A long time ago, Frigate had said to Burton that it had been impossible on Earth to determine the identity of Jack the Ripper. But since the Ripper must be in the Rivervalley, he could be found there. However, the chances for running across him were extremely slight. Even less were the chances that he, if found, would confess. Also, a man who might admit to the murders might be a liar. Actually, the solution to the enigma was not much more likely here than on Earth.
Frigate had stated that a long time before he and Burton had gotten to the tower. Now they were in a place where the odds for finding the man known as Jack the Ripper were high. Frigate knew who the candidates were, though it was possible that the true Ripper might not be among them, and it was likely that the Computer could locate all of these in its files.
Frigate had not gotten around to his suggested project because he was too busy with other lines of research, including tracing his genealogy. This tower, he said, was a genealogist's paradise. He did not have to resort to the difficult-to-find and often-lost records: wills, tax and land deeds, probate and orphan court records, censuses, county histories, newspapers, tombstones, military and pension records and all the other elusive traces of people who might or might not be your ancestors. Here you could set the Computer on the track, starting with yourself, and it could work backward through your parents. You could see on a screen what a parent looked like, where he or she was, see their lives through their own eyes and what they looked like through the eyes of others. Sometimes, he had to wait while the Computer used an ancestor's wathan to search through its files for the matching wathan and then identified the wathan of that person's parents. Where there was doubt about the paternity of a child, the Computer could compare the genetic makeup of the child and the parent in doubt and establish the relationship. If it proved that a certain child could not be the offspring of a certain adult, then the Computer could examine the genes of those suspected of being the true father. The suspects could be easily identified, since the Computer could review the mother's past and determine exactly when and with whom she had had intercourse. After which, the physical recordings of the suspect or suspects would be examined for genetic identity.
Burton found this interesting but was not, for the moment, eager to establish his own lineage. He had always been enthralled by stories of murders, mutilations and tortures, and he had read the newspaper accounts of the Whitechapel murders. Once he had decided that he would launch Operation Ripper, as he called it, he asked the Computer for a bibliography of all the books in English regarding the Ripper that its files contained. Whatever Ethical agent or agents had been assigned to obtaining the literature concerning the Ripper had been very thorough. Frigate took a few minutes off from his own work to check them and indicated the ones he thought Burton might find most profitable as starting points.
"I would read first a book by Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution, published in 1976. That impressed me as not only the most thoroughly researched and brilliant and convincing in its reasoning—would have made Sherlock Holmes proud—but also the only book that might have the true answers. However, some critics have pointed out flaws in it. Whether it's wrong or right or only half-right, it's a good one to use as your springboard to dive from into the incarnadined ocean of the mystery.”
It was strange to hold in his hands a book that was copied from a work published eighty-seven years after his death. He did not marvel long, since marvels were so many that each could be wondered at only briefly. He read the more than 270 pages in three hours. When he put the book down, he could have repeated without many errors long passages, which in total amounted to at least a fourth of the text.
If the book had been issued in his Earthly lifetime, Burton would have been outraged by its preposterousness. Or would he? Would he not on reflection, knowing what he did of the secret maneuverings for power by those on high, knowing of the inhuman and totally unjust deeds done by the government and upper-class individuals in the struggle to keep their power, would he not have considered that the conclusions drawn from the events described in the book were valid?
What Mr. Knight had shown after deep and wide research and illuminated and illuminating deductions was: In 1888, the masses, the poor people, of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were, or seemed to be, on the edge of revolution. The radicals of the left, the socialists and the anarchists, were loudly voicing the oppressions and sufferings of the working class. The government was not just alarmed, it was scared stiff, and many of the ruling class believed that the monarchy itself was threatened. They were overreacting; their ignorance of the masses made them unaware of the deep conservatism of the people. What these wanted was not a change in the structure of the monarchy but steady work with good pay, food, adequate housing and some economic security. They wanted to live as human beings should, not as rats.
Queen Victoria, the ruling class thought, would not be overthrown, but she was old and, at that time, unpopular. When she died, her son Edward ("Bertie") would sit on the throne. And he was a lecherous, pigheaded and totally immoral man whose activities could not be concealed.
There were then many Freemasons in the upper echelons of the British government, including the Marquess of Salisbury, the prime minister. Knight claimed that these highly placed Masons were the power behind the throne, and they were afraid that when the monarchy went, they and their secret society would go, too.
Prince Edward's, oldest surviving son, the duke of Clarence and Avondale, Albert Victor Christian Edward, "Eddy" to his intimates, would ascend the throne if his father died. He was a pathetic creature (from the Victorian standpoint), liked to mingle under an assumed name with artists and other Bohemians, was bisexual and had once frequented a male brothel. Even worse, after falling in love with a shopkeeper's assistant, Annie Elizabeth Crook, to whom he had been introduced by the painter Walter Sickert, the duke had married her in a secret ceremony. It was an illegal marriage in several respects, but the most offensive and dangerous was that Eddy had taken to wife a Roman Catholic. By law, no English monarch could marry a Catholic. Eddy was not the king, but he could easily and soon become the king. A number of people had tried to assassinate the queen; she was old, and Eddy's father, Prince Edward, could die from overindulgence in food and drink, a venereal disease, a bullet from a jealous husband, a revolutionist or a maniac, or from any of the diseases against which there was then no prevention and for which there was no cure except the afflicted's natural resistance.
Adding to the heinousness of Eddy's deeds was the birth in April 1888 of his daughter by Annie Crook. The infant was the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the first cousin of those men who were to reign as Edward VIII and George VI.
This was too much for the queen, who sent an angry note to the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, demanding that he assure that the newspapers and the public not be made aware of the scandal.
Salisbury, in turn, gave the queen's physician, Sir William Gull, a fellow Mason, the responsibility for the coverup. Gull was a brilliant man and a great physician, by Victorian standards, and was also distinguished by a grotesque and perverse sense of humor and an obvious schizophrenia (obvious to a later generation). He could be very kind and compassionate but at other times was cold, cruel and callous. The latter behavior was, however, only evident when he was dealing with lower-class patients and their families. He was a kind master to his own pets, but he had justified, to his own satisfaction, a vivisectionist who had slowly baked live dogs in an oven until they died during his experiments.
Following Gull's secret orders, transmitted through the police commissioner, also a Mason, special police agents raided the apartments of Walter Sickert, Eddy's old companion, and Annie Crook, they hustled Eddy off from Sickert's to the palace and Crook to an asylum. Gull certified that Annie was insane, though she was not at that time, and she spent the rest of her life in asylums and workhouses. In 1920, truly mad, she died. Eddy never saw her again. The police had intended to pick up Mary Kelly, a young Irishwoman who had witnessed the illicit marriage. Probably, Gull would have certified her as insane, too. Whatever he intended for her, he was frustrated. Somehow, she escaped the police net and dived deep into the labyrinth of the East End. Later, she took care for a while of Alice Margaret, Eddy's and Annie's child. Both accompanied Sickert on his long trips to Dieppe. While in France, Mary Jane Kelly changed her name to Marie Jeannette Kelly.
Eventually, Kelly had to hide again in London's vast people warren, the East End. Here she began the slide downward that ended with her becoming one of the many thousands of alcoholic and diseased whores living miserable and hopeless lives.
Like her sisters in the profession, she considered herself fortunate if she earned just enough money to buy gin for a few hours' numbness, enough food to stave off outright starvation, and a roof over her head.
Kelly was not without friends, however, the closest of whom were Mary Anne Nichols, Anne Siffey, alias Chapman, and Elizabeth "Long Liz" Stride, all drunks, diseased, malnourished and doomed to die soon even if "Jack the Ripper" had not existed. When Kelly met these in taverns or in their lousy apartments and the gin bore discretion away on the golden waves of alcohol, she revealed to them the Prince Eddy-Annie Crook liaison and its terrible results. And, during one of these roaring sessions, the idea for blackmailing Prince Eddy was born.
Knight had suggested that the four had tried the extortion scheme because they were forced to do it by a group of dangerous thugs, the Old Nichol Gang.
Whatever the motivation, the idea was very dangerous and stupid. Salisbury had let the search for Kelly drop because he had not heard from her nor had his police spies heard that she was disclosing anything about the affair. As long as she kept her mouth shut, she was no peril to the establishment that Salisbury represented. Now, however, on receiving a message demanding money for silence, Salisbury put the machinery of retribution in motion.
Urged by Salisbury, Gull lost no time in reacting. The prime minister had given him orders to put the lid back on, but Salisbury probably had no glimmering of how Gull intended to do this. Certainly, desperate as he was to silence the blackmailers, he would have been horrified if he had known what Gull intended. It was one thing to imprison a lower-class woman in a series of hospitals and workhouses for life, a regrettable but necessary deed from Salisbury's viewpoint. But to murder and butcher the women was a deed that Salisbury could not have ordered. Once the slayings had started, however, Salisbury could only let them go on and do his best to protect "Jack the Ripper.”
John Netley was the coachman who had driven Prince Eddy to the Sickert home and other places where Eddy did what a prince of the realm was not supposed to do. Gull had insured his silence with threats and bribes after Eddy and Alice Crook had been abducted. Knowing Netley's character, Gull now told him, in general terms, what his plans were for the blackmailers. Netley was eager to serve him. And, since Sickert knew the principals in the affair, was well acquainted with the East End, and had accepted money to keep his mouth shut about Eddy and Crook, Sickert was enlisted by Gull. Though reluctant to take part in the murders, he knew that if he did not, he would himself be killed.
The coach, driven by Netley, holding Sickert and Gull, drove into the Whitechapel area. After a number of reconnoiterings, Gull and Sickert lured Mary Anne Nichols into their coach by requesting her services. Flattered that two such elegant gentlemen would even look at her, though doubtless wondering what kinky acts they had in mind, Nichols got into the coach. Gull offered her a glass of wine containing a drug (Knight had suggested he used poisoned grapes), and, when she was unconscious, he cut her throat from left to right, disemboweled her and stabbed her. Sickert leaned out of the coach and vomited.
Afterward, the coach drove to the dark and momentarily deserted street of Bucks Row, where Netley and Sickert carried the body from the coach and laid it out. They knew the schedule of the patrolman, but, even so, they drove off only a few minutes before he arrived.
Eight days later, the three struck again. Anne Siffey, alias Chapman, was found dead in the backyard of No. 29, Hanbury Street. Her throat had been deeply cut from left to right and back again. Her small intestines and a flap of the abdomen were on her right side near the shoulder, still attached by a cord to the rest of the intestines in the body. Two skin flaps from the lower abdominal region were lying in a pool of blood above the left shoulder.
This time, Gull had the unconscious woman taken from the coach to the backyard, where he performed the ritualistic mutilations in the dim light.
On September 29, Gull killed two whores. The first murder was hastily done because Long Liz Stride refused to get into the coach. Netley and Sickert left the coach, seized her, and held her while Gull cut her throat. But Gull did not have the time to do what he would have liked. He heard loud voices nearby and so did not want to risk being seen carrying her body into the coach. The three left hurriedly.
Later that evening, the second murder was done with plenty of time for execution. Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square (not a part of the Whitechapel area), part of her nose slashed off, the right ear lobe almost cut off, her face and throat worked over with a sharp instrument, her bowels removed, and her left kidney and uterus missing.
Unfortunately, from Gull's viewpoint—and Eddowes'—Sickert had mistaken Eddowes for Marie Kelly. She had not been Kelly's confidante, was totally unaware of the Eddy-Crook events, and died because the painter had thought, in the dim light, that she was Marie Jeannette Kelly. Though he had discovered his error immediately after her throat was cut, Gull insisted on performing the ritual. Why waste his time? Besides, she was just a whore, and if, by any chance, some policeman had an inkling of the plot, she would be a false clue.
In the late evening of November 9, the last and most important target, Kelly, was subjected to the most savage butchering of all. The ritual took two hours. And the Jack the Ripper murders ceased.
Burton had located the recordings of Gull, Netley, Kelly, Crook, Sickert, Salisbury, Prince Eddy, and Stride. For some reason the Computer could not explain, Chapman's and Nichols' were unavailable. The Computer, however, continued looking for them.
Burton viewed the events from the meeting of Eddy with Annie Crook through the slaying of Kelly via the eyes and ears of the recordings. He replayed some of these several times, though he vomited twice, the first time watching Gull working on Eddowes, the second time during Kelly's dissection. He had thought that he had a strong stomach, but he had overestimated its tolerance.
He then had the Computer run some of the episodes from the Riverworld life of each of the participants in the Ripper affair. Annie Elizabeth Crook had been raised on The River with her sanity restored but with most of her memory from 1888 to 1920 missing.
Sir William Gull's schizophrenia seemed to have been eliminated. Twenty years after the first resurrection, he had become converted to a religious sect, the Dowists, by the founder himself, Lorenzo Dow.
John Netley, the coachman, had been deeply affected by the shock of drowning in the Thames and then awakening on the Riverbank. For six months, his behavior could have been described as Christianlike (according to the ideal, not the practice .of most Christians). Once the shock had worn off and he was fairly sure that he was not going to be punished for his sins, he reverted to his Earthly self, an opportunistic, lecherous, self-centered, and cold-blooded criminal.
Walter Sickert, the painter, early converted to the Church of the Second Chance and rose to the rank of bishop.
Long Liz Stride and Marie Kelly were resurrected in The Valley within a few feet of each other. For five years, they had been good friends and close neighbors. Neither had continued as a prostitute, though they had taken a series of lovers, and they drank as much as they could get. Then Stride had gotten religion and joined a popular Buddhist sect, the Nichirenites. Kelly had left her, gone up-River, and, after many adventures, settled down in a peaceful area. Both had died during the terrible times following the grailstone shutdown on the right bank of The River.
The long journeys of all were ended, for the time being, anyway. They were locked up in the physical recordings and the wathans that floated whirling in the central well.
His investigation of the Ripper affair was completed; the mystery, solved. Now he could take residence in his private world, but, for some unfathomable reason, he was still reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, he could not put off moving long. It irked him to be unconsciously opposing himself; he would not put up with it.
Before going, though, he considered what he had been living through, vicariously, these past two weeks. He was shaken and appalled, especially by the world as seen through the eyes of the whores. He had witnessed many savage and grisly deeds and much injustice and oppression, but none matched the grisliness and inhumanity of the deed that was the East End of London in the 1880s. In this relatively small area were jampacked eight hundred thousand people, hungry most of the time, eating swill and glad to have it, drunk if they could afford it and often when they could not, dwelling in small, dirty rooms with sweating peeling walls alive with vermin, cruel to each other, ignorant, superstitious, and, worst condition of all, hopeless.
Burton knew that the lives of the East Enders had been wretched, but not until he had lived in it, even if in a secondhand manner, was he made sick and guilty by the mere existence of that hellhole. Guilty because he now understood that he and all others who had ignored it were responsible.
From one viewpoint, perverted but nevertheless valid, the Ripper had done a deed of mercy when he had put those hungry, gaunt, diseased and hopeless whores out of their deep misery.
Also, unwittingly, he had forced the England outside of the East End to look at the inferno they had turned their eyes away from. The result had been a great cry for change, and many buildings had been torn down to make way for better housing. But in time the poverty and pain had resumed its former level—it had never subsided much—and the East End was forgotten by those who did not have to live there.
Frigate, when told by Burton of the results of his investigation, was intrigued. He said, "What you should do is track down those absentee landlords who made money from the horribly poor and deliver them to oblivion.”
"That's Marxism," Burton said.
"I despised the practice of communism, but it had some great ideals," Frigate said. "I also despised the practice of capitalism, many aspects of it anyway.”
"But it had its ideals," Burton said.
He had looked at Frigate and then laughed. "Has any social-political-economic system ever gotten anywhere near its ideals? Haven't they all been corrupted?”
"Of course. So ... the corrupters should be punished.”
Nur el-Musafir had pointed out what they knew but had ignored.
"It does not matter what they ... we ... did on Earth. What matters is what we're doing now. If the corrupter and the corrupted have changed for the better, then they should be rewarded as much as those who have always been virtuous. Now, let me define virtue and the virtuous ..." He smiled.
"No, I think not. You are tired of the sage of the tower, as you sometimes call me. My truths make you uneasy even though you agree with me.”
Frigate said, "About this business of wondering whom to resurrect to be our companions. Take Cleopatra, for instance. You and I would like to see her in the flesh and hear her story, find out the truth of what went on then. But she liked to stick sharp pins in her slave-girls' breasts, and she could enjoy their screams and writhings. Shakespeare ignored that when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra. So did George Bernard Shaw in his Caesar and Cleopatra. From a literary viewpoint, they were right. Could you believe in or care about the genius and greatness of Cleopatra and Caesar or sorrow over their tragedy if you saw their barbaric sadism and callous murderousness? We, however, live in the real world, not that of fiction. So, would you want Cleopatra or Caesar or Antony as your neighbor?”
"Nur would say that depends upon how they are now.”
"He's right, of course. He's always right. Nevertheless ., .”
He spoke to Nur.
"You're an elitist. You believe, and you're probably right, that very few have the inborn ability to become Sufi or its philosophical-ethical equivalent. You maintain that even fewer will Go On. The majority just don't have it in them to attain the ethical level to do that. Too bad, but that's the way it is. Nature is wasteful with bodies, and she is just as wasteful with souls. Nature has arranged that most flies will become food for birds and frogs, and she has also arranged that most souls will not achieve salvation but will, even though they don't die like the flies, fail to reach the level set for them. A few Go On, but most are like the flies who become food.”
"The difference," Nur said, "is that flies are brainless and soulless but human beings are sentient and are aware of what they must do. Should be aware, anyway.”
Burton said, "Would Nature, God, if you will, be that wasteful, that callous?”
"He gave mankind free will," Nur said. "It is not God's fault that there is such a waste.”
"Yes, but you yourself have said that genetic .defects, chemical imbalances, accidents to the brain, and social environment can influence a person's behavior.”
"Influence, yes. Determine, no. No. I must qualify that. There are certain situations and conditions where a person cannot use his free will. But ... that is not so here, not in the Riverworld.”
"What if the Ethicals had not given us a second chance?”
Nur smiled and held up his palms outward.
"Ah, but He did arrange it so that the Ethicals did give us another chance.”
"Which, according to you, most people are blowing.”
"You believe it, too, don't you?”
Burton and Frigate felt uncomfortable. They usually did when they talked with Nur about serious subjects.
That was the last conversation he had in the apartment. As soon as the screens had faded, Burton went into the corridor. He thought for a moment of canceling the codeword so that someone else could use the rooms. However, he might need a place to run to, a place where no one could find him.
Carrying no possessions except the beamer, wearing only a towel-kilt and sandals, he passed through the doorway. Immediately, a screen appeared on the wall across the corridor. Ignoring the picture — his father approaching him threateningly, for what reason Burton did not remember — Burton started to get into the flying chair parked by the wall. Then he turned away from it to face the length of the hall. A roaring was coming from that direction. His hand started toward his beamer but stopped as he recognized the sound.
Presently, a huge black motorcycle zoomed around the corner of the hall several hundred yards away. Its driver was leaning the vehicle deeply to take the turn at high speed. Then the machine straightened up, and, accompanied by a wall-screen displaying an event in the driver's past, headed toward Burton. The rider, a big black man wearing a visored helmet and a black leather outfit, flashed big white teeth at him.
Burton stood by the chair, refusing to move even though the handlebar of the cycle missed him by only an inch.
"Watch it, motherfucker!" the man shouted, and his laughter dopplered back to Burton.
Burton swore, and he had the Computer form a screen for him so that he could put in a call to Tom Turpin. He had to wait for several minutes before Turpin's grinning face appeared. He was surrounded by his entourage, men and women flashily dressed, talking loudly and laughing shrilly. Tom was wearing an early twentieth-century suit with a bright and clashing checked design and a scarlet derby with a long white feather. A huge cigar was in his mouth. He had gained at least p
"How you doing, baby?”
"I'm not having as good a time as you," Burton said sourly. "Tom, I have a complaint, a legitimate one.”
"We sure don't want no illegitimate gripes, do we?" Torn said, and he puffed out thick green smoke.
"You people are speeding through the halls on motorcycles and cars and God only knows what else," Burton said. "I've not only almost been hit twice, but the stink of gas and horseshit is most obnoxious. Can't you do something about them? They're dangerous and offensive.”
"Hell, no, I can't do anything about it," Tom said, still smiling. "They're my people, yeah, and I'm the king here. But I don't have no police force, you know. Besides, the robots clean up the horsepoppy, and the ventilators clean up the smoke. And you can hear them coming, can't you? Just stand aside. Anyway, it must be boring and lonely down there. Don't they give you a thrill, make you feel like you ain't alone? Tell you, Dick, you been living too long by yourself. It sours your milk. Why don't you get a woman? Hell, get four or five. Maybe you won't be so bitchy then.”
"You won't do anything about it?”
"Can't. Won't. Them niggers are really uppity.”
He grinned. "There goes the neighborhood, right? Tell you what, Dick. You just shoot them next time they annoy you. Won't nobody be hurt permanently. I'll just resurrect them, and we'll all have a good laugh. Course, next time, they might shoot you. See you, Dick. Have a good day.”
The screen faded out.
Burton was seething. There was, however, little he could do about the situation unless he wanted to start a miniwar. Which he did not. Nevertheless ... He got into his chair and took off for his private world. There he would be disturbed by no one, and, when he populated it, he would make sure that his companions would be not only agreeable but sensitive. Yet he loved an argument, and he found verbally violent quarrels most satisfying.
Going around the corner from which the black rider had come, Burton almost hit the heads of five people. Startled, he jnwveis1 his chair lifted above them. They had ducked, but if the chair had been a little lower, it would have struck the group.
His heart pounding hard because of the unexpectedness of the encounter, he stopped the chair, revolved it, and set it down on the floor. The two men and three women were strangers, but they did not seem to be dangerous. They were naked and so had no place to hide weapons. Moreover, they were obviously frightened and unsure of themselves. They did not approach him, though they did call out to him in English. British English, one with the accent of a cultured man, one with a Cockney accent, one with a Scotch burr, one with an Irish lilt, and one with a foreign accent, probably Scandinavian.
Burton had taken two steps toward them when he stopped.
"My God!”
He recognized them now. Gull, Netley, Crook, Kelly and Stride.
Burton usually reacted swiftly to any situation and was seldom jellied with astonishment or fear. But seeing these five here was so unexpected and so impossible that he could only stare at them for a few seconds. If they had been unknown to him, he would have been surprised, but that he knew them so well, and thought them locked up in the recordings, locked his brain.
They, of course, were in a far worse state than he. They had no idea of where they were or why they had been raised. At least, judging from their expressions, they had not been told anything. Whoever had resurrected them here must have left them to their own devices. Probably, thought Burton, his brain beginning to flicker with a little fire, probably it's no coincidence that they were placed near me. But who ... who in the name of God? ... could have done this? And why?
Gull was now on his bare knees, looking upward, his hands together in a praying position, his mouth moving. Netley looked like a cornered animal, snarling, crouching, ready to spring at some unknown danger. The three women were looking at him with wide-open eyes. He could read both fear and hope in their faces, fear that he might be some horrible creature, hope that he might be their savior.
He got out of the chair and, smiling, approached them slowly. When he was five feet from them, he stopped. He raised his hand and said, "There's nothing to worry about. Quite the contrary. If you will please stop babbling and follow me, I'll tell you what's happened to you. And I'll make you comfortable. My name, by the way, is Richard Francis Burton. No need to introduce yourselves. I know who you are.”
He went to an open door, possibly that from which they had just exited. They started toward him just as he heard a faint roaring. Burton recognized the sound of the motorcycle motor. Instead of seating them as he had planned, he stood by the doorway. The others huddled behind him. Presently, the corridor throbbed with noise, and the cycle leaned around the corner, straightened, and shot by them. The black rider waved a gauntleted hand. "How you like that, motherfucker?”
Burton turned and saw that they were puzzled and even more scared. No wonder. None of them had ever seen a motorcycle before, any internal combustion machine, in fact. Neither had he when he died, but he had become familiar with them through his viewing of films and reading of books since he had come to the tower.
"I'll explain that later," he said. He told them to sit down, and they did so, but all tried to speak to him at once.
He said, "I know you have many questions, but please restrain them. We'll get them in a while. First, though, you might like a drink.”
No, first, he would get kilts, bras, and blankets from the converter. For the moment, they were too shocked to be concerned about their nudity. Anyway, after their exposure to naked people on the Riverbanks, they would not be overly anxious about it. They were glad to get the clothing and blankets, and they murmured their thanks before putting them on. Though Netley had lost his wild look, he still seemed suspicious of Burton.
"You must need a drink," he said. "What would you like?”
None seemed to have taken an abstainer's vow. Netley, Stride, and Kelly wanted gin straight. Gull ordered Scotch with water; Annie Crook, wine. After Burton had served them, he said, "Your stomachs'll be empty, but I imagine that you're not hungry just now. When you are, you may have anything and as much as you like. Unlike your situation on The River, you don't have to take what the grail delivers.”
They downed their liquor so swiftly that Burton gave them another round. They now looked less pale and disturbed and seemed eager to listen to him.
Gull spoke with a rich baritone. "You are not by any chance Sir Richard Burton, the famous African explorer and linguist?”
"At your service.”
"By God, I thought so. You look like him, younger of course. I attended several of your lectures at the Anthropological Society.”
"I remember," Burton said.
Gull waved the hand that held the cut-quartz goblet, spilling some Scotch. "But ... all this ... what... ?”
"All in good time.”
Gull and Netley would know each other, of course, even though it had been more than forty years since they had seen each other. Burton doubted that the two recognized the three women. Gull had seen Crook for a brief time when he certified her insane, and she was not now in Victorian garments and had cut her dark hair short. (She did resemble somewhat Princess Alexandra, Eddy's mother, which might be why Eddy, who had obvious Oedipal tendencies, had failed in love with her.) John Netley had seen Annie Elizabeth Crook, Prince Eddy's lover, many times, but if he knew her now he certainly was not acting as if he did. Perhaps he did not want to acknowledge it. If she did not know him, so much the better. On the other hand, why had Crook not recognized him? His moustache was missing, but even so ... Perhaps the shock and the lack of Victorian clothes and the long time since their last encounter accounted for her lack of memory.
As for Kelly, she had been picked up by Sickert and Gull on a dark street, taken into a dark coach, and given drugged liquor. Stride had also seen Netley and Gull in dim surroundings and that briefly.
Burton did not know if he should first explain about the tower and the method of getting them here or should introduce them. He relished their reaction when they realized in whose company they were. But he was afraid that the resulting furor would put off the explanation for a long time. On the other hand, the explanation was going to take a long time, and during that they might come to recognize each other.
He decided, and he said, "First, you should know each other.”
"That's not needed, dearie, for Annie and me!" Kelly said. "We have long been friends. And Liz and I are old friends.”
"Even so," Burton said, grinning, "it's only polite, and the men should make your acquaintance.”
He paused—oh, how he enjoyed this!—and he said, "Elizabeth Stride, Mary Jane Kelly, and Annie Elizabeth Crook, meet Sir William Gull and John Netley!”
What followed was all he had hoped for. Gull paled, and the edge of his goblet, just touching his lip, failed to dip. He never did get to finish his drink. Netley also paled, and, after a moment of rigidity, he leaped up and backed away, his eyes fixed on the women.
Annie rose quickly from her chair and said, "Now I know you! You!" She pointed a shaking finger at Gull, "You're the crooked doctor that said I was crazy! And you," she moved the finger to spear Netley, "you took my Eddy away when the police came.”
"He also tried to kill your daughter twice," Burton said. "And, Mrs. Stride and Mrs. Kelly, this man," he indicated Gull, "is the man who killed you. With the help of that man.”
"God help me," Gull said, getting down on his knees. "God help me and forgive me as I hope that you will.”
"That was a long time ago," Netley said, snarling. "What difference does it make now? You're all alive and well now, right, so what real harm was done?”
"The thing is," Burton said, "Stride and Kelly know that you killed them, but during their many years on The River, they never ran across anyone who spoke about the Jack the Ripper murders. So they—”
"He!" Kelly said, pointing at Gull. "He's Jack the Ripper?”
"There is no such, that is, Jack was not one but three men working together. However, he, Gull, wrote the letters that made the name famous, and he masterminded the entire business. What you, Kelly, don't know is what he did to you after he killed you. You remember, Kelly, how Catherine Eddowes was mutilated? That was nothing compared to the butchery Gull did on you. Shall I describe it?”
Gull rose to his feet and cried, "No! No! Even now, though I've made my peace with God, I can't forget what I did!”
"What about me?" Stride said. "What happened to me?”
"Your throat was cut, that's all. Gull didn't have time to carry out his ritual on you.”
"That's all!" Stride screeched. "That's all! Isn't that enough!”
Screaming, she ran at Gull with her hands out, fingers curled.
He did not run, though he flinched when she sank her fingernails into his face. Netley had stepped forward as if to help Gull, then he moved away after a slight hesitation.
Burton pulled the screaming woman away. Gull felt his bleeding cheeks but said nothing.
"I'd like to cut his guts out and hold them up before his dying eyes," Kelly said. She went to Stride, put her arms around her shoulders, and led the sobbing woman away.
"That's enough of drama, retribution and reproach," Burton said. "What you do after you're on your own is your business, unless it involves those outside this matter. For the time being, you will behave decently and listen carefully to me. You need an education, and though it inconveniences me to instruct you, I must do so. I can't just leave you to find things out for yourself.”
First, he had them describe their appearance in the converter. It had taken place in the huge cube in a corner of this very room. They had awakened from death in the converter, and, after a few moments of confusion, had opened the door and gone into this room. They had explored the other rooms, then gone into the corridor. And Burton had come around the corner in his flying chair.
"Then you saw no one else?" he said.
They replied that they had not.
Burton took Gull into the bathroom of the next room and found, as he had expected, a bottle with a liquid to apply to the scratches on his face. This stopped the bleeding and would, within twenty-four hours, heal the wounds.
He asked them if they were hungry. Netley and the women said that they were; Gull shook his head. Burton got their orders and transmitted them to the converter. After they were seated and eating from little tables before them, Burton launched into the very long exposition of the Riverworld, of his and others' tribulations in getting to the tower, and what had happened since. By the time he was through, he had drunk two tall goblets of Scotch, and they were deep into their own cups.
"So you see," he said, "just what the situation is. I know you have a thousand questions, and it will take you some time to learn how to use the Computer. Meanwhile, I suggest that you settle down for the night—I can get sleeping pills for you if you wish—and I'll see you tomorrow. I'll also introduce you to my eight companions then. Perhaps not personally but via the wall-screens.”
Mary Kelly said, slurring, "How do we know that those two bastards won't try to murder us again while we sleep?”
"I would not even dream of doing such a deed!" Gull said. "I have changed; I am not what I was! Believe me, ladies, I deeply regret my crimes, and I have tried—am trying—to live a Christian life, a truly Christian life. I would not only not harm you, I would defend you against anyone who tried to do so.”
"Fine words," Liz Stride said scornfully.
"I mean them, madam, I truly do!”
"I think he's sincere," Burton said. "In any event, I suggest that you three women sleep in an apartment room separate from that of the men. I will give you a codeword that will prevent anyone from coming through your door except myself and you three.”
After he had shown them how to get food and drink from their converters and how to call him, he left them. Instead of going on to his world, he returned to his apartment. Since he would have to show them the ropes tomorrow morning, he should be close to them.
On the way back, he considered the question of who had resurrected the five. Whoever it was had a vicious sense of irony. But whom could it be? Only Frigate and Nur knew about his investigations of the Ripper, and neither would have brought the five here. Who then? Loga and the Mongolian Agent were dead. Was there ... he did not even like to approach the thought ... another unknown, another Snark?
Burton had just gotten into bed when a screen appeared on the wall. Star Spoon's distraught face was in it.
Speaking Esperanto rapidly, tears flowing, she asked Burton if she could come to his apartment.
"Why?”
"I am tired of sharing Po with five other women, though he gives very little time to any of us. He's too busy drinking with his cronies or studying. Besides ... I do not desire his embraces.”
Burton did not have to ask her whose embraces she did desire.
"Does Po know you're calling me?”
"Yes. I told him an hour ago. He raved and ranted and then ...”
"He didn't beat you?”
"No, he does not beat women, I'll say that for him. Not physically, anyway.”
"And then?”
"Then? Oh! Yes, he smiled and blessed me and said he hoped I'd be happy with you. He spoiled it, though, by saying that he doubted that I would.”
Burton got out of bed and put on a towel-kilt. "I'd like to speak with him.”
Her black eyes widened. "Why? Do you think I'm lying?”
"No, of course not. It's just that I don't want him to think I'm afraid to face him. I also want to make sure that he doesn't think I was sneaking around behind his back.”
"Oh, he doesn't think that. I told him that you were not in the least aware I desired you.”
"That's a lie," Burton said, but he did not reproach her. There were lies and there were lies, and this was in the "white" category. Besides, who was he to rebuke anyone for falsehood?
"I'll speak to him if he's awake," Burton said.
"No, he's awake, but he won't want to be disturbed. He's with a woman. A woman he just resurrected. He said she'll replace me. Poor devil.”
"Perhaps," Burton said. "But for the time being she'll be very grateful he rescued her from the dead.”
He was not in love with the Chinese woman. However, he did not consider love to be a prerequisite for a good bond between man and woman. He had certainly been in love with Alice, and look at what had happened to them.
"Come on over," Burton said. "I'll tell the Computer to let you in.”
Star Spoon quit weeping and snuffling and smiled like the sun at dawn.
"Just as soon as I repair my makeup and get my belongings together. You do want me, don't you?”
"If I didn't, I would say so," Burton said.
He did not get to sleep until five in the morning.
Burton called the three women, in their room, and the two men, who had slept in separate rooms. After bidding them good morning, he told them that he had instructed the Computer to teach them how to operate it. He also invited them to the weekly meeting of the eight—more now—that evening.
"After that, you're on your own. I will, however, call you now and then or even drop in on you, if I'm welcome. And you may call me if you have some problem.”
They did not like what he said. Apparently, they felt that he should devote all his time to making sure that they were adjusted. But they could do nothing about it.
He and Star Spoon had breakfast, eggs au beurre noir, blue-berry muffins, and figs with cream. They then flew to his little world, Theleme, named after the mythical state in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. Its motto was, in the old Frenchman's work, Do What You Will. Burton's motto was: Do What Burton Wills. The world might, however, have been better called Baghdad-in-the-Tower. Burton had had erected in its center a small town and castle that looked like a romanticist's or Hollywood producer's conception of a place out of The Thousand Nights and One. A river ran from the west end of the vast chamber, circled the city, and snaked eastward, disappearing in the sands of the desert not far from the entrance. Outside the city roamed several lions and leopards and many gazelles, antelopes, ostriches, and other desert creatures. Hippopotami and crocodiles swam in the river, and the patches of jungle were alive with monkeys, civet cats and birds.
As of the moment, Theleme was populated only by himself and Star Spoon. He planned to bring in some suitable people later, though he was in no hurry.
At 8:00 p.m., he and Star Spoon went to the party, though not without incident. The black motorcycle rider, this time with a black woman riding behind him, roared below them. The man waved a hand at them but his greeting was more courteous. "Hey, Burton, what's happening?" A few seconds later, they traveled over a large pig trotting along, its hooves clicking.
"My God," Burton said. "Now what?”
"I don't know," Star Spoon said. "I talked to Aphra this afternoon, and she said she's running into people she never saw before. Most of them are from Tom Turpin's world. At least, she thinks so, since they're black. But she flew by a dozen people that looked like gypsies.”
"Gypsies? Who'd resurrect them?”
They entered Nur's apartment, which was noisy with chatter and laughter. Alice was there, dressed in the 1920s flapper's clothes that she liked so much. She smiled slightly at him but made no effort then or later to talk to him. He had expected to surprise everybody by showing up with the Chinese woman. Apparently, however, Li Po had told them about her. If he was jealous, he did not show it. He was realist enough to know that a display of it would not only be useless but also make him lose face. Besides, he was not suffering from lack of company or sex. He had by now resurrected forty men and forty-seven women, all of whom he had known on Earth. Seven of the women were his, one for each day of the week. Tonight, however, he had brought only one.
"They take turns going with me to these meetings," he told Burton.
"Eventually, they're going to tire of this sharing and resurrect men for themselves," Burton said. "What do you plan to do then?”
"Nothing," Li Po said, smiling. "I am not a tyrant. When that happens, I will raise others to replace them. It is just as well that does happen, since, sooner or later, I will tire of them or, difficult as it is to conceive, they may tire of me.”
Burton could visualize the people-burgeoning of Li Po's world. When the saturation point was reached, the excess would have to live in the apartments. The same thing was happening in Turpin's world.
"Man, I don't know," Turpin said, shaking his head. "It all started out with the people I brought in, and then it got out of hand. They resurrected people, and those raised people, and now those're resurrecting like it was going out of style.”
Burton told him about the black motorcyclist. Turpin grinned and said, "That's Bill Williams. I don't know who in hell brought him here. I could find out, but what difference would it make? He isn't an American black, you know. He's Russian.”
"Russian?”
"Yeah. He's got quite a story to tell. You ought to talk to him sometime.”
Burton had observed Gull, Netley, Crook, Stride, and Kelly when he entered. They were standing in two corners, the men in one, the women in another, and they were obviously not meshing with the others. Burton took them around the room to introduce them. It seemed, however, that Frigate had already spread the news about them. This had aroused curiosity about the newcomers, but many were uneasy with Netley and Gull. Anyone would be in the company of the two-thirds of the unholy trinity forming "Jack the Ripper." So affected was Netley by this that he left early. Burton went into the hall off the main room, where he was unobserved, and ordered the Computer to keep track of him.
Noticing the shyness of Stride, Crook, and Kelly, Nur went to them and soon jollied them up. He was at ease with the high and the low, the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, and he adjusted quickly to any company, though he always kept his dignity. After a while, Aphra Behn and Frigate joined them, and Nur drifted off, ending up with Gull. Curious, Burton invited himself into the conversation.
Gull was telling the Moor about the man who had converted him, Lorenzo Dow. Dow had been born in Coventry, Tolland County, Connecticut, in 1777. A highly imaginative and impressionable youngster, he had become devout beyond his years when he had seen an angel. Or claimed to have done so. As a young adult, he became a traveling preacher loosely connected to the Methodist Church. Of all the wandering ministers of the early American frontier, he had been the most traveled and best known. He was famous from Maine to South Carolina and from New York to the wildernesses of the Mississippi River. Wherever there were even a few people, he traveled by boat, by coach, by horse, or on foot, and he preached his eccentric rambling sermons.
When he was raised from the dead on the Riverworld, he had been surprised but not shocked. "I was wrong in some things," he told his converts. "But mainly right.”
He was convinced that the angel he had seen as a child was one of those who had made this Riverworld as a stage through which the worthy must pass to get to a better world. He believed, like the Second Chancers, that all must strive to better themselves morally and spiritually. Unlike the Chancers, he did not believe that the ultimate goal was absorption in the Godhead. No, this River was only a sort of purgatory in which God and his angels had given everybody another chance. But those who attained the rich change of spirit demanded here would go on to another world in which they would be physically resurrected again. However, those who failed would die here and become dust forever.
"I have met your angels," Burton said, "and they are only men and women. In fact, except for one, they were born on Earth and died there when they were children. The exception was Monat, an extra-Terrestrial, a nonhuman, who was in charge of this project. Does this tower look as if it had been built by angels?”
"It certainly does," Gull said. "This Loga you speak of, he ... he must be a fallen angel.”
"You're crazy, man," Burton said, and he walked away.
"That man," Star Spoon said, "will resurrect others of his faith, and we won't be able to go into the halls without bumping into them. His kind won't leave you alone.”
"We'll be in Theleme. They won't get in there.”
"No person or place is inviolable.”
Star Spoon fitted into Burton's way of life as a well-made shoe shaped itself around a foot. The analogy was not just literary. When he took his shoes off, he did not have to pay any attention to them until he was ready to wear them again. The woman seemed content to be ignored when he was busy studying or working the Computer. She often operated it when he was doing the same. She was an excellent companion, a ready and sometimes amusing talker, and she di 1 not insist on interrupting him. She was intelligent, knew Chinese poetry, could paint well, and played the Chinese lute beautifully. She was passionate, thoroughly versed in every aspect of sex, uninhibited, and yet, when Burton did not make love to her for a week because he was engrossed in his studies, she did not seem to mind.
The only thing that Star Spoon complained about was that she could not bring her parents to this place. She had located her mother, but she was alive in The Valley. Her father could not be found.
"You would not mind if I could bring them here?" she said. "Perhaps, some day, I will be able to get them here. They could have their own apartment, and they would not bother you. I would see them only when you consented.”
"Not at all," Burton said. "Bring your sisters and brothers, too. Your aunts and uncles and your cousins.”
He could not have stopped her if he had wanted to, but he was not going to tell her that. Why. spoil her desire to please him? She was a perfect mate for him.
When he spoke of this to Frigate, the American said, "I'm surprised that she didn't learn to be more independent while she was in The Valley. She was raised in the Chinese culture of the eighth century, but she must have lived in many others in The Valley. Usually, The Valley frees women.”
"Not always by any means," Burton said. "She's had a rough life, to put it mildly. You know the sad story of her Terrestrial life. She didn't fare any better on The River. She was raped several scores of times in The Valley, but she doesn't seem to have suffered any deep trauma because of that.”
"She doesn't seem to, but she's very self-controlled.”
"Ah, yes, the inscrutable Oriental.”
"She's very beautiful.”
"Exquisite. And I must confess that I'm flattered that she wanted me so fiercely. However ... I still prefer a blonde, not-too-bright Caucasian who's devoted to me.”
"If you find one and resurrect her, watch out for Star Spoon. There's more fire in her than she lets on to.”
Several days after the party, Burton and Star Spoon set out to visit Frigate's world in specially built chairs designed by Burton. These were larger than the others and were completely enclosed in a three-inch-thick irradiated plastic hemisphere. Beamers projecting from the shell could be fired fore and aft, above and below.
Star Spoon, seeing them the first time, had murmured, "Whom are you afraid of?”
"I fear nobody," he said, "but I trust very few. There are too many strangers, unknown quantities, prowling the corridors. Also, we still don't have any assurance that an Ethical isn't hidden here.”
They rose in their chairs above the minarets and domes made of gold alloy and glittering with gigantic jewels, and they sped over the river and the jungle to the exit. Burton pressed a Console button, which transmitted the coded open-sesame via radio. Star Spoon's vehicle lacked this because he had refused to give her access to the codeword. She had hesitatingly asked him why, and he had told her that he did not want to take the chance that she might be seized and the codeword forced from her.
"Who would do that?" she had said softly.
"Perhaps nobody. But it's a possibility.”
"What if they should grab you and torture the codeword from you?”
"I've anticipated that.”
She did not ask him what the precautions were. Obviously, if she knew, she could be forced to give that information.
The circular area was empty of people, though a few robots were cleaning up the litter. Halting his chair before the entrance to Frigate's world, Burton shouted Frigate's name. In a few seconds, the American's face appeared on a glowing screen. The door opened outward, and they went through in single file. The second door admitted them into a world where the sun was ten degrees past the zenith, the temperature was 85 °F and the air was wet. They shot over a very thick, lush jungle, a river and several joining streams, and some large clearings. The creatures in the streams and basking on the banks were crocodilian, vast and toothy. Now and then they glimpsed a huge reptilian head at the end of a long neck, and, once, an armor-plated saurian lumbered across the clearing. Winged reptiles swooped by them: pterodactyls. These were not from recordings, since the Ethicals had arrived on Earth seventy million years after the last of the dinosaurs had died. But Frigate had had the Computer fashion living replicas of the mighty beasts, and these reigned in the lush growths. In the center of the Brobdingnagian chamber was a rock monolith, two hundred feet high, with slick leaning-out sides impossible for anything to scale. On top was his stronghold, a flat ten acres with an antebellum Southern mansion in the center of an island surrounded by a wide moat in which swam ducks, geese, and swans. Burton and Star Spoon landed on the green lawn before it.
Peter Frigate was sitting on the verandah in a rocking chair listening to Handel's Water Music, drinking a mint julep and surrounded by three dogs. He held a Siamese seal point cat on his lap. The dogs, real dogs, not therioids, leaped barking off the verandah and ran to Burton. They bounded about and wiggled their hindquarters and whined as he petted them. One was a huge Rottweiler; one, a German shepherd; one, a Shetland sheepdog. Frigate rose, the cat jumping off his disappearing lap, and greeted them. He wore a white linen vest with embroidered Egyptian hieroglyphics and a knee-length white linen kilt.
"Welcome to Frigateland!" he said, smiling. "Sit down." He pointed to two rocking chairs. "What'll you have to drink?" He clapped his hands once, and two androids appeared from the front doorway. They wore butler's uniforms.
"You wouldn't recognize them," he said. "They look exactly like two U.S. presidents I had no love for. I call them Tricky Dicky and Ronnie. The sneaky-looking one is Dicky." He paused. "The lady of the house will be down in a minute.”
Burton raised his eyebrows. "Ah, you finally decided on a housemate.”
"Yes. The dogs and cats are splendid companions, don't talk back to or at you. But I got lonely for conversation and other things.”
The servants brought the drinks, Scotch for Burton and wine for Star Spoon. Burton took a fine Havana from his pocket, and Dicky leaped forward, produced a lighter, and held the flame steady for him. Ronnie did the same for Star Spoon's cigarette.
"This is the life," Frigate said. "I fly around and observe my i dinosaurs, really enjoy them. I keep the tyrannosaurs from eating all the brontosaurs by giving them meat at a feeding station at the bottom of my monolith. Even so, it's hard maintaining the balance of prey and predator. I'll get tired of this some day. When I do, I'll erase the Jurassic period and replace it with the Cretaceous. I plan to go through all the evolutionary eras in their various stages to the Pleistocene Epoch. When I get there, I'll stop. I've always been very fond of the mammoth and the sabertooth.”
Burton waved a fly away. "Did you have to be so authentic?”
"There are mosquitoes, too. I have to retreat into my stately mansion at dusk because of them. I don't want life here to be an air-conditioned vermin-free paradise. There was a time when I cursed flies, mosquitoes and ants and wondered why God put them on Earth to bedevil us. Now I know. They are a source of pleasure. When they've been bugging the hell out of you—no pun intended—and you get away from them, get to some place where they can't reach you, you find the zero of their presence to be a plus-one pleasure. I put up with them so I can enjoy their absence.”
Star Spoon looked at him as if she found him strange. Burton, however, understood him. To know full pleasure you had also to know unpleasure. The existence of evil could be justified. Without it, how would you know that good was good? Perhaps, though, that was not necessary. If it were, why had the Ethicals worked so hard to eliminate evil?
At that moment, a woman came out of the house. She was gorgeous, auburn-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned, long-legged, full-breasted, tiny-waisted. Her face was irregular, the nose a trifle too long, the upper lip a trifle too short, and her eyes perhaps too deep-sunk. Nevertheless, their integration gave her a beautiful and not easily forgotten strong face. She was about five feet seven inches tall and wore a white gown of some shimmering white stuff, low-cut and slit to the upper thigh on the left side. Her high-heeled shoes were open and white. She wore no jewelry or pearls, but a silver band was around her right wrist.
Frigate, smiling, introduced her. "Sophie Lefkowitz. I met her at a science-fiction convention in 1955. We corresponded and met occasionally at conventions after that. She died in 1979 of cancer. Her grandparents came over from Russia to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1900, and her father married a woman descended from Sephardic Jews who came to New Amsterdam in 1652. The funny thing is that I once met the original immigrant, Abraham Lopez. We didn't get along; he was a raving bigot. She was a housewife, but she was active in a lot of organizations, including the National Organization for Women. She also made a pile of money writing children's books under the byline of Begonia West.”
"Charmed, I'm sure," said Burton, who meant it. "But you warned against resurrecting writers, remember?”
"They're not all rotten.”
Sophie was sprightly and intelligent, though too fond of puns. She also seemed very grateful to Frigate for raising her from the dead, and he seemed delighted with her.
"Of course, we're going to resurrect others. We'd get on each other's nerves if we didn't have other companions. That takes a lot of time judging the candidates, though.”
"He's looking for perfection, and he isn't going to get it," Sophie said. "The perfect ones have Gone On. I say, pick those who seem reasonably compatible, and if they don't work out, they can always move out.”
"The way things are going," Star Spoon said, "the tower is going to bulge with people. Everybody who's resurrected starts resurrecting others.”
"It can house over two million people quite comfortably," Sophie said.
"But if everybody who's resurrected brings in four more, it wouldn't take long at an exponential rate for the tower to fill," Burton said.
"Not only that," Frigate said, "but it may get worse. I was talking to Tom Turpin the other day. He said that two couples in his world are trying to have children. They've had the Computer eliminate from their diet the contraceptive chemicals that make them sterile. Tom was angry. He told them that if the women did get pregnant, they'd have to leave Turpinland. But they said they didn't care.”
They were silent for a while, aghast at the news. The Ethicals had insured that no children would be born, because there was not enough room on the Riverworld for an expanding population. Moreover, the stage, as it were, had to become empty so that those born on Earth after a.d. 1983 could be resurrected.
"The whole project is going to the dogs," Frigate said.
"To utter hell and damnation," Burton said. "If it's not already there.”
Sophie said, smiling, "This doesn't look like Hell to me." She waved a hand to indicate their private world. From nearby came the songs of birds, anachronistic notes, since there were no birds in the Mesozoic, and the chirping of some raccoons, also out of their era. From over the edge of the monolith came the deep gurgling cries of brontosaurs and the express-train rumbling of a tyrannosaur, like the beginning of a snow avalanche. Pteranodons with thirty-foot wingspreads sounded like giant crows with asthma.
"It's only temporary," Burton said.
The androids, Ronnie and Dicky, brought more drinks. Frigate and Burton, perhaps inspired by the presence of the androids, began talking about free will versus determinism, a favorite subject. Frigate insisted that free will played a larger part in human lives than mechanical, chemical or neural elements. Burton was equally insistent that most people's choices were fixed by their body chemistry and early conditioning.
"But some people do change their characters for the better," Frigate said. "They do it consciously and with effort. Their will manages to overcome their conditioning and even their basic temperament.”
"I'll admit that free will sometimes plays a part in some people," Burton said. "However, only a few do use their free will effectively, and they often fail. Even so, most people are, in a sense, robots. The nonrobots, the lucky few, might be able to exercise their free will only because their genes allow them to. Thus, even free will depends upon genetic determinism.”
"I may as well tell you now, perhaps I should have told you sooner," Frigate said, "but I've asked the Computer if the Ethicals had done any work on free will and determinism. Not in a philosophical but in a scientific sense. The Computer told me that it had an enormous amount of data because the first Ethicals, the people preceding Monat's, had worked on that subject as had Monat's people and their successors, the Earthchildren raised on the Gardenworld. I didn't have time to review all the data or even a small part of it, and I probably wouldn't have understood it if I did have time. I asked for a summary of the conclusions. The Computer said that the project was still going, but it could give me the results as of now.
"The Ethicals long ago charted all chromosomes, fixed their exact function, and analyzed the interrelationships of the genes. Charted their individual and interacting fields. Which is why, when they resurrected us, our malfunctioning genes had been replaced with healthy ones. We were raised in perfect physical, chemical and electrical condition. Any faults from then on were psychological. Of course, our psychic and social conditioning was not removed. If we were to get rid of these, it was strictly up to the individual. He or she had to use free will, if he or she had any or wished to use it.”
"Why didn't you tell me about this?" Burton said.
"Don't get angry. I just wanted you to express your opinion and then show you the truth.”
"You wanted me to go out on a limb so you could cut it off!”
"Why not?" Frigate said, smiling. "You're such an overpowering talker and so opinionated, so dogmatic, so self-righteous, that... well, I thought that for once I could make you listen instead of trying to dominate the conversation.”
"If it helps you get rid of your resentment," Burton said, also smiling. "There was a time when I would have been very angry at you. But, I, too, have changed.”
"Yes, but you'll make me pay for this sometime.”
"No, I won't," Burton said. "I'll use my free will to learn this lesson, I'll keep and treasure it.”
"We'll see. Anyway ...”
"The conclusions!”
"I'll try to put them into plain English. We are not complete robots, as Sam Clemens and that writer I told you about, Kurt Vonnegut, claimed we are. They said our behavior and thoughts were entirely determined by what had taken place in the past and by the chemicals in our bodies. Clemens' theory was that everything that happened in the past, everything, determined f everything in the present. The speed with which and the angle at which the first atom at the beginning of the universe bumped into the second atom started a chain of events in a particular direction. What we were was the result of that primal collision. If the first atom had bumped into the second at a different velocity and angle, then we would be different. Vonnegut said nothing about that but claimed that we acted and thought the way we did because of what he called 'bad chemicals.
"Both Clemcns and Vonnegut railed against evil, but they ignored the fact that their own philosophies removed blame for evil from evildoers. According to them, a person couldn't help the way he or she acted. So, why should they write so much about evildoers and condemn them when the evildoer was not at all responsible? Could murderers be held responsible, could the rich help themselves if they exploited the poor, could the poor help it if they allowed themselves to be exploited, could the child-beater be blamed for his brutality, the Puritan for his in- j tolerance and narrow and rigid morality, the libertines for their sexual excesses, the judge for his corruption, the Ku Klux Klanner for his racial prejudice, the liberal for his blindness to the openly declared goals and obvious bloody methods of the communists, the fascist and capitalist for using evil means to achieve supposedly good goals, the conservative for his contempt for the common people and his excuses for exploiting them? Could Ivan the Terrible and Gilles de Rais and Stalin and Hitler and Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung and Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat and Genghis Khan and Simon Bolivar and the IRA terrorist who drops a bomb into a mailbox and blows legs off babies, could any of these be blamed? Not if you accept Clemens' and Vonnegut's basic philosophy. The murderer and child-abuser and rapist and racist are no more to blame for their actions than those who do good are to be praised. All behave the way they do because of genes or their chemical or psychosocial conditioning. So why did they bother to write about evils when they themselves could not blame the evildoers?
"They did so, according to their own philosophy, because they had been determined to do so. Thus, they get no moral credit.”
Burton had been waiting patiently for the results. Now he said, "Those two said, then, that we are just billiard balls waiting to be struck by other balls and so sent into whatever pocket is determined for them?”
"Yes.”
"I'm well aware of that philosophy. As you know, I wrote a poem about it. However, even those who don't believe in free will always act as if they had it. It seems to be the nature of the beast. Perhaps our genes determine that. Now, would you mind getting to the point?”
"There is more than one," Frigate said. "First, the Ethical studies prove that mental potential is equal among races. All have the same reserves of geniuses, highly intelligent, intelligent, fairly intelligent, and stupid. In 1983, when I died, there was still a lot of controversy about that. Intelligence tests seemed to show that the average Negro intelligence was a few points below that of the Caucasian. The same tests also indicated that the Mongolian IQ was a few points higher than the Caucasian. A lot of people claimed that these tests were not accurate and that they ignored social conditioning, economic opportunity, bias against race, and so forth/ These objectors were right. The Ethical tests prove that all races have an equal mental potential.
"That goes against the grain of your observations on Earth, Dick. You claimed that the Negro was less intelligent than the Caucasian. Oh, you admitted that perhaps the American Negro might be capable of becoming more 'civilized' and brighter than the African Negro. But the implication was that, if this was so, it was because the Yankee black had a lot of white blood, that is, Caucasian genes from racial mixing.”
"I said many things on Earth that I now admit were wrong," Burton said heatedly. "After sixty-seven years of intimate, though often forced, socializing with every race and every nationality and tribe you could imagine, and some you couldn't, I have changed my mind about many things. I'm perfectly willing to call Sambo my brother.”
"I wouldn't use 'Sambo' myself. It shows a lingering trace of bad thinking.”
"You know what I mean.”
"Yes. I remember a line in your poem, 'Stone Talk,' where you criticized the American white because he wouldn't call ... ah, Sambo ... his brother. You were in no position to throw stones.”
"What I was is not what I am. Rubbing elbows with many people causes you to rub in some of their skin. And vice versa.”
"You did a lot of elbow-rubbing on Earth. Very few people traveled as much as you did and came into contact with all classes, rich and poor.”
"It wasn't long enough. Not only are conditions different here, I wasn't only just rubbed here. I was shaken and knocked about. That does something to the machinery, you know.”
"Let's not use mechanistic terms," Frigate said.
"Psychic machinery is perfectly appropriate.”
"The psyche is not an engine but a subtle and complex field of waves. Many fields, in fact, a superfield. Like light, it can be described as being both wave and particle, a psychic wavicle, wavicles forming a hypercomplex.”
"The results.”
"All right. Every person is a semirobot. That is, each is subject to the demands of the biological machine, the body. If you hunger, you eat or try to find food. No one can rise above himself enough to go without food and not starve to death. Injuries to the cerebroneural system, cancer, chemical imbalances, these can cause changes in mentality, make you crazy, make your motives and attitudes change. There's no way the will can suppress the effects of syphilis, poisons, brain damage, and so on. And everyone is born with a set of genes that determine the particular direction his interests take. His tastes, too, I mean in food. Not everybody likes steak or tomatoes or Scotch.
"Also, some are born with chromosomal complexes that make them more emotionally rigid than others. I mean, they can't adapt to new things or changes as well as others. They tend to stick to the old and to the cultural elements that affected them when they were young. Others are more adaptable, less rigid. But sometimes reason, logic, can affect the will and the person can overcome his rigidity, defossilize himself, as it were.
"Take as an example a person who's been brought up in a fundamental Christian faith. That is, a sect in which he believes that every word of the Bible has to be taken literally. Thus, the world was created in six days, there was a worldwide deluge, a Noah and an ark, God did stop Earth's rotation so that Joshua and his bloodthirsty genocidal Hebrews could have enough daylight to defeat the bloodthirsty Amorites. Eve was seduced by a snake and in turn got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Jesus did walk on water. And so on. Like others in his sect, he ignores the vast accumulation of data establishing the fact of evolution. He reads the Bible but does not see that, though the Bible nowhere states that the Earth is flat, it clearly implies that the Earth is flat. Nor does he take literally Christ's injunction to hate your father and mother. He ignores those. Puts them in a separate compartment of his brain. Or erases them as if they were on a tape.
"But some fundamentalists do come across evidence that they'd like to ignore. Iron strikes flint, and the spark falls on inflammable material. The fire is off to the races, as it were. He reads more of the evidence, perhaps loathes and curses himself for his 'sinful' curiosity. But he learns more and more. Finally, his reason convinces him that he's been wrong. And he becomes a liberal Christian or an atheist or agnostic.
"Something in his genetic defenses made a hole or the hole already existed waiting for water to pour through it.
"In any event, he was able to use his reason only because his genetic makeup permitted him.”
"I thought you said that Homo sapiens was a semirobot," Burton said. "You're describing one hundred percent robots.”
"No. Robots don't have reason. They can use logic, if they've been programmed to do it. But, if presented with new evidence that says that their program is wrong, they can't reject the already installed program. Humans can. Sometimes. Nor do robots have to rationalize their reasons for the way they behave. They just do, but humans have to explain why they're doing such and such. They construct a system of logic to excuse their behavior. The system may be founded on wrong premises, but it's usually logical within its own frame of reference. Not always, though.
"What the Ethicals claim, and they can prove it, is that even the most genetically rigid, the most severely conditioned person has the ability to free himself—partially, anyway—from these constraints, these molds. That a few can do this but most don't ... the Ethicals say that this is a demonstration of free will. The restrained, the strait-jacketed, don't want to change. They are happy in their misery.”
"They can prove this?”
"Yes. I'll admit I'm not educated enough to validate their findings. I don't understand the higher mathematics or the extremely involved biology. I accept their proofs, however.”
"There is no such thing as absolute or final certainty, is there?" Burton said. "Unless you can see clearly, as through a crystal, exactly what evidence they present, you won't ever really know if they have the truth, will you?”
"Put that way, no. Some things have to be accepted on faith.”
Burton laughed uproariously.
The American, red-faced, said, "Unless you're competent to do the research yourself, how do you know that what you read in a chemistry or astronomy or biology book is true? How do you know that anything is true unless you duplicate the research? Even then, you may be in error or clinging to the opposite viewpoint because ...”
"Because you're genetically inclined to it?" Burton said scornfully. "Because you're predetermined to believe in one thing and not in another?”
"An attitude like yours makes a man believe in almost nothing.”
"Right," Burton drawled.
"You certainly voiced enough opinions based on the observations of others while you were on Earth. Often very wrong opinions.”
"That was on Earth.”
They were silent for a while. The women were talking about their mothers. Frigate could tell, however, that Sophie was listening to them at the same time. She winked at him and made a gesture that he could not interpret.
Frigate picked up the subject again as if it were a football and he was going to make a ninety-yard run. Doggedly, he said, "About 1978, I think it was, I read in a psychology book that one out of ten men seemed to be a born leader. It was implied that this trait was genetically determined. The Ethical study has validated that and moreover pinpointed the genetic complex responsible.
"Also, it said that ten percent of Homo sapiens had always inclined to a certain degree towards homosexuality. The ten percent had certain inclinations, that is. Not all of the ten percent were practicing homosexuals, but the tendency was there. This had been the rule since the Ethicals started making duplicate records of humanity. And it was assumed that this had been so since Homo sapiens originated.
"The tendency is genetically determined. What interested me about this is that in 1983, a few years before that, too, the militant homosexuals claimed that they had made a free and conscious choice to be homosexuals. In other words, they weren't born homosexuals, they had deliberately chosen to be such because they preferred that sexual way of life.
"They talked as if, when you reached the age of reason, you made up your mind about your path of action. What they ignored or failed to consider, was that, if this were true, then heterosexuals also made their free and conscious decision to be heterosexual. But this just wasn't so. A heterosexual was so because he was born so.”
"What about ... ?" Burton said.
"You were going to say, 'What about those who have homosexual tendencies but behave heterosexually? Or those who are bisexuals? Or those who marry women but have homosexual affairs on the side?' There are varying degrees of homosexuality ... and heterosexuality ... of course. And in any society where it was dangerous to be openly homosexual, the homosexual had to hide his or her tendency. In any event, homosexuality or heterosexuality is not a matter of choice. It's inborn.
"That makes no difference. Being homosexual or not is not a matter of morality. It's not a person's decision. It's what you do with your homosexuality or heterosexuality that matters, that is moral. Rape, sadism, violence are evil whether or not you're homosexual.”
Sophie spoke up. "I can't help overhearing you two, you're so loud. What's all this about free will and determinism and genes and choice? I was very interested in those subjects when I went to college. Really interested. I got passionate about such things, I used to enjoy getting angry at those who didn't agree with me, the stupid jerks! But when I graduated, no, some time before that, I saw that ... well ... thinking you can solve anything by discussing philosophy or those other matters was foolish. There's no end to it, no possible irrefutable conclusions. Fun, maybe, but profitless. Sophomoric. It really is. So I quit talking about it. If somebody wanted to discuss such things, I steered them to some other subject or just walked away, though I wasn't rude about it.”
"Sure, that's right!" Frigate said. "You were right! But the point is that the Ethicals have put these subjects beyond the range of discussion or opinion. They've proved these points. We're no longer in the dark!”
"Maybe. I have to agree with Dick about that. Maybe. But that doesn't matter. What was it Buddha said? 'Work out your own salvation with diligence.' Whoever Mr. or Mrs. Diligence is. I've been looking for Mr. Diligence for a long time. I even borrowed Diogenes' lantern to help me. Which, by the way, the old Greek didn't need. He was honest, why should he go out looking for another honest person?
"Anyway, as Dick said, we all act as if we had free will. So who cares if there is such a thing? All I know is that only I, I alone, am responsible for my moral behavior. Heredity, environment, excuses. Excuses, alibis: scorned. Race, nationality, tribe, parents, religion, society: excuses. I decide what I am. And that's that!”
"Was that why you burned your souffle yesterday?" Frigate said. "You didn't just forget about watching it. You decided to cremate it?”
Frigate and Lefkowitz burst out laughing. Burton said, "You cook?”
"Why, yes," Sophie said. "I like to cook. When it's not required of me, that is. I was making our dinner last night, and I forgot to watch the souffle. I was reading a book, and ...”
They started talking about food and that led to other subjects and finally to dinner. Eating together was a custom more ancient than conversation.
On Christmas Day, many guests stood before the door of Turpinworld. Burton was not the only one surprised at the number of Gull's companions. There were forty at least, all Dowists whom Gull had known in The Valley. They looked Roman in their long white togas and sandals, but it was unlikely that Romans had ever worn headbands with a big aluminum D.
"D," Gull said. "D for Dow and Deliverance. D for Deus, too.”
"Death and Damnation also begin with D," someone muttered.
Gull was not affronted or, at least, did not seem to be so. "True, my friend, whoever you are," he said dignifiedly. "Death and Damnation for those who do not follow the true way.”
"Disgusting," the same voice said.
"Drivel," someone else said.
"Dangerously Dubious," a third person said.
"Devastating Dung!”
"We are used to insults and ill-considered rebukes for 'A, double-L,-part people,' " Gull said. "But Grace abounding is always offered to the chief of sinners.”
"What the hell does 'A, double-L part' mean?" a woman said softly.
"I do not know," Burton said. "It doesn't mean 'All-part,' as you might think. Gull and his followers refuse to define it. They say that when you understand it, then Grace has come to you and you are one of them.”
"It was a pejorative often used by Lorenzo Dow to describe his enemies," Frigate said. "It wasn't much of a description, though it certainly sounds ominous, since his enemies never understood it.”
De Marbot muttered, "It was a mistake to invite them. You can't carry on a decent conversation with them. They want only to convert you. Tom should have known better.”
"Who resurrected Gull?" Sophie said. "No one in her right mind would.”
"No one knows," Burton said. "I asked the Computer for the identity of the person who had raised Gull, Netley, Crook, Stride and Kelly, but it replied that the datum was available to only one person. It didn't say to whom.”
A face appeared in the glowing circle on the door. "Santa Claus!" Frigate cried.
The man wore a big red stocking cap trimmed with white fur, and he had a huge bushy white beard. His skin was rather dark for the conventional St. Nick, however.
Turpin said, "Yeah, I'm Santa Claus. Tom Ho-Ho-Ho! Turpin hisself to be more exact.”
"Merry Christmas!" several shouted.
"And a Merry Christmas to you, too!" Turpin said. "We also got plenty of snow, folks, but it ain't what you're used to. At least, I think it ain't. You're such good folks, ho, ho, ho!”
The door swung open, and there was a jam-up as those in front tried to get their flying chairs through at the same time. These were Li Po and his group, most of them loaded three feet below their Plimsoll line with liquors of various kinds. They had never heard of Christmas until Turpin's invitation, but they were eager to learn about it. After some struggling and good-natured cursing, Li Po got them organized, and they entered one at a time. Burton and his companions went next. The Dowists followed them; they had waited politely for the first two groups at Gull's command. Burton noted that they were trading glances of disdain and sorrow with one another. Evidently, they did not care for the boisterous behavior of the Chinese.
Behind the Dowists were Stride, Kelly and Crook, dressed in elegant if somewhat flashy Victorian gowns and wearing diamond earrings and many rings bearing huge diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. He was not surprised to see unfamiliar male faces with them. Annie Crook was accompanied by one man; the other women had a man on each arm.
About twenty feet behind them was Netley, dressed like a race tout, gleaming with jewelry, with a woman clinging to each of his arms.
Behind them was a group of twenty that startled him. So, it was true that gypsies had been resurrected. They were dressed in the exotic clothes familiar to him, since he had associated with them in England and in Europe. He planned to ask them if they knew their benefactor, but he never got around to doing so. By the time he remembered, it was too late.
The party flew in a long straggling line under an early noon sun and over forests, marshes, roads and railroad tracks. Turpin had a railroad! They came down on the designated area, Louis Chauvin Street, one end of which had been roped off as a landing place. Little St. Louis or Turpinville was bright with Christmas lights and decorations and noisy with revelers. It seemed to Burton that the two thousand he had heard about some weeks ago had increased to four thousand. The streets were jammed with dancers and paraders dressed in outlandish costumes. It was more like Mardi Gras than Yuletide. Five bands were playing five different types of music, ragtime, Dixie-land, hot jazz, cool jazz and spirituals. Scores of dogs ran around barking.
The group pushed their way through the crowds while liquor bottles and cigarettes and cigars of marijuana and hashish were pressed upon them. The odor of booze and grass was almost solid, and everybody was red-eyed.
Turpin, still clad in his Santa Claus suit, stood on the front porch of his huge red-brick headquarters to welcome them.
"The joint is jumping, the jerks are joyous and jazzing is jake!" Turpin cried. "Give me some skin, brothers and sisters!”
Frigate was the only one who knew what he meant. He held his hand out palm up and Turpin slapped it. "Right on, brother!”
While the others followed his example, Frigate explained to Burton that some late twentieth-century blacks must have been resurrected here. The outlandish greeting came from that era.
"That's what he meant when he said there was plenty of snow for Christmas," Frigate said. He pointed at two black males sitting on the steps and staring blankly straight ahead of them. "They must be on heroin. Snow in the vernacular.”
Turpin was revved up, but his high spirits were not of the alcoholic variety. His eyes were clear, and his speech was distinct. Everybody else might be stoned and, hence, vulnerable, but not canny Tom.
They went inside the Rosebud to the vestibule, which was almost as large as Grand Central Station. There was a big crowd there and twenty long bars of polished mahogany or gold behind which white-skinned androids in tuxedoes served drinks. Burton had to step over several unconscious men and women to follow Turpin. He took them into a big elevator and up to the third floor. They went into an office, which Alice said looked like the reception room in Buckingham Palace.
Tom asked them to sit down. He stood in front of a twenty-foot-long desk and ran his brown eyes over them before speaking- , „ .
"I'm the boss," he said, "and I run this place like it's a choochoo train and I'm the engineer. I have to. But I let them have a good time. Most of them are pretty good, they behave like they should, don't go beyond the limits I laid down for them.
"The thing is I know some of them'd like to be the boss, so I keep an eye on 'em like fleas on a dog. The Computer does that for me. Trouble is I didn't pick most of the people here. Anybody I resurrected, I studied their past. But I couldn't tell by that what people the people I picked was going to pick.
"Besides the ones that'd like to sit on my throne, there's two different kinds of people here. Most of them are good-timers, they was whores and pimps and musicians on Earth. But some of them arc church people, Holy Rollers, Second Chancers or New Christians. They raise hell about the hell-raisers, and the hell-raisers raise hell about their interfering.”
"Why don't you just get rid of all of them and start over?”
Star Spoon said.
Burton was surprised. She seldom spoke up unless directly addressed or asked for an opinion. Moreover, it was a strange question, not in keeping with what he knew about her nature.
Turpin lifted his palms.
"How do I do that?”
"There must be ways. The Computer ...”
"I ain't no mass murderer. I been pretty rough in my time, but I ain't going to slaughter people just to get some peace and quiet. Besides, keeping them in line gives me something to do.”
He grinned and said, "Time to get them out of the streets and into the Rosebud. We going to have a party here, and it ain't easy to herd them in.”
He went to the wall behind the desk, said a few words, and a glowing round spot appeared. Then he uttered some codewords.
He turned, grinning even more broadly. "Man, I got the power! I'm Merlin the Magician and the Wizard of Oz rolled up in one and smoking like a ten-dollar Havana. I'm the Great God Turpinus, the black Zeus, mighty Thor the Thunderer, the Old Rainmaker, the Chief Snake Oil Seller, Mr. Bones the Puppeteer.”
Within three minutes clouds had cut off the sun, clouds that thickened and blackened. A wind whistled through the bars in the open windows and lifted the togas, kilts and skirts.
"They'll all be inside quicker'n you can say scat to a cat," he said. "They be bitching about getting wet, but that don't matter.”
"There are unconscious people out there," Alice said. "What about them?”
"They got to take their chances. Besides, it'll do them good. Some of them need a bath. Nobody gets pneumonia, anyway.”
He gave them some instructions about keeping out of trouble if the drunks gave them a hard time. "They shouldn't. I gave them orders they was to treat you nice even if you is white.”
"What about us?" Li Po said. "We aren't white.”
"You are to them. Anybody who ain't black is white. It's a matter of fine but not subtle semantic distinction.”
Burton was partly amused by the latter statement and partly irritated. The man deliberately shifted back and forth from the English of the "well-educated to ghetto lingo as if he wanted to anger his listeners. Or perhaps to play the clown. Or both. Somewhere in him was a self-contempt engendered by the white-ruled system of his time. He might not be conscious of it, but it was there. According to Frigate, the American Negroes of the later twentieth century had overcome this, or tried to, and claimed to be proud to be black. But Turpin was still playing a game for which there was no need.
But, as Nur had said, one should not be proud to be black or white. One should only be proud to be a good human being, and that pride should watch out for stumbles.
Turpin had replied, "Yeah, but you have to go through certain stages to get there, and being proud you're black is one of them.”
"A very good point," Nur had said. "However, one shouldn't get stuck in a stage. Climb on to the next one.”
They went down to the vestibule, as Turpin called it. Long before they reached it, the loud music and chatter and shrill laughter and the tsunami of alcohol, burning drugs and tobacco smote them. Everybody was inside, including those who'd passed out. These had been carried in by the androids and were lined along a wall.
"Mingle, folks!" Turpin shouted, and he waved his hand at the crowd. He did not feel he had to introduce his guests; he had shown their faces and names on the computer screens. However, his guests hesitated. It was not easy to just walk up to a group and start talking. The Dowists were repelled and scandalized and obviously were regretting having come here. Turpin, seeing this, gestured at a small group that had been standing at the far end of the bar. This made its way through the throng to the guests and began conversation. Their host had picked them out to break the ice, and he had done well. Or so it seemed at the beginning. Some of them were Second Chancers or New Christians; these went to the Dowists. Though they differed in some fundamental principles, all three religions were pacifist and theoretically tolerant. They also had a common bond in that they abhorred excessive use of alcohol and any use of tobacco or other drugs.
The man appointed to keep Burton company was six feet three inches tall, broad-shouldered, huge-chested and massively limbed. He was wearing a white doeskin headband, a white kid-skin vest, a white doeskin belt with a broad silver buckle on which was an alto relief wolfs head, tight white doeskin trousers, and white doeskin boots reaching to just below his knees. His face was broad and high-cheekboned, and his nose was large, long and aquiline. He looked more like Sitting Bull than a Negro, except for his everted lips and kinky hair. When he smiled, he was craggily handsome.
He introduced himself with a conventional handshake, announcing in a rich basso that he was Bill Williams and was pleased to know Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Burton was not sure that his use of the title was not a put-on.
"Tom Turpin didn't appoint me to act as your faithful Indian guide and bodyguard," he said, grinning. "I volunteered.”
"Oh?" Burton said, raising his eyebrows. "May I ask why?”
"You may. I read about you; you intrigue me. Besides, Turpin has told me much about how you led him and the others across the mountains and into the tower.”
"I'm flattered," Burton said. "However, I do have a slight bone to pick with you. Why did you almost run over me with your motorcycle?”
Williams laughed and said, "If I'd tried, I would've made it.”
"And the pejorative?”
"I just felt like it. Choppers bring out the meanness in me. I also wanted to test your mettle. I didn't mean anything personally.”
"It makes you feel good to upset Whitey?”
"Sometimes. If you're truly objective, you won't blame me.”
"Hasn't sixty-seven years on The River changed your attitude any?”
"That's something you never get rid of. I don't let it bother me though. It's like a dull toothache you get used to," Williams said. "Want a drink?”
"White wine. Any kind.”
Burton had decided to stay sober.
"Let's get it in one of the rooms upstairs. It'll be quieter there, and we won't have to shout to hear ourselves.”
"Very well," Burton said, wondering what Williams was up to.
They got into the elevator with a laughing, shouting, giggling crowd. On the way up there were cries of protest as the riders groped each other. Someone passed gas before they reached the second floor, and there were shouts of amused outrage. When the doors opened, the culprit, the man blamed, anyway, was thrown headlong onto the floor.
"Everybody's feeling good, real good," Williams murmured. "Won't be so later on, though. You armed?”
Burton patted his jacket pocket.
"Beamer.”
The rooms they passed were, except for one, packed and loud. Here a dozen men and women were sitting and watching a movie on a wall-screen. Burton, curious, stopped to look in. It was one that Frigate had insisted he see, the actors Laurel and Hardy selling Christmas trees in Los Angeles in July. The viewers were laughing uproariously.
"They're New Christians," Williams said. "Quiet, harmless folks. They couldn't refuse Turpin's invitation, they're so polite. But they don't hold with most of the goings-on here.”
They found an empty room far down the hall around the corner. On the way, Burton admired the reproductions of oil paintings. Rembrandt, Rubens, David's "Death of Marat," many by Russians, Kiprensky, Surikov, Ivanov, Repin, Levitan, and others.
"Why so many Slavs?" Burton said.
"There's a reason.”
They got their drinks from a converter. Burton sat down and lit up a cigar.
After a silence, Williams said, "I'm not American, you know.”
Burton puffed out smoke and said, "You would have fooled me if Turpin had not told me you were Russian.”
"I was born Rodion Ivanovitch Kazna in 1949 in the black ghetto of the city of Kiev.”
"Amazing," Burton said. "I didn't know that there were Negroes ... no, I take that back. There were some Russian black slaves. Pushkin was descended from one.”
"What very few people knew, and the Russian government took good care to conceal, was that about twelve million blacks were living in segregated areas of Russian cities. They were the descendants of slaves. The common Russian didn't want to mix with them any more than the whites of America did with their blacks, and the government, secretly, of course, approved and enforced that policy. Despite which, there was some interracial screwing, as always. Can't keep the blood pure no matter how you try. A stiff prick has no bias, and all that. One of my great-grandfathers was a white Russian, and a grandfather was an Uzbek. Turkic-speaking, he never did learn to speak Russian well, a Mongol.
"I was taught Marxist doctrine, however. I became a devout follower of Marx's principles. As he laid them down, not as they were practiced in Russia. I joined the party, but it didn't take me long to find out that I wasn't going to rise very high in it. I'd always have to take the back seat and do the janitoring, as it were.
"I would have tried the army, but blacks were always sent to Siberia to guard the Chinese frontier. The Politburo didn't want any of us stationed on the western front. We'd have caused attention, and investigation would have revealed that we were kept down. That would've looked bad for the Soviets, since they were always pointing out the inequality of blacks in America. So they kept everything under a lid.
"I did very well in school, even though our schools were inferior to the whites'. I had a driving ambition to rise to the top, but that wasn't my only motive. I wanted to learn, to know everything. I read far more than required; I did especially well in languages. That was one of the things that attracted me to you, you know. Your mastery of so many languages.
"The bigshots heard of me mainly because they were looking for blacks they could send as agitators and infiltrators to the States. They asked me to volunteer my services, and I did. Not too eagerly on the surface, of course. I didn't want them to think that I only wanted to go so I could disappear in Harlem. As a matter of fact, I had no intention of betraying them. I knew what they were and how they looked on me, but I was a Russian Marxist and I loathed capitalism.
"One of the things I fully realized, though, was that Marx's dream of the withering of the state when the proletariat had gained control of the-world just was not possible. I'd have rather believed in the second coming of Christ; that, at least, could possibly happen, though it's highly improbable. Once a ruling class has the power in its hands, it won't ever let go. Not until revolutionists take the power from them, and then the new rulers try to make sure they keep in power. The natural withering away of the state, no laws or police force or regulations or bureaucracy, everybody governing himself with love and pure kindness of heart and unselfishness, that's a crock of bullshit. Nobody really believed in it, but the party members pretended they did.
"Nobody pushed that dogma too much, though. If you got enthusiastic about it, you'd be marked down as a fool or a counterrevolutionary.”
Williams had slipped off a Polish freighter and into the wilds of Harlem. There he worked his F&A (Fomenting and Agitating) among various black and white liberal groups. But three weeks after he landed he got gonorrhea.
"That was my first but by no means last dose. The Fates were against me. No sooner was I cured of that filthy disease than I caught it again. I was in the U.S. of Gonococcia and no way out. After I got over that second case, I decided to try sexual abstinence. That didn't work. I was just too horny. So, I told myself, twice bitten, never again. It's a statistical improbability that I'll get infected again. But I did.”
His KGB contact found out about his dose, reported it to his superior, and relayed a message to Williams. Your social diseases are interfering with your security and efficiency. Stay away from women and dirty toilet seats or else!
After that, every time Williams' contact met him, he asked him if he had gonorrhea. Williams, who was avoiding women and so getting a reputation as a homosexual, could truthfully tell the contact that he did not have the clap. Fortunately, the contact did not ask him if he had syphilis. Williams, at that time, was suffering from the onslaught of the dread Spirochaeta pallida.
"I'll swear I don't now where or from whom I got it. I'd been as chaste as Robinson Crusoe—up to the time he met Friday. I don't know. Some people are accident-prone. Could I be one of those rare and unfortunate persons, cursed by the Fates or by Dialectic Materialism, who could be infected by bacteria borne on the breeze, slipping through the keyhole? Was I VD-prone? The lone sexual ranger destined to stumble onto bandits, the Jesse Jameses of Germs? I do know one thing. I sure wasn't getting much spying, fomenting and agitating done. I was spending too much time in doctors' offices.”
When Williams learned that the FBI and perhaps the CIA had been questioning his physicians about him, he reported this to his contact. Orders came back within the hour for him to go to Los Angeles and infiltrate the Black Muslims. The contact gave Williams a bus ticket, explaining that the KGB could not afford airline passage for him.
While riding westward, as every young man should, Williams contracted gonorrhea in the back seat of a Greyhound.
"Yeah, you're laughing again, Burton! It does sound funny now. But, believe me, it wasn't so funny to me then.”
Williams' story, in its many details, convoluted windings, and lengthy asides, had consumed an hour. Burton was interested in it, but he felt that he had stayed away from the others too long.
Bill Williams managed to become a member of the Black Muslims. But when they found out that he had gonorrhea— contracted in Los Angeles after the Greyhound dose had been cured—they kicked him out. Then, having discovered that he was a spy—they mistakenly thought that he was an FBI agent—they put an assassin on his trail.
His story became, from this point, somewhat confusing. Burton could have used a diagram to keep it clear, what with all the flights, doublings back, shootings and mishaps Williams had suffered. He had fled to Chicago, then to San Francisco, where he had gotten into a brawl in a gay bar, been beaten up and raped. Afflicted with gonorrhea fore and aft, as he put it, he had gone to a city in Oregon. Not, however, until he had financed his trip by mugging the KGB contact, who had refused to give him any money at all.
Star Spoon appeared in the doorway. She said softly, "I've been looking everywhere for you.”
"Come in," Burton said. "You've met Bill Williams, haven't you?”
She bowed and said, "So nice to see you again, Mr. Williams. Dick, you seem to be deep in conversation. My apologies for interrupting you. I'll return to the party, if you don't mind.”
Burton asked her where she would be, and she said that Tur-pin was with a small and select group in his suite. He had asked her to find Burton and invite him to the party.
"I'll be along in a while," Burton said.
She bowed again, said goodbye to Williams, and left.
"A beautiful woman," Williams said, and he sighed.
"She knows how to keep a man happy.”
"Do you now how to make her happy?”
"Of course!" Burton said.
"Don't get hot around the collar, nothing personal. I'd say she's a quiet but deep one. I'm pretty good at character analysis on short order. I've had to be. Matter of survival.”
"She's had a very hard life," Burton said. "It's a wonder she's kept her sanity.”
"You trying to be subtle and tell me I'm not the only one who's had a rough time?”
"You're overly sensitive, my friend.”
Williams took thirty minutes more to finish his story. He had married a deeply religious black woman who, unfortunately, could not say No to her overpassionate minister. Result: Williams caught the clap again. Overcoming the desire to find her and kill her, he had decided to go hunting instead and sublimate his wish for violence by shooting birds and rabbits. While he was in the woods, he was fatally wounded by a shotgun blast from behind a bush. Dying, he wondered which of the many candidates had shot him. An agent of the KGB, the CIA, the Black Muslims, the Albanians, or the Salvation Army? Actually, the SA itself was not after him, but a soldier in its ranks was. While in Los Angeles, he had pretended to be converted to Christianity during a sermon given by a Major Barbara. Then he had joined the Army, but a corporal, Rachel Goggin, had fallen in love with him and he with her. At that time, he thought that he was clean, free of VD, but after he and Rachel had made love, he discovered that his nemesis had struck again. Moreover, Rachel had caught the disease from him.
Williams had promised to marry her, but his enemies were closing in, and he had left her to save his own life. Corporal Goggin had apparently gone psychotic because of his unexplained desertion and because of her overreaction to infection with a disease that he had become quite accustomed to. He heard, while he was in Portland, that a woman resembling Rachel was asking about him and that she was packing a gun.
"Everybody except Goodwill Industries was after my ass, and I wasn't too sure about them.”
"And what have you learned from these, ah, Candidean experiences?”
"You sound like Nur.”
"You've talked to him?”
"Sure," Williams said. "I know everybody here. Very well.”
"Yes, but what was the lesson?" Burton said.
"That I'd been the plaything of life but I wasn't going to be any more. I made sure of that on The River, I fought for power and I got it. If I was in a situation where I was the underdog, I became the overdog as soon as possible. I was tired of being kicked around, the one who got shafted. So ...”
"Nobody's victimizing you here, am I correct?" Burton said. He rose from his chair.
"And nobody's going to.”
Williams smiled, his expression a curious blend of amusement and malice.
"Just sit down for a minute. Then you can go. Hasn't something been perplexing you for these past two weeks? Something you just can't account for?”
Burton frowned and said slowly, "I can't recall anything.”
His forehead cleared. "Unless ... yes, I have been wondering ... but you couldn't have had anything to do with it ... I have been wondering who resurrected Netley, Gull, Crook, Stride and Kelly.”
"You mean those involved in the Jack-the-Ripper case?”
Burton was startled but tried not to show it. "How do you know who they are?”
"Oh, / was watching you watch their memory files.”
Burton reared from the chair, his face red and contorted.
"Damn you, you've been spying on me! Why do you think you have the right ...?”
Williams, still smiling, though his eyes were narrowed, rose from his chair.
"Hold it right there! If you think it's OK to spy on others, why shouldn't others spy on you? Don't throw stones in a glass house, my friend.”
Burton was speechless for a moment. Then he said, "There's a vast difference. I observed the dead. You're spying on the living, your neighbors!”
"You didn't observe the living from the grailstones along the River?”
"You soiled my privacy!”
"You can't soil the soiled," Williams said. He was still smiling, but his body stance showed that he was ready to repel attack.
"Very well," Burton said. "You still haven't told me why you took it on yourself to raise those pathological murderers.”
"They were, but they aren't. The reason I did ... I'm a collector and a student of religious types. I got interested on Earth, I had much experience with them, you know. The Marxists ... they're religious, though they'd deny it, the Black Muslims, the Salvation Army, the Buddhists, the Southern Methodists, you know how many of them I became involved with. I am religious, too, though not in a conventional sense. I am the one who raised the New Christians and the Nichirenites and the Second Chancers who live in Turpinville, and I raised Gull the Dowist. I left it to him to resurrect his fellows, which he did. I have plans for bringing others in.”
Burton did not know whether or not to believe him- He snorted and strode out of the room. Williams called, "Don't go away mad, Sir Richard!" and he laughed uproariously.
On his way to the elevator, Burton looked back down the hall. Williams was going down the steps, apparently to join the crowd of revelers in the vestibule. The man looked up and waved at him through the railing uprights. He was grinning as if he had been enjoying himself hugely. Had Williams been telling him the truth or had he been fantasizing? The Riverworld was a place where men and women should no longer have reason to lie. They had been delivered from the societies and institutions that had forced them, or made them think they were forced, to form protective self and public images. But most of them seemed unaware of that or found it hard to discard old and unnecessary habits.
However, climbing the steps was a good idea. He needed the exercise. He turned the corner, passing by the elevator, and strode down the long hallway toward the stairway. The music and voices that he had faintly heard in the other hall faded away. The only sound was that of his footsteps. But, as he passed the door of the room next to the stairwell, he thought he heard a scream. He stopped. It had not been loud. So faint was it, he might have imagined it. No! There it was again, and it seemed to come through the door.
The rooms were insulated but were not, like the tower walls, absolutely soundproof. He placed his ear against the intricately carved oak door. He could not hear the screams now, but a man was yelling in the room. The words were not clear; the tone was. It was threatening and angry.
He tried the doorknob. It turned, but the door would not budge. He hesitated. For all he knew, the two inside, if there were only two, might not want to be disturbed. If they turned on him because he was interfering in a matter strictly between lovers, he would be embarrassed. On the other hand, he was not easily embarrassed, and he would feel that he had been remiss if he could have prevented a crime.
He knocked hard on the wood three times, then kicked it twice. A woman started to scream, but she was cut off.
"Open up in there!" Burton shouted, and he struck the door again.
A man shouted. It sounded like, "Go away, motherfucker!" but Burton was not sure.
He took his beamer from his jacket and cut a circle around the lock. When he had pushed the knob and the lock through, he stepped to one side. It was well that he had. Three shots boomed, and three bullets pierced the thick wood. The man— he supposed it was a man was firing—had a heavy handgun, perhaps a .45 automatic. Burton yelled, "Come out unarmed! Your hands on your head! I have a beamer!”
The man snarled a series of curses and said that he would kill whoever tried to come in.
"It's no use! You're trapped!" Burton said. "Come on out, hands to your head!”
"You can—”
The man's voice was cut off by a thud and a clatter. Then Star Spoon's voice, high and trembling, said, "I knocked him out, Dick!”
Burton pushed the door in and sprang in, beamer ready. A large naked black man was lying face down on the thick Oriental rug, blood on the back of his head. A gold statuette, smeared with blood, lay by his side.
He swore. She was naked, and her face and arms were blue with bruises. One eye was beginning to swell up. Her clothes were scattered in shreds over the room. She ran weeping and sobbing to him, and he held her shaking body close to his. But, seeing the man push himself up from the floor, Burton released her. He picked the .45 automatic up, reversed it, and slammed the man on the back of his neck. Without a sound, the man crumpled.
"What happened?" Burton said.
She had trouble getting the words out. He took her to a table and poured out a glass of wine. She drank, though most of it ran down her chin and neck. Still crying, she choked out a story, most of which he had guessed. She had been on her way to the stairwell when the man had stepped out of the door ahead of her. Smiling, he had asked her name. She had told him and then had tried to get by him, but he had grabbed her arm. He wanted to party, he said. He had never had a Chinese woman before, and she sure was a doll. And so on.
Star Spoon had struggled as he pulled her into the room. The man's whiskey breath sickened her when he kissed her. When she had tried to scream, he clapped his hand over her mouth, slammed the door shut, hurled her so hard she fell on the floor, locked the door and ripped her clothes from her.
By the time Burton arrived, she had been raped three times.
He made sure that the man was tied up, got a tranquilizer from the converter, and gave it and a glass of water to her. He put her into the shower and then held the douche bag while, still trembling and weeping, she washed herself out.
After he had toweled her dry, he ordered some clothes from the converter, helped her get dressed, and put her down on a sofa. He used the computer console to call Turpin. Turpin, hearing the report, scowled and said, "I'll fix that son of a bitch!”
He looked at the man on the floor and said, "That's Crockett Dunaway. A real troublemaker. I've had my eye on him for some time. You wait until I get down there.”
A few minutes later, Tom Turpin, followed by the other members of the party, entered. Alice, Sophie and Aphra took Star Spoon in charge at once and carried her into the room next door. Turpin got a hypodermic full of adrenaline and injected it into Dunaway's buttock. After a minute, Dunaway groaned and got to his hands and knees. When he saw the others, his eyes widened. He croaked, "What you doing here?”
Turpin did not answer. Dunaway got to his feet and staggered to a chair, sat down, bent over and held his head in his hands. "Man, I got a headache killing me!”
"That's not all that's going to kill you," Turpin said harshly.
Dunaway raised his head. His bloodshot, slightly crossed eyes looked at Turpin. "What you talking about? That bitch come on me, and when I obliged her, she started screaming for help. You can't blame me for what that slant-eyed whore done. She must've heard her man coming, and so she pretended like she wasn't having none of me.”
"She couldn't have heard me," Burton said. "I wasn't making any sound in the hall. If I hadn't heard her scream, I would've gone right on by the door. You're guilty as hell, man.”
"I swear 'fore God I ain' t," Dunaway said. "That bitch asked me to give her a good time.”
"There's no use arguing about it," Turpin said. "We'll just run off your memory and get at the truth.”
Dunaway grunted and shot out of the chair. He was headed for the door, but his legs gave way, and he crumpled on the floor.
"Uh, huh!" Turpin said. "I thought so. Dunaway, no one gets away with rape here. You've had it, man!”
Dunaway raised his head. Saliva ran from his open mouth. "No, I swear to God ... !”
Turpin told his two bodyguards to set Dunaway in a chair before the computer console. "We'll know in a few minutes what's what!”
Dunaway tried to struggle, but the two blows had sapped his strength. He was set down in the chair, and a bodyguard asked the Computer to extract Dunaway's memories of the past hour and display them. Dunaway sat trembling and gibbering while his guilt was shown.
"I'm not only going to kill you," Turpin said, "I'm destroying your body-record. You ain't never going to get a chance to do this to a woman again. You've had it, Dunaway!”
The man's screams were snapped off by the ray from Turpin's beamer. Dunaway fell over in the chair, a narrow hole, cauterized at the edges, on each side of his head.
"Throw him in the converter and incinerate him," Turpin said to the bodyguards.
Nur said, "Are you really going to dissolve his recording?”
"Why not? He won't ever be any different.”
"You are not God.”
Turpin scowled, and then he laughed. "You're insidious, Nur. You've been bending my ear so long with all that religious philosophical hoop-de-la you got me confused. OK. So I don't destroy him? And then, when he goes back to The Valley, he's going to rape and beat other women. You want that on your conscience?”
"The Ethicals in their wisdom set it up so that anyone, no matter how vicious, will live until this project is ended. No exceptions. 1 trust them. They must know what they're doing.”
"Yeah?" Turpin said. "If they're so smart, how come they didn't catch on to Loga? Why didn't they make provisions for someone like him? He's wrecked their schedule and their program.”
"I am not certain that they didn't make provisions for someone like him," Nur said calmly.
"Mind explaining that?" Turpin said.
"I have no explanation now.”
Tom Turpin took his time lighting up a big cigar. Then he said, "OK. I'll go along with you. Up to a point. Just now, nobody's being sent back to The Valley, so Dunaway ain't going to do anybody any harm. But when ... if ... the Computer starts sending them back, it ain't going to send Dunaway back until I say so. Which may be never. I don't know just now what I'm going to do when that time comes.”
"There are millions of Dunaways waiting to be released like pent-up hyenas," Burton said. "What good is it going to do to judge just one?”
"It's your woman that was raped!" Turpin said.
"But she is not my property, and I won't speak for her," Burton said. "Why ... since she is the victim, why don't you let her be the judge?”
Alice, having just come from the bedroom, had overheard him. She said, "Well, Dick! So she isn't your property and she can speak for herself! Imagine Richard Burton saying that! You have changed!”
"I suppose I have.”
"Too bad you didn't do it before, not immediately after, we parted," Alice said. "That doesn't make me feel very good, you know. You live with the Chinese woman for a very little while, and she works all sorts of changes in you.”
"She had nothing to do with it.”
"Who did then, God? Oh, you're impossible.”
Nur said, "How is she?”
"As well as can be expected after ... that. Aphra, Sophie and I will take care of her for a few days. If that's all right with you, Dick?”
"Of course," he said, somewhat stiffly. "It is most generous ... compassionate ... of you.”
Star Spoon had fallen asleep under the influence of a drug recommended by the Computer. Burton and Frigate Carried her out on a stretcher through a side entrance and placed her in the back of a huge steam-driven Dobler automobile. Turpin drove it over the winding road to the entrance. Here Burton transferred her to his chair, and, with her on his lap, flew the chair the short distance to his world's entrance and the long distance to the Arabian Nights castle in the center. The others followed him. After Star Spoon had been undressed and put in bed by the women, Alice and Sophie came out from her room.
"She should be all right by the time she wakes up," Sophie said. "Physically, that is. Mentally and emotionally ... ?”
The women would take care of Star Spoon in shifts. As soon as she awoke, Burton would be called. He protested that that was not necessary. He would sit by her bed until she awoke and then do his best to comfort her.
"Let us do something, too," Sophie said.
Burton said that he would go along with them; he understood why they insisted. They empathized deeply with Star Spoon because they, too, had been raped more than once. They also needed to take care of her; that compulsion, if you could call it a compulsion, was part of their natures.
"Born nurses," Burton said to Frigate.
"How lucky can you get?”
The American was not being facetious. He envied people who wanted to use themselves for the benefit of others.
Star Spoon got up in time for breakfast. Though she drank only a little tea and ate part of a piece of toast, she was well enough to take some part in the conversation. She seemed glad to have the three women with her, and they even got her to laugh several times. However, she did not want Burton to hold her, and she responded to his attempts to talk with her with uncompleted sentences or nods or shakes of her head.
After two days, the three women left. Star Spoon immediately quit staring into space for long periods and busied herself with various projects with the Computer.
"She's withdrawing," Burton told Nur and Frigate. "I won't say it's just into herself. She seems to be burying herself with work with the Computer. She'll stop whatever she's doing—she won't talk about that much—and listen while I talk. But I've spent hours, days, trying to get her back to her old self, and I've failed.”
"Yet," Frigate said, "she's been raped before.”
"This may have been the final trauma. The last and the unendurable wound.”
He did not tell them that she had become animated and genuinely interested for a short time when he had asked her what she wanted to do to Dunaway. She had replied that she did not want to destroy his recording. He certainly deserved oblivion forever, but she could not bring herself to do that. Dunaway should be punished, if he would learn anything from it. She doubted that very much. Finally, she said that she was going to forget about any punishment or any kind of retribution. She wished that she could forget about him, but she just could not.
The dullness came into her face and voice again, and she became silent.
Nur talked to her but reported that he could find no wedge to open her and let in some light. Her soul had become darkened. He hoped that it would not remain so forever.
"But you don't know if she'll... stay the same?" Burton said.
Nur shrugged. "No one can know. Except perhaps Star Spoon.”
Burton was frustrated and, hence, angry. He could not take his anger out on her, so he vented it on Frigate and Nur. Understanding what was affecting him, they endured his insults for a while. Then Nur said that he would see Burton again when Burton was rational. Frigate seemed to feel that he should absorb more than Nur had, perhaps for old time's sake or perhaps because some part of him enjoyed the tongue-lashing. An hour after Nur had left, Frigate got up from his chair, threw his half-full glass against the wall, said, "I'm getting out of here," and did so.
A few minutes later, Star Spoon entered. She looked at the spilled whiskey and his brooding face. Then, surprisingly, she went to him and kissed him on the lips.
"I'm much improved now," she said. "I think I can be the cheery woman you want me to be, what I want to be. You'll have no reason to worry about me from now on. That is, except ...”
"I'm very happy," he said. "I think. There's something that is still bothering you?”
"I ... I am not ready to go to bed with you yet. I would like to, but I can't. I do believe, though, Dick, that the time will come when I can, and I'll be completely willing. Just bear with me. The time will come.”
"As I said, I'm very happy. I can wait. Only, this is so sudden. What caused this metamorphosis?”
"I don't know. It just happened.”
"Very curious," he said. "Perhaps we'll know some day. Meanwhile, you wouldn't mind if we kissed just a little longer, would you? I promise not to get carried away.”
"Of course not.”
Life for Burton returned to the routine it had had before Dunaway's violation. Star Spoon was more talkative, even aggressive at times during the parties. Verbally aggressive, in that she was more willing to argue, to present her views. However, she spent as much time with the Computer as she had when she was deeply troubled. Burton did not mind. He had his own projects.
All human beings, Nur thought, reported that time seemed to them to have gone much slower when they were infants. Time speeded up a little when they became prejuveniles, got a little faster when they were juveniles, and stepped up the pace even more when they became young adults. When you were in your sixties, what had been a smooth and slow stream, a leisurely flowing and broad river when one was young, became a narrow roaring channel. By the seventies, it was a short waterfall, time hurtling by. By the eighties, it was a deep mountain cataract, water, time itself, shooting by, disappearing over the edge of life, which was near one's-feet, a precipice over which time rushed by as if eager to destroy itself. And you, too.
If you were an old man or woman of ninety, looking back, childhood seemed to be a long, long, long highway reaching to an unimaginably distant horizon. But the last forty years ... how short they had been, how swift.
Then you died, and you awoke on a bank of The River and your body was that which you had when you were twenty-five, except that any physical defects you had had then were repaired. It would seem then that, being young again, you would experience time as a slowed-down stream. Childhood would not seem so remote in your memory, nor would it seem to you as long as it had been before you became twenty-five again.
Not so. The young body held a brain young in tissue but old with memory and experience. If you were eighty when you died on Earth and had lived forty years on the Riverworld, and thus were one hundred and twenty years old, in fact, then time was a series of rapids. It hurried you along, hustled and pushed you. Keep going, keep going, it said. No rest for you. You don't have the time. No rest for me either.
Nut's living body had existed for one hundred and sixty-one years. And so, when he looked back at his childhood, he saw it as an everstretching length. The older he got, the longer childhood seemed to him. If he should live to be a thousand, he would think that childhood had lasted seven hundred years; young adulthood, two hundred; middle age, fifty-nine; time since then, a year.
His companions had mentioned this phenomenon now and then, but they did not dwell on it. Only he, as far as he knew, had pondered about it. It shocked him when Frigate mentioned that they had been here only a few months. Actually, almost seven months had passed. Burton had put off going to his private world for a few weeks. Or so he had said. In reality, he had taken two months.
What made it easier for them—himself, too—to be unaware of the passage of time was that they no longer watched the calendar. They could have told the Computer to display the month and day on the wall every morning, but here, where time meant no more than it had to Homer's lotus eaters, they had neglected to do so. They should have been shaken when Turpin announced that he was celebrating Christmas, but they had had no reference point to measure the passage of time.
It was this failure to notice the passage of time, this super-mariana attitude, that had caused them to put off something they had been eager to do shortly after getting here. That was the resurrection of those comrades who had died while trying to get to the tower. Joe Miller the titanthrop, Loghu, Kazz the Neanderthal, Tom Mix, Umslopogaas, John Johnston, and many others. These had earned the right to be brought to the tower, and the eight who had made it had intended to do that. They spoke about it now and then, though not often. Somehow, for various reasons, they kept putting it off.
Nur could not excuse himself for having been shot along with them in time's millrace. He, too, had neglected this very important deed. It was true that he had been even busier than they with various research projects, but it would not take the Computer more than half an hour to locate them—if they could be found—and a few minutes to set up arrangements to raise them.
If you lived a million years, would your childhood then seem to have lasted seven hundred and fifty thousand years? And would the last two hundred and fifty years seem only a century? Could the mind play that sort of gigantic trick on itself?
Time, viewed objectively, flowed always at the same speed. A machine watching day-by-day activities of the people in the Rivervalley would see them as having, every day, the same amount of time to do whatever they did. But, inside these people, would not time have speeded up? And would they not be doing less and less with every day? Perhaps not in the outward physical actions such as eating breakfast, taking baths, exercising and so forth. But what about the mental and emotional processes? Would they be slower? Would not the process of changing themselves for the better, the ostensible goal set for them by the Ethicals, be slowed down, too? If this was so, the Ethicals should have given them more than a hundred years to achieve the moral and spiritual near-perfection necessary for Going On.
There was, however, one undeniable realistic reason why one hundred years was the limit for this group of people. The energy needed to fill the grails, to run the tower and to resurrect the dead, was derived from the heat from this planet's molten nickel-iron core. The available energy was enormous, but so was the consumption of it. The Ethicals might have figured out that a hundred years for this group, people who had lived from 100,000 b.c. through a.d. 1983, and a hundred years for the next group, those who had lived after a.d. 1983, would eat up almost all the tappable energy. With all the heat that the thermionic converters drew, two hundred years' withdrawal would cool off the core to the point where it could no longer supply the requirements.
Loga, the Ethical, had never mentioned this energy limitation. He must have known it, and it must have caused him anguish and guilt. Nur, having thought of this factor, had asked the Computer to give him the computation for the energy needed for the two projects. And the answer had been what Nur had expected. Yes, even the core of this planet, slightly larger than Earth's, would lose its white-hot glow and become red and dim within two centuries.
Loga's parents, siblings, and cousins were still in the River-valley. Every one of them had been killed at least once, and none had Gone On. Loga had interfered with the project and gotten rid of his fellow Ethicals and the Ethical Agents so that his family might live longer than the time allotted to them. And, Loga hoped, attain that level where they could Go On.
That did not mean, however, that this project, the first, would not be terminated when the hundred years were up. He could salvage his loved ones by making sure that their body-recordings would not be erased and their wathans released to float for as long as the universe lasted or perhaps longer. He could end the first group and start the next group on schedule. The slight deviation in the procedure would be that his family would continue to live in The Valley. They would be part of the next group and thus get an extra century.
If that were so, why had Loga not just arranged that the Computer would not report that certain persons who should have been disposed of were still living? Loga had been able to fix it so that the Computer had operated illegally in far more noticeable matters.
Probably, Loga had not wanted to take the chance that he could get by with the minor matter—major, from his viewpoint. He had to assure his complete control, even if trying to do this made the risks far greater. He knew that a year or two before the end of this project, a spaceship would arrive from the Gardenworld. It would hold a crew of Ethicals and the body-records of the people for the second project. Loga had to insure that the newcomers would not interfere with him. He had set things up so that the newcomers would be seized or killed when they unsuspectingly got off the ship in the hangar.
Unfortunately, somebody had gotten to Loga, killed him and erased his body-recording.
All evidence pointed to the Mongolian female agent who had been killed by Nur. But Nur had very little evidence to go by. He had no idea how she had gotten into the tower, what her role was or what it had been intended to be, or, even, whether she was still not hiding some place in the tower.
Nur and his companions were supposed to have worked on this mystery until it was solved. However, everybody except himself seemed to have neglected it. They were too occupied with the power and the pleasures the tower gave them. Undoubtedly, they had intended to try to solve the enigma, but they had no idea of how much time had passed.
Nur wondered if it would do any good to call this neglect to their attention. He had gotten nowhere in his efforts to clear matters up via the Computer. Why would they do any better?
Yet it was Alice Hargreaves who had thought of the way to trick the Computer shortly after they had gotten into the magic labyrinth, the tower that was also the Computer. Not he, Nur, not any of the others. He knew, however, from observing them, that they just did not think that solving the mystery was urgent. In fact, nothing seemed urgent to them now except enjoying the treasures of the Computer. And they were in no hurry to get all of those.
They were wrong in thinking that. Nur could see another crisis speeding toward them. Li Po had launched that when he had resurrected people without much thought about the effects. Turpin had then raised many whom he had known on Earth and some he had first known in The Valley. These, in turn, had raised those they wanted to have with them. And so on. Turpinville was already crowded; Turpin was going to oust any more newcomers. They would not care; they would just move into one of the unoccupied worlds or into an apartment suite. And there they would continue the populating.
Most of the people brought in had never even heard of computers, not even those primitive and limited ones of Earth technology. Here they were introduced to a machine that made them, in a sense, demigods. But, being human, many of them would misuse the power through accident or design. Williams, for instance, had raised those involved in the Ripper murders just as a rather malicious joke. Nur could not see that there was any harm in that except that Netley might abuse his power. The others seemed to be decent people. Gull had become born again, as the curious Christian phraseology put it, and the three women were not vicious or power-hungry. The men that they had resurrected to be their companions might be another matter, however. And many of those brought to Turpinville had not changed much since they had been on Earth. A town full of those who had been on Earth pimps, whores, drug sellers, bullies and killers held much danger. Especially when they could operate the Computer.
What Nur had tried but failed to impress on his companions was that the Computer was a genie let out of a bottle or an afreet that had been released from the constraints of Solomon's Seal. Or, as Frigate had put it, a Frankenstein's monster with an unlimited credit card. One person using these powers might suddenly find that another was using them against him or her. The full potentialities of the Computer were still unknown. To use it safely, you had to learn everything it could do, and that would take a long, long time.
For instance, Burton, while watching those in the Ripper case, had not considered that he was being watched while watching. If he had foreseen the possibilities, he would have put an inhibit on anyone spying on him. Now that he knew it could be done, he had ordered the Computer to insure his privacy in his operation of it. But it was rather late for that. Five people, one of whom, Netley, might be a danger to everybody else, had been brought in. Moreover, if Williams had thought of it, he could have told the Computer to override Burton's privacy instructions and not tell Burton about it.
Whoever got to the Computer first could override the latecomers.
Only one who learned the list of all that the Computer could do could protect himself. And the others. Even then, he might be too late. Another might have already put in commands giving himself control channels that he had made sure would be denied to others.
Nur intended to go through the list of potentialities, learn them by heart, and then see to it that the Computer would deny control to anyone who could misuse certain powers. That would, of course, give him the greatest power of anyone in the tower. But he knew that he would not use it for evil purposes.
For the moment, though, he had other things to do. His allotted work hours for the day were over. He must go now and have dinner with the woman he had raised, his wife on Earth, a woman whom he had not seen much there because he had been traveling in his quest for knowledge and the Truth. He owed her much, and now he could repay her.
Alice gave her Mad Tea Party on April 1, April Fool's Day.
It was also a farewell party, not for Alice, who was staying, but for the "decor" of her world and the androids in it. Tired of the Wonderland cum Looking-Glass motif, she intended to change it. Her guests would have a last look at it, and some time later she would have the Computer remove most of it and replace it with whatever she ordered. As of the moment, she said, she had several ideas for the redecorating. What she hoped was that during the party the guests would give her more ideas.
First, though, she had to make up a guest list, and this caused problems from the beginning. She had intended to invite only the seven companions and their mates. Li Po said that he wanted to bring all his "wives." She responded by saying that she preferred that he bring only one. That could be whichever woman was his bedmate for April 1. Li Po replied that his other wives and his friends and their mates would be hurt if they did not receive invitations, too. After all, she had a place big enough for the few people he would like to bring (about a hundred, he estimated). The forty sages (now fifty) and their charming women were all well behaved. They might get a little boisterous, but she wanted a lively party, didn't she?
Alice could be very stubborn. But she was very fond of Li Po, even if she did think that he drank too much and was altogether too lecherous. Also, he was entertaining, and he seemed determined to be accompanied by his friends. In the end, she gave in and extended a blanket invitation to the Chinese.
Frigate said that he and Sophie would be very happy to attend. However, Sophie, who was very gregarious, had by now resurrected ten men and ten women, with his permission, of course. They were very good friends she had known in New York City, Los Angeles, and, believe it or not, please restrain your laughter, Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Puzzled, Alice asked why he thought she would laugh. Frigate sighed and said, "Kalamazoo was, like some other American place-names, Peoria, Podunk, and downtown Burbank, a risible word, a poke in the ribs and a snigger. Like the English Gotham of the later Middle Ages, the German Schildburg, the town of Chelm in Yiddish stories, the Boeotia of the ancient Greeks. Well, Kalamazoo and the other American cities are not quite like the others I mentioned. The difference is ...”
Alice listened politely, then said, "You intended to ask me if I would invite Sophie's friends, but you wandered off. Yes, they are welcome, since there are only twenty of them.”
Frigate thanked her, but she could detect some hesitancy in his voice. Whereas Sophie was gregarious, he was, not anti-gregarious, but non-gregarious. No doubt he had been glad that he and Sophie now had some companions. On the other hand, he was beginning to feel a little crowded and put upon. The world would never have enough elbow room for him.
De Marbot and Behn also wanted to bring the people they had resurrected recently. Alice said that they could come, but when she had cut off their screens, she sighed. Originally, she had planned for around thirty. Now she had one hundred and three. So far.
Burton, at least, was no problem in terms of numbers. He and Star Spoon had not as yet brought anybody else in.
"Oh, yes," she said. "I have a surprise.”
"For all of us or just for me?" he said.
"Oh, for everybody, though it may affect you more than the others.”
"I know you, Alice," he said, smiling and, as so often, looking like Mephistopheles himself when he did so. "I know your expressions. You have just regretted adding that last phrase. You're ashamed that you did so. What is the surprise, another man?”
"Go to hell," Alice said, and she told the Computer to cut them off. She had changed in many ways. Never, never on Earth, no matter how angered, would she have said that to anyone. Not even her husband.
After pacing back and forth a while to allow herself to settle down, she called Nur. He said, "Greetings, Alice. It's a pleasure to see you. Could I call you back in a moment? I'm talking to Tom Turpin. There's ..." He hesitated, then said, "Never mind that.”
"I'm sorry to interrupt," she said. "But I just ... that's all right. I'll call back within the half-hour.”
She bit her lip as she wondered if she should invite William Gull and his fellow Dowists. He had been, after all, physician in ordinary to Queen Victoria and a baronet. Yet she had long ago rid herself of the class distinctions that had governed her on Earth and for quite a while on the Riverworld, so his high connections should not be considered. Also, he had been a murderer-mutilator. Yet he had repented and was a deacon of the Dowist Church. And she, as one who was no longer a believer in Christianity but still tried to act like a Christian, should not permit his renounced past to bother her. He could be an entertaining conversationalist as long as he refrained from proselytizing. Then he became a nuisance and a bore. But she would insist that the Dowists not push their religion if they attended the party.
Finally, she called him. He was pleased to be asked, almost pathetically so.
"I'm also inviting Annie Crook, Elizabeth Stride and Marie Kelly," she said, "if that makes a difference to you.”
"Oh, of course not," he said. "It is your party, and Mrs. Stride and I get along well now, though we have certain disagreements on theology. Mrs. Crook and Mrs. Kelly are rather cool, understandably so, but I hope to bring them around some day. I assure you that I will not spoil this social function by any unseemly behavior.”
Alice then called the three women, and they said they would be delighted. Could they bring their "beans" with them? Though reluctant to have them, Alice smiled and said they would be welcome. So, that made one hundred and fifty-one guests, since Gull would bring his woman and thirty-two others. Stride and Crook would each bring a man, and Kelly would, as usual, have a man on each arm.
The second time she tried Nur, he was ready to talk to her. He thanked her for the invitation and said that he and Ayesha would be happy to come. He had just had a rather intense conversation with Tom Turpin. Both of them were disturbed because of the two women who had become pregnant. The first birth would occur in four months; the second, two weeks later.
"Tom has told the women many times that the babies will have no wathans. Since the Ethicals did not intend to have babies here, they made no provisions for creating wathans. I asked the Computer if it had the schematics for making a wathan generator, and it said that there was no such thing in its records. That means, as you perhaps remember, that the babies, lacking wathans, will hence lack self-consciousness. For all exterior purposes, they will behave just as babies with wathans will. But they will not be self-conscious. They'll be biological machines, very superior machines, but still machines.”
"Yes, I know," Alice said. "But what can one do?”
"If those women want to bear and raise what will be the equivalent of androids, that would be only their business, if that was all there was to it. However, their example may stimulate others to imitate them, to have babies also. Eventually, this tower will be jammed with people, a good part of whom will be soulless. What happens when the overcrowding causes fights for space? War. Suffering. Death. I don't have to fill in the picture for you.”
"Yes, but ..." Alice said.
"Turpin has threatened to kick them out if they bear the children. They don't care. They'll just go to an apartment with their men and live there. But this little trouble will lead to great trouble. Somebody ... we ... will have to take drastic action to stop this and make sure that it doesn't happen again.”
"You mean ... kill the babies?”
"I don't like to contemplate that, it pains me greatly, but it will have to be done. The babies, as I said, are really androids, and one should have no more compunction about destroying them than about destroying androids. They look completely human and behave like human beings to a certain extent. But they are not self-conscious; they do not have that which makes Homo sapiens human. The babies can't be allowed to grow into children; they should be eliminated now before they know what's happening.”
Alice knew that their death would be instantaneous and painless. They would be placed in a converter and reduced to atoms in a microsecond. Nevertheless, the idea horrified her.
No doubt the kind-hearted Nur felt horror, too. But he knew what had to be done, and he would do it. If Turpin could not get the job done, Nur would see to it.
"If we had a wathan generator," Nur said, "I would insist... I think almost everybody would agree with me ... that these two infants be the exception. We would see that they had wathans, but there would be no more children born. Any woman who used the Computer to make herself fertile would be killed and her body kept in the records until the day ... if it ever comes ... that the Computer starts resurrecting people again in The Valley. Any man who knowingly made the woman pregnant would also be slain. However ...”
"Yes?”
"Allah! That won't be necessary. I should have thought of this before. The Computer can be ordered not to make anyone fertile from now on. Why didn't I think of that long ago? Time ...”
"Time?" Alice said.
Nur waved his hand to dismiss the phrase.
"Then I see no reason to destroy the babies," Alice said. "Surely they won't be any problem.”
Nur sighed with relief, though he still looked troubled. Perhaps that was because he had been so slow in arriving at the very obvious solution.
He shook his head. "There's a possibility I must check on at once. What if someone has given a command to the Computer that anybody who wants to become fertile can become so? That would be the prior command and the authoritative one. The only one who could override that would be Loga or the woman whom I killed ... if I did kill her. Just a moment. I'll check.”
Alice could have listened in on him, but she would never have done that unless he gave permission. A minute later, the screen before her glowed, and Nur's face appeared. She knew at once what had happened from his angry expression.
"Someone has done just what I hoped would not be done. He ... she ... whoever ... has made it possible for anyone who wants to become fertile to so so. The Computer would not tell me who gave it the command.”
"My God!" Alice said. Then, "Dick told me about that black man, Bill Williams, resurrecting Gull and the others. Do you suppose ... ?”
"I don't know. We'll probably never find out. It's possible that Wandal Goudal or Sarah Kelpin, one of the women having babies, did it. In any event ...”
Though not very often at a loss for words, Nur was so now.
"Tom will have to be told," she said. "Surely, he'll do what must be done.”
"I'll call him now," Nur said.
She sat down to wait, thinking that she would hear from him in ten or fifteen minutes. However, the screen glowed on the control console in less than six minutes. She was surprised to see, not Nur's, but Tom Turpin's face. It was red under his dark skin, and his face was contorted.
"I'm contacting all of you!" he shouted.
You, she understood, would be the seven companions. But what was he doing in the central area forming the O at the tips of the pie-slice-shaped private worlds? And why were his favorite woman, Diamond Lil Schindler, his cronies, Chauvin, Joplin and other musicians, and their women there?
"OK! I see all of you there! Man, I'm mad! Mad, do you hear?”
Nur's voice, quiet and soothing, came.
"Calm down, Tom. Tell us what happened.”
"They threw me out!" he screamed. "Overpowered my guards, grabbed me and my friends, and threw me out! They said I wasn't King Tom no more! I was through! I couldn't ever get back in! So long, goodbye, farewell, adieu, adios, motherfucker!”
"Who's they?" Burton's voice said. "Was Bill Williams the ringleader?”
"No, not him! He moved out two days ago into one of the empty worlds! It was Jonathan Hawley and Hamilton Biggs did it! They were the ringleaders, I mean!”
Alice had probably been introduced to the two, but she did not remember the names.
"Something like this was to be expected," Nur said. "There's little ... nothing ... you can do about it, Tom. Why don't you move into one of the empty worlds? And be very careful the next time you select someone to bring in?”
"I can't even do that!" Tom yelled. He raised his arms and brought them down violently, his hands slapping his thighs. "Can't even do that! Williams is in one of them! The gypsies have taken over another! I know 'cause I saw them coming out of it! I can't get into any of the other four! Somebody's locked them with codewords! I don't know who did it, but I think Hawley and Biggs did it! They're holding them for excess population or whatever! Maybe they did it just out of spite!”
"It could be worse. They could have killed you," Nur said.
"Yeah, Pollyanna, it could have been worse!”
Turpin was weeping now. The big black woman, Schindler, put her arms around him. He sobbed on her neck while she smiled, exposing the twinkling gems set into her teeth. On Earth, she had been one of the most important madams of the St. Louis Tenderloin district and one of Turpin's lovers.
Alice waited until he had released himself from Diamond Lil's embrace, and she said, "You and your friends can stay at my place, Tom.”
The others, Burton, de Marbot, Aphra, Frigate, and Nur, hastened to extend their invitations.
"No," Turpin said, wiping his eyes with a huge violet handkerchief, "that ain't necessary, but I thank you. We'll just move into apartments.”
He raised a fist and began howling, "I'll get you, Hawley, Biggs, you other motherfucking Judases! I'll get you! You'll be sorry, you sons of bitches! Watch out for Tom Turpin, you hear me!”
She could not see the screen that must have appeared on the wall before Turpin. But she could hear the loud laughter and the triumphant words.
"Get lost, you blubbering blubber!”
Tom howled with anger and anguish and began striking the wall. Alice cut off the screen. What next?
What indeed? That was the only one of the upsetting events leading up to the party. Which, she would say later to anyone who would hear—there were few of those left—was, she was not exaggerating in the slightest, the worst party she had ever given.
The morning of April the first, Burton and Star Spoon breakfasted on the balcony outside their bedroom. The sky was clear, and the breeze was gentle and cool because Burton had ordered it so. Now and then, an elephant trumpeted and a lion roared. The shadow of a roc crossed over the table, the bird with a forty-foot wingspread designed by Burton and fashioned by the Computer. Star Spoon started when it darkened them.
"It won't hurt us, it's programmed not to attack us," Burton said, smiling.
"It could be an ill omen.”
He did not argue with her. Li Po and the men and women of the eighth century a.d. whom he had brought in were intelligent and much-experienced, yet they had not rid themselves of their superstitions. Li Po was perhaps the most flexible, but even he reacted now and then to something that he should by now laugh at or not even think of.
He wondered if one had to desuperstition oneself, as it were, before one could Go On. What did the holding of absurd beliefs have to do with gaining compassion and empathy and freedom from hate and prejudice? It had much to do with it if it caused fear and cruelty and irrational behavior. But could one be afraid that bad luck would come if a black cat crossed one's path and still be a "good" person? No, not if one threw a brick at the cat or treated one's friends badly because one was in an ill humor from anxiety.
"You, too, are afraid," Star Spoon said.
"What?" He stared at her.
"You knocked on wood three times. On the table.”
"No, I didn't.”
"I'm sorry to have to contradict you, Dick. But you did. I would not lie.”
"I really did?”
He laughed uproariously.
"Why do you find that funny?”
He explained, and she smiled. That, he thought, was the first time in days that she had lost her blank expression. Well, if he had to pull her out of her soberness by making a fool of himself, he did not mind.
"I did not ask you how you are," he said.
"I am well.”
"I hope that you will be happy soon.”
"I thank you.”
Burton was thinking about proposing to her that the Computer locate in her memory all her experiences of brutality, especially the rapes. The Computer could excise them as a surgeon could a rotting appendix. Though the erasing would eliminate much from her memory, perhaps many years if the time of events were totaled, she would be free of painful thoughts. On the other hand, though the memories would be gone, their emotional impact would still be there. The Computer could not remove that. Star Spoon still might be repulsed by love-making but not have the slightest idea why.
The mind had to operate on itself, but it was seldom a skilled surgeon.
Burton silently cursed Dunaway and wished that there was a hell to which the man could be sent.
Star Spoon lifted a fork of trout to her mouth, chewed while staring out over the gardens below the castle, the jungle river, and the desert beyond. Having swallowed, she said, "I want you to bring in another woman, Dick. One who can take care of your needs. A woman who can laugh and love. I do not mind, I not only do not mind, I would be very pleased.”
"No," he said. "No. That is most generous of you—also very Chinese. I admire the culture and wisdom of your people, But I am not Chinese.”
"It's not just Chinese. It's good common sense. There's no reason why I should be—what did you say the other day?—a dog in the ... ?”
"A dog in the manger. One who owns something he can't use but won't let anybody else use it because he's selfish.”
"A dog in the manger. I am not that. Please, Dick, it would make me less unhappy.”
"But I wouldn't be happy.”
"If it would embarrass you to have another woman here, put her in an apartment and visit her. Or ... I could leave.”
He laughed and said, "Human beings are not androids. I couldn't just raise a woman and imprison her for my own pleasure. In the first place, she might not like me. In the second, even if she did, she would want the company of others. She'd want to be free, not a caged odalisque.”
She reached across the table and put her hand on his. "It is too bad.”
"What? What we've just been talking about?”
"That and much more. Everything." She waved a hand as if to take in the whole universe. "Bad. AH bad.”
"No, it's not. Part is bad, part is good. You've just had more than your share of the bad. But you have time, a long, long time, to get your share of the good.”
She shook her head. "No. Not for me.”
Burton pushed his plate, still half-full, away. An android silently took the plate away.
"I'll stay and talk with you, if you like. I have work to do, but it's not more important than you.”
"I, too, have work," she said. He rose, went around the solid gold table to her, and kissed her cheek. He was curious about what she was doing with the Computer, but, when he asked her about it, she always said that it was uninteresting and she would prefer to hear about his studies.
However, when they left the castle in the armored flying chairs, she seemed to be excited about the party. She chattered away about some amusing incidents in her childhood, and she even laughed several times. Burton thought that it was no good for her to be alone so much or just with him. Yet when they had gone to the weekly meetings, she had been subdued and withdrawn.
During flight, Burton spoke over the transmitter to Star Spoon. "I tried earlier this morning to call Turpinville. Which I suppose will have another name by now. I got no answer. Apparently, whoe'ver's running Turpinville now is not taking calls.”
"Why did you call them?”
"I was curious. I wanted to find out if whoever's in charge intends to be aggressive. It's possible, you know, that he ... they ... won't be content with just ruling Turpinville. He might have some plans for taking over the entire tower.”
"What sense would there be in that?”
"What sense was there in ousting Turpin and grabbing the seat of power? I also called Tom to determine his mood. It was black. Or perhaps scarlet is a better description. He is still vowing vengeance, but he knows that he has no chance of getting that. All they have to do is stay shut up in their world.”
They floated through the doorway into the central area. Burton was surprised by the crowd and the uproar there. Turpin was with Louis Chauvin, Scott Joplin and other musician-friends who had two days ago been in Little St. Louis. Evidently, these had also been hurled out from the little world without anything except the clothes they were wearing. There were also about a hundred other blacks, some of whom he recognized. And something had also happened to Frigate and Lefkowitz and her friends. They were gesticulating angrily and shouting words unintelligible in the great noise. This was added to by the blaring voices from the wall-screens showing each one his or her past.
Li Po and his comrades left their world just then, and their questions swelled the volume of sound.
Burton and Star Spoon eased the chairs onto the floor. He got up and yelled, "What's going on?" but only those very near him could hear.
Frigate had put on an outlandish costume for the party. A huge scarlet bowtie, a lemon-yellow vest with enormous silver buttons, a big sky-blue belt, tight white pants with scarlet seams, and lemon-yellow Wellington boots. His skin color almost matched that of the bowtie.
"We came out of my place," he said, "and found Netley and a dozen others there. They had beamers and guns, and Netley told me that if I didn't give him the codeword, he'd shoot all of us! So I gave it to him! I had to, nothing else I could do! He and his gang went inside and closed the door ... and ... and that's that! We're locked out! Dispossessed! My beautiful world taken away from me!”
"Not to mention from me and my friends," Sophie said. She was dressed in ancient Egyptian fashion, a la Cleopatra. A uraeus headband, a naked torso exposing big shapely breasts— what would Alice think of that?—and a long skirt split in front almost to the crotch. She even had a staff with an ankh at its end. Her companions were in costumes of many periods, Asiatic and European.
"I should have been more cautious!" Frigate cried. "I should have checked on the area outside before we went through the door!”
"He's locking the barn after the horse is stolen," Sophie said. "Crying over spilt milk. Pardon the cliches, but crises always bring out cliches. They're not very creative situations, verbally, anyway.”
Tom Turpin, dressed in tails and a stovepipe hat, came up to them. "It's Thieves' Week!" he said. "They're doing all right, too.”
"What about those?" Burton said, pointing at the weeping and bewildered-looking blacks.
"Them? Those're the good folks, the churchers, Second Chancers, New Christians, Revised Free Will Baptists, and Nichirenites. Boggs and Hawley threw them out a couple of minutes after Pete got his world taken from him.”
At that moment, Stride, Crook, Kelly and their men came out of the lift shaft. Burton left it to others to explain what had happened. He ordered a screen on the wall and called Alice. Her dark eyes widened when she saw the scene behind him and heard the babel. Burton told her what had happened, and he said, "I'm afraid that this may spoil your party.”
"Not at all," she said. "I'm not going to allow anything to do that. I suppose it will take Tom and Peter some time to simmer down, but they can do it, I know. As for those poor people those ruffians kicked out, well, tell them they can come to the party if they wish. It might make them feel better. Of course, it's not as if they can find no home or have to go hungry. Well, anyway, you invite them for me. I'll be waiting." .
Burton went to the milling exiles, asked for quiet, got it, and passed on Alice's invitation. All accepted. These had no flying chairs, but they could have them made in the converter in the anteroom to Alice's world.
Frigate had some drinks made for his party by the anteroom converter so they could soften the shock with liquor while en route to their destination. Sophie took one, a tall glass of gin, but she said, "I'm not so sure that we should spend any time having fun now, Pete. We ought to go over the list of Computer potentialities and put in all the prohibitions we can. We have to forestall anything those scumbags might think of.”
"Good thinking," Burton said, though he had not been addressed. "However, Alice won't like it if you miss her party. And I am sure that the dispossessors are going to be so happy celebrating that they won't be plotting any more trouble for some time.”
"You may be right," Sophie said. "But I think we should all put our heads together tomorrow and try to figure out everything those assholes could do.”
"Our heads are usually not worth much the day after a big party," Burton said. "I'll call you and the others tomorrow about ten in the morning for the big powwow.”
Nur and his woman entered the anteroom, halted, looked around, and then made their way through the crowd to Burton. Nur introduced Ayesha bint Yusuf, a thin brown woman even shorter than Nur. Though she was not pretty, she looked quite charming when she smiled.
Burton said to Nur, "I'll explain later. We have to get out of this noisy mess.”
As he turned to sit down in his chair, he saw Gull and a score of Dowists, all dressed in long flowing white robes, enter. They looked as if they were stunned.
Burton lifted the chair up and shot it through the wide doorway. He climbed until he was two hundred feet high and sped over the massive oak and pine forest, the Tulgey Wood, and the river Issus toward the huge clearing at the foot of the high hill on which Alice's mansion stood. The field was three hundred yards square, perfectly flat, and covered with a bright green grass that never needed mowing. The field held a huge ferris wheel and a roller-coaster on one side and a merry-go-round and a small skating rink and many tables on which were placed food and drinks and white open-sided tents and a bandstand on which androids were playing a waltz and small buildings like tiny Roman villas, which he supposed were comfort stations, and a croquet field and badminton nets and equipment and a dance floor of polished wood and many android servants, almost all of them looking like characters from Lewis Carroll's two famous books.
Under a giant oak at the edge of the field was a house with chimneys shaped like a rabbit's ears and with a roof covered with rabbit fur. Before it was a large table set for tea-time and many chairs around it. A man-sized March Hare and Mad Hatter and a little girl sat at the table. Though she was dressed as Tenniel had illustrated Alice, she did not have her long blonde hair. Alice had ordered an android that looked as she did when she was ten.
"Alice has certainly done herself proud," he muttered as he steered the chair toward the foot of the hill.
She stood there by a chair that looked like the coronation chair in Westminster Hall. There was another and similar chair by it; a tall yellow-haired man stood by it.
"Her surprise!" he said. "I knew it!”
He was hurt, and he was also angry with himself because he could be hurt. So, he had been lying to himself when he had told himself that he felt nothing for her any more.
She certainly looked beautiful. She was wearing her favorite, the flapper's garments of the 1920s. She should have been wearing a hat, since this was an afternoon affair, but Terrestrial rules did not hold now. Her bobbed hair shone black and glossy in the sun. The man, judging by Alice's height, was about six feet four inches tall. He wore the uniform of a Scots chief, kilt, tartan, sporran, and all. As Burton descended, he could make out the black and red checks of the Rob Roy clan on the kilt. The man was a descendant of the famous Scots outlaw, which made him a distant relative of Burton's. He was broad-shouldered and well-muscled, and his face was handsome but very strong. He smiled on seeing the turbaned and robed Burton, and, like a sword cutting a rope and releasing a drawbridge, the smile opened Burton's memory. He was Sir Monteith Maglenna, a Scots baronet and laird. Burton had met him in 1872 when Burton spoke in London before the British National Association of Spiritualists. Burton had upset his audience because of his firm declaration that he did not believe in ghosts and would have no use for them if they did exist. The young baronet had talked with him for a while at the party following the lecture'. Both had traveled in the American West, and the Scot was, like Burton, an amateur archaeologist. They had spent an interesting half-hour while others, hoping to get a chance to defend spiritualism, fretted by them.
Alice, smiling—was there some malice in it?—introduced Burton and Star Spoon. Burton shook his hand and said, at the same time that Maglenna did, "We've met.”
They talked for a few minutes, recalling their old acquaintanceship while the line of people waiting to greet the hostess or be introduced grew longer, and then Burton said, "I say, Alice, how did you know of him?”
"Oh, I met Monty in 1872 when I was twenty years old and he was thirty, at a ball given by the earl of Perth. We danced together quite a few times ...”
"Did we ever," Monteith said.
"... and I saw him several times after that. Then he went off to the States, where he came close to dying, an outlaw shot him, quite accidentally, though, and he did not return until 1880. By then, I was married.”
"I was unable to keep up our correspondence," Maglenna said. "I did write her about my disability, but my letter never got to her. And so ...”
Some androids, at a signal from Alice, picked up the chairs in which Burton and Star Spoon had arrived and carried them across the field to the east end. It would have been quicker and more efficient for them to have flown the chairs to the parking area, but Alice had not had the time or had not wished to take the time to program them to operate the chairs.
Burton listened as Alice told Star Spoon in detail how grief-stricken she had been when she had believed that Maglenna had lost interest in her. Partway through her story, he decided that he had heard more than enough of that. He excused himself and wandered around until Star Spoon rejoined him.
"Did you know about Mr. Maglenna?" she said.
"No!" he said savagely. "She never mentioned him in all the many years that she.was with me!”
"It's very fortunate that they've finally been reunited. Just think, if it weren't for you, they would have never found each other.”
She was smiling as if she were very pleased. Was that because Alice was happy? Or, unhappy creature that she was, did Star Spoon get satisfaction from knowing that he was anything but glad about Maglenna? Some people were so abysmally wretched that their only joy was that others also suffered.