The River of Fog
You bastard, James Allison!"
I turned from the window where I had been staring down from my suite atop San Francisco's Nob Hill, watching the fog like a river of ice flow through the Golden Gate. I faced my three guests. They were all seated in deep Moroccan-leather chairs, surrounding the jade-inlaid table near my fireplace.
A fragrant back-log had burned low, but still cast enough of a glow that no artificial lighting was required in the room.
The speaker had been Yuriko Yamash'ta. She was probably the most beautiful woman alive, and the low flames reflected from deep in her dark eyes, her long glossy black hair and the matching costume that did little to conceal her elegant figure. She was also the only human being to climb the perilous north face of Everest alone. And she was known to have killed no fewer than five armed men—three of them on one occasion—with her bare hands.
"Bastard, my dear?" I smiled at her. "In fact, I am not that. Not as James Allison. Although I'm certain that I was indeed a bastard in most of my prior incarnations. Most of us were."
"You really believe in that reincarnation business?"
The speaker now was Abraham Steinman. His wheelchair lay folded in the outer vestibule of my suite. A cursory glance at Abraham as he sat near the hearth would never have suggested that he had been a paraplegic from early childhood. Nor had the injury to his spine that had turned his body into a passive appendage interfered with the development of the most innovative mind since that of Edison.
Steinman's greatest invention to date—the one that had freed the industrialized world of its bondage to OPEC oil and that had made Steinman the world's first self-created billionaire since the original Rockefeller—was the Steinman Universal Conversion Engine. That engine, in sizes anywhere from the dimensions of a wristwatch to those of the Grand Coulee Dam—could convert energy from any form into any other form, including solar, wind, or ther¬mal power into electricity. And it could do that with an efficiency of 99%+.
Abe Steinman maintained a giant technological and administrative apparatus to manage his inventions, but he kept a private laboratory in a wooden shed for himself. And from that wooden shed, he had sworn, he would bring forth a set of neural-controlled miniaturized servo-motors by means of which he would walk within three years and would play third base in the American League within five. If he had to buy his own team to get the job, he said, he would do it. And he would hit for .300 or better!
I answered his question. "I don't just believe in reincarnation, Abe. Any more than you 'believe in' rainstorms or the element oxygen. They
exist.
You know they exist, but that isn't what makes them real. There would be rainstorms whether you believed in them or not. There would be oxygen molecules, pairs of atoms with an atomic weight of eight and a valence of two, whether you believed in them or not. We're all reincarnated, time after time after time. Belief has nothing to do with it."
"Not so." He moved his head slowly from side to side, one of the few actual motions he was capable of. "Belief is all important. If we all believed in reincarnation, there would be no reason to struggle for anything in this world. We might as well lie back and wait for a better life if we weren't happy with this one. No, Jim, it's the belief that this life is our one chance at the brass ring that makes us try for the ring—and some of us actually snag it!"
My third guest made the kind of loud, inarticulate sound that writers render as
hmph!
He reached an elegantly-manicured hand for the small cobalt-blue glass-lined silver dish on the jade-topped table, lifted it and an even tinier silver spoon. He filled the spoon carefully with fine white powder and offered it to Yuriko and Abraham, then carefully took a spoon for himself.
After a few seconds he said, "I agree that belief is all important, but belief in reincarnation isn't necessarily as debilitating as you suggest, Abe."
"Come now," Steinman rejoined. "That belief has been the greatest impediment to the development of India. One of the world's great cultures—gone stagnant and flat. Why work?
"Why bother to advance oneself or society, when there's always another chance and another chance and another chance to come? Someday we'll all be kings if we keep our karma right, so why bother to improve the lot of peasants, even if we're all peasants in this turn around the wheel?"
"Ah, Abe, Abe, Abe," the other said. "You ought to get your nose out of the laboratory once in a while and observe the way the world works. It wasn't reincarnation that set India back, it was the British East India Company! And India's still working to undo the distortions in her character that Britain brought about."
Steinman grimaced. "Very well. I certainly bow to your greater understanding of politics, Senator."
Senator McPherson smiled in mock gratitude.
Gardner Hendricks McPherson had been the most brilliant cadet to graduate from West Point since Douglas MacArthur, and had broken even MacArthur's record for a speedy rise from second lieutenant to brigadier general. His star continued to rise in the military firmament until he startled the nation by resigning his commission to run for a seat in the United States Senate.
He had won, had performed with similar brilliance in the Senate, becoming Minority Leader before the end of his first term—another unprecedented achievement for McPherson. It was now a foregone conclusion that he would be President of the United States one day, whether four years hence, or eight, being the major question that remained.
He placed the cobalt-blue dish back on the table, selected a slim, hand-rolled stick of Thai gold from a filigreed tray, and lit it with a solid gold lighter. He exhaled slowly, nodded and passed the stick to his right.
"Surely you didn't mean to direct the conversation onto abstract philosophy, Yuriko, when you called our gracious host a bastard." McPherson inclined his head toward the mountaineer. "But what
did
you have in mind?"
"I had in mind that James was a bastard for leaving his story hanging there. Whether it's gospel truth or whether it's all a cock-and-bull story, I don't even care. With due respect to your convictions, Abraham and Gardner. But James . . ." She shook her head despairingly. The back-log hissed and flared briefly, throwing golden lights dancing across Yuriko's hair.
I crossed the soft Kermanshahan carpeting and stood before the hearth. Yuriko held the Thai toward me, as if to say,
Never mind my words, everything remains between us as before.
I nodded my understanding, inhaled the fragrant gold, held the Thai for Steinman and passed it along to Senator McPherson.
The strains of a Mozart concerto emerged from speakers whose baffle-cloths were indistinguishable from priceless centuries-old tapestry for very good reasons.
"What further did you wish to hear?" I asked.
Yuriko laughed. "James, you're fortunate to have inherited your fortune. You'd never be much good at earning money—at least not if you tried to do it by writing novels."
"I never claimed to be a businessman
or
a novelist," I responded. "But just what is your complaint? I've simply told you the story of Ghor, fifth-born son of Genseric. As I lived it. Yes, my dear, as I lived it, unmeasured millennia ago. You might quarrel with the structure of a novel, but how can you complain about the truth?"
"Well, James, let's see where you left yourself. That is, Ghor."
Her startlingly slim and graceful hands flowed through an arresting gesture. "You started life as an abandoned cripple, suckled by a conveniently lactating wolf-bitch. Certainly a familiar touch, that!"
I agreed.
"You survived your infancy, overcame your twisted leg, were raised as a wolf, returned to human society and took rather sanguine vengeance upon the family that had abandoned you."
"Yes."
"And then you launched yourself on the most extraordinary series of adventures. Including, as the expression has it, arson, rape and bloody murder."
"But what is it that you find so objectionable in my tale?" I asked her.
She smiled at me.
"I'll accept all of the improbabilities, James, and I'll even write off the seemingly supernatural interventions that seem to occur so often. Let's just say that they were the barbaric mind's interpretation of events that we would find other explanations for, today."
"Such as?"
"Well," she reached and touched my hand lightly. I felt the electric thrill that never failed to come with her touch. "Well," she said, "just for one example. That strange incident on the island. What happened? A volcano opened, bronze robots emerged from its molten bowels, wiped out Ghor's followers, then flew away into the sky. Now really!"
"It happened," I said angrily.
"Of course it did. But was it magical? Might there not have been a more advanced civilization in the world at the time? Maybe they were geologists, sent there to study that volcano. Once it blew, they took their findings and left. They weren't robots. They were wearing protective suits."
"Still, Yuriko, why the 'You bastard' treatment?"
"Because, James, at the end of your whole incredible saga, you just left it hanging. All of the blood, all of the suffering, your wife and child dead, your arch-foe Mentumenen dead. You'd been, literally, to hell and back. And there you were, living with the wolves once again. What happened?"
Before I could answer her, Abraham Steinman raised another objection. "I find it hard to reconcile your pantheon, Allison."
I stood with my back to the guttering fire, waiting for Steinman to elaborate.
"At the start of your tale you made reference to some Scandinavian deities. Ymir, of course, is a familiar figure. Ythillin is less so, but your description of her fits into the Norse concept. But then you bring in Mitra, who was worshipped for some centuries as a sort of alternate Jesus. Ishtar, who was the great Babylonian goddess. Set, the Egyptian devil-god who murdered his brother Osiris. Gaea, the Greek earth-mother. And the Hounds of Tindalos, creations, I believe, of the modern genius Belknapius. Not to mention Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Cthugha of Fomalhaut."
He clucked his tongue like a nursery school teacher who had caught a five-year-old in a fib. Compared to that great intellect, I suppose we were all on the level of five-year-olds.
"If all of this took place those untold thousands of generations ago," Abraham resumed, "how to account for the admixture of deities and beings from so many cultures and such widely separated periods?"
"I do not account for them," said. "What I have told you is the baldest outline of a life I lived long before this one. What happened, happened, and I make no effort to defend or justify it. This is not a courtroom. If you choose not to believe me, then consider it all just a tale. I hope that I have amused you, these past hours. You are surely not obliged to believe me."
"Well," Steinman considered, "I suppose that's fair enough."
Now Senator McPherson spoke. "Suppose, though, to satisfy Miz Yamash'ta, you do tell us what happened after you rejoined the wolves. Surely your memory doesn't just fade out at that point?"
"Surely it does not," I said.
***
And so I found myself a wolf once again, a beast in my heart and largely, even, in my body. It was as if I had reverted to the days of my childhood—or cubhood!—in that terrible time after Gudrun of the Shining Locks had rejected me and Genseric the Sworder exposed me on the ice to die.
Werewolf, wolf-man, man-wolf, what difference did it make? I struggled not to think, not to deal with the terrible events that had overtaken me and the terrible deeds that I myself had performed since my first encounters with the Aesir and the Vanir.
Did I change? Did the weird Lycanthropic alteration come over me, there in the snow-riven waste? Did I mutter those few simple syllables that I had learned from Telordric the White Magician, going now on two legs, now on four, fighting now with fist or the metal arm made for me by Dar'ah Humarl, now with the fangs and claws of my animal form?
I knew not, neither did I care.
At times I think I switched back and forth between my Lycanthropic form as a werewolf and my human form as a wolf-man. What difference did it make?
The anguish of my life was forgotten, and that was all that mattered to me. None of the fighting, none of the killing—nor any of the wounds, the pain, the injury that had been inflicted upon me—mattered. It was all like a grand game in which the winning of a battle, the conquest of a nation, the overthrow of a dynasty meant neither more nor less than the gain or loss of a marker.
I had seen enough of death to know both that it came inevitably to all men and indeed to all living things, and that it was to be fought off and avoided only for the purpose of prolonging this game of warfare that we chose to call life. There with the wolves of the ice-pack I could forget the one memory that it had been impossible for me to accept—the memory of my wife Shanara and my nameless infant child, dead in the northern wastes.
Surely this was a rich irony. I who had slain parent and brother with never a moment's hesitancy, who had gloated in their dying agony, had been brought low by the loss of two loved ones of my own.
The Ice Bitch Ythillin laughed her cold and bitter laugh, I am sure, at the irony of my grief! And it was my life with the wolves of the ice-pack, my deliberate and willful abandonment of human identity, human consciousness, human recollection, that alone made it possible for me to live on.
With the wolves I hunted elk, exulting in the acrid stench of fear that emanated from our prey when some great ruminant realized that it was trapped, doomed. I lusted for the feel of living flesh between my fangs, the taste of hotly spurting blood on my tongue.
As a wolf I became respected as a sharp-nosed scout, a peerless and tireless tracker of our prey. In the moment of attack none was more fearless and none more ferocious than I. At the moment of the kill, no wolf was more savage or more terrible than I.