IT WAS LOGHU AND ALICE WHO GOT BURTON AND THE OTHERS onto King John’s boat.
Their group had traveled up-River to the area at which the Rex had anchored for shore leave and repairs. They found the landing place temporarily overpopulated because of those curious to see the great vessel at close range, some of whom were also ambitious to get signed up as crew members. There were some vacancies aboard which rumor said had resulted when the captain had reprimanded too harshly six people whom he thought negligent in their duties. He didn’t seem in any hurry to replace them.
When John came ashore, he was surrounded by twelve marines, who gave him plenty of elbow room. It was no secret, though, that King John had an eye for beautiful women. So Loghu, an exceedingly beautiful ancient Tokharian blonde, walked by him clad only in a short kiltcloth. John stopped his marines and began talking to her. He wasn’t long in inviting her aboard for a tour of his boat. Though he didn’t say so, he intimated that his grand suite might take the longest to inspect and that only he and Loghu should do the inspecting.
Loghu laughed and said that she might come aboard, but her friends would have to come with her. As for the tete-a-tete, she would consider it but would not make up her mind until she had seen everything on the vessel.
King John looked sour, but then he laughed and said that he would show her something that most people didn’t get to see. Loghu was no fool and understood well what he meant. Nevertheless, she knew how desperately necessary it was to get aboard the Rex.
Thus Alice, Burton, Kazz, and Besst were also invited to the tour.
Burton was fuming since he did not wish to get John’s ear by having Loghu behave like a slut. It was the only way, however. His previous declarations that he would find some way to get onto the boat, no matter what the obstacles, had been so much excess steam, impressive but useless. There was no other course to take that would get him more than a very temporary stay on the Rex.
Thus, Loghu had taken a very old and still effective method. Without actually saying so, she had suggested that she might be willing to share John’s bed. Burton hadn’t liked it. He felt iike a whoremonger, and it also angered him that it was a woman who had done what he couldn’t do. He wasn’t as upset as he would have been on Earth or even here many years ago. This world had given him a good opportunity to see what women could do once the inhibitions and strictures of Terrestrial society had been removed. Moreover, it was he who had written: Women the world over are what men have made them. That might have been true in Victorian times, but it no longer applied.
While going back to the boat, Loghu introduced the others. All except Burton were using their native names. He had decided this time not to use his old half-Arab, half-Pathan guise, not to be Mirza Abdullah Bushiri or Abdul Hassan or any of the many similar guises he’d used on Earth and here. This time, for a reason he didn’t explain to his companions, he was posing as Gwalchgwynn, a Dark-Age Welshman who’d lived when the Britons were making their final stand against the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
“It means ‘White Hawk,’ Your Majesty,” he said.
“So?” John said. “You are very dark for a white hawk.”
Kazz, the Neanderthal male, rumbled, “He is a great swordsman and marksman, Your Majesty. He would be a good fighter for you.”
“Perhaps I’ll give him a chance to demonstrate his skill sometime,” John said.
John looked through lowered lids at Kazz. John was five feet four inches in stature, but he looked tall alongside the Neanderthal. Kazz was squat and big-boned, as all early Old Stone Agers were. His breadloaf-shaped head, the low slanting forehead, thick shelving brows, broad flat nose, and very protruding jaws didn’t make him handsome. But he was not subhuman-appearing like the Neanderthals in illustrations or the early reconstructions in museums. He was hairy but no more than the most hirsute of Homo sapiens.
His mate, Besst, was several inches shorter than he and just as unprepossessing.
John was interested in the two of them, however, They were small, but their strength was enormous, and both male and female would be good warriors. The low brows did not necessarily front a low intelligence since the gamut of brilliance to stupidity was the same in Neanderthals as in that of modern humanity.
Half of John’s complement was early Paleolithic: John, nicknamed Lackland because for a long time he’d not been able to possess the states he claimed title to, was the younger brother of King Richard I the Lion-hearted, the monarch to whom the legendary Robin Hood remained loyal while John ruled England as regent. He had broad shoulders and an athletic sturdy frame, a heavy jaw, tawny hair, blue eyes, and a terrible temper, though that was nothing unusual for a medieval king. He’d had a very bad reputation during and after his death, though he was no worse than many kings before or since and better than his brother. Contemporary and later chroniclers united to present an unfair portrait of him. He was so loathed that it became a tradition that no one of the British royal family should be named John.
Richard had designated his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, as his heir. John had refused to accept this, and, while fighting Arthur, had captured him and then imprisoned him in the castle of Falaise and later in Rouen. There Richard’s nephew disappeared under circumstances which made most people believe that John had slain him and then thrown the weighted body into the Seine. John had never denied or confirmed the accusations.
Another blot on his record, .though no larger or blacker than that on the records of many monarchs, was the undeniable fact that he had caused to be starved to death the wife and son of an enemy, the Baron de Braose.
There were many more stories, some of which were true, about his evil deeds. But not until many centuries later did objective historians record that he had also done much good for England.
Burton didn’t know much about John’s life on the River-world except that he had stolen Samuel Clemens’ boat. He also knew that it would not be discreet to mention this to John.
The monarch himself was their guide. He showed them almost everything from the lowest deck to the top, the boiler, main, hurricane, flight, and texas deck, an extension from the lower story of the two-story pilothouse. While they were in the pilothouse, Alice told the king that she was his descendant through his son, John of Gaunt.
“Indeed,” he said. “Were you then a princess or a queen?”
“Not even of the nobility,” she said. “Though I was of the gentry. My father was a relative of Baron Ravensworth. I was born in the Year of Our Lord 1852, when Victoria, another descendant of yours, was queen.”
The king’s tawny eyebrows rose.
“You are the first descendant of mine I’ve ever met. A very pretty one, too.”
“Thank you, Sire.”
Burton burned even more. Was John contemplating incest, however rarified the consanguinity might be?
John had apparently been considering taking all of them on as crewmembers, and Alice’s distant kinship decided him. After they had gone to the grand salon for a drink, he told them that they could, if they wished, travel the river with him. He told them in detail, first, what the general duties of the crew were and what the discipline consisted of, and then demanded they swear an oath of fealty to him.
So far, John had not followed up on his intimations that Loghu go to bed with him, but he undoubtedly meant to. Burton asked if he could talk to the others privately for a minute. John graciously gave permission, and they went to a corner to talk.
“I don’t mind,” Loghu said. “I might even like it. I’ve never been mounted by a king. Anyway, I have no man now and I haven’t since that bastard Frigate ran out on us. John isn’t a bad looker at all, even if he is shorter than I am.”
On Earth, Alice would have been horrified. But she’d seen too much and changed too much; most of her Victorian attitudes had long dissipated.
“As long as it’s voluntary,” she said, “then it’s not wrong.”
“I’d do it if it were wrong,” Loghu said. “We have too much at stake for me to be squeamish.”
“I don’t like it,” Burton said. He was relieved but didn’t want to admit it. “But if we miss this boat, we may not get a chance to get on the other. I’d say that boarding the Mark Twain would be as difficult as it would be for a politician to get into Heaven.
“However, if he should mistreat you...”
“Oh, I can take care of myself,” Loghu said. “If I can’t throw that runt clear across the cabin, I’ve lost my touch! As a last resort I can crack his nuts.”
Alice hadn’t changed so much that she didn’t blush.
“He might even make you his Number One mistress,” Kazz said. “Haw! That’d make you queen then! Hail, Queen Loghu!”
“I’m more worried about his current mistress than I am about him,” Loghu said. “John wouldn’t stab me in the back, though he might try to take me in the rear, but his woman might put a knife in my spine.”
“I still feel like a pimp,” Burton said.
“Why should you? You don’t own me.”
They returned to John and told him that they wished to take the oath.
John ordered drinks for the occasion. After these, he had his executive officer, a huge late-twentieth-century Yank named Augustus Strubewell, make arrangements for the swearing-in that evening.
Two days later, the Rex up-anchored and set out up-River. Alice was attached as a nurse to the staff of one of the boat’s physicians, a Doctor Doyle. Loghu was to be trained as a pilot, after which she would be officially a pilot second-class, extra. The duties would require only that she substitute if one of the second-class pilots was unavailable. She would have plenty of spare time unless John kept her busy in his suite, which he did for some time to come. The woman she dispossessed seemed to be angry about it, but was only pretending. She’d been getting as tired of John as he of her.
Kazz and Burton were ranked as privates in the marines. Kazz was an axeman; Burton, a pistoleer and rapiersman. Besst was put among the women archers.
One of the first things that Burton did was find out who on the boat claimed to have lived past A.D. 1983. There were four. One was Strubewell. He’d been with John when he hijacked the boat.
WHEN THE REVEREND MR. DODGSON, BETTER KNOWN AS LEWIS Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland, he prefaced it with a poem. It begins with “All in the golden afternoon” and compresses that famous journey by boat up the Isis during which Dodgson was teased by the real Alice into writing down the tale he’d composed to please the “cruel Three.”
On that day of July 4,1852, golden in memory only because it actually was cool and wet, Dodgson, who would be the Dodo in Alice and the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, was accompanied by Reverend Duckworth, who naturally became the Duck. Lorina, aged thirteen, was the Lory, and Alice, age ten, Dodgson’s favorite, was of course Alice. Edith, the youngest sister, aged eight, would be the Eaglet.
The three little girls were the daughters of Bishop Liddell, whose surname rhymed with fiddle, as evidenced by a poem-“ about the bishop sung by the rowdy Oxford students. Dodgson’s verse refers to the girls in Latin ordinals according to the ages. Prima, Secunda, and Tertia.
It seemed to Alice now, as she stood in the middle of Richard’s and her cabin, that she had in truth played the part of Secunda during her Earthly life. Certainly on this world she was Secunda. Richard Burton regarded few men as his equal and no women, not even his wife and perhaps especially his wife, as equals.
She hadn’t minded. She was dreamy, gentle and introverted. As Dodgson had written of her:
Still she haunts me, phantomwise.
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
That would become true in more senses than Dodgson could have dreamed of. Now she was under a sky in which even at the blaze of noon she could see near the tops of the mountains the faint phantom glow of a few giant stars. And in the moonless night sky was the blaze of great gas sheets and enormous stars which shed the light of a full moon.
Under the light of day and night, she had been content, even eager, to have Richard make the decisions. These had often involved violence, and, contrary to her nature, she had fought like an Amazon. Though she did not have the physique of a Penthesilea, she did have the courage.
Life on the Riverworld had often been harsh, cruel, and bloody. After dying on Earth, she’d awakened naked and with all body hair shaven, in the body she’d had when she was twenty-five, though she’d died when eighty-two. Around her was not the room of the house in which she’d died, her sister Rhoda’s in Westerham, Kent. Instead towering unbroken mountain ranges enclosed the plains and the foothills and the river in the middle of the valley. As far as she could see, people stood on the banks, all naked, hairless, young and in shock, screaming, weeping, laughing hysterically, or in horror-struck silence.
She knew no one and had by impulse attached herself to Burton. However, one of the items in her grail was a chiclelike stick containing some sort of psychedelic substance. She’d chewed it, and then she and Burton had copulated furiously all night and also done things she then regarded as perverted and some things which she still did.
She’d loathed herself in the morning and felt like killing herself. Burton she’d hated as she’d never hated anyone. But she continued to stay with him since anyone she switched to might be worse. Also she had to admit that he too was under the gum’s influence, and he did not press her to renew, as she then thought of it, their carnal acquaintance. Burton would have used an Anglo-Saxonism, as he called it, to describe their coupling.
In time she’d fallen in love with him—had, in fact, been in love that night—and they began living together. Living together was not exactly accurate since a good half of her time she spent by herself in their hut. Burton was the most restless man she’d ever known. After a week in one place he must be up and moving: From time to time they’d had quarrels, he doing most of the quarreling, though by now she could hold her own. Eventually he disappeared for years and returned with a story that turned out to be the essence of cock-and-bull.
She was very hurt when she finally found out that he’d kept his most important secret from her for years. He’d been visited one night by a robed and masked being who said that he was an Ethical, one of the Council which governed those responsible for the resurrections of thirty-five billion or so Terrestrials.
The story went that these Ethicals had raised humanity to life to perform certain experiments. They meant to let humankind die, never to be resurrected again. One of the Council, this Ethical, this “man,” was secretly opposing this.
Burton was skeptical. But when the other Ethicals tried to seize him, Burton had run. He was forced to kill himself several times, utilizing the principle of resurrection, to get far away from his pursuers. After a while he decided that he might as well keep going. After 777 suicides, he awoke in the Council room of the twelve. These had told him what he knew already from X, that is, that there was a renegade among them. So far, they hadn’t been able to detect who he or she was. But they would.
Now that they had caught him, they would keep him under permanent surveillance. The memory of his visits from the Ethicals, in fact, everything since he’d first known X, would be wiped out of his mind.
Burton, however, on waking on the banks of The River, had found his memory unimpaired. Somehow, X has succeeded in averting the erasure and in fooling his colleagues.
Burton reasoned also that X must have arranged it so that the Ethicals couldn’t find him whenever they wished to. Burton had gone up-River then, looking for the others whom X had recruited. Just when and how they could help him, X wouldn’t say, though he promised to reveal the time and the methods at a later time.
Something had gone wrong. X hadn’t appeared for years, and the resurrections had suddenly stopped.
Then Burton had found out that the Peter Jairus Frigate and the Tau Cetan, who’d been with Burton from the beginning, were either Ethicals or the Ethicals’ agents. Before Burton could seize them, the two had fled.
Burton could no longer hide his secret from his companions. Alice was shocked by the story, stunned.. Later, she became furious. Why hadn’t he told her the truth long ago? Burton had explained that he wanted to protect her. If she knew the truth, she might be subject to abduction and questions and God only knew what else by the Ethicals.
Since that time, she’d been slowly burning. The repressed anger had now and then broken out, and the flames had scorched Burton. He, always willing to burn back, had quarreled with her. And though they’d always reconciled afterward, Alice knew that the day of parting had to come soon.
She should have made the break before signing on the Rex. But she also wanted to know the answers to the mysteries of the Riverworld. If she stayed behind, she would always regret not having gone on. So she had boarded with Richard, and here she was in their cabin wondering what to do next.
Also, she had to confess that there was more to her being here than the desire to reveal mysteries. For the first time in her life on this world, she had hot and cold running water and a comfortable toilet and bed and air-conditioning and a grand salon in which she could see movies and stage plays and hear music, classical and popular, played by orchestras which used the instruments known on Earth, not the clay and skin and bamboo substitutes used on the banks. There was also bridge and whist and other games. All these comforts of body and soul and others were hers. They would be hard to give up.
It was indeed a strange situation for a bishop’s daughter born May 4, 1852, next to Westminster Abbey. Her father was not only the dean of Christ Church College but famous as the co-editor of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. Her mother was a beautiful and cultured woman who looked as if she were Spanish. Alice Pleasance Liddell came to Oxford when she was four and almost immediately made friends with the shy, stammering mathematician-clergyman with the offbeat sense of humor. Both lived in Tom Quad so that their meetings were frequent.
As the daughters of a bishop of royal and noble descent, she and her sisters had not been allowed to play with other children very often. They were educated principally by their governess, Miss Prickett, a woman who strove mightily to teach her girls but had not enough education herself. Nevertheless, Alice enjoyed all the advantages of a privileged Victorian childhood. John Ruskin was her drawing teacher. She often managed to eavesdrop on the conversations of her father’s dinner guests: the Prince of Wales, Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, and many other notables and greats.
She was a pretty child, dark, her straight hair in bangs, her face a reflection of her quiet dreaming soul when she was pensive but bright and eager when stimulated, especially by Dodgson’s wild stories. She read a lot and was largely self-educated.
She liked to play with her black cat, Dinah, and to tell her stories which were never as good as the reverend’s. Her favorite song was “Star of Evening,” which Dodgson was to satirize in Alice as the Mock Turtle’s song, “Turtle Soup.”
Soup of the evening, beautiful soup! Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!
The real Alice’s favorite section of the book, however, was that about the Cheshire Cat. She loved cats, and even when she’d grown up she would occasionally talk to her pet as if it were human when no one else was around.
She’d grown up to be a good-looking woman with a splendid physique and something special about her, an indefinable misty air which had attracted Dodgson when she was a child and had also drawn Ruskin and others. To them she was the “child of pure unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder.”
Despite her adult attractiveness, she did not get married until she was twenty-eight, which made her an old maid in Victorian 1880. Her husband, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves of the estate of Cuffnells, near Lyndhurst, Hampshire, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, and became a justice of the peace, living a very quiet life with Alice and her three sons. He liked to read, especially French literature, to ride and hunt, and he had a huge arboretum which included Douglas pines and redwoods.
Despite certain inhibitions and awkwardness in the beginning, she had adjusted to the sexual act and came to desire it. She loved her husband, and she sorrowed deeply when he died in 1926.
But Burton she had loved with a passion far exceeding that for Reginald.
No longer, she told herself.
She couldn’t put up with his eternal restlessness, though it looked as if he would be staying in one place for many years now. But it was the place that was moving him. His rages, his eagerness to pick a quarrel, his intense jealousy, were becoming tiresome. The very traits which had attracted her because she had lacked them were now driving her away.
The greatest wedge was that he had kept to himself The Secret.
The trouble with leaving Richard at once was that she had no place to go. All the cabins were taken. Some were occupied by single men, but she did not intend to move in with a man she didn’t love.
Richard would have scoffed at that. He claimed that all he wanted in a woman was beauty and affection. He also preferred blondes, but in her case he had waived this requirement. He would tell her to find some good-looking man with at least passable manners and live with him. No, he wouldn’t. He would threaten to kill her if she left him. Or would he? Surely, he must be getting as tired of her as she was of him.
She sat down and smoked a cigarette, something she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing on Earth, and she considered what to do. After a while, finding no answer, she left the cabin and went to the grand salon. There was always something pleasant or exciting there.
In the salon she walked around for a few minutes admiring the paintings and statuettes and listening to a piece by Liszt being played on the piano.
While she was feeling very lonely and hoping that someone would come up and break her mood, a woman approached her. She was about five feet tall, slim, long-legged, and had medium-sized conical breasts with up-tilted nipples thinly covered with a wispy cloth. Her features were beautiful despite her somewhat too long nose.
Exposing very white and even teeth, the blonde said, in Esperanto, “Hello, I’m Aphra Behn, one of His Majesty’s pistoleers and ex-mistresses, though he still likes an occasional rerun. You’re Alice Liddel, right? The woman of the fierce-looking ugly-handsome Welshman, Gwalchgwynn.”
Alice acknowledged that she was right and asked immediately, “Are you the authoress of OroonokoT
Aphra smiled again. “Yes, and of several plays. It’s nice to know that I was not unknown in the twentieth century. Do you play bridge? We’re looking for a fourth.”
“I haven’t played for thirty-four years,” Alice said. “But I loved it. If you don’t mind some clumsiness at first...”
“Oh, we’ll sharpen you up, though it may hurt some,” Aphra said. She laughed and led Alice by her hand toward a table near a wall and below a huge painting. This depicted Theseus entering the heart of Minos’ labyrinth where the Minotaur awaited him. Ariadne’s thread was tied to the hero’s enormous erection.
Aphra, seeing Alice’s expression, grinned.
“Does give you a start when you first see it, doesn’t it? Don’t know if Theseus is going to kill the bullman with his sword or bugger him to death, what?”
“If he does the latter,” Alice said, “he’ll break the thread and won’t be able to find his way back out to Ariadne.”
“Lucky woman,” Aphra said. “She can die still thinking he loves her, not knowing he plans to desert her at the first opportunity.”
So this was Aphra Amis Behn, the novelist, poet, and dramatist whom London called the Incomparable Astrea, after the divine star maiden of classical Greek religion. Before she died in 1689 at the age of forty-nine, she had written a novel, Oroonoko, which was a sensation in her time and was reprinted in 1930, giving Alice a chance to read it before she died. The book had been very influential in the development of the novel, and Aphra’s contemporaries rated her with Defoe when she was at her best. Her plays were bawdy and coarse but witty and had delighted the theatergoers. She was the first English woman to support herself entirely by writing, and she had also been a spy for Charles II during the war against the Dutch. Her behavior was scandalous, even for the Restoration period, but she was buried in Westminster Abbey, an honor denied the equally scandalous and far more famous Lord Byron.
Two men were waiting impatiently at the table. Aphra made the introductions, giving a slight biography of each.
The man at the west end of the table was Lazzaro Spallan-zani, born A.D. 1729, died 1799. He had been one of the more well-known natural scientists of his time and was chiefly noted for his experiments with bats to determine how they could fly through total darkness. He’d discovered that they did so by use of a form of sonar, though that term wasn’t known in his day. He was short, slim, dark, and obviously Italian though he spoke Esperanto.
The man who sat at the north end was Ladislas Podebrad, a Czech. He was of medium height (for the middle and late twentieth century), very broad, muscular, and thick-necked. His hair was yellow, and his eyes were cold and blue; The eyebrows were very thick and yellowish. His eaglish nose was large, and his massive chin was deeply clefted. Though his hands were broad—as big as a bear’s, thought Alice, who tended to exaggerate—and the fingers were relatively short, he handled the cards like a Mississippi riverboat gambler.
Aphra commented that he’d been picked up only eight days ago and that he was an electromechanical engineer with a doctor’s degree. She also said—and here Alice was suddenly very interested—that Podebrad had attracted John’s attention when John saw him standing .by the wreck of an airship on the left bank. After hearing Podebrad’s story and his qualifications, John had invited him to come aboard as an engineer’s mate in the engine room. The duraluminum keel and gondola of the semirigid dirigible had been cut up and put in a storage room in the Rex.
Podebrad didn’t talk much, seeming to be one of those bridge players who was all intent on the game. But since Behn and Spallanzani chattered back and forth, Alice was emboldened to ask him some questions. He replied tersely, but gave no outward signs of being annoyed. This didn’t mean that he wasn’t; his face was stony throughout the playing.
Podebrad explained that he had been head of a state far far down-River called Nova Bohemujo, Esperanto for New Bohemia. He’d been qualified for the position since he’d also been head of a government post in Czechoslovakia and a prominent member of the Communist party. He no longer was a Communist, though, since that ideology was as useless and irrelevant as capitalism was here. Also, he’d been very attracted to the Church of the Second Chance, though he’d never joined. He’d had a recurring dream that there were large deposits of iron and other minerals deep under the area of Nova Bohemujo. After much urging, he’d gotten his people to dig for them. This was a long and wearisome task and wore out many flint, chert, and wood tools, but his zeal had kept them at it. Besides, it gave them something to do.
“You must realize that I am not at all superstitious,” Podebrad said in a basso profundo. “I despise oneiromancy, and I would have ignored this series of dreams, no matter how sustained and compelling they were. That is, under most circumstances I would have. It seemed to me that they were the expressions of my unconscious, a term I didn’t like to use, since I reject Freudianism, but useful here to describe the phenomena I was experiencing. They were, at first, only the expressions of my wishes to find metal, or so I thought. Then I came to believe that there might be another explanation, though the first was really no explanation. Perhaps there was an affinity between metal and myself, some sort of earth current that put me in its circuit, that is, the metal was one pole and I the other so that I felt the flow of energy.”
And he says he isn’t superstitious, Alice thought. Or is he kidding me?
Richard, however, would have gone for that sort of rot. He believed that there was an affinity between himself and silver. When he’d suffered from ophthalmia in India, he’d placed silver coins on his eyes, and, when he had gout in his old age, he’d put them on his feet.
“Though I do not believe in dreams as manifestations of the unconscious, I do believe that they may be a medium for transmission of telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception,” Podebrad said. “Much experimentation was done with ESP in the Soviet Union. Whatever the reason, I felt strongly that there was metal deep under the surface of Nova Bohemujo. And there was. Iron, bauxite, cryolite, vanadium, platinum, tungsten, and other ores. All jumbled together, not in a natural strata. Evidently whoever re-formed this planet had piled the ores there during the process.”
All this was said between bidding, of course. Podebrad talked as if he hadn’t been interrupted, picking up exactly where he’d left off.
Podebrad had industrialized his state. His people had been armed with steel swords and fiberglass bows and firearms. He’d built two armored steamboats, neither nearly as large as the Rex.
“Not for conquest but for defense. The other states were jealous of our mineral wealth and would have liked to possess it, but they didn’t dare attack. My ultimate object, however, was to build a large boat with screw propellers to travel to the headwaters of The River. I didn’t know at that time that there were two giant boats already coming up The River. If I had known, I would have built my own vessel anyway.
“Eventually I fell in with some adventurers who proposed to get to the headwaters by means of an airship. Their idea intrigued me and soon after I made the blimp and set out in it. But a storm wrecked it. I and my crew got out alive, and then the Rex came along.”
The game was over a few minutes later with Podebrad and Alice winners and Spallanzani angrily demanding why Podebrad had led with a diamond instead of a club. The Czech refused to tell him but said that he should be able to figure it out for himself. He congratulated Alice on her correct playing. Alice thanked him, but she still didn’t know any more than Spallanzani how Podebrad had done it.
Before they parted, however, she said, “Sinjorino Behn forgot to say exactly when you were born and died on Earth.”
He looked sharply at her.
“Perhaps that is because she doesn’t know. Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, I’m just interested in that sort of thing.”
He shrugged and said, “A.D. 1912 to 1980.”
Alice hurried off to find Burton before she had to go on duty and learn to set bones and make plaster-of-paris casts. She caught him in the corridor on the way to their cabin. He was sweating, his dark skin looking like oiled bronze. He’d just finished two hours of stick-fighting and fencing and had half an hour before he fell in for drill.
On the way to the cabin, she told him about Podebrad. He asked her why she seemed so excited about the Czech.
“It’s nonsense, that about his dream,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I think about it. I think he’s an agent who got stranded and who knew where that deposit of ores was. He used the dream as an excuse to get his people to dig it up. Then he built the blimp and tried to get to the tower itself, not just the headwaters. He must have!”
“Oh, reeeally,” Burton drawled in that infuriating manner. “What other slight evidence do you have, if it’s even slight? After all, the chap didn’t live past 1983.”
“That’s what he said! But how do we know that some agents... you’ve said so yourself.. .haven’t changed their story? Anyway...”
She paused, her whole being radiating eagerness.
“Yaas?”
“You described the council of twelve. He looks like he might be the one called Thanabur or maybe the one called Loga!”
That rocked him. But after a few seconds, he said, “Describe this man again.”
When he’d heard her out he shook his head.
“No. Both Loga and Thanabur had green eyes. Loga was red-headed, and Thanabur was brown haired. This Podebrad has yellow hair and blue eyes. He may look much like them, but I suppose there are millions who do.”
“But Richard! Hair color can be changed! He wasn’t wearing those plastic lens that can change the eye color that Frigate told us about. But don’t you think the Ethicals would have the means to change eye color without obvious aids?”
“It’s possible. I’ll take a look at the fellow.”
After showering, he bustled down to the grand salon. Not finding Podebrad there he returned to the engine room. Later when he next met Alice, Burton said, “We’ll have to see. He could be Thanabur or Loga. If one can be a chameleon, the other can. But it’s been twenty-eight years since I saw them, and our meeting was very brief. I really can’t say.”
“Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
“I can’t very well arrest him on John’s boat! No. We’ll just have to watch him, and if we get something to justify our suspicions, then we’ll see what we can do.
“Remember Spruce the agent. When we caught him, he killed himself just by thinking a sort of code and released poison into his system from that little black ball in his brain. It’ll be very tricky if we do act, and we can’t until we’re sure. Personally, I think it’s just a coincidence. Now, Strube-well... there’s someone we don’t have any doubt about. Well, not much perhaps. After all, it’s only a theory that anyone claiming to be post-1983 is an agent. It is possible that we just haven’t met many.”
“Well, I’ll be playing bridge a lot with Podebrad, if I don’t come a duffer. I’ll watch him.”
“Be very careful, Alice. If he is one of Them, he’ll be very observant. In fact, you shouldn’t have asked him about the dates. That may have put him on his guard. You should have found out from someone else.”
“Can’t you ever give me full credit?” she said, and she walked out.
LOGHU WAS NO LONGER THE KING’S FAVORITE.
King John had become so smitten with a very pretty redhead with large blue eyes whom he’d seen on the bank that he decided to stay in the area for a while. The boat was anchored by a large dock the locals had built long ago. After two days to make sure that the people here were as friendly as they pretended to be, John permitted shore leave. He didn’t say anything to anybody at first about his sudden attack of irresistible lechery, but his behavior made that obvious.
Loghu didn’t especially care that she had to leave the grand suite after John had talked the woman into going to bed with him. She wasn’t in love with him. Besides, she was more than somewhat interested in one of the locals, a big dark Tokharian. Though he wasn’t of her century, he was of her nation, and they had many things to talk about between lovemaking. However, she was humiliated that she had lasted such a short time with the monarch, and she was heard to mutter that she might just push John overboard some dark night. There had been, there were now, there would be many who would like to remove him from the living.
Burton stood guard duty the first night. The next, he moved into a hut with Alice near the dock. The people here, most of whom were Early Minoan Cretans, were hospitable and fun-loving. They danced and sang around the bonfires in the evening until their allotment of lichen alcohol was gone and then reeled to bed to sleep or couple or “pluralize,” as Burton called it. He was happy to stay here for a few weeks anyway because he’d have a chance to add the language to his now long list. He mastered its basic grammar and vocabulary quickly since it was closely related to Phoenician and Hebrew. There were, however, many words which were non-Semitic, these having been borrowed from the aboriginals of Crete while the conquerors from the Middle East were assimilating them. They all spoke Esperanto, of course, though it deviated somewhat from the artificial tongue invented by Dr. Zamenhof.
John had no trouble getting his new mistress to agree to go to bed with him. But he had a problem. There was no cabin space for Loghu, and he couldn’t throw her off the boat without a good reason. Autocratic though he was, he was able to override her rights. His crew would see to that. Remembering the Magna Carta, he did not buck them, but he was undoubtedly trying to think of a way to get rid of Loghu which would seem justifiable.
On the fourth night of shore leave, while John was in his grand suite with Blue-eyes, and Burton was with Alice in their small but comfortable quarters, a helicopter dropped out of the night sky onto the landing deck of the Rex.
Burton would find out very much later that the raiders came from the airship Parseval and had been ordered to capture King John if they could or to kill him if they couldn’t. All he knew then was that the gunfire of the Rex meant bad trouble. He put on a cloth around his waist and fastened it with the magnetic tabs inside the material. Then, grabbing a rapier and a fully loaded pistol from the table by the bed, he ran outside while Alice was still yelling to him. He could hear men screaming and shouting in the midst of shots and then a great explosion apparently in the engine room. He ran as fast as he could toward the boat. There were lights on in the pilothouse; somebody was at the controls. Then the paddle wheels began to turn. The boat started moving backward, but Burton leaped onto the promenade of the boiler deck just before the lines tied to the pilings pulled them down and the dock collapsed. ,
A moment later, a stranger came down the stairs from the lowest story of the pilothouse. Burton emptied his pistol at him but missed. Cursing, he dropped the gun and proceeded toward the fellow. Then the slippery one showed up again with a rapier in his hand.
Never had Burton faced such a demon with his sword! No wonder. The tall thin demon was Cyrano de Bergerac! Playfully he introduced himself during a lull in the swordplay but Burton saw no such reason to waste breath. Both were slightly wounded—a good indication that they were evenly matched. Somebody shouted, Burton’s attention was distracted and that was enough. The Frenchman drove his blade deep into Burton’s thigh.
He fell to the deck, helpless. The agony came a few seconds later, making him clench his teeth to keep from screaming. De Bergerac was a gallant man. He made no effort to kill Burton, and, when one of his men appeared a moment after, de Bergerac told him not to shoot Burton.
The helicopter lifted off shortly thereafter as men shot at it from the deck. Before it had gotten a hundred feet, however, a naked white body appeared in the beam of a searchlight and then dropped into the darkness. Somebody had either leaped or been thrown from the craft. Burton guessed that it was King John.
Groaning, Burton wrapped the heavily bleeding wound in a cloth, tied its ends, and forced himself to hobble to the steps leading up to the pilothouse base. The Rex was drifting down-River, and there was nothing to do about it. John was hauled aboard moments later, unconscious, an arm and a leg broken.
Five miles downstream, the Rex beached, and, ten minutes later, the first of the men who’d run all the way along the bank, following the boat, came aboard.
Doctor Doyle set John’s bones and administered Irish coffee for shock.
When John was fit enough to curse and rave, he did so. But he was glad to be alive, and the engine could be repaired with the precious aluminum wire in the storage room. That would take a month, though, and meanwhile the Clemens boat was slowly gaining on them.
Since twelve guards had been killed, there was a cabin for Loghu to move into. The king had to replace the dead men, but he seemed to be in no hurry to do so. After days of examining candidates and then putting some through mental and physical tests, he chose only two.
“There’s no hurry,” he said. “I want only the best. These locals are a scroungy lot.”
One result of the raid was that John became fond of Burton, whom he gave the most credit for saving his life. He couldn’t promote him over the heads of Burton’s fellow marines, but he could make him a bodyguard. And he promised Burton to give him a commission whenever it was possible to do so. Burton and Alice moved into the cabin next to John’s quarters. Burton was displeased in one way because he liked to dance attendance to no man. However, it did give him an opportunity to be with Strubewell a lot and to study him. He listened carefully to the man’s speech for traces of a foreign accent. If Strubewell was an agent, he had mastered American Midwestern.
Alice kept an intent eye and ear on Podebrad while playing bridge and during other social activities. Loghu liked one of the suspected agents, a huge man named Arthur Pal who claimed to have been a Hungarian electrical engineer, so she moved in with him after his mate left him. Burton’s suspicions were increased when Loghu noted that Pal spent much time with Podebrad. Her efforts to trip him up on his story were fruitless, but Burton said that if enough time elapsed she was “ bound to do so. If the agents had a common story, they would have memorized it. However, they were (presumably) human and so would make mistakes. One contradiction would be enough.
Alice still had not been able to bring herself to force the split with Burton. She kept hoping that he would change his attitude toward her enough to justify staying with him. That their duties kept them apart most of the day helped ease matters. He seemed so glad to see her at the end of the day that she felt better, and she talked herself into believing that they would get back to their original passionate state. They were like an old married couple in many ways. They still had a certain fluctuating affection but were increasingly irritated by character traits they could have once easily overlooked.
In one sense, they were old though their youthful bodies had been restored. She had lived on Earth to be eighty-two and he to sixty-nine. (“Considering my sexual preferences, a significant age at which to die,” Burton had once drawled.) A long life tended to ossify more than the arteries; it also ossified habits and attitudes. It made it much more difficult to adjust, to change one’s self for the better. The impact of the resurrection and the Riverworld had shattered many people’s beliefs and helped set them up for change. It had decalcified many, though in some the fragmentation was only slight, in others much more, and many had been unable to adjust at all.
Alice had suffered a metamorphosis in many respects, though her basic character remained. It was down there in the abysm of the soul, the deeps which make the spaces between the stars seem a mere step over a puddle. It was the same with Burton.
So Alice stayed with him, hoping what she knew was hopeless.
At times, she dreamed of finding Reginald again. But she also knew that that was even more hopeless. She would never go back to him whether he had remained the same or changed. It was doubtful that he had changed. He was a good man, but, like all the good, he had faults, some grave, and he was too stubborn to change.
The thing was that no caterpillar could ever effect a metamorphosis in another. The other, if it is to become a butterfly, must do it itself. The difference between man and caterpillar was that the insect was pre-programmed and the human had to re-program himself.
Thus the days passed for Alice, though there was much more to them than thinking such thoughts.
And then one day, when the Rex connected its batacitor and grail lines to a stone on the right bank, the stone failed to discharge.
SHOCK AND PANIC.
Fifteen years ago, the grailstones on the left bank had quit operation. Twenty-four hours later, they had resumed functioning. King John had been told by Clemens that the line had been severed by a great meteorite but that it had been reconnected and all damage restored in that amazingly short period. It must have been done by the Ethicals, though anybody in the area to witness the re-forming had been overcome by something—probably a gas—and slept through the whole project. Now the question was: Would the line be repaired again?; the lesser question: What caused this disaster? Another meteorite? Or was it one more step downward in the breakdown of this world?
King John, though stunned, rallied swiftly. He sent his officers to calm down the crew, and he gave orders to serve everybody the mixture of lichen alcohol, water, and powdered irontree blooms called grog on the Rex.
After all were soaked enough in the drink that gives good cheer and courage, he ordered that the copper “feeder” cap be taken back into the boat. Then the Rex proceeded up-river in the shallows near the left bank. There was enough energy in the batacitor to keep the boat going until the next mealtime. When it was two hours to dusk, John commanded that it stop and the copper cap be attached to a stone.
As expected, the locals refused to “loan” a stone to the Rex. One of the steam machine guns loosed a stream of plastic bullets over the heads of the crowd on the bank, and it ran back panicked halfway across the plain. The two amphibian launches, once named Firedragon I and II, now Eleanor and Henry, rumbled onto shore and stood guard while the cap was placed over the stone. Within an hour, however, locals from stones as far away as a mile on each side gathered, including those whose grailstones were in the foothills. Whooping war cries, yelling, thousands of men and women charged the amphibians and the riverboat. At the same time, five hundred in boats attacked from the water.
Exploding shells and rockets from the Rex wiped out hundreds. The steam guns mowed down hundreds more. The marines and crew members lined along the railings shot rifles, pistols, and arrows, and launched small rockets from bazookas.
The bank and the waters around the Rex quickly became bloodied and strewn with corpses and pieces of corpses. The charge broke, but not before small and large rockets sent by the locals had done some damage and killed and wounded some of John’s people.
Burton could still barely walk though wounds healed more quickly than they would have on Earth. He nevertheless dragged himself to the railing of the texas-deck promenade and fired a rifle with .48-caliber wooden bullets. He hit at least a third of his targets, which were on The River side. When all the boats, dugouts, canoes, war canoes, and sailing boats had been sunk, he struggled around to the other side to help.
He got there in time for the third and final charge. This had been preceded by much haranguing by the enemy officers, pounding of drums, and blowing of fishhorns, and then, with another yell, the locals ran toward the boat. By this time, the launches had exhausted their ammunition and retreated to the dock in the rear of the motherboat. However, the two fighter planes, the single-seater reconnaissance, the torpedo bomber, and the helicopter went up to add their fire.
Almost, a few locals reached the water. Then, the ranks wilting, they broke and fled. Shortly thereafter, the stones boomed and flashed, and the grails and the batacitor were recharged.
“God’s teeth!” King John said, his eyes wild. “Today was bad enough! Tomorrow...! God save us!”
He was right. Before dawn the next day, the hunger-mad right-bankers came in hordes. Every boat available, including many two-masters, was jammed to capacity with men and women. Behind them came another horde of swimmers. And when the sun rose, for as far as the eye could reach, The River was alive with vessels and swimmers. The front ranks, the boats, were met with all the rockets and arrows the defenders had. Nevertheless, most of the boats grounded, and from them leaped the right-bankers.
Caught between two forces, the Rex battled mightily. Its fire cleared space around the grailstones, and the amphibians, spouting flame, rolled on their trackless treads to the stone. While they kept off the raging defenders and attackers alike, the crane of the Henry swung the cap onto the stone.
The grailstones thundered, and immediately the cap was swung off by the crane, which then telescoped into the interior of the Henry.
After the launches had returned to the boat, John ordered that the anchor be’ taken up. “And then full power ahead!” It was easier commanded than carried out. The press of vessels around the Rex was so great that it could move only very slowly. While the paddle wheels dug into the water, and the prow crushed into pieces the large sailing boats and ground the smaller between them, the right-bankers bombarded it. Men and women managed to clamber onto the promenade of the boiler deck, though they didn’t stay there long.
Finally, the Rex broke loose and headed for the other shore. There it swung into the weaker current near the bank and forged up-River. Across the stream, the battle was still raging.
At noon, John had to decide whether or not to recharge. After a minute of deliberation, he ordered the boat to anchor by a big dock.
“We’ll let them kill each other,” he said. “We have plenty of smoked and dried food to keep us going through tomorrow. The day after, we’ll recharge. By then the slaughter should be over.”
The right bank was a strange sight indeed. They had gotten so used to seeing its throngs, noisy, chattering, laughing, that the unpeopled land was eerie ./On this side, except for a very few wise or timid persons who’d elected not to try to fill their bellies at the expense of the left-bankers, not a soul was to be seen. The huts and the longhouses and the big state log buildings were tenantless, and so were the plains and the foothills. Since no animals, birds, insects or reptiles existed on this planet, only the wind rustling the leaves of the few trees on the plains made any sound.
By then, the warring peoples across the stream had exhausted their gunpowder, and only occasionally could the Rexites hear a very low murmur, the diluted and compressed sound of people voicing their fury, hunger, and fear, their pain and their deaths.
The casualties on the Rex from both days were thirty dead and sixty wounded, twenty seriously, though it might be said that any wound was taken seriously by the sufferers. The corpses were cast in weighted fishskin bags and into the middle of The River after a brief ceremony. The bags were only to spare the feelings of the survivors since the bags would be ripped open and the flesh devoured by the fish before they reach the bottom.
Along the left bank the waters were thick with corpses, bumping into each other while the eating fish thrashed the bloodied waters. For a month, the logjam of bodies made The River hideous. Everywhere, apparently, the fighting had taken place, and it would be a long time before the drifting corpses disappeared. Meanwhile, the fish ravened, and the colossal riverdragonfish came up from the depths and took the bloating dead whole in their mouths until their stomachs were crammed. And when they had digested and eliminated these, they rose again to feed and to digest and to eliminate.
“It’s Armageddon, the.Apocalypse,” Burton said to Alice, and he groaned.
Alice wept more than once, and she had nightmares. Burton comforted her so much that she felt that they were close again.
The afternoon of the next day, the Rex ventured across The River to recharge. But instead of going on, it went back to the right bank. It was necessary to make gunpowder and to repair damages. That took a month, during which time Burton completely recovered from his wound.
After the boat resumed its journey, some of its crew were tasked with making a count of the survivors in various areas picked at random. The result: an estimate that nearly half the population must have been killed, if the fighting had occurred on the same scale everywhere. Seventeen and a half billion people had died within twenty-four hours.
It was a long time before gaiety came back to the riverboat, and the people on the bank behaved like ghosts. Even worse than the effect of the slaughter was the dread thought: What if the remaining grailstone line quits?
Now, thought Burton, was the time to question the suspected agents. But if they were cornered, they might kill themselves even if no resurrection awaited them. And there was also the restraint that the post-1983 people might be innocent.
He would wait. He could do nothing else but wait.
Meanwhile, Loghu was subtly questioning her cabinmate, and Alice, though not subtle, was doing her best with Podebrad. And Burton was waiting for Strubewell to make a slip.
Several days after the voyage had started again, John decided that he would do some recruiting. He stopped the Rex during the noontime meal and went ashore to make it known that he had empty berths to fill.
Burton, as Sergeant Gwalchgwynn, had the duty with others of wandering through the crowd looking for possible assassins. When he came across an obvious early paleolithic, a squat massive-boned fellow who looked like a pre-Generalized Mongolian, and started to talk to him, he forgot his job for a while. Ngangchungding didn’t mind giving him a quick lesson in the fundamentals of his native speech, one which Burton had never encountered before. Then Burton, speaking Esperanto, tried to get him to sign up on the Rex. Not only would he be a desirable marine, he would give Burton the opportunity to learn his language. Ngangchungding refused his offer. He was, he said a Nichirenite, a member of that Buddhist discipline which stressed pacifism as strongly as its chief rival, the Church of the Second Chance. Though disappointed, Burton gave him a cigarette to show that there were no hard feelings, and he went back to King John’s table.
John was interviewing a Caucasian whose back was partially blocked from Burton’s view by a tall, skinny-legged, long-armed, broad-shouldered Negro. Burton walked by them to place himself behind John.
He heard the white man say, “I am Peter Jairus Frigate.”
Burton whirled, stared, glaring and then he leaped at Frigate. Frigate went down under him, Burton’s hands around his throat.
“I’ll kill you!” Burton shouted.
Something struck him on the back of the head.
WHEN HE REGAINED HIS SENSES, HE SAW THE NEGRO AND THE four men who’d been behind him struggling with John’s bodyguards. The monarch had leaped on top of the table, and, red-faced, was shouting orders. There was some confusion for a minute before everybody settled down. Frigate, coughing, had gotten to his feet. Burton pulled himself up, feeling pain in the back of his head. Evidently, he’d been hit with the knob-kerrie the black had carried suspended from a thong on his belt. It lay on the grass now.
Though not entirely clear-headed, Burton realized that he had, somehow, erred. This man looked much like the Frigate he knew, and his voice was similar. But neither his voice nor his features were quite the same, and he wasn’t as tall. Yet... the same name?
“I apologize, Sinjoro Frigate,” he said. “I thought... you looked so much like a man whom I have good reason to loathe... he did me a terrible injury... never mind. I am truly sorry, and if I may make amends...”
What the devil, he thought. Or perhaps it should be, Which the devil?
Though this was not his Frigate, he couldn’t help looking around for Monat.
“You almost scared the piss out of me,” the fellow said. “But, well, all right. I accept. Besides, I think you’ve paid for your error. Umslopogaas can hit hard.”
The black said, “I only tapped him to discourage him.”
“Which you did,” Burton said, and he laughed, though it hurt his head.
“You and your friends were fortunate you weren’t slain on the spot!” John bellowed. He got down from the table and sat down. “Now, what is the difficulty?”
Burton explained again, secretly elated since under the circumstances the “almost” Frigate couldn’t reveal to John that Burton was using an assumed name. John got assurances from Frigate and his four companions that they held no resentment against Burton and then ordered his men to release them. Before continuing the interviews, he insisted that Burton give him an account of why he had attacked Frigate. Burton made up a story which seemed to satisfy the monarch.
He said to Frigate, “How do you explain this startling resemblance?”
“I can’t,” Frigate said, shrugging. “I’ve had this happen before. Not the attack, I mean. I mean running across people who think they’ve seen me before, and I don’t have a commonplace face. If my father had been a traveling salesman, I could explain it. But he wasn’t. He was an electrical and civil engineer and seldom got out of Peoria.”
Frigate didn’t seem to have any superior enlistment qualifications. He was almost six feet tall and muscular but not especially so. He claimed to be a good archer, but there were hundreds of thousands of bowmen available to John. He would have dismissed him if Frigate had not mentioned that he’d arrived in an area a hundred miles up-River in a balloon, and he’d seen a huge dirigible. John knew that had to be the Parseval. He was also interested in the balloon story.
Frigate said that he and his companions had been journeying up-River with the intention of getting to the headwaters. They’d gotten tired of the slow rate of travel in their sailboat, and when they came to a place where metal was available, they’d talked its chief of state into building them a blimp.
“Ah!” John said. “What was this ruler’s name?”
Frigate looked puzzled. “He was a Czech named Ladislas Podebrad.”
John laughed until the tears came. When he’d finished, he said, “That is a good one. It just so happens that this Podebrad is one of my engineers now.”
“Yeah?” one of Frigate’s companions said. “We have a score to settle with him.”
The speaker was about five feet ten inches high. He had a lean muscular body and dark hair and eyes. His face was strong but handsome and distinctive-looking. He wore a cowboy’s ten-gallon hat and high-heeled boots, though his only other clothing was a white kiltcloth.
“Tom Mix at your service, Your Majesty,” he said in a Texas drawl.
He puffed on his cigarette and added, “I’m a specialist in the rope and the boomerang, Sire, and I was once a well-known movie star, if you know what that is.”
John turned to Strubewell. “Have you ever heard of him?”
“I’ve read about him,” Strubewell said. “He was long before my time, but he was very famous in the twenties and thirties. He was a star of what they called horse operas.”
Burton wondered if it was likely that an agent would know that.
“We sometimes make movies on the Rex,” John said, smiling. “But we don’t have horses, as you know.”
“Do I ever!”
The monarch asked Frigate more about the adventure. The American said that at the same time they’d sighted the dirigible, they’d sprung a leak in an apparatus used to heat the hydrogen in the envelope. While trying to cover the leak in the pipe with some quick-setting glue, they’d vented gas from the bag so they could drop quickly into thicker and warmer air and thus open the ports of the gondola.
The leak had been fixed, but a wind started blowing them back and the batteries supplying fresh hydrogen had become dead. They decided to land. When they heard that John had sent a launch ahead to this place to announce that he was recruiting, they’d sailed down here as fast as they could.
“What were you on Earth?”
“A lot of things, like most people. In my middle age and old age, a writer of science-fiction and detective stories. I wasn’t exactly obscure, but I was never near as well known as him.”
He pointed at a medium-sized but muscular man with curly hair and a handsome Irish-looking face.
“He’s Jack London, a great early twentieth-century writer.”
“I’m not too fond of writers,” John said. “I’ve had some on my boat, and they’ve generally caused a lot of trouble. However... who is the Negro who knocked my sergeant on the head without my permission?”
“Umslopogaas, a Swazi, a native of South Africa of the nineteenth century. He is a great warrior, especially proficient with his axe, which he calls Woodpecker. He also is notable as providing the model for the great fictional Zulu hero of the same name created by another writer, H. Rider Haggard.”
“And he?”
John pointed at a brown-skinned black-haired man with a big nose. He stood a little over five feet and wore a large green cloth wrapped in turban fashion.
“That is Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, a much-traveled Iberian Moor, Your Majesty. He lived in your time and is a Sufi. He also happened to have met Your Majesty at your court in London.”
John said, “What?” and stood up. He looked closely at the little man, then shut his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “Yes, I remember him well!”
The monarch got up and strode around the table, his arms open, speaking the English of his time rapidly and smiling. The others were astonished to see him embrace the little man and kiss him on both cheeks.
“Jeeze, another Frenchy!” Mix said, but he was grinning.
After the two had gabbed for some time, John said, “All I have to know is that Nur el-Musafir has traveled far with you and still regards you as his friends. Strubewell, you sign them up and give them instructions. Sergeant Gwalchgwynn, you assign them their cabins. Well, my good friend and mentor, we will talk after I have completed the interviews.”
On the way down the corridor to their quarters, they ran into Loghu. She stopped, turned pale, then red, and screaming, “Peter, you bastard!” she hurled herself at Frigate. He went down with her hands clutching his throat. Laughing, the black and Mix pulled her off of him.
“You sure got a way with people,” Mix said to Frigate.
“Another case of mistaken identity,” Burton said. He explained to Loghu what had happened.
After he’d quit coughing and feeling his finger-marked neck, Frigate said, “I don’t know who this other Frigate was, but he sure must not be likable.”
Reluctantly, Loghu apologised. She was not fully convinced that this Frigate wasn’t her former lover.
Mix muttered, “She can grab me any time she wants to, but not around the neck.”
Loghu overheard him. She said, “If your whacker is as big as your hat, I might just grab it.”
Surprisingly, Mix blushed. When she had hip-swayed away, he said, “Too bold and brassy for me.”
Two days later, they were living together.
Burton was not content to admit that the resemblance of the two Frigates was just a coincidence. Whenever he had a chance, he talked to the fellow, delving into his background. What startled him was the discovery that this Frigate, like the other, had been a student of his, Burton’s, life.
The American, in his turn, had been watching Burton, though covertly. Every once in a while, Burton caught him staring at him. One night, Frigate cornered him in the grand salon. After looking around to make sure their conversation wasn’t overheard, the American said, without preamble and in English, “I’m familiar with the various portraits of Richard Francis Burton. I even had a big blowup of him when he was fifty on the wall in front of my desk. So I think I could recognize him without his mustachios and his forked beard.”
“Yaas?”
“I recall well a photograph of him taken when he was about thirty. He had only a mustache then, though it was very thick. If I mentally remove the lip-hair...”
“Yaas?”
“Burton looks remarkably like a certain Dark-Ages Welshman I know. The name he claims is Gwalchgwynn, which, translated into English, is white hawk. Gwalchgwynn is an early form of the Welsh name which became better known much later as Gawain. And Gawain was the knight who, in the earlier King Arthur cycles, was first to seek the Holy Grail. The metal cornucopias we call grails look remarkably like the tower that’s supposed to be in the middle of the north polar sea—from what I’ve heard. You might say it’s the Big Grail.”
“Very interesting,” Burton said after he’d sipped on his grog. “Another coincidence.”
Frigate looked steadily at him, disconcerting him a trifle. The devil take him. The fellow looked enough like the other to be his brother. Perhaps he was. Perhaps both were agents, and this one was playing with him as the other had.
“Burton would know all about the Arthurian cycles and the earlier folk tales on which they were based. It would be just like him, if he assumed a disguise—and he was famous on earth for assuming many—to take the name of Gwalchgwynn.
He would know that it signified a seeker after the Holy Grail, but he wouldn’t expect anyone else to.”
“I’m not so dense that I can’t see that you think I’m that Burton fellow. But I never heard of him, and I don’t care to have you pursue this matter even if it amuses you so much. I am not amused.”
He lifted the glass to his lips and drank.
“Nur told me when he was visited by the Ethical, the Ethical told him that one of the men he’d picked was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer.”
Burton was able to control himself enough to keep from spitting the drink out.
Slowly, he put the glass down on the bar.
“Nur?”
“You know him. Mr. Burton, the others are waiting in the stage-prop room. Just to show you how sure I am that you’re Burton, I’ll reveal something. Mix and London used to go under assumed names. But they recently decided to hell with ‘ it. Now, Mr. Burton, would you care to go with me there?” Burton considered. Could Frigate and his companions be agents? Were they waiting to seize and question him, turning the tables on him?
He looked around the crowded and noisy salon. When he saw Kazz, he said, “I’ll go with you if you insist on this nonsense. But I’ll take my good friend the Neanderthal with me. And we’ll be armed.”
When Burton entered the prop room ten minutes later, he was accompanied also by Alice and Loghu.
When Mix saw Loghu, his jaw dropped in astonishment. “You in on this, too?”
THEY HAD AGREED NEVER TO TALK ABOUT THE ETHICAL OR anything connected with him in their cabins. These might be bugged. Their next meeting was at a table where they played poker. Present were Burton, Alice, Frigate, Nur, Mix, and London. Loghu and Umslopogaas were on duty.
When Burton had heard Nur’s and Mix’s story of their visits from X, he’ had been convinced that they were indeed recruits of the Ethical. Nevertheless, he had listened to what each had to say in detail before he had admitted his real identity. Then he had told his story, holding back nothing.
Now he was saying, “See you and raise you ten. No, I don’t think we should plant eavesdropping devices in the cabins of any of the suspects. We might learn something valuable. But if they find one, then they’ll know that X’s agents, we could be called that, are on to them. It’s too dangerous.”
“I agree,” the little Moor said. “Do the rest of you?”
Even Mix, who’d proposed planting the bugs, nodded. However, he said, “What about Podebrad? I run into him now and then, and all he does is say howdy to me and then pass on grinning like a parson who’s just found out his girlfriend ain’t pregnant. It galls me. I’d like to tear into the bastard.”
“Me, too,” London said. “He figures he’s going to get away scot-free after making suckers of us.”
“Attacking him would only get you thrown off the boat,” Nur said. “Besides, he is tremendously strong. I believe that he would tear you apart while you were tearing into him.”
“I can take him!” Mix and London said at the same time.
“You’ve bloody good reason for revenge,” Burton said. “But it’s out, for the time being anyway. Surely you can see that?”
“But why’d he say he was taking us along on the blimp and then desert us like we had B.O.?”
Nur ed-Din said, “I’ve thought about that. The only reasonable explanation is that he somehow suspected that we were X’s men. That would be one more bit of evidence that he is an Ethical agent.”
“I think he’s just a goddamn sadist!” London said.
“No.”
Burton said, “If he suspects you four, then you’ll have to be on guard. The rest of us will, too. I didn’t think of what Nur said or I’d not have suggested that we meet in the salon.”
“It’s too late to worry about that,” Alice said. “Anyway, he isn’t going to do anything, if he is an agent, until he gets to the headwaters. Any more than we are.”
Burton won the pot with three jacks and two tens. Alice dealt. Burton thought that Nur must be concentrating on other matters than poker. The Moor won about half the time, and Burton suspected that he could rake in the chips even more often if he cared to. Somehow, the little man seemed to be able to tell what his opponents had in their hand just by looking at their faces.
“We might as well enjoy the ride,” Frigate said.
Burton looked at him from lowered lids. The fellow had the same adulation for him that the other Frigate had or had pretended to have. Whenever he got the chance, he would ply Burton with questions, most of them about periods in his life which Burton’s biographers had only been able to speculate about. But, also like the other, he would question attitudes and beliefs which Burton held dear. His attitude toward women and the colored races, for instance, and his belief in telepathy. Burton had too often had to explain that what he had believed on Earth did, not necessarily hold here. He had seen too much and experienced too much. He had changed in many respects. Now he thought it was a good1 time to delve into the matter of the pseudo-Frigate.
“There had to be a very good reason for the so-called coincidence.”
“I’ve been pondering that, too,” The American said. “Fortunately, I was an avid science-fiction reader and writer in that field. So I have a certain flexibility of imagination, which you’ll need if you’re going to bear with me, because I believe that the Frigate you’ve known by no coincidence at all is my brother James, dead at the ripe old age of one year!
“Now, consider the children who died on Earth. One reason, the best, is that if they were raised here, they would jam the planet. There wouldn’t be enough living space here. In fact, the population of children deceased before five would be the largest segment of the entire population by far.
“So what would the Ethicals do with them? They’d resurrect them on another planet, perhaps one like this, perhaps not. Maybe it’d take two planets to hold them comfortably.
“Anyway, let’s assume that this has happened. Unless,” he lifted a finger, “unless for some reason they haven’t been resurrected as yet. Maybe they’re to be raised here after we’re gone. Who knows?
“I don’t. But I can speculate. Say that the infants were incarnated on another planet. It couldn’t be done with the entire population at once because there would have to be adults to take care of them. And that would crowd a planet the size of Earth. So maybe they’re incarnated at a certain rate, that is, so many infants within a certain time. These are raised to adulthood, and then they become the nurses, the teachers, the foster parents of more infants. And so on. Or maybe it’s all done at once on more than one planet. I doubt that, though. The energy involved in planet reforming would be enormous. On the other hand, they may use planets which don’t have to be re-formed.”
“Keep dealing,” London said. “If you don’t people’ll wonder what the hell we’re talking about!”
“I can open,” Mix said.
They were silent except for announcing their play for a minute. Then Frigate said, “If what I propose were true, well, let me put it this way. Ah ... I was the eldest child in my family. The oldest alive, that is. My older brother, James, died at one. I was born six months later. Now... ah... he would be resurrected. And when he grew up, he became an agent for the Ethicals.
“He was planted here on Resurrection Day. He was assigned to watch Burton. Why would he be assigned? Because the Ethicals knew that, somehow, Burton had awakened in that vast chamber of floating bodies before Resurrection Day, before he was supposed to awake. They must have figured it was no accident, that... uh... somebody awakened him on purpose. Well, we don’t have to speculate on that. We know that’s what the Council of Ethicals told Burton when they caught him. He was supposed to have his memory of that erased, but X arranged it so that he kept it.
“Anyway, the Ethicals were suspicious. So they put this pseudo-Frigate, well, actually he’s a real Frigate, on Dick’s trail. My brother was to keep an eye on him and report anything suspicious. But like everybody in The Valley, he got caught with his kilt down.”
“I’ll take two cards,” Burton said. “That’s very intriguing, Peter. It seems a wild concept, but it may just be true. However, if your brother was an agent, then what was Monat the Tau Cetan or Arcturan or whatever he is? Certainly, he’d have to be an agent, a strange one true, but nevertheless...”
“Perhaps he’s an Ethical!” Alice said.
Burton, who didn’t like to be interrupted, glared.
“I was just going to say that. But if Monat is an agent, I don’t think he’s an Ethical, otherwise he’d have been in the Council... no, by Allah, he wouldn’t have been! If I’d have seen him there, I’d have known that he was one of ‘em! And he wouldn’t have been able to stay with me. Though why he stuck to me, I don’t know.
“However, Monat’s presence means that there is more than one species . . . genus . . . zoological family . . . extra-Terrestrials . . . involved in this.”
“I’ll take one card,” Frigate said. “As I was about to say...”
“Pardon me,” London said. “But how could Peter’s brother know about Burton?”
“I suppose that the children are educated, probably better than they’d be on Earth. And maybe, just maybe, my brother knew I was his brother. How do we know what incredibly vast and minute knowledge the Ethicals have? Look at the photo of Burton which he found in the kilt of that agent, Agneau. It was taken when Dick was twenty-eight and a subaltern in the East India Army. Doesn’t that prove that the Ethicals were on Earth in 1848? Who knows how long they’ve been walking the streets of Earth taking data? Don’t ask me for what purpose.”
“Why would James take your name?” Nur said.
“Well, I was a rabid Burton fan. I even wrote a novel about him. Maybe it pleased James’ sense of humor. I have one. My whole family is known for... an odd sense of humor. And so it struck him funny to be his brother, to pretend to be the Peter that he never knew. Maybe he could vicariously relive the life he’d been denied on Earth. Maybe he thought that if he ran into someone who’d known the Frigate family, he could pass himself off as me. Maybe all these reasons are true. Whatever. . .I’m sure he punched out Sharkko, the crooked publisher, to avenge me, which shows that he knew much about my life on Earth.”
Alice said, “But what about the story that agent, Spruce, told? He said he was from the seventy-second century A.D., and he said something about a chronoscope, something which could look back in time.”
“Spruce may have been lying,” Burton said.
“Anyway,” Frigate said, “I don’t believe there could be a chronoscope or such a thing as time-travel in any form. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. We’re all time-traveling. Forward, the only way there is.”
“What nobody has said,” Nur said, “is that somebody had to resurrect the children. It may or may not have been people from the seventy-second century. More probably, it was Monat’s people who did it. Note also that it was Monat who did most of the questioning of Spruce. He may have been, in a sense, coaching Spruce.”
“Why?” Alice said.
That was one question nobody could answer unless the Eth-ical’s story was true. By now, his recruits thought that he might be as big a liar as his colleagues.
Nur closed that round with the speculation that the agents who’d gotten on the boat early in its voyage had told their post-1983 story and were stuck with it. Agents who’d gotten on later knew mat the story might be suspect, so they’d avoided it. For instance, the huge Gaul named Megalosos—his name meant “Great”—claimed that he’d lived about Caesar’s time. His saying so, however, didn’t make it so. It seems he found Podebrad congenial, though how anyone could was beyond Nur. He could be an agent, too.