To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (14 page)

“Shut your mouth,” a man near Ruach said. He had red hair so curly it was almost kinky, blue eyes, and a face that might have been handsome if it had not been for his broken nose. He was six feet tall and had a wrestler’s body.

“Dov Targoff here,” he said in a crisp Oxford accent. “Late commander in the Israeli Navy. Pay no attention to this man. He’s one of the old-time Jews, a pessimist, a whiner. He’d rather wail against the wall than stand up and fight like a man.”

Ruach choked, then said, “You arrogant Sabra! I fought; I killed! And I am not a whiner! What are you doing now, you brave warrior? Aren’t you a slave as much as the rest of us?”

“It’s the old story,” a woman said. She was tall and dark-haired and probably would have been a beauty if she had not been so gaunt. “The old story. We fight among ourselves while our enemies conquer. Just as we fought when Titus besieged Jerusalem and we killed more of our own people than we did the Romans. Just as….”

The two men turned against her, and all three argued loudly until a guard began beating them with a stick.

Later, through swollen lips, Targoff said, “I can’t take much of this, much longer. Soon…well, that guard is mine to kill.”

“You have a plan?” Frigate said, eagerly, but Targoff would not answer.

Shortly before dawn, the slaves were awakened and marched to the
grailrock. Again, they were given a modicum of food. After eating, they were split up into groups and marched off to their differing assignments. Burton and Frigate were taken to the northern border. They were put to work with a thousand other slaves, and they toiled naked all day in the sun. Their only rest was when they took their grails to the rock at noon and were fed.

Göring meant to build a wall between the mountain and The River; he also intended to erect a second wall which would run for the full ten-mile length of the lakeshore and a third wall at the southern end.

Burton and the others had to dig a deep trench and then pile the dirt taken from the hole into a wall. This was hard work, for they had only stone hoes with which to hack at the ground. Since the roots of the grass formed a thickly tangled complex of very tough material, they could be cut only with repeated blows. The dirt and roots were scraped up on wooden shovels and tossed onto large bamboo sleds. These were dragged by teams onto the top of the wall, where the dirt was shoveled off to make the wall even higher and thicker.

At night, the slaves were herded back into the stockade. Here, most of them fell asleep almost at once. But Targoff, the red-headed Israeli, squatted by Burton.

“The grapevine gives a little juice now and then,” he said. “I heard about the fight you and your crew made. I also heard about your refusal to join Göring and his swine.”

“What do you hear about my infamous book?” Burton said.

Targoff smiled and said, “I never heard of it until Ruach brought it to my attention. Your actions speak for themselves. Besides, Ruach is very sensitive about such things. Not that you can really blame him after what he went through. But I do not think that you would behave as you did if you were what he said you are. I think you’re a good man, the type we need. So….”

Days and nights of hard work and short rations followed. Burton learned through the grapevine about the women. Wilfreda and Fatima were in Campbell’s apartment. Loghu was with Tullius. Alice had been kept by Göring for a week, then had been turned over to a lieutenant, a Manfred von Kreyscharft. Rumor was that Göring had complained of her coldness and had wanted to give her to his bodyguards to do with as they pleased. But von Kreyscharft had asked for her.

Burton was in agony. He could not endure the mental images of her with Göring and von Kreyscharft. He had to stop these beasts or at least die trying. Late that night, he crawled from the big hut he occupied with twenty-five men into Targoff’s hut and woke him up.

“You said you knew that I must be on your side,” he whispered. “When are you going to take me into your confidence? I might as well warn you now that, if you don’t do so at once, I intend to foment a break among my own group and anybody else who will join us.”

“Ruach has told me
more
about you,” Targoff said. “I didn’t understand, really, what he was talking about. Could a Jew trust anyone who wrote such a book? Or could such a man be trusted not to turn on them after the common enemy has been defeated?”

Burton opened his mouth to speak angrily, then closed it. For a moment, he was silent. When he spoke, he did so calmly. “In the first place, my actions on Earth speak louder than any of my printed words. I was the friend and protector of many Jews; I had many Jewish friends.”

“That last statement is always a preface to an attack on the Jews,” Targoff said.

“Perhaps. However, even if what Ruach claims were true, the Richard Burton you see before you in this valley is not the Burton who lived on Earth. I think every man has been changed somewhat by his experience here. If he hasn’t, he is incapable of change. He would be better off dead.

“During the four hundred and seventy-six days that I have lived on this River, I have learned much. I am not incapable of changing my mind. I listened to Ruach and Frigate. I argued frequently and passionately with them. And though I did not want to admit it at the time, I thought much about what they said.”

“Jew-hate is something bred into the child,” Targoff said. “It becomes part of the nerve. No act of will can get rid of it, unless it is not very deeply embedded or the will is extraordinarily strong. The bell rings, and Pavlov’s dog salivates. Mention the word
Jew
, and the nervous system storms the citadel of the mind of the Gentile. Just as the word
Arab
storms mine. But I have a realistic basis for hating all Arabs.”

“I have pled enough,” Burton said. “You will either accept me or reject me. In either case, you know what I will do.”

“I accept,” Targoff said. “If you can change your mind, I can change
mine. I’ve worked with you, eaten bread with you. I like to think I’m a good judge of character. Tell me, if you were planning this, what would you do?”

Targoff listened carefully. At the end of Burton’s explanation, Targoff nodded. “Much like my plan. Now….”

T
he next day, shortly after breakfast, several guards came for Burton and Frigate. Targoff looked hard at Burton, who knew what Targoff was thinking. Nothing could be done except to march off to Göring’s “palace.” He was seated in a big wooden chair and smoking a pipe. He asked them to sit down and offered them cigars and wine.

“Every once in a while,” he said, “I like to relax and talk with somebody besides my colleagues, who are not overly bright. I like especially to talk with somebody who lived
after
I died. And to men who were famous in their time. I’ve few of either type, so far.”

“Many of your Israeli prisoners lived after you,” Frigate said.

“Ah, the Jews!” Göring airily waved his pipe. “That is the trouble. They know me too well. They are sullen when I try to talk to them, and too many have tried to kill me for me to feel comfortable around them. Not that I have anything against them. I don’t particularly like Jews, but I had many Jewish friends….”

Burton reddened.

Göring, after sucking on his pipe, continued, “Der Führer was a great man, but he had some idiocies. One of them was his attitude toward Jews. Myself, I cared less. But the Germany of my time was anti-Jewish, and a man must go with the zeitgeist if he wants to get any place in life. Enough of that. Even here, a man cannot get away from them.”

He chattered on for a while, then asked Frigate many questions concerning the fate of his contemporaries and the history of post-war Germany.

“If you Americans had had any political sense, you would have declared war on Russia as soon as we surrendered. We would have fought with you against the Bolshevik, and we would have crushed them.”

Frigate did not reply. Göring then told several “funny,” very obscene
stories. He asked Burton to tell him about the strange experience he had had before being resurrected in the valley.

Burton was surprised. Had Göring learned about this from Kazz or was there an informer among the slaves?

He told in full detail everything that had happened between the time he opened his eyes to find himself in the place of floating bodies to the instant when the man in the aerial canoe pointed the metal tube at him.

“The extra-Terrestrial, Monat, has a theory that some beings—call them Whomever or X—have been observing mankind since he ceased to be an ape. For at least two million years. These superbeings have, in some manner, recorded every cell of every human being that ever lived from the moment of conception, probably, to the moment of death. This seems a staggering concept, but it is no more staggering than the resurrection of all humanity and the reshaping of this planet into one Rivervalley. The recordings may have been made when the recordees were living. Or it may be that these superbeings detected vibrations from the past, just as we on Earth saw the light of stars as they had been a thousand years before.

“Monat, however, inclines to the former theory. He does not believe in time travel even in a limited sense.

“Monat believes that the X’s stored these recordings. How, he does not know. But this planet was then reshaped for us. It is obviously one great Riverworld. During our journey up River, we’ve talked to dozens whose descriptions leave no doubt that they come from widely scattered parts, from all over. One was from far up in the northern hemisphere; another, far down in the southern. All the descriptions fall together to make a picture of a world that has been reworked into one zigzagging Rivervalley.

“The people we talked to were killed or died by accident here and were resurrected again in the areas we happened to be traveling through. Monat says that we resurrectees are still being recorded. And when one of us dies again, the up-to-the-minute recordings are being placed somewhere—maybe under the surface of this planet—and played into energy-matter converters. The bodies were reproduced as they were at the moment of death and then the rejuvenating devices restored the sleeping bodies. Probably in that same chamber in which I awoke. After this, the bodies, young and whole again, were recorded
and then destroyed. And the recordings were played out again, this time through devices under the ground. Once more, energy-matter converters, probably using the heat of this planet’s molten core as energy, reproduced us above the ground, near the grailstones. I do not know why they are not resurrected a second time in the same spot where they died. But then I don’t know why all our hairs were shaven off or why men’s facial hairs don’t grow or why men were circumcised and women made virgins again. Or why we were resurrected. For what purpose? Whoever put us here has not shown up to tell us why.”

“The thing is,” Frigate said, “the thing is, we are
not
the
same
people we were on Earth. I died. Burton died. You died, Hermann Göring. Everybody died. And we
cannot
be brought back to life!”

Göring sucked on his pipe noisily, stared at Frigate, and then said, “Why not? I am living again. Do you deny that?”

“Yes! I do deny that—in a sense.
You
are living. But you are
not
the Hermann Göring who was born in Marienbad Sanatorium at Rosenheim in Bavaria on January 12, 1893. You are
not
the Hermann Göring whose godfather was Dr. Hermann Eppenstein, a Jew converted to Christianity. You are
not
the Göring who succeeded von Richthofen after his death and continued to lead his fliers against the Allies even after the war ended. You are
not
the Reichsmarschal of Hitler’s Germany
nor
the refugee arrested by Lieutenant Jerome N. Shapiro. Eppenstein and Shapiro, hah! And you are
not
the Hermann Göring who took his life by swallowing potassium cyanide during his trial for his crimes against humanity!”

Göring tamped his pipe with tobacco and said, mildly, “You certainly know much about me. I should be flattered, I suppose. At least, I was not forgotten.”

“Generally, you were,” Frigate said. “You did have a long-lived reputation as a sinister clown, a failure, and a toady.”

Burton was surprised. He had not known that the fellow would stand up to someone who had power of life and death over him or who had treated him so painfully. But then perhaps Frigate hoped to be killed.

It was probable that he was banking on Göring’s curiosity.

Göring said, “Explain your statement. Not about my reputation. Every man of importance expects to be reviled and misunderstood by the brainless masses. Explain why I am not the same man.”

Frigate smiled slightly and said, “You are the product, the hybrid, of a recording and an energy-matter converter. You were made with all the
memories
of the dead man Hermann Göring and with every cell of his body a duplicate. You have everything he had. So you
think
you are Göring. But you are not! You are a duplication, and that is all! The original Hermann Göring is nothing but molecules that have been absorbed into the soil and the air and so into plants and back into the flesh of beasts and men and out again as excrement,
und so weiter
!

“But you, here before me, are not the original, any more than the recording on a disc or a tape is the original voice, the vibrations issuing from the mouth of a man and detected and converted by an electronic device and then replayed.”

Burton understood the reference, since he had seen an Edison phonograph in Paris in 1888. He felt outraged, actually violated, at Frigate’s assertions.

Göring’s wide-open eyes and reddening face indicated that he, too, felt threatened down to the core of his being.

After stuttering, Göring said, “And why would these beings go to all this trouble just to make duplicates?”

Frigate shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

Göring heaved up from his chair and pointed the stem of his pipe at Frigate.

“You lie!” he screamed in German. “You lie,
scheisshund
!”

Frigate quivered as if he expected to be struck over the kidneys again, but he said, “I must be right. Of course, you don’t have to believe what I say. I can’t prove anything. And I understand exactly how you feel. I
know
that I am Peter Jairus Frigate, born 1918, died
A.D.
2008. But I also must believe, because logic tells me so, that I am only, really, a being who has the
memories
of that Frigate who will never rise from the dead. In a sense, I am the son of that Frigate who can never exist again. Not flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, but mind of his mind. I am
not
the man who was born of a woman on that lost world of Earth. I am the byblow of science and a machine. Unless….”

Göring said, “Yes? Unless what?”

“Unless there is some entity attached to the human body, an entity which is the human being. I mean, it contains all that makes the individual what he is, and when the body is destroyed, this entity still exists. So that, if the body were to be made again, this entity, storing the
essence of the individual, could be attached again to the body. And it would record everything that the body recorded. And so the original individual
would
live again. He would not be just a duplicate.”

Burton said, “For God’s sake, Pete! Are you proposing the
soul
?”

Frigate nodded and said, “Something analagous to the soul. Something that the primitives dimly apprehended and called a soul.”

Göring laughed uproariously. Burton would have laughed, but he did not care to give Göring any support, moral or intellectual.

When Göring had quit laughing, he said, “Even here, in a world which is clearly the result of science, the supernaturalists won’t quit trying. Well, enough of that. To more practical and immediate matters. Tell me, have you changed your mind? Are you ready to join me?”

Burton glared and said, “I would not be under the orders of a man who rapes women; moreover, I respect the Israelis. I would rather be a slave with them than free with you.”

Göring scowled and said, harshly, “Very well. I thought as much. But I had hoped…well, I have been having trouble with the Roman. If he gets his way, you will see how merciful I have been to you slaves. You do not know him. Only my intervention has saved one of you being tortured to death every night for his amusement.”

At noon, the two returned to their work in the hills. Neither got a chance to speak to Targoff or any of the slaves, since their duties happened not to bring them into contact. They did not dare make an open attempt to talk to him, because that would have meant a severe beating.

After they returned to the stockade in the evening, Burton told the others what had happened.

“More than likely Targoff will not believe my story. He’ll think we’re spies. Even if he’s not certain, he can’t afford to take chances. So there’ll be trouble. It’s too bad that this had to happen. The escape plan will have to be cancelled for tonight.”

Nothing untoward took place—at first. The Israelis walked away from Burton and Frigate when they tried to talk to them. The stars came out, and the stockade was flooded with a light almost as bright as a full moon on Earth.

The prisoners stayed inside their barracks, but they talked in low voices with their heads together. Despite their deep tiredness, they could not sleep. The guards must have sensed the tension, even though they could not see or hear the men in the huts. They walked back and forth
on the walks, stood together talking, and peered down into the enclosure by the light of the night sky and the flames of the resin torches.

“Targoff will do nothing until it rains,” Burton said. He gave orders. Frigate was to stand first watch; Robert Spruce, the second; Burton, third. Burton lay down on his pile of leaves and, ignoring the murmuring of voices and the moving around of bodies, fell asleep.

It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when Spruce touched him. He rose quickly to his feet, yawned, and stretched. The others were all awake. Within a few minutes, the first of the clouds formed. In ten minutes, the stars were blotted out. Thunder grumbled way up in the mountains, and the first lightning flash forked the sky.

Lightning struck near. Burton saw by its flash that the guards were huddled under the roofs sticking out from the base of the watch houses at each corner of the stockade. They were covered with towels against the chill and the rain.

Burton crawled from his barracks to the next. Targoff was standing inside the entrance. Burton stood up and said, “Does the plan still hold?”

“You know better than that,” Targoff said. A bolt of lightning showed his angry face. “You Judas!”

He stepped forward, and a dozen men followed him. Burton did not wait; he attacked. But, as he rushed forward, he heard a strange sound. He paused to look out through the door. Another flash revealed a guard sprawled facedown in the grass beneath a walk.

Targoff had put his fists down when Burton turned his back on him. He said, “What’s going on, Burton?”

“Wait,” the Englishman replied. He had no more idea than the Israeli about what was happening, but anything unexpected could be to his advantage.

Lightning illuminated the squat figure of Kazz on the wooden walk. He was swinging a huge stone axe against a group of guards who were in the angle formed by the meeting of the two walls. Another flash. The guards were sprawled out on the walk. Darkness. At the next blaze of light, another was down; the remaining two were running away down the walk in different directions.

Another bolt very near the wall showed that, finally, the other guards were aware of what was happening. They ran down the walk, shouting and waving their spears.

Kazz, ignoring them, slid a long bamboo ladder down into the enclosure
and then he threw a bundle of spears after it. By the next flash, he could be seen advancing toward the nearest guards.

Burton snatched a spear and almost ran up the ladder. The others, including the Israeli, were behind him. The fight was bloody and brief. With the guards on the walk either stabbed or hurled to their deaths, only those in the watch houses remained. The ladder was carried to the other end of the stockade and placed against the gate. In two minutes, men had climbed to the outside, dropped down, and opened the gate. For the first time, Burton found the chance to talk to Kazz.