To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (21 page)

S
ometimes Burton thought of himself as a planetary grasshopper, launching himself out into the darkness of death, landing, nibbling a little at the grass, with one eye cocked for the shadow that betrayed the downswoop of the shrike—the Ethicals. In this vast meadow of humanity, he had sampled many blades, tasted briefly, and then had gone on.

Other times he thought of himself as a net scooping up specimens here and there in the huge sea of mankind. He got a few big fish and many sardines, although there was as much, if not more, to be learned from the small fish as from the large ones.

He did not like the metaphor of the net, however, because it reminded him that there was a much larger net out for him.

Whatever metaphors or similes he used, he was a man who got around a lot, to use a twentieth-century Americanism. So much so that he several times came across the legend of Burton the Gypsy, or, in one English-speaking area, Richard the Rover, and, in another, the Loping Lazarus. This worried him somewhat, since the Ethicals might get a clue to his method of evasion and be able to take measures to trap him. Or They might even guess at his basic goal and set up guards near the headwaters.

At the end of seven years, through much observation of the daystars and through many conversations, he had formed a picture of the course of The River.

It was not an amphisbaena, a snake with two heads, headwaters at the north pole and mouth at the south pole. It was a Midgard Serpent, with the tail at the north pole, the body coiled around and around the planet and the tail in the serpent’s mouth. The River’s source stemmed from the north polar sea, zigzagged back and forth across one hemisphere, circled the south pole and then zigzagged across the face of the
other hemisphere, back and forth, ever working upward until the mouth opened into the hypothetical polar sea.

Nor was the large body of water so hypothetical. If the story of the Titanthrop, the subhuman who claimed to have seen the Misty Tower, was true, the Tower rose out of the fog-shrouded sea.

Burton had heard the tale only at second hand. But he had seen the Titanthrops near the beginning of The River on his first “jump,” and it seemed reasonable that one might actually have crossed the mountains and gotten close enough to get a glimpse of the polar sea. Where one man had gone, another could follow.

And how did The River flow uphill?

Its rate of speed seemed to remain constant even where it should have slowed or refused to go further. From this he postulated localized gravitational fields that urged the mighty stream onward until it had regained an area where natural gravity would take over. Somewhere, perhaps buried under The River itself, were devices that did this work. Their fields must be very restricted, since the pull of the earth did not vary on human beings in these areas to any detectable degree.

There were too many questions. He must go on until he got to the place or to the beings Who could answer them.

And seven years after his first death, he reached the desired area.

It was on his 777th “jump.” He was convinced seven was a lucky number for him. Burton, despite the scoffings of his twentieth-century friends, believed steadfastly in most of the superstitions he had nourished on Earth. He often laughed at the superstitions of others, but he knew that some numbers held good fortune for him, that silver placed on his eyes would rejuvenate his body when it was tired and would help his second sight, the perception that warned him ahead of time of evil situations. True, there seemed to be no silver on this mineral-poor world, but if there were, he could use it to advantage.

All that first day, he stayed at the edge of The River. He paid little attention to those who tried to talk to him, giving them a brief smile. Unlike people in most of the areas he had seen, these were not hostile. The sun moved along the eastern peaks, seemingly just clearing their tops. The flaming ball slid across the valley, lower than he had ever seen it before, except when he had landed among the grotesquely nosed Titanthrops. The sun flooded the valley for a while with light and warmth, and then began its circling just above the western mountains. The valley
became shadowed, and the air became colder than it had been any other place, except, of course, on that first jump. The sun continued to circle until it was again at the point where Burton had first seen it on opening his eyes.

Weary from his twenty-four-hour vigil, but happy, he turned to look for living quarters. He knew now that he was in the arctic area, but he was not at a point just below the headwaters. This time, he was at the other end, the mouth.

As he turned, he heard a voice, familiar but unidentifiable. (He had heard so many.)

“John Collop!”

“Abdul ibn Harun! And they say there are no miracles! What has happened to you since last I saw you?”

“I died the same night you did,” Burton said. “And several times since. There are many evil men in this world.”

“’Tis only natural. There were many on Earth. Yet I dare say their number has been cut down, for the Church has been able to do much good work, praise God. Especially in this area. But come with me, friend. I’ll introduce you to my hutmate. A lovely woman, faithful in a world that still seems to put little value on marital fidelity or, indeed, in virtue of any sort. She was born in the twentieth century
A.D.
and taught English most of her life. Verily, I sometimes think she loves me not so much for myself as for what I can teach her of the speech of my time.”

He gave a curious nervous laugh, by which Burton knew he was joking.

They crossed the plains toward the foothills where fires were burning on small stone platforms before each hut. Most of the men and women had fastened towels around them to form parkas which shielded them from the chill of the shadows.

“A gloomy and shivering place,” Burton said. “Why would anybody want to live here?”

“Most of these people be Finns or Swedes of the late twentieth century.
They are used to the midnight sun. However, you should be happy you’re here. I remember your burning curiosity about the polar regions and your speculations anent. There have been others like you who have gone on down The River to seek their ultima Thule, or if you will pardon me for so terming it, the fool’s gold at the end of the rainbow. But all have either failed to return or have come back, daunted by the forbidding obstacles.”

“Which are what?” Burton said, grabbing Collop’s arm.

“Friend, you’re hurting me. Item, the grailstones cease, so that there is nothing wherewith they may recharge their grails with food. Item, the plains of the valley suddenly terminate, and The River pursues its course between the mountains themselves, through a chasm of icy shadows. Item, what lies beyond, I do not know, for no man has come back to tell me. But I fear they’ve met the end of all who commit the sin of hubris.”

“How far away is this plunge of no return?”

“As The River winds, about 25,000 miles. You may get there with diligent sailing in a year or more. The Almighty Father alone knows how far you must then go before you arrive at the very end of The River. Belike you’d starve before then, because you’d have to take provisions on your boat after leaving the final grailstone.”

“There’s one way to find out,” Burton said.

“Nothing will stop you then, Richard Burton?” Collop said. “You will not give up this fruitless chase after the physical when you should be hot on the track of the metaphysical?”

Burton seized Collop by the arm again. “You said
Burton
?”

“Yes, I did. Your friend Göring told me some time ago that that was your true name. He also told me other things about you.”

“Göring is here?”

Collop nodded and said, “He has been here for about two years now. He lives a mile from here. We can see him tomorrow. You will be pleased at the change in him, I know. He has conquered the dissolution begun by the dreamgum, shaped the fragments of himself into a new, and a far better, man. In fact, he is now the leader of the Church of the Second Chance in this area.

“While you, my friend, have been questing after some irrelevant grail outside you, he has found the Holy Grail inside himself. He almost perished from madness, nearly fell back into the evil ways of his Terrestrial life. But through the grace of God and his true desire to
show himself worthy of being given another opportunity at life, he…well, you may see for yourself tomorrow. And I pray you will profit from his example.”

Collop elaborated. Göring had died almost as many times as Burton, usually by suicide. Unable to stand the nightmares and the self-loathing, he had time and again purchased a brief and useless surcease. Only to be faced with himself the next day. But on arriving at this area, and seeking help from Collop, the man he had once murdered, he had won.

“I am astonished,” Burton said. “And I’m happy for Göring. But I have other goals. I would like your promise that you’ll tell no one my true identity. Allow me to be Abdul ibn Harun.”

Collop said that he would keep silent, although he was disappointed that Burton would not be able to see Göring again and judge for himself what faith and love could do for even the seemingly hopeless and depraved. He took Burton to his hut and introduced him to his wife, a short, delicately boned brunette. She was very gracious and friendly and insisted on going with the two men while they visited the local boss, the
valkotukkainen.
(This word was regional slang for white-haired boy or big shot.)

Ville Ahonen was a huge, quiet-spoken man who listened patiently to Burton. Burton revealed only half of his plan, saying that he wanted to build a boat so he could travel to the end of The River. He did not mention wanting to take it further. But Ahonen had evidently met others like him.

He smiled knowingly and replied that Burton could build a craft. However, the people hereabouts were conservationists. They did not believe in despoiling the land of its trees. Oak and pine were to be left untouched, but bamboo was available. Even this material would have to be purchased with cigarettes and liquor, which would take him some time to accumulate from his grail.

Burton thanked him and left. Later, he went to bed in a hut near Collop’s, but he could not get to sleep.

Shortly before the inevitable rains came, he decided to leave the hut. He would go up into the mountains, take refuge under a ledge until the rains ceased, the clouds dissipated, and the eternal (but weak) sun reasserted itself. Now that he was so near to his goal, he did not want to be surprised by Them. And it seemed likely that the Ethicals would concentrate agents here. For all he knew, Collop’s wife could be one of Them.

Before he had walked half a mile, rain struck him and lightning smashed nearby into the ground. By the dazzling flash, he saw something flicker into existence just ahead and about twenty feet above him.

He whirled and ran toward a grove of trees, hoping that They had not seen him and that he could hide there. If he was unobserved, then he could get up into the mountains. And when They had put everybody to sleep here, They would find him gone again.…

Y
ou gave us a long hard chase, Burton,” a man said in English.

Burton opened his eyes. The transition to this place was so unexpected that he was dazed. But only for a second. He was sitting in a chair of some very soft buoyant material. The room was a perfect sphere; the walls were a very pale green and were semitransparent. He could see other spherical chambers on all sides, in front, behind, above and, when he bent over, below. Again he was confused, since the other rooms did not just impinge upon the boundaries of his sphere. They intersected. Sections of the other rooms came into his room, but then became so colorless and clear that he could barely detect them.

On the wall at the opposite end of his room was an oval of darker green. It curved to follow the wall. There was a ghostly forest portrayed in the oval. A phantom fawn trotted across the picture. From it came the odor of pine and dogwood.

Across the bubble from him sat twelve in chairs like his. Six were men; six, women. All were very good-looking. Except for two, all had black or dark brown hair and deeply tanned skins. Three had slight epicanthic folds; one man’s hair was so curly it was almost kinky.

One woman had long wavy yellow hair bound into a psyche knot. A man had red hair, red as the fur of a fox. He was handsome, his features were irregular, his nose large and curved, and his eyes were dark green.

All were dressed in silvery or purple blouses with short flaring sleeves and ruffled collars, slender luminescent belts, kilts, and sandals. Both men and women had painted fingernails and toenails, earrings, and eye makeup.

Above the head of each, almost touching the hair, spun a many-colored globe about a foot across. These whirled and flashed and changed color, running through every hue in the spectrum. From time
to time, the globes thrust out long hexagonal arms of green, of blue, of black, or of gleaming white. Then the arms would collapse, only to be succeeded by other hexagons.

Burton looked down. He was clad only in a black towel secured at his waist.

“I’ll forestall your first question by telling you we won’t give you any information on where you are.”

The speaker was the red-haired man. He grinned at Burton, showing unhumanly white teeth.

“Very well,” Burton said. “What questions will you answer, Whoever you are? For instance, how did you find me?”

“My name is Loga,” the red-haired man said. “We found you through a combination of detective work and luck. It was a complicated procedure, but I’ll simplify it for you. We had a number of agents looking for you, a pitifully small number, considering the thirty-six billion, six million, nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven candidates that live along The River.”

Candidates? Burton thought. Candidates for what? For eternal life? Had Spruce told the truth about the purpose behind the Resurrection?

Loga said, “We had no idea that you were escaping us by suicide. Even when you were detected in areas so widely separated that you could not possibly have gotten to them except through resurrection, we did not suspect. We thought that you had been killed and then translated. The years went by. We had no idea where you were. There were other things for us to do, so we pulled all agents from the Burton Case, as we called it, except for some stationed at both ends of The River. Somehow, you had knowledge of the polar tower. Later we found out how. Your friends Göring and Collop were very helpful, although they did not know they were talking to Ethicals, of course.”

“Who notified you that I was near The River’s end?” Burton said.

Loga smiled and said, “There’s no need for you to know. However, we would have caught you anyway. You see, every space in the restoration bubble—the place where you unaccountably awakened during the preresurrection phase—has an automatic counter. They were installed for statistical and research purposes. We like to keep records of what’s going on. For instance, any candidate who has a higher than average number of deaths sooner or later is a subject for study. Usually later, since we’re short-handed.

“It was not until your 777th death that we got around to looking at some of the higher frequency resurrections. Yours had the highest count. You may be congratulated on this, I suppose.”

“There are others, as well?”

“They’re not being pursued, if that’s what you mean. And, relatively speaking, they’re not many. We had no idea that it was you who had racked up this staggering number. Your space in the PR bubble was empty when we looked at it during our statistical investigation. The two technicians who had seen you when you woke up in the PR chamber identified you by your…photograph.

“We set the resurrector so that the next time your body was to be re-created, an alarm would notify us, and we would bring you here to this place.”

“Suppose I hadn’t died again?” Burton said.

“You were destined to die! You planned on trying to enter the polar sea via The River’s mouth, right? That is impossible. The last hundred miles of The River go through an underground tunnel. Any boat would be torn to pieces. Like others who have dared the journey, you would have died.”

Burton said, “My photograph—the one I took from Agneau. That was obviously taken on Earth when I was an officer for John Company in India. How was that gotten?”

“Research, Mr. Burton,” Loga said, still smiling.

Burton wanted to smash the look of superiority on his face. He did not seem to be restrained by anything; he could, seemingly, walk over to Loga and strike him. But he knew that the Ethicals were not likely to sit in the same room with him without safeguards. They would as soon have given a rabid hyena its freedom.

“Did you ever find out what made me awaken before my time?” he asked. “Or what made those others gain consciousness, too?”

Loga gave a start. Several of the men and women gasped.

Loga rallied first. He said, “We’ve made a thorough examination of your body. You have no idea how thorough. We have also screened every component of your…psychomorph, I think you could call it. Or aura, whichever word you prefer.” He gestured at the sphere above his head. “We found no clues whatsoever.”

Burton threw back his head and laughed loudly and long.

“So you bastards don’t know everything!”

Loga smiled tightly. “No. We never will. Only One is omnipotent.”

He touched his forehead, lips, heart, and genitals with the three longest fingers of his right hand. The others did the same.

“However, I’ll tell you that you frightened us—if that’ll make you feel any better. You still do. You see, we are fairly sure that you may be one of the men of whom we were warned.”

“Warned against? By whom?”

“By a…sort of giant computer, a living one. And by its operator.” Again, he made the curious sign with his fingers. “That’s all I care to tell you—even though you won’t remember a thing that occurs down here after we send you back to the Rivervalley.”

Burton’s mind was clouded with anger, but not so much that he missed the “down here.” Did that mean that the resurrection machinery and the hideout of the Ethicals were below the surface of the Riverworld?

Loga continued, “The data indicates you may have the potentiality to wreck our plans. Why you should or how you might, we do not know. But we respect our source of information, how highly you can’t imagine.”

“If you believe that,” Burton said, “why don’t you just put me in cold storage? Suspend me between those two bars. Leave me floating in space, turning around and around forever, like a roast on a spit, until your plans are completed?”

Loga said, “We couldn’t do that! That act alone would ruin everything! How would you attain your salvation? Besides, that would mean an unforgivable violence on our part! It’s unthinkable!”

“You were being violent when you forced me to run and hide from you,” Burton said. “You are being violent now by holding me here against my will. And you will violate me when you destroy my memory of this little tête-à-tête with you.”

Loga almost wrung his hands. If he was the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical, he was a great actor. In a grieved tone, Loga said, “That is only partly true. We had to take certain measures to protect ourselves. If the man had been anyone but you, we would have left you strictly alone. It is true we violated our own code of ethics by making you run from us and by examining you. That had to be, however. And, believe me, we are paying for this in mental agony.”

“You could make up for some of it by telling me why I, why all the
human beings that ever lived, have been resurrected. And how you did it.”

Loga talked, with occasional interruptions from some of the others. The yellow-haired woman broke in most often, and after a while Burton deduced from her attitude and Loga’s that she was either his wife or she held a high position.

Another man interrupted at times. When he did, there was a concentration and respect from the others that led Burton to believe he was the head of this group. Once he turned his head so that the light sparkled off one eye. Burton stared, because he had not noticed before that the left eye was a jewel.

Burton thought that it probably was a device which gave him a sense, or senses, of perception denied the others. From then on, Burton felt uncomfortable whenever the faceted and gleaming eye was turned on him. What did that many-angled prism see?

At the end of the explanation, Burton did not know much more than he had before. The Ethicals could see back into the past with a sort of chronoscope; with this they had been able to record whatever physical beings they wished to. Using these records as models, they had then performed the resurrection with energy-matter converters.

“What,” Burton said, “would happen if you re-created two bodies of an individual at the same time?”

Loga smiled wryly and said that the experiment had been performed. Only one body had life.

Burton smiled like a cat that has just eaten a mouse. He said, “I think you’re lying to me. Or telling me half-truths. There is a fallacy in all this. If human beings can attain such a rarefiedly high ethical state that they ‘go on,’ why are you Ethicals, supposedly superior beings, still here? Why haven’t you, too, ‘gone on’?”

The faces of all but Loga and the jewel-eyed man became rigid. Loga laughed and said, “Very shrewd. An excellent point. I can only answer that some of us
do
go on. But more is demanded of us, ethically speaking, than of you resurrectees.”

“I still think you’re lying,” Burton said. “However, there’s nothing I can do about it.” He grinned and said, “Not just now, anyway.”

“If you persist in that attitude, you will never Go On,” Loga said. “But we felt that we owed it to you to explain what we are doing—as
best we could. When we catch those others who have been tampered with, we’ll do the same for them.”

“There’s a Judas among you,” Burton said, enjoying the effect of his words.

But the jewel-eyed man said, “Why don’t you tell him the truth, Loga? It’ll wipe off that sickening smirk and put him in his proper place.”

Loga hesitated, then said, “Very well, Thanabur. Burton, you will have to be very careful from now on. You
must not
commit suicide and you must fight as hard to stay alive as you did on Earth, when you thought you had only one life. There is a limit to the number of times a man may be resurrected. After a certain amount—it varies and there’s no way to predict the individual allotment—the psychomorph seems unable to reattach itself to the body. Every death weakens the
attraction
between body and psychomorph. Eventually, the psychomorph comes to the point of no return. It becomes a—well, to use an unscientific term—a ‘lost soul.’ It wanders bodiless through the universe; we can detect these unattached psychomorphs with instruments, unlike those of the—how shall I put it?—the ‘saved,’ which disappear entirely from our ken.

“So you see, you must give up this form of travel by death. This is why continued suicide by those poor unfortunates who cannot face life is, if not the unforgivable sin, the irrevocable.”

The jewel-eyed man said, “The traitor, the filthy unknown who claims to be aiding you, was actually using you for his own purposes. He did not tell you that you were expending your chance for eternal life by carrying out his—and your—designs. He, or she, whoever the traitor is, is evil. Evil, evil!

“Therefore, you must be careful from now on. You may have a residue of a dozen or so deaths left to you. Or your next death may be your last!”

Burton stood up and shouted, “You don’t want me to get to the end of The River? Why? Why?”

Loga said, “Au revoir. Forgive us for this violence.”

Burton did not see any of the twelve persons point an instrument at him. But consciousness sprang from him as swiftly as an arrow from the bow, and he awoke.…