The Magic Labyrinth (10 page)

Resurrection has restored Orion’s charred skin, but it would never heal his interior wounds. Just as it had failed to heal Sam’s.

And where was the poor old whiskey-sodden tramp who had died when the Hannibal jail caught fire? Sam had been ten then, had been awakened out of sleep by the fire bells. He had run down to the jail and seen the man, clinging to the bars, screaming, blackly silhouetted against the bright red flames. The town marshal could not be found, and he had the only keys to the cell door. A group had tried to batter the oaken doors down and had failed.

Some hours before the marshal had picked up the bum, Sam had given the bum some matches to light his pipe. It was one of these that must have set fire to the straw bed in the cell. Sam knew that he was responsible for the tramp’s terrible death. If he had not felt sorry for him and gone home to get the matches for him, the man would not have died. An act of charity, a moment of sympathy, had caused him to be burned to death.

And where was Nina, his granddaughter? She was born after he’d died, but he had learned about her from a man who’d read her death notice in the
Los Angeles Times
of January 18, 1966.

RITES PENDING FOR NINA CLEMENS,
LAST DESCENDANT OF MARK TWAIN

The fellow had a very good memory, but his interest in Mark Twain had helped him to record the heading in his mind.

“She was fifty-five years old and was found dead late Sunday in a motel room at 20-something-or-other North Highland Avenue. Her room was strewn with bottles of pills and liquor. There wasn’t any note and an autopsy was ordered to find out the exact cause of her death. I never saw the report.

“She’d died across the street from her luxurious three-bedroom penthouse in the Highland Towers. Her friends said she often checked in there for the weekend when she was tired of being alone. The paper said she’d been alone most of her life. She’d used the name of Clemens after she divorced an artist by the name of Rutgers. She had been married to him briefly in, ah, 1935, I think. The paper said she was the daughter of Clara Grabrilowitsch, your only daughter. It meant that she was your only
surviving
daughter. Clara married a Jacques Samoussoud after her first husband died. In 1935, I think. She was a devout Christian Scientist, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know!” Sam said.

His informant, knowing that Sam loathed Christian Science, that he had once written a defamatory book about Mary Baker Eddy, had grinned.

“Do you suppose she was getting back at you?”

“Spare me your psychological analyses,” Sam had said. “Clara worshipped me. All my children did.”

“Anyway, Clara died in 1962, not long after she’d authorized publication of your unpublished
Letters to the Earth.
”

“
That
was printed?” Sam said. “What was the reaction?”

“It sold well. But it was pretty mild stuff, you know. No one was outraged or thought it was blasphemous. Oh, yes, your
1601,
uncensored, was also printed. When I was young, it could be obtained only through private presses. But by the late 1960s, it was sold to the general public.”

Sam had shaken his head. “You mean children could buy it?”

“No, but a lot of them read it.”

“How things must’ve changed!”

“Anything, well, almost anything, went. Let’s see. The article said that your granddaughter was an amateur artist, singer, and actress. She was also a shutterbug—a person who liked to take photographs—she took dozens of pictures every week of friends, bartenders, and waiters. Even strangers on the street.

“She was writing an autobiography,
A Life Alone,
which title tells you a lot about her. Poor thing. Her friends said the book was ‘generally confused’ but parts of it showed some of your genius.”

“I always said that Livy and I were too high-strung to have children.”

“Well, she wasn’t suffering from lack of money. She inherited some trust funds from her mother, about $800,000, I believe. Money from the sale of your books. When she died, she was worth one and a half million dollars. Yet, she was unhappy and lonely.

“Oh, yes. Her body was taken to Elmira, New York…
for burial in a family plot near the famed grandfather whose name she bore.
”

“I can’t be blamed for her character,” Sam had said. “Clara and Ossip can take credit for that.”

The informant shrugged and said, “You and your wife formed the characters of your children, Clara included.”

“Yes, but my character was formed by my parents. And theirs by theirs,” Sam had said. “Do we go back to Adam and Eve to fix the responsibility? No, because God formed their temperaments when he created them. There is but one being who bears the ultimate responsibility.”

“I’m a free-willer myself,” the man had said.

“Listen,” Sam had said. “
When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian sea, the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing in my kilt at this instant, talking to you.
That’s from my
What Is Man?
slightly paraphrased. What do you think of that?”

“It’s bullshit.”

“You say that because you have been determined to do so. You could not have said anything else.”

“You’re a sorry case, Mr. Clemens, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I do. But you can’t help saying that. Listen, what was your profession?”

The man looked surprised. “What’s that got to do with it? I was a realtor. I was also on the school board for many years.”

“Let me quote myself again,” Sam had said. “
In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.
”

Sam chuckled now at the memory of the man’s expression.

He sat up. Gwen slept on. He turned on the nightlight and saw that she was smiling slightly. She looked innocent, childlike, yet the full lips and the full curves of the breast, almost entirely exposed, excited him. He reached out to awake her but changed his mind. Instead, he put on his kilt and a cloth for a cape and his visored high-peaked fish-leather cap. He picked up a cigar and left the room closing the door softly. The corridor was warm and bright. At the far end, the door was locked; two armed guards stood by it. Two also stood at the near end by the elevator doors. He lit a cigar and walked toward the elevator. He chatted for a minute with the guards and then entered the cage.

He punched the P button. The doors slid shut, but not before he saw a guard starting to phone to the pilothouse that La Bosso (The Boss) was coming up. The cage rose from the D or hangar deck, where the officers’ quarters were, through the two narrow round rooms below the pilothouse, and then to the top chamber. There was a brief wait while the third-watch exec checked out the cage with closed-circuit TV. Then the doors slid open, and Sam entered the pilothouse or control room.

“It’s all right, boys,” he said. “Just me, enjoying insomnia.”

There were three others there. The night pilot, smoking a big cigar, eyeing the dials lackadaisically. He was Akande Erin, a massive Dahomeyan who had spent thirty years operating a jungle riverboat. The most outrageous liar Sam had ever known, and he had met the world’s best. Third-mate Calvin Cregar, a Scot who had put in forty years on an Australian coastal steamer. Ensign Diego Santiago of the marines, a seventeenth-century Venezuelan.

“Just came to look around,” Sam said. “Carry on.”

The sky was unclouded, blazing as if that great arsonist, God, had set it afire. The Valley was broad here, and the light fell softly, showing dimly the buildings and boats on both banks. Beyond them was a darker darkness. A few sentinel fires made eyes in the night. Otherwise, the world seemed asleep. The hills rose dark with trees, the giant irontrees, a thousand feet high, spiring up from the others. Beyond, the mountains loomed blackly. Faint starlight sparked on the waves.

Sam went through the door to stand on the port walk that ringed the exterior of the pilothouse. The wind was cool but not yet cold. It ran fingers through his bushy hair. Standing on the deck, he felt like a living part, an organ, of the vessel. It was spanking along, paddle wheels churning, its flags flapping, brave as a tiger, huge and sleek as a sperm whale, beautiful as a woman, heading always against the current, its goal the Axis Mundi, the Navel of the World, the dark tower. He felt roots grow from his feet, tendrils that spread through the hull, extended from the hull, dropped through the black waters, touched by the monsters of the deep, plunged into the muck three miles below, grew laterally up through the earth, spread out, shooting with the speed of thought, growing vines which erupted from the earth, stabbed into the flesh of every living human being on this world, spiraled upward through the roofs of the huts, rocketed toward the skies, veined space with the shoots which wrapped themselves around every planet on which lived animal life and sentients, enveloped and penetrated these, and then shot exploring tentacles toward the blackness where no matter was, where only God existed.

In that moment, Sam Clemens was, if not one with the universe, at least integral with it. And for a moment he believed in God.

And at that moment Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain inhabited the same flesh, merged, became one.

Then the thrilling vision exploded, contracted, dwindled, shot back into him.

He laughed. For several seconds he had known an ecstasy that surpassed even sexual intercourse, up to that moment the supreme feeling in his, and humanity’s, lot, disappointing as it often was.

Now he was within himself again, and the universe was outside.

He returned to the control room. Erin, the black pilot, looking up at him, said, “You have been visited by the spirits.”

“Do I look that peculiar?” Sam said. “Yes, I have.”

“What did they say?”

“That I am nothing and everything. I once heard the village idiot say the same thing.”

Late at night, while the exceptionally thick and high fog shrouded even the pilothouse, Burton prowled.

Unable to sleep, he roamed here and there with no place to go in mind—except that of getting away from himself.

“Damn me! Always trying to outrun my own self! If I had the wits of a cow, I’d stay and wrestle with him. But he can outrun, outwrestle me, the Jacob to my angel. Yet…I am Jacob also. I have a broken cog, not a broken thigh, I am an automaton Jacob, a mechanical angel, a robot devil. The ladder to heaven still leans against its window, but I can’t find it again.

“Destiny is happenchance. No, not that. I make my own. Not I, though. That thing which drives me, the devil that rides me. It waits grinning in the dark corner, and when I’ve reached my hand out to grab the prize, it leaps out and snatches it away from me.

“My ungovernable temper. The thing that cheats me and laughs and gibbers and runs away to hide and to emerge another day.

“Ah, Richard Francis Burton, Ruffian Dick, Nigger Dick, as they used to call me in India. They! The mediocrities, the robots running on the tracks of Victoria’s railroad…they had no interest in the native except to lay the women and eat good food and drink good drink and make a fortune if they could. They couldn’t even speak the native language after thirty years in the greatest gem in the queen’s crown. A gem, hah! A stinking pesthole! Cholera and its sisters! The black plague and its brothers! Hindus and Moslems laughing behind pukka Sahib’s back! The English couldn’t even fuck well. The women laughed at them and went to their black lovers for satisfaction after Sahib had gone home.

“I warned the government two years before it happened, the Sepoy Mutiny, and they laughed at me! Me, the only man in India who knew the Hindu, the Moslem!”

He paused on the top landing of the grand staircase. Light blazed out, and the sound of revelry tore through the mists without moving them. No curtain there to be moved by a breath.

“Arrgh! Damn them! They laugh and flirt, and doom waits for them. The world is falling apart. The rider on the black camel waits for them around the next bend of The River. Fools! And I, a fool also.

“And on this Narrboot, this great vessel of fools, men and women sleep who in their waking hours plot against me, plot against all natives of Earth. No. We’re all native to this universe. Citizens of the cosmos. I spit over the railing. Into the mists. The River flows below. It receives that part of me which will never return except in another form of water. H
₂
O. Hell doubled over. That’s a strange thought. But aren’t all thoughts strangers? Don’t they drift along like bottles enclosing messages cast away by that Great Castaway into the sea? And if they chance to lodge in the mind, my mind, I think that I originated them. Or is there a magnetism between certain souls and certain thoughts, and only those with the peculiar field of the thinkers are drawn to the thinkers? And then the individual reshapes them to fit his own character and thinks proudly—if he thinks at all in any sense more than a cow does—that he originated them? Flotsam and jetsam, my thoughts, and I the reef.

“Podebrad! What are you dreaming of? That tower? Your home? Or are you a secret one or just a Czech engineer? Or both?

“Fourteen years I’ve been on this Riverboat, and the boat has been driving its paddle wheels upRiver for thirty-three. Now I’m captain of the marines of that exalted bastard and regal asshole, King John. Living proof that I can govern my temper.

“Another year and we arrive at Virolando. There the
Rex
stops for a while, and we talk to La Viro, La Fondinto, the pope of the poopery of the Church of the Second Chance. Second chance, my sainted aunt’s arse! Those who gave it to us don’t have a chance now. Caught in their own trap! Hoisted by their own petard, which is French for ‘little fart.’ As Mix says, we don’t have the chance of a fart in a windstorm.

“Out there on the banks. The sleeping billions. Where is Edward, my beloved brother? A brilliant man, and that gang of thugs beat his brains in, and he never spoke another word for forty years. You shouldn’t have gone tiger hunting that day, Edward. The tiger was the Hindu who saw his chance to beat and rob a hated Englishman. Though they’d been doing it to their own people, too.

“But does it matter now, Edward? You’ve had your terrible injury healed, and you’ve been talking as of yore. Perhaps not now, though. Lazarus! Your body rots. No Jesus for you. No ‘Arise!’

“And mother! Where is she! The silly woman who talked my grandfather into willing her vicious brother, his son, a good part of his fortune. Grandpa changed his mind and was on his way to see his solicitor to arrange that I get that money. And he dropped dead before he got to the solicitor, and my uncle threw the fortune away in French gambling halls. And so I could not buy myself a decent commission in the regular army, and I could not finance my explorations as they should have been and so I never became what I should have been.

“Speke! The unspeakable Speke! You cheated me out of finding the true source of the Nile, you incompetent sneak, you piece of dung from a sick camel! You sneaked back to England after promising you’d not announce our discoveries until I got there, and you lied about me. You paid; you put a bullet into yourself. Your conscience finally got to you. How I wept. I loved you, Speke, though I hated you. How I wept!

“But if I chance across you now—what? Would you run? Surely you’d not have the perverted courage to hold out your hand for me to shake. Judas! Would I kiss you as Jesus kissed the traitor? Judas! No, I’d kick your arse halfway up a mountain!

“Sickness, the iron talons of African disease, gripped me. But I’d have recovered, and I’d have discovered the headwaters of the Nile! Not Speke, not hyena, not jackal Speke! My apologies, Brother Hyena and Sister Jackal. You’re only animals and useful in the scheme of things. Speke wasn’t worthy to kiss your foul arseholes.

“But how I wept!

“The headwaters of the Nile. The headwaters of The River. Having failed to get to one, will I fail to get to the other?

“My mother never showed any of us, me, Edward, Maria, any affection. She might as well have been our governess. No. Our nannies showed us more love, gave us more time, than she did.

“A man is what his mother makes him.

“No! There is something in the soul that rises above the lack of love, that drives me on and on toward…what?

“Father, if I may call you that. No. Not father. Begetter. You wheezing selfish humorless hypochondriac. You forever self-exile and traveler. Where was our home? A dozen foreign lands. You went here and there seeking the health which you thought you didn’t have. And we dragged along in your wake. Ignorant women our nannies and drunken Irish clergymen our tutors. Wheeze away, damn you! But no more. You’ve been cured by the unknowns who made this world. Have you? Haven’t you found some excuse to cozen yourself into hypochondria? It’s your soul, not your lungs, that has asthma.

“By Lake Tanganyika, Ujiji, the sickness seized me in demon fingers. In my delirium I saw myself, mocking, gibing, jeering, leering at me. That other Burton which mocks at the world but mostly at me.

“It couldn’t stop me, though, I went on…no…not then. Speke went on, and he…he…hee, hee! I laugh, though it startles the revelers and wakes the sleeping. Laugh, Burton, laugh, you Pagliacci! That silly-arse Yank, Frigate, tells me that it was I who became known as the great explorer and your treachery became infamous. I, I, not you, you Unspeakable! I have been vindicated, not you.

“My misfortune began with my not being a Frenchman. I wouldn’t have had to fight against English prejudice, English rigidity, English stupidity. I…but I wasn’t born a Frenchman, though I am descended from a bastard of Louis XIV. The Sun-King. Blood will tell.

“What bloody nonsense! Burton blood, not the Sun-King’s, will tell.

“I traveled, restless-footed, everywhere. But
Omne solum forti patria. Every region is a strong man’s home.
It was I who was the first European to enter the holy and forbidden city of Harar and come alive out of that Ethiopian hellhole. It was I who made a pilgrimage as Mirza Abdulla Bushiri to Mecca and wrote the most famous, detailed, and true book about it and who could have been torn to pieces if I’d been found out. It was I who discovered Lake Tanganyika. It was I who wrote the first manual on the use of the bayonet for the British army. It was I…

“Why recount to myself these vain glories? It’s not what a man’s done that counts, it’s what he’s going to do.

“Ayesha! Ayesha! My Persian beauty, my first true love! I would’ve renounced the world, my British citizenship, I would have become a Persian and lived with you until I died. You were most foully murdered, Ayesha! I avenged you, I slew the poisoner with my own hands, choked the life from him and buried his body in the desert. Where are you, Ayesha?

“Somewhere. And if we met again—what? That ravening love is now a dead lion.

“Isabel. My wife. The woman…did I ever love her? Affection I had. Not the great love I had for Ayesha and still have for Alice. ‘Pay, pack, and follow’ I told her whenever I left for a journey, and she did so, as obediently and as uncomplaining as a slave. I was her hero, her god, she said, and she set herself a list of rules for the perfect wife. But when I became old and bitter, a neglected failure, she became my nurse, my keeper, my cager, my prison guard.

“What if I should see her again, this woman who said that she could never love another man on Earth or in Heaven? Not that this world is Heaven. What would I do, say, ‘Hello, Isabel. It’s been a long time’?

“No, I’d run like the veriest coward. Hide. Yet…

“And here’s the entrance to the engine room. Is Podebrad on duty tonight? What if he is? I cannot confront him until we get to the headwaters.

“There goes a figure, dim in the mists. Is it an agent of the Ethicals? Or X, the renegade, skulking in the fog? He is always here now, there then, as elusive as the concept of time and eternity, nothingness and somethingness.

“‘Who goes there?’ I should shout. But he—she—it is gone.

“While I was in that transition between sleeping and waking, between death and resurrection, I saw God. ‘You owe for the flesh,’ He said, that bearded old gentleman in the garments of 1890, and in another dream He said, ‘Pay up.’

“Pay what? What is the price?

“I didn’t ask for the flesh, I didn’t petition to be born. Flesh, life, should be gratis.

“I should have detained Him. I should have asked him if a man does have free will or are all his actions, his nonactions, too, determined. Written down in the world’s Bradshaw, so-and-so will arrive at such-a-place at 10:32
A.M.
and will depart at 10:40 on track 12. If I am a train on His railway, then I am not responsible for anything I do. Evil and good are not my doing. In fact, there is no evil and good. Without free will, they don’t exist.

“But He won’t be detained. And if He were, would I understand his explanation of death and immortality, of determinism and indeterminism, of determinacy and indeterminacy?

“The human mind cannot grasp these. But if it can’t, it’s God’s fault—if there is a God.

“When I was surveying the Sind area in India, I became a Sufi, a Master Sufi. But watching them in the Sind and in Egypt and seeing them end by proclaiming themselves to be God, I concluded that extreme mysticism was closely allied to madness.

“Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, who is a Sufi, says that I do not understand. One, there are fake or deluded Sufis, degenerates of that great discipline. Two, when a Sufi says that he is God, he does not mean that literally. He is saying that he has become one with God, though not God.

“Great God! I will penetrate to His heart, to the heart of the Mystery and the mysteries. I am a living sword, but I have been attacking with my edge, not with my point. The point is the most deadly, not the edge. I will be from now on the point.

“Yet, if I’m to find my way through the magic labyrinth, I must have a thread to follow to the great beast that lives in its heart. Where is that thread? No Ariadne. I will be myself the thread and Ariadne and Theseus, just as…why didn’t I think of this before?—I am the labyrinth.

“Not quite true. What
is
? It’s always
not quite.
But in human, and divine, affairs, a near-hit is sometimes as good as a direct hit. The larger the exploding shell, the less it matters that it doesn’t strike the bull’s eye.

“Yet a sword is no good unless it’s well balanced. It has been said of me, I have the wide-reading Frigate for authority, that some have said that I was one in whom Nature ran riot, that I had not one but thirty splendid talents. But I had no sense of balance or of direction either. That I was an orchestra without a director, a fine ship with only one flaw: no compass. As I’ve said of myself, a blaze of light without focus.

“If I couldn’t do something first, I wouldn’t do it.

“That it’s the abnormal, the perverse, and the savage, in men, not the divine in their nature, that fascinate me.

“That, though I was deeply learned, I never understood that wisdom had little to do with knowledge and literature and nothing to do with learning.

“They were wrong! If they were once right, no more!”

Burton prowled on and on, looking for he knew not what. He passed down a dim corridor and paused by a door. Within should be Loghu, unless she was dancing in the grand salon, and Frigate. They were together again, having gone through two or three lovers in fourteen years. She had not been able to tolerate him for a long time, but then he’d won her over—though it might be the other Frigate whom she still loved—and now they shared the same quarters. Once more.

He went on, seeing a shadowy figure faintly outlined in the light over the exit. X? Another sufferer from insomnia? Himself?

He stood outside the texas and watched the guards pacing back and forth. Watchman, what of the night? Well, what of it?

On he walked. Where have you been? From walking to and fro, not over this giant world but on this pygmy cosmos of a Riverboat.

Alice was in his cabin again, having left him a little less than fourteen years ago and having returned twice. This time, they would be together forever. Perhaps. But he was glad that she was back.