Gods of Riverworld (13 page)

A huge hand, his father’s, came down and lifted something from him. The blanket.

“A fine son you’ve given me, my dear,” his father said.

“He’s beautiful, beautiful,” a croaking voice said. His mother’s.

“Now, now,” a deep voice said. The doctor’s face hove into view. “We mustn’t tire Mrs. Burton. Besides, the little devil seems to be hungry.”

At this point, he must have fallen asleep. His next view was of an enormous breast, a swollen, pale red nipple, and his little hands reaching out. Then he saw with one eye a field of pink flesh and the underpart of his wetnurse’s face. Mrs. Burton, being a genteel lady, would not have nursed the baby herself.

“I wonder who she was?” Burton muttered. “Some Irishwoman?”

He had a vague memory of his mother having mentioned the nurse’s name once. A Mrs. Riley? Kiley?

He was shocked but not so much that he could not think clearly. The Computer had read his memory from his body-recording, reeling it up as a fisherman did a trout. After storing it in a separate file, the Computer was feeding it back to him via the wall-screen. The showing of the whole of it, if done in the same time as that in which the events had occurred, would take a lifetime. However, no one’s memory held everything that the person had seen, heard, tasted, felt, and thought. Memory was selective and there were great gaps when the person was sleeping, except when he was dreaming, of course. Thus, it did not take as much time as might have been expected to display all that was in the subject’s memory bank.

The film, it was a film of sorts, could be speeded up or slowed down or run backward. The Computer might be doing this now. On the other hand, he could have fallen asleep shortly after birth.

Burton, now watching his diapers being changed by another servant, a maid, wondered why this memory display had been commanded. And by whom?

Before he could question the Computer, several small screens whitened wall areas. Frigate’s, Turpin’s, and de Marbot’s faces appeared. They looked shocked.

“Yes,” he said before they could begin talking, “I’m being visited by the past, too. From bloody birth onward.”

“It’s terrible,” Alice said. “And wonderful, too. Awesome. I feel like crying.”

Frigate said, “I’ll call the others and see if they’re going through the same thing.” His screen dimmed to gray.

Tom Turpin was weeping.

“I’m telling you, seeing my own momma and poppa and that old shack … I don’t think I can take it.”

Burton glanced at the big screen. There he was again, being lifted toward that titanic breast. He could hear his infant’s cry of hunger. The scene faded and was replaced by a view of a blue canopy, and the room rocking. No, a great hand was rocking his cradle.

The screens of the others came on. Seven faces with various emotions looked at him.

Li Po, grinning, said, “It is something indescribable, except for a poet, of course, to see yourself suckled by your mother. But … who ordered this?”

“Wait a moment,” Burton said, “and I’ll ask the Computer.”

“I have done that,” Nur said. “It says that the who and the why are unavailable. But it did not refuse to tell me the when. The order was given two days ago to start the memory-display this morning.”

“Then it must have been given by the woman you killed,” Burton said.

“She’s the most likely candidate.”

“I’m completely at sea about why she ordered this memory-display,” Burton said.

“Obviously,” Nur said, “it was done to accelerate our ethical advancement. If we’re forced to know our past, how we behaved, how others behaved, we’ll see our weaknesses, faults, and vices in all their details. Like it or not, we’ll have what we were, exactly what we were, rubbed into our noses. Ground into our souls. By watching that inescapable drama and comedy, we might be so strongly affected that we’ll take steps to eliminate our undesirable character traits. And then become better human beings.”

“Or it might drive us mad,” Frigate said.

“More likely it will drive us to ingenious methods to shut it out,” Burton said. “Nur, did you ask the Computer to stop the display?”

“Yes. The Computer did not reply. Obviously, the woman’s command is another override.”

“Just a minute,” Burton said.

He walked out of the room into the corridor. The screen had slid along the wall of the big room until he left the room. Now it appeared on the corridor wall opposite him. He cursed and spun on his heels and walked back into the room. The screen accompanied him.

He told the others what had happened. “Apparently, we can’t get rid of it. It’s like the albatross around the ancient mariner’s neck.”

Burton shut his eyes. He heard himself screaming. Opening his eyes, he saw the canopy above him and then heard, faintly, the maid’s voice. “Saints presarve us! What is it now?”

“I think,” he said slowly, “that if we’re going to shut this out, we’ll have to paint our walls. We can’t use the Computer in our apartments, though I suppose we can use the auxiliary computers. And we’ll have to wear ear plugs if we want to sleep. There’s no way of getting away from this outside the apartments.”

“We’ll go crazy!” Frigate said.

Nur said, “Surely, the woman must have realized that. Perhaps we’ll get relief during certain hours of the day. And at night, too.”

Burton asked de Marbot and Behn about the locations of their screens.

“One is on one wall and the other on the wall opposite it,” the Frenchman said. “We can take turns, my little diamond and I, watching each other’s so charming infancies.”

“How the devil can I get any research done with that going on?” Burton muttered.

He said so-long to the others after agreeing to meet them at the swimming pool. The Computer did not refuse to make him a pair of earphones that blocked off the sounds. The only way he could escape the sight on the wall was to stare at the display screen of the auxiliary computer. And he found that he could not concentrate on his work. He was too curious. He could not resist looking at scenes that he did not remember. Yet, after a minute, he got bored. Not much happened to a baby outside of routine, and seeing his parents when they were young quickly lost its interest. They did not talk of anything except him when they were together, and his mother only spoke baby talk. Which he, of course, had been too undeveloped to understand, though he must have responded to her face and the tones of her voice. Now he became sick of them. Not that she was with him much. The people he mostly saw were the wetnurse and the two maids who took turns cleaning him or carrying him around.

At 11:00
A.M.
he went to the swimming pool. The screen followed him along the walls. The pasts of the others accompanied them, too. The screens were at first on one of the long walls, then they were on all the walls.

“Familiarity, I hope, will breed deafness and blindness,” Aphra said as she came up out of the water next to Burton.

“It’ll never be familiar, even though it now has mostly to do with the family,” he said. “What it will breed will be shame, grief, and anger. And humiliation. Do you want to see yourself when you were mean, childish, degraded?”

“Oh, I was never mean. And I was never degraded, though others tried to degrade me.”

He did not think that she was as unperturbed as she seemed to be. No one could be.

It was difficult to swim and talk and have fun. He could not keep from glancing at the screens.

Frigate bobbed up from the surface of the pool beside Burton.

“Look at that,” he said. “I can see myself now.”

His mother, a slim woman with Indian-black hair, dark brown eyes, and high cheekbones, was holding her baby up to a mirror. The infant Peter was nude and grinning, his mouth so wide that he looked froglike.

“It’s a jolt to see yourself at that age. And I can expect many thousands of mirror images, from the puling baby to the old man of sixty-five. Jesus H. Christ!”

That evening, Frigate asked the Computer when the life-recordings started. It replied that they started from the moment of conception. The Computer could not answer Frigate’s question about why the display had not started then. But Frigate and some of the others decided that that was because the nine months in the womb were mostly darkness and silence. They could learn little from it and could easily ignore it.

However, when Frigate asked the Computer to run off his gestation period and show only those moments when sound did penetrate to the embryo, he was astounded. Many times, though the sounds were muffled, he could clearly hear those close to his mother, and his mother’s voice. There were other sounds, too, car motors, locomotive whistles and escaping steam, firecrackers, excretory noises, crashings of fallen glasses or dishes, loud laughter, and, embarrassingly, his parents making love. After two hours of this, Frigate ordered the Computer to stop the recording.

“I suppose that the woman who started this did not do it out of malice,” he said. “Its purpose must be to show us, whether or not we want to see it, our weaknesses, vanities, pettinesses, meannesses, selfishnesses, stupid thinking, prejudices, you name it, everything undesirable in us. With, I suppose, an end in mind, a goal. That we should be able to change ourselves for the better. Ethical advancement.”

“That’s probably true,” Nur said. “But … why the secrecy on her part? Why did she kill Loga?”

“That’s something we’ll have to find out,” Burton said. “If we can.”

The woman who had ordered the merciless recordings had had some compassion, however. At 8:00
P.M.
the screens’ displays faded out, and they did not reappear until 8:00
A.M.
There would be some respite.

Burton left early that evening for his apartment. However, a sufferer from insomnia all his life, he was unable to sleep. After two hours of tossing and turning, his mind filled with scenes from the past-displays, he rose, dressed, and left the apartment. For three hours, he rode his chair through many corridors and into many rooms and up and down many shafts. His wanderings were aimless until he decided to organize his explorations. Why not get a diagram from the Computer and start from the top and work every level thoroughly down to the bottom? He had no goal in mind, no thought that he’d find something new. He was restless, he wanted to keep moving, and, perhaps, he might come across something novel or useful or both.

On the way up to the hangar, his starting point, he changed his mind again. The twelve vast rooms that had been the private worlds of the Council of Twelve beckoned him. They, at least, would offer a variety, something different from the monotonous sameness of corridor and rooms. His tour lasted four hours. When finished with all of them, he knew that he would tell the others that they, too, should explore these fascinating worlds.

Burton visited the hangar again and found it, as far as he could see, unchanged. He counted the craft to make sure that none were missing. That did not mean that the woman Agent had not used one since his last visit.

He returned to his apartment at four in the morning and slept from 4:30 to 7:30. After showering, he decided to go for breakfast at Li Po’s. First, he called him to make sure that the Chinese would be his host for today. The handsome, somewhat Mephistophelian face was smiling.

“Yes, I am eager to have you as my guest. I have a surprise for you.”

He turned his head and said something in Chinese.

Another face appeared by his. Burton was startled. It was a stranger’s, a beautiful Chinese woman’s.

13

Some men and women seem to be steam locomotives chug-chugging steadily on their tracks, slowing down uphill but working steadily and running freely downhill. Others are like internal combustion automobiles that take different roads but now and then run out of gas and wait to be refueled.

Li Po seemed to be a rocket with inexhaustible fuel. He was always exploding, propelled here and there, noisy, sometimes obnoxious, but always letting you know that he was not to be ignored. His face, expressions, and gesticulations reminded Burton of the final stanza in Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan
:

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Li Po, also known as Li T’ai-Po and Tai-Peng, had been born in
A.D.
701 in the oasis town of Yarkand. At the time he was born, the vast desert territory did not belong to any Chinese kingdom. Yarkand was on the trade route between Persia and China, and Li Po’s great-great-grandfather had come there from China. According to family tradition, he had been banned for some political reason. He brought his wife and children with him, and his oldest son married a Turkic-speaking woman, a Uigur. Their eldest son had married a Chinese woman; the second son of this marriage had taken for wife an Afghani-Uigur woman.

The family had become well-to-do, and, five years after Li Po was born, he went with his parents to the southwest Chinese province of Szechwan. They settled in a city that harbored many foreigners, Zoroastrian Persians, Hindus, Jews, Nestorian Christians, and Muslims from Persia, Afghanistan, and the Mesopotamian area. Li Po knew the languages of all of these and was later to add Korean and some Japanese to his stock.

He was almost an inch over six feet, a height attributed by the Chinese to his foreign blood. At an early age, he began composing poetry and drinking wine. Though he had a great reputation as a drunkard later in life, he was not condemned for this. Heavy drinking was endemic among the upper classes; liquor was regarded as an aid to opening the gate to divine inspiration. The speed with which he could compose poetry while drunk dazzled his contemporaries. Strangely, much was great enough to make many rank him as China’s foremost poet.

In his twenties, he began the roving that so many Chinese poets, statesmen, and artists were famous for. For a while, he became a knight-errant, a wanderer who tried to right wrongs by his sword. During this time, he killed several warriors in duels and was widely known as a demon with the blade. Once, he was jailed for killing a man in a tavern brawl but escaped before a sentence could be passed.