Venus, the emotions.”
"Hah!" Burton said. Alice glared at him.
"Taurus builds. Your positive qualities make you loyal, dependable and patient. But you have to battle against excessive pride, self-indulgence and greediness.”
"Not to my knowledge," Alice said quietly.
"The second house OK with you?”
"Of course.”
Frigate spoke to Thomas Million Turpin, who was smoking a panatela and holding a glass of bourbon.
"You were born on May 21, 1873, under the sign of Gemini, the Twins. You're ruled by Mercury, and you're strong on communication. You're versatile, genial and creative.”
"Keep talking, man!”
"But your negative qualities ... uh ... you're two-faced, superficial and unstable.”
"That's a damn lie! I never been two-faced, I always been straightforward. Where'd you get that shit?”
"Nobody said that you were," Frigate said. "What that indicates is that you have had to overcome those tendencies."
"I ain't two-faced. I'm just discreet and polite. No use hurting someone's feelings if you don't have to. It don't pay.”
"The third house agreeable with you?”
"One's good as another and maybe better.”
"We don't have anybody born under Cancer," Frigate said. "Not yet, anyway. The fifth house is Leo the Lion, representing vitality and ruled by the sun. Leo dramatizes. That's you, Marcelin. Born August 18, 1782.”
"So far, excellent," de Marbot said. "I am all those.”
"A Leo is regal ...”
"True!”
"... entertaining ...”
"Doubly true!”
"... and commanding.”
"Triply true.”
"The bad qualities, alas, are that Leo is pompous, domineering and conceited.”
The Frenchman reddened and scowled; the others burst out laughing.
"He got you there!" Turpin said.
"Leo, the fifth house, OK?" Frigate said.
"If it is understood that we are merely amusing ourselves with this parlor game of astrology and that, though I may be a leader, I am not domineering, and though I have much to boast about but do not, I am not conceited, and that never, never am I pompous!”
"Nobody'11 argue with you," Frigate said ambiguously. "Now we come to the sixth house, Virgo, the virgin. Ruled also by Mercury, the communicator. Virgo analyzes. That's you, Aphra, born September 22, 1640. Virgo is practical, analytical, intellectual.”
"I've never been any of those," Aphra said.
"Virgo is also critical, hypochondriacal and prim.”
She laughed uproariously.
"I, with my reputation and my bawdy dramas?”
"The sixth house OK?”
"Why not?”
"Why not?" dc Marbot said. "I ask, why not? We have been living together, my little cabbage, and I am delighted and content. Now ... sacrebleu ... -we will no longer share a bed and a roof. Have you not thought of that? If not, why not? Are you tired of me?”
She patted him on the arm. "Not at all, my bantam cock, not at all. But... well... we are always with each other, never out of each other's sight. It's possible, only possible, I say, after all, we're human, that such close and continuous intimacy may pall after a while. Besides ... I like the idea of having my own world. We can build our own, each to our own desire, and still be with each other whenever we wish. I will stay one night in your world. You, the next night, in mine. We can pretend that we are a king and a queen making state visits to each other's monarchy.”
"I do not know about that," he said.
Aphra shrugged. "Well, if it doesn't work out, we can live together as before. Surely, Marcelin, you are not afraid of this venture?”
"I? Afraid? Never! Very well, Peter, I will take up residence in the fifth house and Aphra in the sixth. After all, we will be next-door neighbors.”
"With a thick wall between you. Walls make good neighbors.”
"But poor lovers," Burton said.
"You are too cynical, my friend," de Marbot said.
"Libra and Scorpio, the seventh and eighth houses, will have to be empty for the time being," Frigate said. "The ninth is Sagittarius, the archer, ruled by Jupiter, the dominant mode being expansion. Sagittarius philosophizes. Which is appropriate, since you, Nur, are Sagittarius. You are, according to the ancient science, jovial, prophetic and logical.”
"And more," Nur said.
"You have the negative qualities of bluntness, fanaticism and intolerance.”
"Had. I conquered those in my .late youth.”
"We must skip Capricorn. Aquarius, my sign," Frigate said, "is the eleventh house. Aquarius the Waterbearer is ruled by Saturn, which symbolizes lessons, and by Uranus, which stands for opportunities. Aquarius humanizes. Aquarius is diplomatic, altruistic and inventive. Unfortunately, on the negative side, he is selfish, eccentric and impulsive.”
"Do you plead guilty?" Burton said.
"More or less. Now, Dick, we come to you, Pisces, since you were born March 19, 1821. Pisces the Fish. Harmonizes, haw! haw! Ruled by Neptune or idealism and Jupiter or expansion. No argument there. Positive qualities: intuitive, sympathetic, artistic.”
"You've told me, more than once, that I was a self-made martyr," Burton said.
"And so," Nur said, "carrying our baggage of good and bad qualities, we go to our new homes. If we could only leave the suitcases containing the bad at the door.”
Moving into the "pie-in-the-sky" chambers demanded much preparation. The tenants had to tour their little worlds and decide whether they should keep the present decor or "environment" or make their own. Except for Nur, who was intrigued by the chamber of dark mirrors, each finally had his or her place stripped. While the hordes of androids and robots were doing this, the tenants decided on what kind of private world they wanted. After that, they had to instruct the Computer down to the minutest details about their specifications.
Nur changed his mind. He would remain in his suite though he would visit the mirror-world now and then to meditate.
Burton surprised everybody by his unaccountable reluctance to change homes. He had always been a wanderer who grew restless if he stayed in one place more than a week. Yet he now refused to move until he had made his world exactly as he wished. Halfway through the building of his first world, he stopped the work and had it stripped again. After a long time, he started on a second design but abandoned that after two weeks.
"Perhaps he's so unwilling to go there," Nur said, "because it will be his last home. Where else can he go after he moves into that?”
The afternoon that the six were to move, all eight held a big going-away party in the central area. It was not entirely a joyous occasion because de Marbot and Behn quarreled just before they were to take occupancy. The Frenchman was burned up at Aphra's refusal to live with him in his world, and, after drinking more wine than he was accustomed to, he accused her of not loving him.
"1 am entitled to my own world, the world I made," she said loftily.
"A woman's place is by the man she loves. She should go where he goes.”
"We've been through this too many times," she said. "I'm weary of it.”
"You should be under my roof. It is my right. How can I trust you?”
"I don't have to be in your sight every minute. If you can't trust me, if you think I'll hop into another man's bed the moment I go around the corner ... Is it just me or don't you trust any woman? You were often absent for many months from your wife when you were a soldier. Did you trust her? You must have, you didn't—”
"My wife was above suspicion!" de Marbot shouted.
"Hail, Caesar!" Aphra said scornfully. "The real Caesar's wife, my precious little piece of shit, put horns on him. So, if your wife was as good as Caesar's wife ...”
Aphra walked away from him while he yelled at her, and she went through the doorway to the sixth house.
Weeping, she let the door close behind her. She felt as if she were also closing off her lover forever, though she had had enough experience to know that her emotions, not her reason, were speaking. How many men had she parted from and never expected to see again? It seemed like a hundred, but, actually, it must be only twenty. And she could not remember the names of some. She would, though, when the dogging screen of her past showed up again. Here, at least, she could get away from it.
She went up the steps, the door opening for her at the top, and she stepped into her world. There was another flying chair there; she got into it and soared to an altitude of a hundred feet and headed inward. Below her was South American low-altitude tropical jungle, with winding narrow rivers gleaming in the light of the false moon. The cries of night birds rang and clanged below her; a bat shot by near her and dipped toward the dark tops of the trees a few feet below her. The moon was full because she had arranged for one every night, and its light was twice as powerful as that of Earth's. And the stars, also those of equatorial South America, were three times as bright as the real ones. In this luminous night, she saw a shape slip across a glade. A jaguar. And she heard the bellowings of alligators.
The wind cooled her and fluttered her robe as she headed toward the big lake in the middle of the jungle. Its waters sparkled around the floating palace in its center. She had reconstructed this from her memory of an apparition she had seen while voyaging from Antwerp to London. It had appeared suddenly ahead of the ship as if placed there by magic and had startled and frightened everybody aboard. This magical building was square, four stories high, made of marble of various colors, and surrounded by rows of fluted and twisting pillars with climbing vines and flowers and streamers waving in the breeze. Each pillar was carved with hundreds of little Cupids who seemed to be climbing them with the aid of their fluttering wings.
The palace had been seen by everybody aboard the ship. Where had it come from? If it was a mirage, what building did it reflect? There was nowhere in England or the Continent such a rococo fantastic palace.
That unexplainable vision had haunted her the rest of her life on Earth and still did on the Riverworld. She had asked the Computer to explain it to her, but its searches had turned up only the reference to it in the biography of her by John Gildon. This posthumous work had both intrigued and disgusted her because of its inaccuracies and lies. She had then asked for all available literature concerning her and had read Montague Summers', Bernbaum's and Sackville-West's accounts. These authors had been mainly occupied in trying to sift the truth from the romance and speculations and had usually failed. They could not be blamed. The official records and documents about her were scarce, and getting the historical facts about her from her novels, plays and poems was hopeless.
Aphra knew, or had been told, that she was the daughter of a barber, James Johnson of Canterbury. Her mother had died a few days after Aphra's birth, and she and her sister and brother had been adopted by relatives, John and Amy Amis. Neither she nor the Amises, of course, had any prescience that the little girl would some day be the first Englishwoman to support herself wholly by writing. Nor that one of her poems would be included in anthologies for centuries afterward and one novel would survive as a minor classic.
Her successful intrusion into the hitherto all-male literary field had shocked and affronted many. The deepest shock was felt by the male writers and critics. Their biased and vindictive remarks and politicking made her furious, and she responded in kind, and justly so. She suffered all the hardships, the slingstones and fiery crosses, of the pioneer, but she blazed the path for a host of women who earned their living by the pen.
As a child, she had been nervous and imaginative and often ill. Nevertheless, she survived the six-thousand-mile rough and dangerous voyage to Surinam, an English possession in north South America on the Atlantic Ocean. Her adopted father, John Amis, was not so lucky. He died en route, a victim of a "fever." He had been appointed lieutenant general of Surinam through the influence of a relative, Lord Willoughby of Parham. Despite the loss of her father, she enjoyed her life, and she took full advantage of the exotic land. Here she met a black slave who had been stolen from his tribe in West Africa and brought to Surinam. His stories of his homeland and his exalted position there, whether true or not, were the source of that romantic novel she was to write years later, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave.
"Those were the happiest years of my life. There 'twas always spring, always April, May and June. The trees bore at once all degrees of leaves and fruits. There were groves of oranges, lemons, citrons, figs, nutmegs and noble aromatics continually exuding fragrances. Gaily colored macaws, parrots and canaries flashed above the water lilies in the lagoons and trenches. The twa-twa bird had a cry like a silver gong. The kiskadee called 'Qu'est-ce que dit? Qu'est-ce que dit?' I became versed in the strange language of the blacks, half-African, half-English, and heard of Gran Gado, the Grand God, his wife Maria, and his son Jesi Kist. Indians came down from the mountains carrying bags full of gold dust.
"It was not all lovely and paradisiacal, of course, I fell sick with malaria once and almost died.”
In 1658, at the age of eighteen, she returned to London. At nineteen she was married to a much older man, a wealthy Dutch merchant, Jans Behn. Though she had no money, her good looks and wit and learning had inspired love in Mr. Behn. Through his connections, hi introduced his wife into the court of Charles II.
"And is it true," Frigate had said, "that you were the king's mistress?”
"His Majesty did ask me to bed with him," she had said, "but at that time I was married. I had the conception then, which I later abandoned, that adultery was sinful. Moreover, I loved my husband, no Dutch lump he, and I knew that he would be terribly hurt if I betrayed him.”
By 1665, her husband had lost his immense fortune because of the sinking by storms or capture by pirates of the ships bearing his merchandise. He died from a heart attack in early 1666, leaving his widow with only fifty pounds. By the time she had gotten employment, she had only forty pounds left. Through friends at the court, she became an espionage agent and went to Antwerp. She was told that any information she could get on the Dutch fleet would be welcome. But her main assignment was to spy on renegade Englishmen living in Holland. There were many there who had fled England and were conspiring to overthrow the present monarchy.
"A female James Bond," Frigate had said.
"What?”
"Never mind.”
"I was especially charged to make friends with an exile, William Scott, and endeavor to get him to return to England. He wouldn't do so until he got a full pardon, but toward that end he agreed to collaborate with me. By then, I was broke. I sent a letter to James Halsall, the king's cupbearer, my immediate superior. I asked him for funds to continue my spying. I got no answer, so I wrote a second missive, telling him how expensive Antwerp was and that I had only been able to feed myself and keep a roof over my head by pawning a ring. Again, no reply. Once more I wrote to Halsall and, at the same time, to Thomas Killigrew, a friend who was also in the secret service. I stated that I needed fifty pounds to pay debts. I also sent news of the number and disposition of the Dutch ships, of the Dutch army, and of my progress with Scott. After receiving no replies, I wrote in utter despair to the secretary of state, Lord Arlington. I told him all that I had done, how impoverished I was, and that soon I'd be in a Dutch debtor's prison. But he did not answer.”
"Did you then think about going over to the Dutch?" Burton had asked.
"I? Never!”
"Even then, the British government was mistreating and neglecting its soldiers and spies," Burton had said.
"I wrote again to Lord Arlington and begged him to send one hundred pounds to pay off my debts and return to England. Again, silence. So, there I was, not a penny of pay for my services, not a single word from my chiefs. What was I doing there but making a piteous fool of myself, a poverty-stricken dunce? Finally, I succeeded in getting a loan of one hundred and fifty pounds from a friend in England, Edward Butler, and I sailed back home in January, year of Our Lord 1667.”
Weary, sick and heavily in debt, Aphra crossed the Channel from Antwerp to London. Here she saw the ruins of the city laid low by the Great Fire. Yet the terrible blaze had not been without its good. It had consumed the hundreds of thousands of rats and millions of lice that had spread the Great Plague. Aphra, however, had little time to think about either the fire or the plague. Mr. Butler pressed her for repayment, and Lord Arlington and the king kept on ignoring her just requests for her back pay. The inevitable came; she was thrown into debtors' prison.
"Where," Aphra had said, "if you had no money to buy food, you starved to death. That is, if the diseases running through the prisons like wild redskins on a raid did not strike you down first. The plagues were democratic, however. They killed you, high or low, poor or with money in your purse, young or old.”
All the City prisons had been burned down or made useless by the Great Fire. Newgate was hastily repaired, but Aphra was sent to Garonne House in South Lambeth. The filth and overcrowding had been bad enough before the fire. They were ten times worse now because of the lack of prisons and the great numbers of citizens whose houses and property had been destroyed. Unable to pay their debts, they, too, went to gaol.
"I lived through it, though there were times when I wished that I would die. The stench of unwashed bodies and clothes, the stink from the sick suffering from the bloody flux, the noisome odor of the open sewers, the wailing of frightened and sick children, the stealing, the screaming of the mad and the furious, the coughing and retching, the fights, the brutality, the utter lack of privacy ... if you would piss or shit you must do it in a cell with a dozen others watching or laughing at you ... if my mother had not borrowed money to send me food, half of which was confiscated by the guards for their own benefit... I would have wasted away until I was too weak to resist the diseases floating in the sickening air of that hellhole. Whatever sins I had sinned, before I was in gaol or after, I paid for them. 'Twas a purgatory without flames, flames that we would have welcomed to keep us warm.”
Two of the guards offered to give her a meal a day with meat, vegetables and wine if she would have intercourse with them both at the same time.
"If my mother had not sent me enough to keep me from completely starving, I suppose I would have consented to their demands sooner or later, probably sooner. My empty belly was sucking wind, and I told myself, though I did not really believe it, that the guards were preferable to starvation. However, one of the guards, in addition to being unusually filthy, one-eyed, humpbacked, and rotten-toothed, had the French disease. I don't know ...”
"Syphilis or gonorrhea?" Frigate had said.
"Both, I think. What did it matter? Anyway, thanks to my mother, not God, I escaped them. And, eventually, Killigrew did pay me enough to discharge my debts and to live on for a while. A very short while.”
She had paused, then said, smiling, and she looked beautiful when smiling, "I lied when I said that I wanted to die when in prison. Oh, perhaps! did briefly consider the benefits of suicide. No, I have always believed passionately that life is worthwhile, and I was not one who hoisted the white flag at the first discouragement. Nor did I ever acknowledge defeat. Not until the last breath came, and then not then. Death had not defeated me any more than life had. It just retired me.
"There I was, just out of prison, thin and wan, my debts paid except for what I owed my mother and not a penny to pay her unless I went without food and lodging and cosmetics and clothes and books.”
She was nearing thirty in a time when a woman of thirty looked—usually—much older than the woman of thirty of the late 1900s. Most had lost many teeth, and their breaths stank of rotten teeth. A woman without a husband, father, brother, uncle or cousin to protect her was considered fair prey. If wronged, she could resort to a law that was far on the side of the wealthy and privileged. The judges, the lawyers, the bailiffs, the jurors, were open to bribery—very few exceptions—and were easily impressed by the rich and the titled. Women writers were not unknown, but these were not professionals. They were the daughters of country vicars who wrote in their spare time or noblewomen who wanted to get a "name" for themselves. No woman in England had tried to get her livelihood from her pen.
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 cor-rupter 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 Ri-verworld, 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.
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.
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.
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 j 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 Goring. 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 have 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.
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.
He had even composed a ragtime tune for her, "My Egyptian Belle," which he'd play for her after she got adjusted to this life.
Smack dab in the center of his world, Turpinville, would be his New Rosebud Cafe. It wouldn't be the original, the square red-brick building at 2220 Market Street in the black red-light district of St. Louis. It'd be ten stories high, round, its walls of gold alloy, thick with diamonds and emeralds. The roof would be topped with a big gold alloy T. T for Turpin.
The streets around it would be paved with gold bricks, and parked around it would be Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs, Stude-bakers, Mercedeses, Stutz Bearcats, Cords.
The little town would have other buildings around it, three stories high, also made of gold alloy and encrusted with jewels. He'd really be dogging it. There'd be a big fountain in front of the Rosebud, which would spout bourbon day and night onto a golden statue of a piano. There'd be other fountains spraying up champagne and gin and liqueurs onto the statues of Joplin and' Chauvin and Turpin. The decorations and the furniture in the buildings would make J. P. Morgan turn green with envy. Not that that old pirate would ever see them.
There'd be a thousand pianos in Turpinville, and violins, trumpets, drums, every instrument that might be needed. The servants would be androids, all white-skinned, and they'd address Tom's guests as Massah and Marse regardless of their gender. But Tom would be the only one they'd call Boss.
Outside the forty-building town would be a forest with a river and creeks and several huge marshes and steep hills here and there. A concrete road would wind through the forest so that Tom and his buddies and fancy women could ride in their expensive cars whenever they felt like it. The woods and marshes and streams would be alive with rabbits and wild pigs and foxes and ducks and geese and pheasants and grouse and turkeys and fish and turtles and alligators. Tom loved to hunt; he figured on bagging lots of rabbits and ducks.
"You're planning on having a good time forever?" Nur said.
"Maybe not forever," Tom said. "Just as long as it lasts.”
Nur's expression made him uneasy, though he did not know why.
"It'll be a jumping world," he told Nur, and from then on, when he referred to his private universe, he called it "the Jum-pin' Planet.”
"You've come a long way, baby," he told himself.
"What?" Nur said.
"I've come a long way. I was born in an old run-down shack in Savannah, Georgia, but my father was a big man, big in many ways. He made good money, and we moved into a big fancy house—I don't mean a whorehouse—I mean a beautiful house like the rich white folks lived in. But then the Ku Klux Klan started making trouble, and my pa decided we'd go to Mississippi. There was a street in Savannah named Turpin Hill after my father and his brothers. That shows you what a big man my pa was.”
There was even more trouble with the white folks in Mississippi, so they moved on to St. Louis. There they settled down in the black tenderloin district, and "Honest John" Turpin made a fortune with his Silver Dollar Saloon and his livery stable.
"My pa said he'd never done a day's work for another man after the slaves was freed, and he'd never fought with his fists. He was a fighting man, though. He'd grab his man by the wrist, bend them wrist bones together, and butt his head against the man's. Pa had the thickest skull west of the Mississippi, east, too. He always knocked his man out. The man staggered around blind and seeing shooting stars for a week. Nobody fucked around with my pa.”
Like so many Negro musicians, Tom taught himself, but, unlike many, he could read music.
"When I was eighteen, me and my brother Charlie went West just to see the country. We was looking for gold, too, lots of it around then, though it wasn't easy getting it out of the ground. We spent a year in Nevada, but that gold just up and hid when we was around.
"I died August 13, 1922. Old Man Death, he had a harder head than Pa's, and I couldn't pay him off. Old Man Death, the only honest man in St. Louis. No bribes, no money under the counter. This is it, I got a job to do, and 1 always do it. I didn't have no children, but they called me the father of St. Louis ragtime.”
"Your wife was more than well-off, and your brother Charlie did all right, too," Frigate said. "He was a constable, the first black elected to public office in Missouri. When he died, I think it was Christmas Day, 1935, he left a hundred and five thousand dollars in a trust fund for his family. Big money in those days.”
"Even bigger money for a nigger," Tom said. "Nineteen thirty-five, you say?”
"I'll ask the Computer if it's got a book titled They All Played Ragtime," Frigate said. "You'll like to read it. Lots about you. It'll make you proud.”
"I don't need no book for that, but I'll get it.”
The day after the Computer told him that his Jumpin' Planet was finished, Tom Turpin entered it. It was ten in the morning; the sky was blue except for a few high-seeming, thin, cotton-white clouds. Tom went down the steps leading into it and found, as he had ordered, his chauffeur and his pink 1920 convertible Mercedes-Benz waiting for him. The android chauffeur was six feet three inches tall, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and yellow-haired. He also was the ugliest white man Tom had ever seen, because his face had been designed by Tom himself. He wore a typical chauffeur's uniform except it was pink. "To go with the car," Tom had told the others.
He got in the back seat and said, "Home, James." The beauty started up fine, its motor purring, and they began the long winding drive through the tunnel formed by trees with interlocking branches.
"Shouldn't of made the road so narrow," Tom muttered. "But, what the hell, there won't be any oncoming traffic.”
After a while the woods thinned out, and they passed along the edge of a lake. Its surface was brilliantly colored with ducks and geese and herons and cranes in the shallows dipping to catch fish. It was also noisy with honks and screeches and weird loon cries.
The road took them away from Turpinville near the edge of the vast chamber. "Wouldn't know it if I didn't know it," Tom said. "Looks like more forest and hills there. I ain't gonna touch the wall. I want to keep the illusion.”
From the entrance, a straight path to Turpinville was only two and seven-tenths miles. The road designed by Turpin took up almost ten miles, however, to the town, and he could have taken a branch road and made the trip twenty-two miles. Now and then he glimpsed the roof of his town, and his heart surged with pride. "Mine, all mine.”
When they drove from the dark forest into Turpinville, he wished that he had arranged for a big band and a crowd to greet him. The place was so empty, so silent. "A ghost town before its time," he said. "Well, it'll be leaping with sound and people before long.”
The car pulled up in front of the Rosebud, and Tom got out.
He walked across the town square to the central fountain, took a silver cup from a hook on the fountain, dipped it into the strong-smelling liquid, and drank.
"Man, that's the best! But I need the old crowd, the music, the smoke, the laughs, the ... friends. No fun drinking by yourself, talking to yourself.”
He went into the Rosebud, took the ornate elevator to the third floor, entered his suite, went into the room where a huge console stood, and began the search.
Three weeks later, he had not just the forty or so people he had intended, but two thousand.
"It's nigger heaven," he told his former companions during one of the rare times he attended their soirees. "It's like a flea circus. Everybody's jumping.”
Tom was amused when Frigate winced at "nigger heaven." Frigate was a liberal who found such terms repulsive. Tom would not tolerate these from others, unless they were black, but he had no hesitation using them himself. When Frigate asked him why he did so, Tom replied that it was just his way. He hadn't been able to break his old Earth habit.
"You've lived long enough on the Riverworld to get over that," Nur said.
"It takes away the hurt.”
"Whipping yourself is a curious method of salving wounds," Frigate said.
There seemed to be no answer to that. Aphra said, "When are we going to see your world?”
"How about next Friday?" Tom said. "You'll be all right. You'll have a good time. I told my friends about you, and they don't mind you coming." He laughed. "Long as you know your place.”
After Turpin had left, Frigate said, "After sixty-seven years here, the old evils of Earth still fester.”
"He'll never Go On until that evil no longer exists in him," Nur said. "I mean, its effects.”
What had been born on Earth had not necessarily died on the Riverworld. Yet as Nur said, humankind in general had made ethical and psychic progress.
"To put it in plain English," Burton said, "you mean that many have become better human beings.”
"Yes. The Riverworld is a rough reshaper, but change seldom comes without pain.”
Nur was silent for a while, then said, "Tom has many good qualities. He's usually cheerful, always courageous, easy to get along with if you don't step on his toes, which is as it should be. But he has never said he regretted his whore-mongering. A man who deals in whores is himself a whore, and he is in a violent and dirty business. He has to be rough and ruthless and bloody his hands from time to time. He lacks a certain empathy.”
There was another silence, broken when Frigate said, "Yes?”
"It's not just Tom I'm thinking of. You have sealed yourself up in your little worlds. Can a person grow in a vacuum?”
"Of course we can," Frigate said.
"We'll see," Nur said.
He alone had changed his mind about moving. He had decided to stay in his apartment. "Which is world enough for me.”
"And that means trouble," Burton said. "Some among the newly resurrected are going to want those empty worlds for themselves and they'll be shedding blood to get them.”
Burton, Frigate, and Behn were talking about the standards for resurrecting people in the tower.
"Don't pick any actors, any stage, movie or TV actors," Frigate said. "They're all swollen egotists, selfish, opportunistic, and untrustworthy. They may be amusing companions for a while, but they're all self-centered.”
"All?" Burton said.
"All," Behn said. "I should know. I wrote plays; I had a lot to do with them.”
"There might be some exceptions," Frigate said. "However, there are no exceptions among the producers, and they are even more ruthless and cold-blooded than the actors. Don't resurrect producers, especially the Hollywood kind. They're not entirely human.”
"I would class them, then, with politicians," Burton said.
"Oh, yes. No politicians or statesmen need apply. Liars, opportunists all.”
"All?" Behn said.
"You should know," Burton said.
"I didn't know all of them, so I can't really judge them fairly.”
"Take my word for it," Burton said, "No politicians here. What about priests?”
"Men of the cloth, priests, ministers, rabbis, mullahs, witch doctors, bones, whatever; they're all brothers under the uniform. But ... not all alike. There are some real human beings there, now and then, here and there," Frigate said. "But you have to be suspicious of anyone who thinks well enough of himself to become a spiritual leader. What's his real motive?”
"Popes are out," Burton said. "They're politicians, liars, cold-bloodedly manipulate people, pervert Christianity for the good of the Church. No popes.”
"No chief rabbis or chief mullahs or archbishops of Canterbury and their kind," Frigate said. "What applies to the popes applies to them.”
"Mother superiors?”
"Out!" Burton said, jerking a thumb at the ceiling.
"Surely, there are exceptions?”
"Not enough to make it worthwhile to spend time on them," Burton said.
"What about used-car salesmen? Used-car saleswomen, too?" Frigate said.
Burton and Behn looked blank.
"A twentieth-century phenomenon," Frigate said. "Forget it. I'll keep an eye out for them and warn you if I have to. I doubt that I'll have to.”
"Doctors?”
"No blanket rule can be applied to them. But most are lost souls in this world where there is little need for them and they have no authority. Be careful.”
"Lawyers?”
"Some of them are the best people in the world; some, the worst. Be careful. Oh, by the way, I located Buddha," Frigate said. "Siddhartha, the historical Buddha.”
"What's that got to do with lawyers?" Burton said.
"Nothing. But Buddha ... ah ... he's noted in the records, plenty of film on him, if you want to see the living Buddha, Gautama, just ask the Computer. That is, he was living on Earth. He was never resurrected on the Riverworld. When he died on Earth, he Went On.”
"Ah!" Burton said, as if he suddenly understood much that had been hidden before.
"Ah?”
"Yes. I located the file of the historical Jesus Christ several days ago," Burton said.
"Me, too!" Frigate said.
"Then you know that he was resurrected on the River, died several times, the last time twenty years ago. And he, too, has Gone On now. But, apparently, Buddha was more ethically advanced than Jesus.”
"Buddha had a much longer life on Earth than Jesus," Frigate said.
"I am attacking no one, only pointing out a fact.”
"I located St. Francis of Assisi," Frigate said. "He was raised on the River, but when he died ten years ago, he Went On.”
"How many popes and cardinals, how many high churchmen of any faith have Gone On?" Aphra Behn said.
"None," Frigate said. "None so far as I've determined, I mean. I haven't located all. Rather, the Computer hasn't. I put it on a scan. It's located all but twelve of the popes ...”
"Including the first one, St. Peter?" Burton said.
"He wasn't the first pope, he was the first bishop of Rome. Technically speaking, that is.”
"Ah, then he really was in Rome?”
"Yes, he was executed by the Romans there. But ... he's still on The River. He's died three times and still has not Gone On.”
"So," Burton said, "we could resurrect him and get the truth about Jesus and Christianity. That is, the truth as he knows it, which may not be the objective truth.”
"Jesus' records are still on tap," Frigate said. "His wathan is gone, but his life is still there to be run off.”
"St. Paul?”
"Ah, St. Paul!" Frigate cried, smiling. "First, he was a fanatical Orthodox Judaist, then a fanatical Christian, probably did more to pervert the course of the founder's teachings than anyone, and now he is a fanatical member of the Church of the Second Chance. Rather, I should say, he was. The Church wants zealots but not fanatics, and so it recently kicked him out. He is now interested in the teachings of the Dowists,”
"The Dowists?”
"Tell you about them some other time. Paul is alive on The River. I located him and I watched him for a while. Ugly little fellow", but a powerful speaker. He's no longer celibate; he decided that he is burning and wants a woman to quench the flame.”
Frigate showed them three men he had located because of their undeniable evil and vast prominence in his time. Burton had heard of them while in The Valley but had known little about them until now. Adolf Hitler was born the year before Burton had died, Joseph Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, was born eleven years before Burton's death, and Mao Tse-tung was born three years after 1890.
"They're locked up in the files now," Frigate said. "I've not had much time to look at their post-Earth lives, but I've seen enough to be sure that they did not change for the better. Their natures are still essentially like Ivan the Terrible's. Whom, by the way, I've also located.”
Nur said, "You believe that there is no hope for them, that they will never change for the better?”
"Yes. It looks that way, anyway. They were and are evil, sadistic and cold-blooded killers, mass butchers, without love. Psychopathic.”
"But Loga said that there were no true psychopaths on the Riverworld. He said that true psychopaths were so because of chemical imbalances in their bodies. These imbalances, these deficiencies, were eliminated when the bodies were resurrected.”
Frigate shrugged and said, "Yes, I know. So ... what is their excuse now? They have none; they have chosen their attitudes through their own free will. They and they alone are responsible.”
"That may be," Nur said, "but it is not up to you to destroy them, to cut their allotted time short. Who knows? They might, at the very last moment, undergo a radical change of character. See the light, as it were. Remember Goring.”
"Goring started suffering remorse and guilt years ago. These ... creatures ... Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Ivan the Terrible ... are still ready ... eager, in fact ... to kill anyone who stands in their way. Which way, by the way, is a steady advancement toward power, supreme power, the power to dominate and control others and crush all who oppose them. Or who they think oppose them. They're all genuinely paranoiac, you know. Though they strive to shape reality, and often do, they're not connected with reality. I mean that they don't truly perceive things as they are. They're driven by their lust to shape reality into what they think it is or should be.”
"Most people are driven by the same desire.”
"There are great evils and little evils.”
"Great evildoers and little evildoers, you mean. There is no such thing as abstract evil. Evil always consists of concrete acts and concrete actors.”
Burton, who had been listening, became impatient.
"The true philosophy is not in talk, which most philosophers think is philosophy, but in action. Pete, you're doing a lot of talking about what you'd like to do. Why? Because you're afraid to act, and your fear comes from your feeling not self-justified?”
"I keep thinking, Judge not lest ye be judged.”
"Do you think for one moment that you won't be judged even if you refrain from judging others?" Burton said scornfully. "Besides, it's impossible for anybody not to judge others. Even saints can't keep from judging, try though they might not to. It's automatic and takes place in both the conscious and unconscious mind. So, I say, judge right and left, fore and aft, up and down, in and out!”
Nur laughed and said, "But don't pass sentence.”
"Why not?" Burton said, grinning fiendishly. "Why not?”
"I've located a real judge, I mean a judge in the legal sense," Frigate said. "A man who sat in the circuit court of my hometown, Peoria, during the Prohibition era. I remember reading about him when I was a kid; I also remember what my father and his friends said about him. He was part of the very corrupt municipal system then, he sent many a bootlegger to prison or fined those found with booze in their homes or in speakeasies. Yet he had a cellar full of whiskey and gin he purchased from bootleggers. Some of whom, by the way, he let off because they were his direct suppliers.”
"You've been very busy," Nur said.
"I can't resist it," Frigate said.
Burton understood Frigate's fascination, or, at least, thought he could. Evil people did have a certain magnetism that drew everybody, evil or good or gray-shaded, towards them. First, attraction, then repulsion. In fact, paradoxically, it was the repulsion that caused the attraction.
"The curious thing is," Frigate said suddenly, as if he had been thinking about it for a long time but had thrust it back down, "the curious thing is that none of these, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tsar Ivan, the Peoria judge, and the baby-rapist I told you about, none of these thinks of himself as evil.”
"Goring did, and that was his first step away from his evil," Nur said. "These men ... Hitler, Stalin, and others ... what do you intend to do about them?”
"I've put them On Hold," Frigate said.
"You haven't made up your mind yet what to do with them?”
"No. But if the Computer starts releasing the eighteen billion people back into The Valley, it won't do it for those men. Look! I've seen what they've done! Seen it through their own eyes, seen it through the eyes of the people they did it to!”
Frigate's eyes were large and wild, and his face was red.
"I don't want them to keep on doing those evil things! Why should they escape justice now! They did it on Earth, but things are different here! There is some reason why they're locked in the files and why we are in a position to judge. And to convict and execute if need be!”
"It's not divine intervention or intention that caused the lockup," Nur said. "It's an accident.”
"Is it?" Frigate said.
Nur smiled and shrugged. "Perhaps not. All the more reason for us to act discreetly, reasonably and carefully.”
"Why should we?" Burton roared. "Who cares?”
"Ah," the Moor said, holding up his index finger and looking at its tip as if it held the answer. "Who knows? Have you perhaps had the feeling, now and then, that we are still being watched? I do not mean by the Computer but by someone who is using the Computer.”
"And just whom could that be?”
"I don't know. But have you had that feeling?”
"No.”
"I have," Frigate said. "But that doesn't mean anything. I've always had the feeling ... al my life ... that someone was watching me.”
"Who then is watching the watcher? Who then judges the judge?”
"You Sufis ..." Burton said disgustedly.
"The thing is," Frigate said, "these men, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ivan the Terrible and so on had immense power in their lifetime on Earth. They were exceedingly important historical figures. And now ...”
"Now you, the insignificant, have them in your power," Nur said.
"I wish I could have had them in my power when they were just beginning their criminal careers," Frigate said.
"Would you have pushed the Destroy button then?”
"Jesus! I don't know! I should have! But...”
"What if someone could have pushed a button to destroy you?" Nur said.
"My sins were not that great," Frigate said.
"Their size would depend on the attitude of the button pusher," Nur said. "Or in the minds of those injured by your sins.”
Burton left then, though he paused a moment to say goodnight to Li Po and his woman, Star Spoon, and his cronies. Li Po had located and resurrected seven of the poets and painters who had been his especial friends.
As Burton turned toward the door, Star Spoon said, softly, "We must see each other again. Soon.”
"Quite," Burton said. "Of course.”
"I mean alone," she said, and she walked away before the others noticed that she had spoken to him.
Burton did not believe that she just wished to talk to him. Under other circumstances, he would have been delighted. But Li Po was a friend and was very jealous, even if he had had no right to be so possessive. It would not be honorable to meet her alone.
But she is a free agent, he told himself. Li Po gave her life again, but he does not own her. Not unless she thinks he does. If she wishes to see me and will do so openly, Li knowing all about it, ah, well ...
The very egotistic Chinese would find it hard to believe that she could prefer another man. There would be a scene, much shouting and bombast and perhaps Li Po would challenge him to a duel. That challenge and his acceptance would both be stupid. Li Po had been born in a.d. 701 and he in a.d. 1821, but neither were any longer bound by the codes of those times and, in fact, never had been entirely creatures of their ages. To fight over a woman was ridiculous. Li Po would realize that. Surely. But Li Po would no longer be his friend. And Burton valued his friendship.
On the other hand, Star Spoon was not a robot, and Li Po must have known when he resurrected her that he could not control her. She was no longer a slave girl.
The swaying of her hips was the tolling of a fleshly bell. Ding, dong! Ding, dong! He sighed and tried to think of something besides his rigid and aching flesh. No use. It had been too long.
But, if he came to know her well, not in the Biblical sense, would he even like her? She was probably not worth the trouble she'd cause, and he was sure that she would.
Being an old man in a young man's body causes conflict, he thought. My hormones rage upstream against my long experience. 'Tis true a stiff prick has no conscience. 'Tis also true it has no brains.
However, Star Spoon was not the only woman in the world. He had available, theoretically, anyway, about 9.5 billion. Unfortunately, at that moment, Star Spoon was the woman he wanted. He was not "in love" with her, he did not think that he would ever be "in love" again, no one who was 136 years old and was intelligent could be swept away by romantic love. Should not be, anyway.
Of the 8.5 billion plus males locked in the files, perhaps a sixteenth were as old as he. Of these, a sixteenth might be said to be intelligent enough to have slipped the moorings of romantic love. He did not have much company.
At the moment, his only companion was the memory-view-screen on the wall alongside his flying chair. The Computer had skipped to the age of thirty-nine and selected a very painful scene. He was in London then, getting ready for the secret journey to Mecca. Since there would be many times when his penis would be exposed before his Moslem fellow-travelers, he had to be circumcised. Otherwise, one look at his foreskin would show them that he was an infidel dog, and he would be killed, probably literally torn apart, on the spot. Though the Muslim men usually squatted to urinate, and their robes usually covered their penises, there would be times when he could not escape their view. Thus, he was being circumcised, and his only anesthetic was a half-quart of whiskey.
Burton stopped the chair. The scene stopped with him. Burton, not knowing why he was doing so, told the Computer to project the neural-emotional field.
At once, he felt a searing pain as the doctor's knife rounded the foreskin.
He clamped down on his teeth to keep from screaming, as he had clamped down on his cigar during the actual operation.
At the same time, he felt dizzy and sluggish. The field was enveloping him with his sensations as they had been at that time, and he had been drunk. Not as drunk as he should have been.
"Enough!" he cried. "Remove the NE field.”
Immediately, the pain was gone. Or was it? Was there not the ghost or the shadow of one slowly departing?
Burton was no masochist. He had inflicted pain only so that his desire for Star Spoon, for any woman, would go away. It worked. But not for long.