To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (9 page)

“You’re a real Christian,” Frigate said, grinning.

“I thought you were my friend!” Ruach said.

T
his was the second time that Burton had heard the name Hitler. He intended to find out all about him, but at the moment everybody would have to put off talking to finish the roofs on the huts. They all pitched in, cutting off more grass with the little scissors they had found in their grails, or climbing the irontrees and tearing off the huge triangular green and scarlet-laced leaves. The roofs left much to be desired. Burton meant to search around for a professional thatcher and learn the proper techniques. The beds would have to be, for the time being, piles of grass on top of which were piles of softer irontree leaves. The blankets would be another pile of the same leaves.

“Thank God, or Whoever, that there is no insect life,” Burton said.

He lifted the gray metal cup which still held two ounces of the best scotch he had ever tasted.

“Here’s to Whoever. If he had raised us just to live on an exact duplicate of Earth, we’d be sharing our beds with ten thousand kinds of biting, scratching, stinging, scraping, tickling, bloodsucking vermin.”

They drank, and then they sat around the fire for a while and smoked and talked. The shadow darkened, the sky lost its blue, and the gigantic stars and great sheets, which had been dimly seen ghosts just before dusk, blossomed out. The sky was indeed a blaze of glory.

“Like a Sime illustration,” Frigate said.

Burton did not know what a Sime was. Half of the conversation with the non-nineteenth-centurians consisted of them explaining their references and he explaining his.

Burton rose and went over to the other side of the fire and squatted by Alice. She had just returned from putting the little girl, Gwenafra, to bed in a hut.

Burton held out a stick of gum to Alice and said, “I just had half a piece. Would you care for the other half?”

She looked at him without expression and said, “No, thanks.”

“There are eight huts,” he said. “There isn’t any doubt about who is sharing which hut with whom, except for Wilfreda, you, and me.”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” she said.

“Then you’re sleeping with Gwenafra?”

She kept her face turned away from him. He squatted for a few seconds and then got up and went back to the other side and sat down by Wilfreda.

“You can move on, Sir Richard,” she said. Her lip was curled. “Lord grab me, I don’t like being second choice. You could of asked ’er where nobody could of seen you. I got some pride, too.”

He was silent for a minute. His first impulse had been to lash out at her with a sharp-pointed insult. But she was right. He had been too contemptuous of her. Even if she had been a whore, she had a right to be treated as a human being. Especially since she maintained that it was hunger that had driven her to prostitution, though he had been skeptical about that. Too many prostitutes had to rationalize their profession; too many had justifying fantasies about their entrance into the business. Yet, her rage at Smithson and her behavior toward him indicated that she was sincere.

He stood up and said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“Are you in love with her?” Wilfreda said, looking up at him.

“I’ve only told one woman that I ever loved her,” he said.

“Your wife?”

“No. The girl died before I could marry her.”

“And how long was you married?”

“Twenty-nine years, though it’s none of your business.”

“Lord grab me! All that time, and you never once told her you loved her!”

“It wasn’t necessary,” he said, and walked away. The hut he chose was occupied by Monat and Kazz. Kazz was snoring away; Monat was leaning on his elbow and smoking a marijuana stick. Monat preferred that to tobacco, because it tasted more like his native tobacco. However, he got little effect from it. On the other hand, tobacco sometimes gave him fleeting but vividly colored visions.

Burton decided to save the rest of his dreamgum, as he called it. He lit up a cigarette, knowing that marijuana would probably make his rage and frustration even darker. He asked Monat questions about his
home, Ghuurrkh. He was intensely interested, but the marijuana betrayed him, and he drifted away while the Cetan’s voice became fainter and fainter.

“.…
cover your eyes now, boys!
”
Gilchrist said in his broad Scots speech.

Richard looked at Edward; Edward grinned and put his hands over his eyes, but he was surely peeking through the spaces between his fingers. Richard placed his own hands over his eyes and continued to stand on tiptoe. Although he and his brother were standing on boxes, they still had to stretch to see over the heads of the adults in front of them.

The woman’s head was in the stock by now; her long brown hair had fallen over her face. He wished he could see her expression as she stared down at the basket waiting for her, or for her head, rather.

“Don’t peek now, boys!” Gilchrist said again.

There was a roll of drums, a single shout, and the blade raced downward, and then a concerted shout from the crowd, mingled with some screams and moans, and the head fell down. The neck spurted out blood and would never stop. It kept spurting and spurting while the sun gleamed on it, it spurted out and covered the crowd and, though he was at least fifty yards from her, the blood struck him in the hands and seeped down between his fingers and over his face, filling his eyes and blinding him and making his lips sticky and salty. He screamed…

“Wake up, Dick!” Monat was saying. He was shaking Burton by the shoulder. “Wake up! You must have been having a nightmare!”

Burton, sobbing and shivering, sat up. He rubbed his hands and then felt his face. Both were wet. But with perspiration, not with blood.

“I was dreaming,” he said. “I was just six years old and in the city of Tours. In France, where we were living then. My tutor, John Gilchrist, took me and my brother Edward to see the execution of a woman who had poisoned her family. It was a
treat
, Gilchrist said.

“I was excited, and I peeked through my fingers when he told us not to watch the final seconds, when the blade of the guillotine came down. But I did; I had to. I remember getting a little sick at my stomach but that was the only effect the gruesome scene had on me. I seemed to have dislocated myself while I was watching it; it was as if I saw the whole thing through a thick glass, as if it were unreal. Or I was unreal. So I wasn’t really horrified.”

Monat had lit another marijuana. Its light was enough so that Burton could see him shaking his head. “How savage! You mean that
you not only killed your criminals, you cut their heads off! In public! And you allowed children to see it!”

“They were a little more humane in England,” Burton said. “They hung the criminals!”

“At least the French permitted the people to be fully aware that they were spilling the blood of their criminals,” Monat said. “The blood was on their hands. But apparently this aspect did not occur to anyone. Not consciously, anyway. So now, after how many years—sixty-three?—you smoke some marijuana and you relive an incident which you had always believed did not harm you. But, this time, you recoil with horror. You screamed like a frightened child. You reacted as you should have reacted when you were a child. I would say that the marijuana dug away some deep layers of repression and uncovered the horror that had been buried there for sixty-three years.”

“Perhaps,” Burton said.

He stopped. There was thunder and lightning in the distance. A minute later, a rushing sound came, and then the patter of drops on the roof. It had rained about this time last night, about three in the morning, he would guess. And this second night, it was raining about the same time. The downpour became heavy, but the roof had been packed tightly, and no water dripped down through it. Some water did, however, come under the back wall, which was uphill. It spread out over the floor but did not wet them, since the grass and leaves under them formed a mat about ten inches thick.

Burton talked with Monat until the rain ceased approximately half an hour later. Monat fell asleep; Kazz had never awakened. Burton tried to get back to sleep but could not. He had never felt so alone, and he was afraid that he might slip back into the nightmare. After a while, he left the hut and walked to the one which Wilfreda had chosen. He smelled the tobacco before he got to the doorway. The tip of her cigarette glowed in the dark. She was a dim figure sitting upright in the pile of grass and leaves.

“Hello,” she said. “I was hoping you would come.”

“I
T
’s the instinct to own property,” Burton said.

“I doubt that it’s an instinct in man,” Frigate said. “Some people in the ’60s—1960s, that is—tried to demonstrate that man had an instinct which they called the
territorial imperative.
But….”

“I like that phrase. It has a fine ring to it,” Burton said.

“I knew you’d like it,” Frigate said. “But Ardrey and others tried to prove that man not only had an instinct to claim a certain area of land as his own, he also was descended from a killer ape. And the instinct to kill was still strong in his heritage from the killer ape. Which explained national boundaries, patriotism both national and local, capitalism, war, murder, crime, and so forth. But the other school of thought, or of the temperamental inclination, maintained that all these are the results of culture, of the cultural continuity of societies dedicated from earliest times to tribal hostilities, to war, to murder, to crime, and so forth. Change the culture, and the killer ape is missing. Missing because he was never there, like the little man on the stairs. The killer was the society, and society bred the new killers out of every batch of babies. But there were some societies, composed of preliterates, it is true, but still societies, that did not breed killers. And they were proof that man was not descended from a killer ape. Or I should say, he was perhaps descended from the ape but he did not carry the killing genes any longer, any more than he carried the genes for a heavy supraorbital ridge or hairy skin or thick bones or a skull with only 650 cubic centimeters capacity.”

“That is all very interesting,” Burton said. “We’ll go into the theory more deeply at another time. Let me point out to you, however, that almost every member of resurrected humanity comes from a culture which encouraged war and murder and crime and rape and robbery and madness. It is these people among whom we are living and with whom we have to deal. There may be a new generation someday. I don’t know. It’s too early to say, since we’ve only been here for seven days. But, like it or not, we are in a world populated by beings who quite often act
as if
they were killer apes.

“In the meantime, let’s get back to our model.”

They were sitting on bamboo stools before Burton’s hut. On a little bamboo table in front of them was a model of a boat made from pine and bamboo. It had a double hull across the top of which was a platform with a low railing in the center. It had a single mast, very tall, with a fore-and-aft rig, a balloon jib sail, and a slightly raised bridge with a wheel. Burton and Frigate had used chert knives and the edge of the scissors to carve the model of the catamaran. Burton had decided to name the boat, when it was built,
The Hadji.
It would be going on a pilgrimage, though its goal was not Mecca. He intended to sail it up
The River as far as it would go. (By now, the river had become The River.)

The two had been talking about the
territorial imperative
because of some anticipated difficulties in getting the boat built. By now the people in this area were somewhat settled. They had staked out their property and constructed their dwellings or were still working on them. These ranged all the way from lean-tos to relatively grandiose buildings that would be made of bamboo logs and stone, have four rooms, and be two stories high. Most of them were near the grailstones along The River and at the base of the mountain. Burton’s survey, completed two days before, resulted in an estimate of about 260 to 261 people per square mile. For every square mile of flat plain on each side of The River, there were approximately 2.4 square miles of hills. But the hills were so high and irregular that their actual inhabitable area was about nine square miles. In the three areas that he had studied, he found that about one-third had built their dwellings close to the Riverside grailstones and one-third around the inland grailstones. Two hundred and sixty-one persons per square mile seemed like a heavy population, but the hills were so heavily wooded and convoluted in topography that a small group living there could feel isolated. And the plain was seldom crowded except at mealtimes, because the plains people were in the woods or fishing along the edge of The River. Many were working on dugouts or bamboo boats with the idea of fishing in the middle of The River. Or, like Burton, of going exploring.

The stands of bamboo had disappeared, although it was evident that they would be quickly replaced. The bamboo had a phenomenal growth. Burton estimated that a fifty-foot-high plant could grow from start to finish in ten days.

His gang had worked hard and cut down all they thought they would need for the boat. But they wanted to keep thieves away, so they used more wood to erect a high fence. This was being finished the same day that the model was completed. The trouble was that they would have to build the boat on the plain. It could never be gotten through the woods and down the various hills if it were built on this site.

“Yeah, but if we move out and set up a new base, we’ll run into opposition,” Frigate had said. “There isn’t a square inch of the high-grass border that isn’t claimed. As it is, you have to trespass to get to the plain. So far, nobody has tried to be hard-nosed about their property
rights, but this can change any day. And if you build the ship a little back from the high-grass border, you can get it out of the woods okay and between the huts. But you’d have to set up a guard night and day, otherwise your stuff will be stolen. Or destroyed. You know these barbarians.”

He was referring to the huts wrecked while their owners were away and to the fouling of the pools below the cataract and the spring. He was also referring to the highly unsanitary habits of many of the locals. These would not use the little outhouses put up by various people for the public.