Gods of Riverworld (11 page)

“I would be devastated with remorse and grief if I thought I had forever eliminated her chance of being resurrected again. But I’m sure that she must have another recording in the Computer file. I doubt that we can reach it, though. She would have inhibited the Computer from enabling us to find it.”

“We’ll see,” Burton said. “You’re probably right, though.”

“Who the hell was she?” Frigate said. “What was she doing here? Loga said that all the Ethicals and their Agents were dead. If he was right, then she wasn’t one of them. But what else could she be?”

“One of Loga’s enemies, otherwise she wouldn’t have eliminated him,” Nur said. “But if she wasn’t an Ethical or Agent, what reason would she have to do away with him? If she just wanted complete power, why didn’t she kill us?”

Aphra said, slowly, “Perhaps Monat the Operator was more far-seeing than Loga expected. Perhaps Monat made arrangements for an Agent, this woman, to be resurrected if certain events happened. Certain events in general, I mean. Monat could not have anticipated all events in particular.”

Burton requested the Computer to identify the dead woman. It replied that the data was unavailable, and it would not or could not say why.

Burton asked it if the dead woman’s body-recording was in its files.

The Computer said that it was unavailable.

“One more mystery,” said Frigate, and he groaned.

Burton asked the Computer for the location of the machine that had broken through the barricade walls. As he had expected, he was told that that information was also unavailable.

“I’ve seen all the robots the tower contains,” Burton said. “I had the Computer show them on a screen. That machine was not among them.”

The woman might have had it made for her by the Computer just to break down the walls.

Nur and Frigate dragged the body from the corridor and laid it down by the body near the cabinet. Stretched out, faceup, they looked like identical twins.

“Shall we have them disintegrated in the converter?” Nur said.

“One of them,” Burton said. “I want the Computer to examine the other.”

“So you can see if she has a black ball in her brain?”

Burton grimaced. Nur always seemed to be able to read his mind.

“Yes.”

The two dumped one body into a cabinet and ordered the Computer to get rid of it. White light filled the cabinet, and, when they looked through the window in the door, the cabinet was empty. There were not even ashes in it.

The other corpse was placed on a table above which was a huge dome-shaped device. Though there was no display of energy, the interior of the body was shown on a screen in a series of images. Burton had the Computer run the images back to the one he wanted. There
was
a tiny black sphere on the forebrain. This had been surgically implanted and, acting at a subvocalized codeword, would release a poison into the bearer’s body, killing it instantly.

“So … she was an Agent.”

“But we still don’t know when she came here or what her ultimate intentions were,” Frigate said.

“For the moment,” Burton said, “we don’t have to. It’s enough that we’ve gotten rid of the Snark. Now we’re on our own, free.”

They were, however, free only in some senses. Burton asked the Computer if the overrides installed by the woman were now removed. It replied that they were not.

“When would they be released?”

The Computer did not know.

“We’re stymied,” Frigate said.

“Not forever,” Burton replied. He was not as confident as he sounded.

10

On that perhaps forever-lost Earth, so far in distance and time, in
A.D.
1880 in the city of London, England, appeared a privately printed book. It was titled
The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî,
A Lay of the Higher Law. Translated and annotated by His Friend and Pupil F. B. The initials stood for Frank Baker, a nom de plume of Captain Richard Francis Burton. “Frank” was from his middle name; “Baker” was his mother’s maiden surname. Not until after his death would his true name be appended to a reprint.

The poem, set in distichs imitating the classical Arab form, was supposed to be the work of a Persian Sufi, Haji Abdu of the city of Yezdi in Persia. Haji was a title borne by any Moslem who had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton himself, having made the pilgrimage, disguised as a Moslem, could call himself a Haji. In this poem, Burton poured out his wisdom, pessimism, vast knowledge, and agnosticism, the Burtonian World-View and World-Pain. As Frank Baker, he had annotated the poem by “Abdu” and written an afterword that expressed a somewhat cynical and laughing view of himself. The laughter was, however, sad.

The preface summed up his philosophy, formed after fifty-nine years of wandering over the only planet he would ever know—or so he thought at the time.

TO THE READER

The Translator has ventured to entitle a “Lay of the Higher Law” the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the “Higher Culture!” The principles which justify the name are as follows: The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.

(Frigate’s comment on this statement was that it could be valid. But if Burton meant that
individuals
got an equal share of happiness and misery, he was wrong. Some people staggered along under a great burden of misery and had little happiness to lighten their load. Others had far more than their share of happiness. Anyway, Burton had not defined what he meant by happiness and misery. Though, of course, he didn’t have to do that for misery. Everybody knew what that was. Happiness, however, what was that? A mere freedom from pain and trouble? Or a positive quality? Was contentment happiness? Or did you have to be joyous to be happy?)

He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.

(What about your children? Alice had said. You have to cultivate them more than you do yourself so that they’ll be better, happier, and more adjusted than yourself. Every generation should be an improvement on the previous. I’ll admit, however, that it seldoms happens. Perhaps you’re right in that you can’t properly cultivate your children if you have not properly cultivated yourself. But you didn’t have any children, did you?)

(Self-cultivation is a major and vital principle, Nur had said. We Sufis stress it, keeping in mind that it demands self-discipline, compassion, and intelligence. But most people carry it to the extreme and make self-cultivation self-centeredness. This is not surprising. Mankind always does things to excess. Most people do, that is.)

He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the “divine gift of Pity” are man’s highest enjoyments.

(A pinch of pity adds savor to the soup of life, Nur said. Too much spoils it. Pity may lead to sentimentality and maudlinism.)

(Pity breeds a sense of superiority, Frigate had said. It also leads to self-pity. Not that I’m decrying that. There’s an exquisite joy in self-pity, if it’s indulged in now and then, here and there, and you end up laughing at yourself.)

(You forgot to include sex, Aphra Behn had said. Though I suppose that sex is part of the affections and sympathies.)

(Creating something, a painting, a poem, music, a book, a statue, a piece of furniture, childbirth, raising a child properly, these are man’s—and woman’s—highest enjoyments, Frigate had added. Though there’s much to be said for creating pristine sparkling bullshit, too.)

He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of “Facts, the idlest of superstitions.”

(But there comes a time when you must judge, Nur had said. First, though, you must be sure that you are qualified to judge. Who knows that?)

(One person’s facts are another’s superstition, Frigate had said. What does that mean, by the way?)

(You can believe only in what you see, Li Po had said. And even then you can’t be sure. Perhaps you can really believe only in what you have not seen, what you’ve imagined. Dragons and fairies exist because I believe in them. A rock is a fact, and so is my imagination.)

Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.

(Man is the only animal who thinks of the should-be rather than the what-is, Nur had said. Which is why man is the only animal who consciously changes the environment to suit himself. And usually spoils it because of his stupidity and excess. There are exceptions to this rule, of course.)

(A fine statement, Alice had said. But Dick Burton has always been self-destructive. When, if ever, will he stop destroying himself?)

For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume.

(Has it occurred to you, Nur had said, that you are nearing the end of that book you call Richard Francis Burton? It’s been published in two volumes, Earth-Burton and Riverworld-Burton. This tower may be The End.)

(It’s always been an excellent philosophy to live as if you’re going to die in the next hour, Frigate had said. Everybody agrees on that, but the only people who live it are those who know they’re going to die soon. And not even then.)

(That’s why I like to go to bed whenever possible, Aphra had said. Marcelin, are you in the mood?)

(Even the most ardent soldier needs to go to a rest camp now and then, de Marbot said. At the moment, I am an old, weary and saddlesore veteran.)

11

Burton also felt like a weary, saddlesore veteran. He had been riding himself—and others—too hard for too long. Now that he had crossed the last of hundreds of obstacles that had had to be dealt with at once, he needed rest and recreation. The problems to be solved, those presented by the Computer, could be tackled later.

Yet,
he thought, as he looked into a mirror,
I do not look as if I had lived for sixty-nine years on Earth and sixty-seven years here. My face is not that of a 136-year-old man. It is the face I had when I was a youth of twenty-five.
Minus the long Satan-black drooping moustache, a hairy crescent moon. The Ethicals had arranged that the resurrected males lack facial hair, an arrangement that Burton had always resented. It was true that men did not have to shave, but what about the feelings—the rights—of those who desired moustaches and beards?

Now that I am in the tower,
he thought,
why not change those despotic arrangements? Surely there must be a way to start the hair growing again on my face.

On Earth, he had been afflicted—perhaps afflicted was too strong a word—marked with a slight strabismus. He had a “wandering eye.” In more senses than one. This small fault had been corrected by the Computer when he had been raised from the dead in the Rivervalley.

So, loss of beard weighed against correction of focus. But now, why could he not have both?

He made a note to look into that question.

“Brow of a god, jaw of a devil” some impressionable biographer had written of him. An accurate description, however. And one that described the two personae within him, the one who lusted for success and the one who lusted for defeat.

If, that is, the books written about him were correct in their judgments.

Some of them were on the table now. He had requested a few of the titles suggested by Frigate, and the Computer had printed and bound them for him and deposited their reproductions in a converter. The best, so Frigate said, was
The Devil Drives,
written by an American woman, Fawn M. Brodie, first published in 1967.

“I gave up my intention to write a biography of you when that came out,” Frigate had said. “But its excellence and wide inclusiveness did not keep others from writing biographies of you after hers. They lacked good judgment. However, you may not like
The Devil Drives.
Brodie couldn’t keep from analyzing you in Freudian terms. On the other hand, perhaps you can tell me if she was right or not. But then, you’d be the last person to know, wouldn’t you?”

Burton had not read the text yet, but he had looked at the reproductions of photographs. There was one of him at the age of fifty-one, painted by the famous artist Sir Frederick Leighton, and displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He did look fierce, Elizabethan, buccaneerish. Leighton had posed him at such an angle as to catch the high forehead, the swelling supraorbital ridges, the thick eyebrows, the driven hungry expression of his eyes, the thrusting chin, the high cheekbones. The scar left from a Somali spear was prominent; Leighton had insisted on showing that, and Burton had not objected. A scar, if honorably gotten, was a form of medal, and he, who should have been covered with real medals, had been slighted.

“Partly your own fault,” Frigate had said. “I can understand and sympathize with that. I, too, was, am, self-defeating.”

“My family motto was ‘Honour, not Honours.’ ”

Opposite the Leighton portrait was a photograph of his wife, Isabel, made in 1869, when she was thirty-eight. She looked buxom, regal, and handsome. Like a kindly but domineering mother, he thought. A few pages back was a portrait of her done by the French artist Louis Desanges in 1861, when she had married Burton. She looked young, loving, and optimistic. Beneath her was the Desanges painting of Burton done at the same time. She was thirty; he, forty. His moustache dropped almost to his shoulder bones, and he certainly looked dark and fierce. And how thick his lips were. Which had suggested to certain biographers, and others, an overly sensual nature. How thin and prim and pursed were Isabel’s lips. A flaw in an otherwise perfectly beautiful face. Thin lips. Thick lips. Love, tenderness, and cheerfulness versus fierceness, ambitiousness, and pessimism. Isabel, blond; he, dark.

He turned the pages to a photograph of him at sixty-nine in 1890 and another of himself and Isabel in the same year, same place, Trieste. It had been taken by Doctor Baker, his personal physician, under a tree in the backyard. Burton sat on a chair, not visible in the photograph, one hand on the knob of his iron cane, the other draped over his right wrist. The fingers looked skeletal: Death’s own hand. He wore a tall gray plug hat, a stiff white collar, and a gray morning coat. The eyes in the gaunt face looked like those of a dying prisoner. Which, in a sense, he was. Little of the fierceness evident in the earlier pictures was there.