Gods of Riverworld (10 page)

He had explored continents and minds, those of the legion of devils known as Burtonia excepted.

“There is only one great adventure,” Frigate had said, “and that is the descent into oneself.” He was quoting or paraphrasing some twentieth-century writer, Henry Miller, whom the American greatly admired at the same time that he despised some of his attitudes.

“The darkest Africa, the highest Everest, the deepest Pacific Abyss is your own mind. So why do so few set out to conquer it?”

“Because it’s like a fish trying to find out the nature of water,” Burton had said.

Talk, talk, talk. Parrots. Language was the plumage of human beings.

How did one burst through the self-erected barriers?

At that moment, something did break through. There was a crash and a roar. Burton leaped into the air and whirled toward the noise, his heart beating almost loud enough to drown out the uproar.

When he looked around the doorway, he saw that the corridor was dark except for the lamplight coming from inside Loga’s room and through the half-opened door of the laboratory. No. There was also light shining through a huge hole in the brick wall. It dimly revealed a monstrous thing, a horizontal cylinder with a conical nose, a dark mass that rolled on wheels toward him.

9

Burton jumped inside the doorway, turned, and stuck his head out far enough to see the thing. It was moving slowly, though it must have been traveling very swiftly to breach the wall, the bricks of which were held together by cement far stronger than anything on Earth in his time. The light from the corridor walls beyond the big hole showed that the monster was traveling on ten wheels.

Burton pointed his beamer at a spot behind the nose. The end of the scarlet rod-shaped ray struck, but though it could burn through twelve inches of nickel-steel in five seconds, it made no visible impression on the gray metallic-looking surface. He pulled back into the doorway and hurled himself backward and to one side as a violet-colored ray from the side of the machine leaped over his shoulder. Other rays followed; then the conical end of the monster was passing him. Daring to look around the doorway again, he saw that its large beamers were projecting the rays at various angles from both sides and many places.

When it was within a few feet of the other wall blocking the corridor, it stopped and began moving back. The beams were still going off and on at intervals of a few seconds. Moreover, the angles of fire were changing. Where they had struck were bare spots. The paint had been burned off.

Burton backed up behind the wall. A ray streaked through the doorway and burned off the paint on the far wall. Another, at a higher angle, destroyed more paint.

De Marbot called, “Dick, are you all right?”

“I’m not hurt!” Burton yelled. “Don’t expose yourself!”

“I am not stupid!” the Frenchman screamed back.

But he was stupid; at least, from Burton’s viewpoint, he was. De Marbot ran past him and out into the corridor toward the machine. Burton cried out after him to stop. The Frenchman did not hesitate but leaped upon the back of the juggernaut and grabbed a rung near the top. Burton had expected him to be cut through by a ray, but the beams had stopped the moment de Marbot had run into the corridor. Later, Burton wondered if the rays that had been shot at him had only been to discourage him from getting close to it or following it when it left.

Now the machine rolled backward and past the opening to Loga’s room. De Marbot, clinging with one hand and smiling, waved at Burton.

“Get off it!” Burton shouted. “You can’t do anything to it! Get off before it kills you!”

“Where it goes, I go!” de Marbot yelled.

He lost his bravado then, because the machine, having halted, suddenly sped forward, its tires screaming as they burned on the floor. All the beams had been turned off, but now one sprang from the nose. The violet lance struck the brick wall and pierced it, and then the beam widened into a cone, the base of which melted the bricks within its area and made an opening just large enough for the machine to pass through.

De Marbot, screaming, had, however, loosed his grip before he was hit by the bricks at the edge of the breach. He lay face-down, silent.

“That crazy frog!” Burton said. The machine was whipping around a distant corner, revealing that it was not solid but had articulations that permitted it to turn corners, though just barely. De Marbot was sitting up by then and was holding his head.

Burton ran to him, beating Aphra by a few steps.

“Are you hurt?”

De Marbot sat up, grimaced, then smiled.

“Only my pride. I became frightened. I screamed with fear.”

Assisted by Burton, he got to his feet. “I do have a few scratches, bruises, and contusions. I have taken worse spills many times from a horse while fighting for my glorious emperor. But never, never, have I had such a short ride!”

Aphra wrapped her arms around him and snuggled her face into his chest. “You stupid son of a bitch! You scared me to death!”

“You are most lively and reproachful for a corpse,” he said, hugging her. “Oh, my poor arm and shoulder! I cannot embrace you, little cabbage, with all my huge and accustomed strength and love!”

She freed herself and wiped her tears away with her fingers.

“You’re little cabbage, hell! I am not a vegetable, I’m a woman! A woman who’s very angry with you and your heroics!”

“A rose with thorns, perhaps, is it not?”

Burton looked up and down the corridor. No one in sight.

“Why did you jump on it?” he said. “What did you expect to accomplish?”

“I was going to ride it to its lair, where I might find its master, the Snark, awaiting it. And then I would surprise him and take him prisoner or kill him if I had to. But I forgot, in the heat of combat, that the thing would only make a hole large enough for it to pass through.”

“You were lucky that your brains, such as they are, weren’t dashed out,” Burton said. He shared some of Aphra’s anger; he was very fond of the Frenchman. “It was magnificent, but it was not good soldiership.”

“Ah, you are just jealous because you did not think of doing it.”

Burton laughed and said, “Perhaps you’re right.”

He indicated the areas where the paint had been burned off.

“The Snark now sees and hears us.”

“Odsblood!” Aphra said. “He just showed us how weak and helpless we are. We can’t even hide from him!”

“But we did force him to act,” Burton said. “He had to find out what we were doing here. He did not disdain us enough to ignore us.”

“And so I have worked like a helot with spraying paint, sweated like a slave for nothing,” de Marbot said.

“You did get an unusual ride out of it.”

De Marbot’s teeth shone.

“Yes. It was worth it!”

Burton was not sure. They had not done well. Moreover, the machine probably had cameras that had shown the Snark the open door to Loga’s secret room.

“What do we do now?” Aphra said. “Slink back to our apartments like bad little puppies who’ve been whipped?”

Burton did not answer because of a shout from the right. A flying chair was suspended near the intersection of the corridor, and the voice had come from the opened curtain in an enclosure on the chair. It had been fitted with a frame over which transparent plastic had been arranged. The man in the chair was sitting with his legs drawn up in front of him on the seat.

“Who’s that?” de Marbot said.

“Frigate,” Aphra said, having recognized his voice.

The chair shot forward and settled on the floor, and Frigate pulled the enclosure, a sort of tiny cabin, from the chair. He got out, looked around, and said, “What happened?”

Burton explained. Then the American had to tell de Marbot and Behn why he was here and what the purpose of the enclosure was.

“Dick arranged with me to come here eight hours after you three had left. The contraption—the enclosure—is to prevent my body heat being detected by the Computer.”

De Marbot looked reproachfully at Burton.

“You said that you’d enlisted just us.”

“I don’t tell the truth if it’s useful not to do so,” Burton said. “I thought that it would be best if I had two follow us but didn’t tell you. I didn’t want you and Aphra to be saying anything to each other about this.”

“Two?” de Marbot said. “Where is the other?”

“Nur is supposed to come down the corridors on the other side,” Burton said, pointing in the direction in which the machine had gone.

“Why?” de Marbot said. Then, “You think that perhaps Nur might have tracked the machine to its lair?”

“We won’t know until later.”

Burton turned to Frigate.

“I assume, since you’ve reported nothing, you saw nothing.”

“Right.”

“The machine could have gone in any direction in this maze. We’ll wait until Nur gets here.”

“If the Snark didn’t catch him,” Frigate said.

“You’re so optimistic,” Aphra said.

“I just like to consider every possibility,” Frigate said somewhat heatedly. “It’s not my fault that negative possibilities always outnumber the positive.”

“They don’t. You just see the dark chances easier than you see the bright ones.”

Burton looked at his wristwatch. Five minutes had passed since the machine had broken through. He would wait a total of thirty. If Nur did not show by then, they would go back to their apartments. There they might have to wait for a while until Turpin, Alice, and Li Po returned from searching for them. If, that is, they had indeed gone out to look for them. Logic might tell them to stay together in one apartment for defense.

A voice startled them. It was Nur’s, speaking from just outside the nearest brick wall.

“Don’t shoot. It’s I. Nur. I have good news.”

“Come in,” Burton said.

The little man entered. He stripped off some plastic material from his face and removed his gloves and jacket.

“Hot.”

Burton stepped outside the doorway. Nur’s chair, equipped with an enclosure like Frigate’s, was parked by the wall. Burton went inside. Nur was smiling, as well he might.

“I caught the Snark outside her secret room. I came speeding out of the dark part of the corridor and yelled at her to surrender. She refused; she started to take her beamer from her holster. So I shot her.”

“Her?” Burton said.

“Yes. We knew that the unknown could be of either sex, but we spoke of her as him so much that we’d fallen into the habit of thinking that she must be a he. The rest of you did, anyway. I did not.”

Nur said it would be best if he took them to the scene of the discovery and then explained what had happened. They followed him in their chairs through the breach in the wall, went down one corridor, turned, and stopped a hundred feet from the corner. The unknown lay on her back, eyes and mouth open, a thin cauterized wound on her throat showing where Nur’s beam had pierced it from front to back. She was short and slim and clothed in scarlet shirt, sky-blue slacks, and yellow sandals. A beamer lay near one open hand on the floor.

“She’s Mongolian,” Nur said. That he would point out the obvious showed that he was not as calm as he seemed. “I don’t know if she’s Chinese, Japanese, or of some other Mongolian nationality. Li Po might be able to tell us. But it’s irrelevant.”

There was a large circular opening in the wall, the doorwheel having rolled within the wall recess. Beyond would be her apartment, where she had hidden while keeping herself well informed of the movements of the eight. Wall-screens showed all the rooms in their apartments. The beds of Alice, Tom Turpin, and Li Po were empty; another screen displayed them at a table, playing cards in Turpin’s apartment. If they were alarmed, they did not show it. Apparently, they had decided that their colleagues had disappeared because Burton was carrying out one of his secret plans, or they had stayed together for safety. As it turned out, they had elected to hole up for both reasons.

Burton would, however, have to endure their reproaches when he returned to the apartment. He could bear them easily because he came with victory in his pocket.

The night before, Peter Frigate and Nur el-Musafir had gone to their bedrooms. They had hoped that the Snark would be sleeping and that the Computer would awaken the Snark only if it detected someone leaving the suite to enter the corridor. The only detectors on, they hoped, would be the heat devices. They were praying that no video screen would be on the corridor wall facing the suite door.

The two ordered from their converters a pair of suits and helmets for them and enclosures for the chairs. This could have been reported to the Snark, but they were gambling that the Computer—if it had recorded these actions—would not submit them to the Snark until the Snark awoke.

Clad in the heat-retaining outfits, carrying the enclosures, Frigate and Nur had left the suite. And the wall sensors had not been activated by them. The unknown, not having made provisions for such deceptions, had slept on. Unlike the Computer, she could have imagined these, but she had not done so.

“We were very lucky,” Burton said. “Events turned out to favor us, and they could just as easily not have done so. In fact, the probabilities that we would succeed were not very high.”

“You think that we were too lucky,” Nur said. Burton waited for him to elaborate, but Nur said, “The first thing I thought of when I killed her … I only meant to wound her … was that she would have arranged for an automatic and immediate resurrection.”

They followed the Moor into the room. At one corner was a converter, and a few feet near it, sprawled facedown, was another body of the woman. The auxiliary computer console had been destroyed by beamer fire.

“I came into this room as soon as I’d killed her,” Nur said. “Her body had just formed, and she was running to get a beamer on a table. I told her to stop. She ignored me, and so I shot her. I immediately rayed the computer and so prevented a third resurrection. Unfortunately, the ray also destroyed her body-recording.”

He led Burton to the ruin and pointed at a section that had been cut off. Inside was a blackish, half-melted, cranberry-sized object that had held everything needed to duplicate the body down to the submolecular level.