The Magic Labyrinth (5 page)

When the Reverend Mr. Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, wrote
Alice in Wonderland,
he prefaced it with a poem. It begins with “All in the golden afternoon” and compresses that famous journey by boat up the Isis during which Dodgson was teased by the real Alice into writing down the tale he’d composed to please the “cruel Three.”

On that day of July 4, 1852, golden in memory only because it actually was cool and wet, Dodgson, who would be the Dodo in
Alice
and the White Knight in
Through the Looking-Glass,
was accompanied by Reverend Duckworth, who naturally became the Duck. Lorina, aged thirteen, was the Lory, and Alice, aged ten, Dodgson’s favorite, was of course Alice. Edith, the youngest sister, aged eight, would be the Eaglet.

The three little girls were the daughters of Bishop Liddell, whose surname rhymed with fiddle, as evidenced by a poem about the bishop sung by the rowdy Oxford students. Dodgson’s verse refers to the girls in Latin ordinals according to the ages. Prima, Secunda, and Tertia.

It seemed to Alice now, as she stood in the middle of Richard’s and her cabin, that she had in truth played the part of Secunda during her Earthly life. Certainly, on this world she was Secunda. Richard Burton regarded few men as his equal and no women, not even his wife and perhaps especially his wife, as equals.

She hadn’t minded. She was dreamy, gentle, and introverted. As Dodgson had written of her:

That would become true in more senses than Dodgson could have dreamed of. Now she was under a sky in which even at the blaze of noon she could see near the tops of the mountains the faint phantom glow of a few giant stars. And in the moonless night sky was the blaze of great gas sheets and enormous stars which shed the light of a full moon.

Under the light of day and night, she had been content, even eager, to have Richard make the decisions. These had often involved violence, and, contrary to her nature, she had fought like an Amazon. Though she did not have the physique of a Penthesilea, she did have the courage.

Life on the Riverworld had often been harsh, cruel, and bloody. After dying on Earth, she’d awakened naked and with all body hair shaven, in the body she’d had when she was twenty-five, though she’d died when eighty-two. Around her was not the room of the house in which she’d died, her sister Rhoda’s in Westerham, Kent. Instead towering unbroken mountain ranges enclosed the plains and the foothills and the river in the middle of the valley. As far as she could see, people stood on the banks, all naked, hairless, young, and in shock, screaming, weeping, laughing hysterically, or in horror-struck silence.

She knew no one and had by impulse attached herself to Burton. However, one of the items in her grail was a chiclelike stick containing some sort of psychedelic substance. She’d chewed it, and then she and Burton had copulated furiously all night and also done things she then regarded as perverted and some things which she still did.

She’d loathed herself in the morning and felt like killing herself. Burton she’d hated as she’d never hated anyone. But she continued to stay with him since anyone she switched to might be worse. Also she had to admit that he too was under the gum’s influence, and he did not press her to renew, as she then thought of it, their carnal acquaintance. Burton would have used an Anglo-Saxonism, as he called it, to describe their coupling.

In time she’d fallen in love with him—had, in fact, been in love that night—and they began living together. Living together was not exactly accurate since a good half of her time she spent by herself in their hut. Burton was the most restless man she’d ever known. After a week in one place he must be up and moving: From time to time they’d had quarrels, he doing most of the quarrelling, though by now she could hold her own. Eventually he disappeared for years and returned with a story that turned out to be the essence of cock-and-bull.

She was very hurt when she finally found out that he’d kept his most important secret from her for years. He’d been visited one night by a robed and masked being who said that he was an
Ethical,
one of the Council which governed those responsible for the resurrections of thirty-five billion or so Terrestrials.

The story went that these Ethicals had raised humanity to life to perform certain experiments. They meant to let humankind die, never to be resurrected again. One of the Council, this Ethical, this “man,” was secretly opposing this.

Burton was skeptical. But when the other Ethicals tried to seize him, Burton had run. He was forced to kill himself several times, utilizing the principle of resurrection, to get far away from his pursuers. After a while he decided that he might as well keep going. After 777 suicides, he awoke in the Council room of the twelve. These had told him what he knew already from X, that is, that there was a renegade among them. So far, they hadn’t been able to detect who he or she was. But they would.

Now that they had caught him, they would keep him under permanent surveillance. The memory of his visits from the Ethicals, in fact, everything since he’d first known X, would be wiped out of his mind.

Burton, however, on waking on the banks of The River, had found his memory unimpaired. Somehow, X had succeeded in averting the erasure and in fooling his colleagues.

Burton reasoned also that X must have arranged it so that the Ethicals couldn’t find him whenever they wished to. Burton had gone upRiver then, looking for the others whom X had recruited. Just when and how they could help him, X wouldn’t say, though he promised to reveal the time and the methods at a later time.

Something had gone wrong. X hadn’t appeared for years, and the resurrections had suddenly stopped.

Then Burton had found out that the Peter Jairus Frigate and the Tau Cetan, who’d been with Burton from the beginning, were either Ethicals or the Ethicals’ agents. Before Burton could seize them, the two had fled.

Burton could no longer hide his secret from his companions. Alice was shocked by the story, stunned. Later, she became furious. Why hadn’t he told her the truth long ago? Burton had explained that he wanted to protect her. If she knew the truth, she might be subject to abduction and questioning and God only knew what else by the Ethicals.

Since that time, she’d been slowly burning. The repressed anger had now and then broken out, and the flames had scorched Burton. He, always willing to burn back, had quarreled with her. And though they’d always reconciled afterwards, Alice knew that the day of parting had to come soon.

She should have made the break before signing on the
Rex.
But she also wanted to know the answers to the mysteries of the Riverworld. If she stayed behind, she would always regret not having gone on. So she had boarded with Richard, and here she was in their cabin wondering what to do next.

Also, she had to confess that there was more to her being here than the desire to reveal mysteries. For the first time in her life on this world, she had hot and cold running water and a comfortable toilet and bed and air-conditioning and a grand salon in which she could see movies and stage plays and hear music, classical and popular, played by orchestras which used the instruments known on Earth, not the clay and skin and bamboo substitutes used on the banks. There was also bridge and whist and other games. All these comforts of body and soul and others were hers. They would be hard to give up.

It was indeed a strange situation for a bishop’s daughter born May 4, 1852, next to Westminster Abbey. Her father was not only the dean of Christ Church College but famous as the coeditor of Liddell and Scott’s
Greek-English Lexicon.
Her mother was a beautiful and cultured woman who looked as if she were Spanish. Alice Pleasance Liddell came to Oxford when she was four and almost immediately made friends with the shy, stammering mathematician-clergyman with the offbeat sense of humor. Both lived in Tom Quad so that their meetings were frequent.

As the daughters of a bishop of royal and noble descent, she and her sisters had not been allowed to play with other children very often. They were educated principally by their governess, Miss Prickett, a woman who strove mightily to teach her girls but had not enough education herself. Nevertheless, Alice enjoyed all the advantages of a privileged Victorian childhood. John Ruskin was her drawing teacher. She often managed to eavesdrop on the conversations of her father’s dinner guests: the Prince of Wales, Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, and many other notables and greats.

She was a pretty child, dark, her straight hair in bangs, her face a reflection of her quiet dreaming soul when she was pensive but bright and eager when stimulated, especially by Dodgson’s wild stories. She read a lot and was largely self-educated.

She liked to play with her black cat, Dinah, and to tell her stories which were never as good as the reverend’s. Her favorite song was “Star of Evening,” which Dodgson was to satirize in
Alice
as the Mock Turtle’s song, “Turtle Soup.”

The real Alice’s favorite section of the book, however, was that about the Cheshire Cat. She loved cats, and even when she’d grown up she would occasionally talk to her pet as if it were human when no one else was around.

She’d grown up to be a good-looking woman with a splendid physique and something special about her, an indefinable misty air which had attracted Dodgson when she was a child and had also drawn Ruskin and others. To them she was the “child of pure unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

Despite her adult attractiveness, she did not get married until she was twenty-eight, which made her an old maid in Victorian 1880. Her husband, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves of the estate of Cuffnells, near Lyndhurst, Hampshire, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, and became a justice of the peace, living a very quiet life with Alice and her three sons. He liked to read, especially French literature, to ride and hunt, and he had a huge arboretum which included Douglas pines and redwoods.

Despite certain inhibitions and awkwardness in the beginning, she had adjusted to the sexual act and came to desire it. She loved her husband, and she sorrowed deeply when he died in 1926.

But Burton she had loved with a passion far exceeding that for Reginald.

No longer, she told herself.

She couldn’t put up with his eternal restlessness, though it looked as if he would be staying in one place for many years now. But it was the place that was moving him. His rages, his eagerness to pick a quarrel, his intense jealousy, were becoming tiresome. The very traits which had attracted her because she had lacked them were now driving her away.

The greatest wedge was that he had kept to himself The Secret.

The trouble with leaving Richard at once was that she had no place to go. All the cabins were taken. Some were occupied by single men, but she did not intend to move in with a man she didn’t love.

Richard would have scoffed at that. He claimed that all he wanted in a woman was beauty and affection. He also preferred blondes, but in her case he had waived this requirement. He would tell her to find some good-looking man with at least passable manners and live with him. No, he wouldn’t. He would threaten to kill her if she left him. Or would he? Surely, he must be getting as tired of her as she was of him.

She sat down and smoked a cigarette, something she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing on Earth, and she considered what to do. After a while, finding no answer, she left the cabin and went to the grand salon. There was always something pleasant or exciting there.

In the salon she walked around for a few minutes admiring the paintings and statuettes and listening to a piece by Liszt being played on the piano.

While she was feeling very lonely and hoping that someone would come up and break her mood, a woman approached her. She was about five feet tall, slim, long-legged, and had medium-sized conical breasts with up-tilted nipples thinly covered with a wispy cloth. Her features were beautiful despite her somewhat too long nose.

Exposing very white and even teeth, the blonde said, in Esperanto, “Hello, I’m Aphra Behn, one of His Majesty’s pistoleers and ex-mistresses, though he still likes an occasional rerun. You’re Alice Liddell, right? The woman of the fierce-looking ugly-handsome Welshman, Gwalchgwynn.”

Alice acknowledged that she was right and asked immediately, “Are you the authoress of
Oroonoko
?”

Aphra smiled again. “Yes, and of several plays. It’s nice to know that I was not unknown in the twentieth century. Do you play bridge? We’re looking for a fourth.”

“I haven’t played for thirty-four years,” Alice said. “But I loved it. If you don’t mind some clumsiness at first…”

“Oh, we’ll sharpen you up, though it may hurt some,” Aphra said. She laughed and led Alice by her hand toward a table near a wall and below a huge painting. This depicted Theseus entering the heart of Minos’ labyrinth where the Minotaur awaited him. Ariadne’s thread was tied to the hero’s enormous erection.

Aphra, seeing Alice’s expression, grinned.

“Does give you a start when you first see it, doesn’t it? Don’t know if Theseus is going to kill the bullman with his sword or bugger him to death, what?”

“If he does the latter,” Alice said, “he’ll break the thread and won’t be able to find his way back out to Ariadne.”

“Lucky woman,” Aphra said. “She can die still thinking he loves her, not knowing he plans to desert her at the first opportunity.”

So this was Aphra Amis Behn, the novelist, poet, and dramatist whom London called the Incomparable Astrea, after the divine star maiden of classical Greek religion. Before she died in 1689 at the age of forty-nine, she had written a novel,
Oroonoko,
which was a sensation in her time and was reprinted in 1930, giving Alice a chance to read it before she died. The book had been very influential in the development of the novel, and Aphra’s contemporaries rated her with Defoe when she was at her best. Her plays were bawdy and coarse but witty and had delighted the theatergoers. She was the first English woman to support herself entirely by writing, and she had also been a spy for Charles II during the war against the Dutch. Her behavior was scandalous, even for the Restoration period, but she was buried in Westminster Abbey, an honor denied the equally scandalous and far more famous Lord Byron.