The Dark Design (28 page)

The series was his specialty in dreams or in fiction. At one time, during his writing career, he had twenty-one series going. He’d completed ten of them. The others were still waiting, cliff-hangers all, when that great editor in the skies arbitrarily canceled all of them.

As in life, so in death. He could never—never? Well, hardly ever—finish anything. The great uncompleted. He’d first become aware of that when, a troubled youth, he had poured out his torments and anxieties onto his college freshman advisor, who also happened to be his psychology teacher.

The professor, what was his name? O’Brien? He was a short, slim youth with a fiery manner and even fierier red hair. And he always wore a bow tie.

And now Peter Jairus Frigate was walking along in the fog and there was no sound except for the hooting of a distant owl. Suddenly, a motor was roaring, two lights shone faintly ahead of him, then brightly, and the motor screamed as he screamed. He dived to one side, floating, slowly floating, while the black bulk of the automobile sped slowly toward him. As he inched through the air, his arms flailing, he turned his head toward it. Now he could see, beyond the glare of its lights, that it was a Duesenberg, the long, low, classy roadster driven by Cary Grant in the movie he’d seen last week,
Topper.
A shapeless mass sat behind the wheel, its only visible features its eyes. They were the pale-blue eyes of his German grandmother, his mother’s mother, Wilhelmina Kaiser.

Then he was screaming because the car had swerved and headed directly toward him and there was no way he could escape being hit.

He woke up moaning. Eve said sleepily, “Did you have a bad… ?” and she subsided into mumbles and a gentle snoring.

Peter got out of bed, a short-legged structure with a bamboo frame and rope supports for a mattress made of cloths magnetically attached around treated leaves. The earthen floor was covered with attached cloths. The windows were paned with the isinglasslike intestinal membrane of the hornfish. Their squares shone faintly with the reflected light from the night sky.

He stumbled to the door, opened it, walked outside, and urinated. Rain still dripped from the thatched roof. Through a pass in the hills, he could see a fire blazing under the roof of a sentinel tower. It outlined the form of a guard leaning on the railing and looking down The River. The flames also shone on the masts and rigging of a boat he had never seen before. The other guard wasn’t on the tower, which meant that he would be down by the boat. He’d be questioning the boat’s skipper. It must be all right, since there were no alarm drums beating.

Back in bed, he considered the dream. Its chronology was mixed up, which was par for dreams. For one thing, in 1937, brother Roosevelt had been only sixteen. The motorcycle, the distillery job, and the peroxided blondes were still two years away. The family wasn’t even living in that house anymore. It had moved to a newer, larger house a few blocks away.

There was that amorphous, sinister dark mass in the car, the thing with his grandmother’s eyes. What did that mean? It wasn’t the first time he had been horrified by a black hooded thing with Grandma Kaiser’s almost colorless blue eyes. Nor the first time he’d tried to figure out why she appeared in such horrendous guise.

He knew that she had come from Galena, Kansas, to Terre Haute to help his mother take care of him just after he’d been born. His mother had told him that his grandmother had also taken care of him when he was five. He didn’t remember, however, ever seeing her before the age of twelve, when she had come to this house for a visit. But he was convinced that she had done something awful to him when he was an infant. Or it was something which had
seemed
awful. Yet she was a kindly old lady, though inclined to get hysterical. Nor did she have any control at all over her daughter’s children when they were left in her care.

Where was she now? She’d died at about seventy-seven after a long and painful siege of stomach cancer. But he’d seen photographs of her when she was twenty. A petite blonde whose eyes looked a lively blue, not the washed-out, red-veined things he remembered. The mouth was thin and tight, but all the adults in her family were grim lipped. Those brown-toned photogravures displayed faces that looked as if they’d had a very tough time but would never break under the strain.

The Victorians, judging by their photographs, were a hard-nosed, stiff-spined lot. His German grandma’s family had been made of the same stern stuff. Persecuted by their Lutheran neighbors and the authorities because they had converted to the Baptist church, they left Oberellen, Thuringia, for the land of promise. (Peter’s family on both sides had always opted for the religion of the minority, usually a somewhat crank religion. Maybe they were troubleseekers.)

After years of moving from one place to another, never finding a single street paved with gold, after backbreaking labor, soul-searing poverty, and the deaths of many children and finally of parents and grandparents, the Kaisers had made it. They had become well-to-do farmers near, or owners of machine shops in, Kansas City.

Was it worth it? The survivors said that it was.

Wilhelmina had been a pretty, blue-eyed blonde of ten when she had come to America. At eighteen she had married a Kansan twenty years older than she, probably to escape poverty. It was said that old Bill Griffiths was part Cherokee and that he had been one of Quantrill’s guerrillas, but there was a lot of malarkey in Peter’s family on both sides. They were always trying to make themselves look better, or worse, than they really were. Whatever old Bill’s past, Peter’s mother never wanted to talk about it. Maybe he was just a horse thief.

Where was Wilhelmina now? She’d no longer be the wrinkled, bent old woman he’d known. She’d be a good-looking, shapely wench, though still with the vacuous blue eyes and still speaking English with a heavy German accent. If he should run across her, would he recognize her? Not likely. And if he did, what could he find out from her about the traumas she’d inflicted on her infant grandson? Nothing. She wouldn’t remember what would have been minor incidents to her. Or, if she did, she surely wasn’t going to admit that she had ever mistreated him. If indeed the dark deed had ever been done.

During a brief stint of psychoanalysis, Peter had tried to break through the thick shadows of repressed memory to the primal drama in which his grandmother played such an important role. The effort had failed. More extended attempts in Dianetics and Scientology had resulted in zilch also. He had kept on sliding past the traumatic episodes, like a monkey on a greased pole, on past his birth and into previous lives.

After being a woman giving birth in a medieval castle, a dinosaur, a prevertebrate in the postprimal ocean, and an eighteenth-century passenger in a stagecoach going through the Black Forest, Peter had abandoned Scientology.

The fantasies were interesting, and they revealed something of his character. But his grandmother evaded him.

Here, on The Riverworld, he had tried dreamgum as a weapon to pierce the thick shadows. Under the guidance of a guru, he had chewed half a stick, a heavy load, and dived after the pearl hidden in the depths of his unconscious. When he woke from some horrible visions, he found his guru, battered and bloody, unconscious on the floor of the hut. There was no mystery about who had done this deed.

Peter had left the area after making sure that his guide would live without serious aftereffects. He could not stay in the area nor could he feel anything but guilt and shame whenever he saw his guru. The fellow had been very forgiving, had, in fact, been willing to continue the sessions—if Peter was tied up during them.

He could not face the violence that he felt dwelt deep within him. It was this fear of violence in himself that made him so afraid of violence in others.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in our lousy genes. Or in failure of one’s conquest of one’s self.

The fault, dear Brutus, is in our fear of knowing our self.

The next, almost inevitable, scene in this drama of recollection was the seduction of Wilhelmina. How easy to think of this fantasy as potentially real, since it was possible that he would meet her. After some mutual questioning, they would discover that they were grandmother and grandson. Then the long talk with him telling what had happened to her daughter and husband (Peter’s father) and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Would she be horrified when she found that a great-granddaughter had married a Jew? Undoubtedly. Anyone of rural stock born in 1880 was bound to be deeply prejudiced. Or what if he told her that his sister had married a Japanese? Or that a brother and a first cousin had married Catholics? Or that a great-granddaughter had converted to Catholicism? Or that a great-grandson had become a Buddhist?

On the other hand, The Riverworld might have changed her attitudes, as it had done to so many. However, many more were as psychologically fossilized as when they had lived on Earth.

To get on to the fantasy.

After a few drinks and a long talk, bed?

Rationally, one could not object to incest here. There would be no children.

But when did people ever think rationally in such situations?

No, the thing to do would be to say nothing about their relationship until after they’d been to bed.

The construction crumbled then. To reveal that would make her grievously ashamed. It would be cruel. And no matter how much he wanted revenge, he could not do that to her. To anyone. Besides, it would be revenge for some act that he only thought might have been committed. Even if it had occurred, it might have been something only a child would have thought terrible. Or something misinterpreted in his infant mind. Or something that she, being a product of her times, would have thought only natural.

It was exciting to think about laying your grandmother. But, in reality, it just wouldn’t happen. He was sexually drawn only to intelligent women, and his grandmother had been an ignorant peasant. Vulgar, too, though not in an obscene or irreligious way. He remembered when she was eating with the family on a Thanksgiving holiday. She’d sneezed, the snot had landed on her blouse, and she had wiped it off with her hand and deposited it on her skirt. His father had laughed, his mother had looked stricken, and he had lost his appetite.

There went the whole fantasy, dissolved in disgust.

Still, she might have changed.

To hell with it, he told himself, and he turned on his side and went to sleep.

Drums beat, and wooden trumpets blew. Peter Frigate woke up in the midst of another dream. It was three months after Pearl Harbor, and he was an air cadet at Randolph Field being chewed out by his flight instructor.

The lieutenant, a tall young man with a thin moustache and big feet, was almost as hysterical as Grandma Kaiser.

“The next time you turn left when I tell you to turn right, Frigate, I’m bringing us in right now, cutting the goddamn flight, and I’m refusing to go up with you! You can get an instructor who doesn’t give a shit if his dumb student kills him or not! Jesus Christ, Frigate, we coulda been killed! Didn’t you see that plane on your left! Are you suicidal! That’s all right with me, but don’t take me and two others with you! And do it on your own time, off the field, and not with government property! What the hell is the matter with you, Frigate! Do you
hate
me!”

“I couldn’t hear you, sir,” Peter said. Though he was sweating in the heavy flight clothes in the warm room, he was shivering and he felt a painful urge to urinate. “I just can’t seem to hear through those tubes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the tubes! I could hear you all right! And there’s nothing wrong with your ears! You had a medical checkup only two weeks ago, didn’t you? All you pissy-assed cadets are examined when you transfer here! Aren’t you?”

Peter nodded and said, “Yes sir, just like you were.”

The lieutenant, his face red, eyes bugging, said, “What do you mean by that? Are you saying I was a pissy-assed cadet?”

“No, sir,” Peter said, feeling the sweat pour out from his armpits. “I would never say ‘pissy-assed’ in reference to you, sir.”

“What would you say?” the lieutenant said, almost screaming.

Peter looked from the corners of his eyes at the other cadets and instructors. Most of them were paying no attention or pretending not to. Some were grinning.

“I would never mention you,” Peter said.

“What? Because I’m not worth mentioning, is that it? Frigate, you
try
me! I don’t like your attitude on the ground or in the air. But to get back to the subject despite all your efforts to avoid it! Why in hell can’t you hear me when I can hear you? Is it because you don’t want to hear me?

“Well, that’s dangerous, Frigate! It’s frightening, too. You scare the hell out of me! Do you know how many of those stubby-winged BT-12s spin in every week? Those sons of bitches have got a built-in spin, cadet. Even when an instructor tells his ape-brained student to spin it deliberately, and he’s got his hand on the stick, ready to take over, the sons of bitches sometimes still keep on spinning!