Gods of Riverworld (12 page)

By his side, looking down at him, one white hand held up, a finger extended as if she were chiding him, was Lady Isabel. Fat, fat, fat. While he shriveled, she expanded. Yet, according to Frigate, though she knew that he was dying, she bore in herself the seeds of death, a cancer. She had not said a word to him about it; she had not wanted to upset him.

In her black dress and hood, she looked like a nun, a nurse nun. Kindly but firm. No nonsense.

He contrasted the youthful face in the mirror with that in the photograph. Those old old eyes. Sunken, despairing, lost. Those of a prisoner who had no hope of bail or pardon. Moons in eclipse.

He remembered how at Trieste in September, the last month of his life, he had purchased caged birds in the market, taken them home, and set them free. And how, one day, he had stopped before a monkey in a cage. “What crime did you commit in some other world, Jocko, that you are now caged and tormented and going through your purgatory?” And, shaking his head, walking away, he had muttered, “I wonder what he did? I wonder what he did?”

This world, the Riverworld, was a purgatory, if what the Ethicals said was true. Purgatory was the hardest of the three afterworlds, heaven, purgatory, and hell. In heaven you were free and ecstatic and knew that the future would always be good. In hell, though you suffered, you knew for once and all what your future would be. You did not have to strive for freedom; you knew that you would never attain it. But in purgatory you knew that you were going either to hell or to heaven, and it was up to you where you went. With the joys and freedom of heaven as a carrot, you strove like hell in purgatory. You knew the theory of how to get a ticket to heaven. But the practice … ah, the practice … that eluded you. You snatched it away from yourself.

Earth had bristled with carrots of many kinds: physical, mental, spiritual, economic, political. Of these, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, was sex.

Frigate had once written a story in which God had made all animals, hence humans, unisex. Every species lacked males; only females existed. Women impregnated themselves by eating fruit from sperm trees. Cross-fertilization was a very intricate procedure in the story, the women shedding genes with their excretion and the trees picking these up through their roots. Thus, males were unnecessary and not included in the parallel world Frigate had imagined.

Every three years, women were afflicted with arboreal frenzy and compulsively devoured the fruit until they became pregnant. In the meantime, women fell in love with one another, lived amicably or passionately or angrily with one another, were jealous, committed adultery, and, of course, often practiced erotic deviations. One of which, not uncommon, was falling in love with a certain tree and eating fruit out of season.

The main plot of the story was about the insane jealousy of a woman who, thinking that she had been cuckolded by her lover’s tree, chopped it down. Grief-stricken, the lover went into a nunnery.

A subplot of the story concerned a science-fiction writer who had imagined another world in which there were no sperm trees. Instead, woman had mates who were their counterparts physically except that they had no mammaries and were equipped with a rodlike organ that shot seeds into the uteruses of their lovers.

This method, according to the science-fiction writer in Frigate’s story, was a much better method and also eliminated the competition for trees. The mates with the rods were much like the trees in that their vegetable nature made them subservient to the females. But, unlike the trees, they were useful for something besides reproduction. They did the housework and fieldwork and took care of the babies while women played bridge or attended political meetings.

In the end, however, the rod-creatures, being more human than vegetable and more muscular than the females, rebelled and made the women their servants.

Burton, hearing Frigate’s story, had suggested that a better idea would have been to make the humans of one sex, the male, and have them impregnate the trees. The males would also get most of their food from the fruit of the trees. However, being human, the males would want power, and they would war among themselves for the trees. The victors would be rewarded with vast arboreal harems. The defeated would either be killed or driven into the woods to satisfy themselves with an inferior species of vegetation, a bush which could be screwed but which could not bear children.

“A good idea,” Frigate had said, “but who would take care of the infants? Trees can’t. Besides, the victorious male, the owner of the harem, or grove, would be so busy guarding his trees from other males that he would neglect the infants. Most of them would die. And if he were overcome by another male, his infants would be left to die or perhaps be killed by the conqueror. The victor would not want to raise the other man’s children.

“There doesn’t seem to be any perfect means for reproduction and caretaking of the infant, does there?” Frigate had said. “Perhaps God knew what He was doing when He made us male and female.”

“Perhaps He was limited in His choices and took the best one. Perhaps perfection is not possible in this universe. Or, if it is, perfection rules out progress. The amoeba is perfect, but it can’t evolve into something different. Or, if it does, it ceases to be an amoeba and must give up perfection for certain advantages, balanced or unbalanced with certain disadvantages.”

And so the splitting of
Homo sapiens
into two species in the real world and the vagaries of Fate brought together Lieutenant General Joseph Netterville Burton and Martha Baker, the prig and hypochondriac father and the child-spoiling and seductive but moralistic mother. They had gotten married after a short courtship, possibly because the retired officer on half-pay had been induced by Martha’s fortune to marry her. He had once had money, but he could not hang onto it. Though he despised gamblers, he did not think that speculation in the market was un-Christian.

On a night circa June 19, 1820, the lieutenant general had launched millions of spermatozoa into the heiress’ womb, and one wriggler had beaten the others to the egg waiting in its lair. The chance combination of genes had resulted in Richard Francis Burton, eldest of three siblings, born March 19, 1821, in Torquay, Devonshire, England. Richard’s mother had been lucky in not being infected by puerperal fever, which killed so many women giving birth in those days. Richard was also lucky in that he caught only one of the childhood diseases that put so many in the graveyard then. Measles laid him low, but he survived unharmed.

His mother’s father was so delighted when his daughter bore a red-headed and blue-eyed son that he considered changing his will and giving the bulk of his estate to Richard instead of Martha’s half-brother. Mrs. Burton fought against this, an act for which Richard never really forgave his mother. Finally, the grandfather decided that he would ignore his daughter’s arguments and arrange for his beloved grandson to inherit. Unfortunately, Mr. Baker died of a heart attack as he started to get into the carriage that was to take him to his solicitor. The son got the money, was cheated out of it by a sharpster, and died in poverty. A short time later, Richard’s red hair turned to jet black and his blue eyes to a deep brown. This was the first of his many disguises, though not, in this case, the first deliberately assumed.

It was his mother’s infatuation with her brother that had caused the first of Burton’s many misfortunes. Or so Burton had always thought. If he had been independently wealthy, he, a thoroughly undisciplined and argumentative man, would not have had to endure military life so long in order to support himself. He would not have been deprived of the money needed to make his African explorations thoroughly successful.

And his father’s decision to go to the Continent, where life was cheaper and where he might find a cure for his more-or-less imaginary ills, had cut off the father’s connections with old school friends who might have advanced his son’s career. It also made Burton a wanderer, rootless, one who never felt at home in England. Though it was true, as Frigate pointed out, that he had never felt at home anywhere.

He could not abide to stay in one place more than a week. After that, his restlessness drove him on. Or, if circumstances forced him to stay, he suffered.

Which meant that he was indeed suffering here.

“You could move from one apartment to another,” Nur had said to him. “I doubt that that would satisfy you. This is a small world, and you can take only small trips. Anyway, why move? You can change your apartment so that it looks like another world. And when you’re tired of that, change it again. You may travel from Africa to America without taking a step.”

“You were a Pisces,” Frigate had said. “The fish. Ruled by Neptune and Jupiter and associated with the twelfth house. The principle of Neptune is idealism and that of Jupiter is expansion. Pisces harmonizes. Pisces’ positive qualities make you intuitive, sympathetic, and artistic. Its negative qualities tend to make you a martyr, indecisive, and melancholy. The characteristics and activities of the twelfth house are the unconscious mind, institutions, banks, prisons, universities, libraries, hospitals, hidden enemies, intuition, inspiration, solitary pursuits, dream and sleep patterns, and your pets are large.”

“Sheer jobbernowlry, darkest superstition,” Burton had said.

“Yes. But you have always been a fish out of water. Idealistic, though cynical. Expansive, certainly. You’ve tried to be everything. You have tried to harmonize many fields, synthesize them. You are intuitive, sympathetic, and artistic. Certainly, you’ve made a martyr of yourself. You have often been indecisive. And melancholy! Read your own books.

“As for the unconscious or subconscious, you were more than an explorer of unknown lands. You also explored the darkest Africas of the human mind. You had many hidden enemies, though you also had many open enemies. You did depend on intuitions hunches, quite often. You loved the solitary pursuits: scholarship and writing. As for institutions, you did not like to work in them but you studied and analyzed them. As for dream and sleep patterns, you were fascinated by them, and you became a skilled hypnotist.

“Large pets. That seems not to be true. Yours were mostly bull terriers and gamecocks and monkeys. But you did love horses.”

“I could take any one of the other zodiacal signs or all of them,” Burton had said, sneering, “and I could show you how each and all would apply most appropriately to me. Or to you. Or any of us.”

“Probably,” Frigate had said. “But it’s fun to dabble in astrology, if only to demonstrate that it doesn’t work. However…”

Nur and Frigate were convinced that the universe was one cosmic spiderweb, and a fly landing on one strand sent shivers through the entire web. Someone sneezing on a planet of Mizrab somehow might cause a Chinese peasant to stub his toe on a rock.

“Environment is as important as genes, but the environment is much vaster than most people think.”

“Everything is,” Burton had replied.

He was thinking of this when the wall before him began glowing. He straightened up and leaned back. This was going to be a much larger screen than usual. When it ceased growing it was ten feet across.

“Well?” he said as the expected face, one of the seven, did not appear. Instead, the light dimmed until it was a blackness on the gray of the wall. Faint noises came from it.

He told the Computer to amplify them and leaned forward. The sounds were as faint as before. He repeated his command; the Computer failed to comply.

Suddenly, light made a ragged hole in the center of the screen, and the sounds loudened, though they were still unintelligible. The hole expanded, and he was looking at something white and streaked with blood. Something wet with other than blood.

“Here comes the little devil,” someone said.

Burton shot from the chair.

“Good God!”

He was seeing through someone’s eyes. The white thing was a sheet; the water, that which burst before birth; the red streaks, blood. The voice was unfamiliar. But the scream that drowned it out was, he did not know how he knew but he knew, his mother’s.

Suddenly, the screen showed him more, though it was a dim vision. Around him was a room containing giants. The screen was blanked out as something passed across it. And then the room rotated, and he glimpsed giant arms, bare from the elbows down, rolled shirt sleeves above. A big bed was turning also, and in it was his mother, sweaty, her hair dank. His mother was young. A giant hand was pulling a sheet over the bare stomach and legs and the bloody hairy home from which he had been pulled.

Now he was upside down. A sharp slap. A thin wailing. His first blow.

“Lusty little devil, isn’t he?” a man’s voice said.

Burton was witnessing his own birth.

12

Burton could see and hear what was happening to him, to the newborn, rather, but he could not feel its, his, reactions. He felt no pain, except emphatically, when his cord was clipped. Indeed, he did not see the operation, but, when he was picked up, he glimpsed the umbilicus on a towel. Nor did he know that he was being cleaned off until a towel pressed down on his, the baby’s eyes. Then he was wrapped in a blanket and placed in his mother’s arms. Of this he saw only the nurse approaching with the blanket, her stiff white pinafore, the upper part of his mother, and then her face from underneath.

Presently, his father entered. How young that dark sallow Roman face was! And his father was smiling. This usually happened only when Mr. Burton had made a profit in the stock market, and that was not often.

He shuddered when he saw the doctor’s hands. They were being wiped on a towel, not given a thorough scrubbing. Doubtless, the doctor had not bothered to wash his hands before delivering him. It was strange, though, unusual, anyway, that the doctor had personally delivered him. If he remembered correctly, most doctors at that time instructed the nurses or midwives but did not touch the woman in labor. Some did not even see the mother’s lower parts, which were hidden by a sheet, but heard the details of the delivery from the midwife and then gave their instructions.