Gods of Riverworld (19 page)

“Well, hell!” Frigate said to himself. “There goes another theory. Probably I’ll find out that my character deficiencies were due to genetic disposition far more than to the environment.”

He told Nur about his search. The little Moor laughed and said, “It’s not the past that counts. It’s the present. You cannot charge the past for your present failures and weaknesses. The present is here for you to change what you have been and are.”

“Yes, but the memory-movie is a great psychoanalytic tool,” Frigate said. “Too bad they didn’t have it on Earth. The patient and the doctor could have gone over any areas in doubt and cleared everything up. The patient could have seen what really happened, and he could have separated the truth from fantasy, the unimportant from the really significant.”

“Perhaps. But it’s not necessary. You know what you are now. At least, you should, unless you’re still fooling yourself about yourself, and that’s highly possible. One good thing about the movie is that it would destroy your self-image, would demonstrate that you may have been wrong many times when you thought you were right. Or convince you that others were not entirely monsters or egoistic when they dealt with you. Or show you the times when they truly were so.

“However, aside from satisfying your curiosity, and that may be very painful and humiliating, or satisfying your desire to see the faces of those you once loved or hated, the movies are time wasted. It is now that matters, now is the cliff edge on which you stand and must leap from into the future. What you have been and are is not what you must be. You are avoiding taking action on the now by immersing yourself in the past. The past should be only a light to the future. Or a measuring stick of your progress. That and that only.”

“You don’t watch your movie?” Frigate said.

“No. I’m not interested in it.”

“You don’t care to see your parents when they were young, your playmates?”

Nur tapped his head. “They’re all in there. I can summon them up when I wish.”

“If the movie is a waste of time, then why did the unknown fix it so that it would be with us every second of waking time?”

“The unknown did not arrange just that. The unknown fixed it so that we could see the movie if we wished to. She wasn’t unaware of the possibility that we’d paint the walls and so block out the movie. Perhaps, by painting, we failed a test.”

“And what would the penalty for flunking it be?”

Nur shrugged.

“I’d guess that the penalty would be self-inflicted. It’d be a failure to progress.”

“But you said that you didn’t need to see your past.”

“I don’t. But I am not you or the others.”

“Isn’t that arrogant?”

“One man’s arrogance is another’s realism.”

“You Sufis like to proverb your way through life,” Frigate said.

Nur only smiled. This made the American feel as if he had failed to pass a test. For some time, Frigate had suffered from the belief that he had let Nur down—and himself—because he had quit being Nur’s disciple. He had lost faith in his own ability ever to attain to Nur’s lofty stature as a complete master of himself, free from neurosis and weakness, always logical yet compassionate. He just could not make it. So, rather than not succeed and be humiliated when Nur discharged him, flunked him, as it were, Frigate had resigned as Nur’s disciple.

“A Sufi does not fear failure,” Nur had said.

“What if I change my mind and ask you to take me as your pupil again?”

“We’ll see.”

“I’ve quit a lot of things or been forced to quit,” Frigate said. “But I always went back and tried them again.”

“Perhaps it’s time that you got rid of this start-and-stop habit. You need to form a psychic momentum that won’t run out so quickly.”

“The great perhaps.”

“What does that mean?”

Frigate did not know, and that made him angry.

“You haven’t yet learned, after one hundred and thirty-two years, to meld your opposites into a smooth cooperating whole,” Nur had said. “You have always had within you a conservative, which isn’t always bad by any means, and a liberal, which isn’t always good by any means. You have within you a coward and a brave man. You detest and fear violence, yet there is someone violent within you, a person you’ve tried to repress. You don’t know how to make your violence creative, how to control it so that it discharges into the right paths. You—”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Frigate had said and had walked away.

He sometimes got the same sort of philosophical drum-beating from Li Po. The Chinese liked to tell him about the process of becoming “round,” that is, making one’s self into a “whole” man. Balancing his yin and yang, his negative and positive qualities. But Li Po, in Frigate’s estimation, was very unbalanced. He admired Li Po’s energy and poetical creativeness and compassion and self-confidence and linguistic mastery and courage untainted by fear. On the other hand—people were bimanual in more than one sense—Li Po had an excessive drive to dominate, was too self-absorbed, and utterly failed to see that these qualities often made him tiresome and offensive. He also was a drunk, though unlike any Frigate had ever known.

Frigate believed that Li Po, despite his apparent superiority, had no more chance of Going On than he. Indeed, of the eight, only Nur and perhaps Aphra Behn and Alice were at this moment promising candidates for Going On. Which might or might not be desirable. The theory was that such a state was the end-all and be-all because it could be attained only if you were ethically perfect or near-perfect. The
wathan
of such a person just disappeared from all detectors and thus, so the reasoning went, was absorbed into the Godhead or God or Allah or What-Do-You-Call-It.

The theory also claimed that the
wathan
then became part of the Creator, lost its individuality, and experienced from then on an eternity of ecstasy. Ecstasy undescribable, unknown in the physical state.

“How do I know,” Frigate thought, “that the
wathan
doesn’t just disappear? Evaporate like an ectoplasmic bubble? Become nothing,
nada,
nil, zero? Is that something to be hotly wished for? How does that differ from just being dead? Not that there aren’t some good things to be said about just being dead. Past knowing, past caring, past torment physical and mental, past frustration and defeat, past loneliness. Oh, Death, where is thy sting?”

Death had no sting. On the other hand, death had no zing.

Gain something, lose something. That was the unchangeable law, the unchanged economy of the universe.

“Am I paranoiac? Is all this a big con game? For what purpose? A con man expects to gain something. Who could gain in this situation? What could be gained?”

Sometimes, his turmoiling thoughts swelled his brain, or seemed to do so, until it seemed that his skull, like a balloon under too much pressure, would burst. Maybe because his thoughts were just too much hot air.

“After a hundred and thirty-two years, I ought to know better than to drive myself into such a state. Will I ever graduate from the sophomore class?”

Life’s sophomore, the wise-foolish, could not follow Nur’s advice to rid himself of such thoughts, to dump them as if they were ballast on a balloon. Instead, he shunted them, put them on a sidetrack of the Great P.J.F. Railroad, and became for a while an engineer of the G.B.R., the Grailstones-on-the-banks-of-the-River express.

He had found out something that the Ethical, Loga, had not mentioned, though doubtless he would have if he’d lived longer. That was that the grailstones lining both banks of The River were more than just electrical discharge devices to supply the grails with energy converted into food and liquor and various goodies for the Valleydwellers. They were also observation equipment, window-peeping and eavesdropping machines. A person in the tower could see and hear the people within detection range of the grailstones.

Having discovered this, Frigate indulged himself until he became dizzied and confused. He scanned The Valley on the right bank at the rate of one grailstone every two seconds, starting with the first one in the polar zone. After a while, realizing that at this rate he’d take about 232 days to get from one end to the other, he began leapfrogging every twenty grailstones and watched from the twenty-first for ten seconds each. The blur of human bodies and River and plain and mountains stopped. Even so, he got light-headed after an hour. He would have to abandon his plan to zoom by all of humanity, to take it all in two sweeps. No, he was wrong there. Eighteen billion plus were not in The Valley; they were retired, for the time being, in the Computer’s records and the well of the
wathans.
But the number he must zip by was staggering.

“Always too grandiose, Frigate,” he told himself. “You’re just not big enough. Your ambition is a lightyear ahead of your ability. Your imagination is the eight-legged steed Sleipnir, but you, as Odin, have fallen off a thousand leagues ago.”

It was hard to tell the nationality of the people he saw. Except for those who were nude, and there were plenty of them, they wore the towels as kilts or loincloths and the women used smaller, thinner cloths as brassieres. The race was usually identifiable, though sometimes he could not be sure. Some of the faces were unmistakably Mediterranean, Spanish, Italians, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth. Still, one could be mistaken about that. Language was a key, but there were thousands of tongues he could not label just from listening. Besides, the majority spoke Esperanto or various dialects thereof.

After two hours, he tired of this kind of observation.

“Well, hell! From the collective to the personal.”

Seeing no one who caught his fancy near the stone he’d stopped at, he moved the observation points a stone at a time southward, pausing for twenty or so seconds at each one. It was now early afternoon, and the citizens of the right bank had eaten their lunch and were passing the time. Some were standing or sitting around and talking. Some were playing games. Many were swimming or fishing. A number of them would be in their huts and so out of sight. Those within three hundred feet could be seen closeup and easily overheard, however. The stone, like the TV camera, could zoom in and had built-in directional sound amplifiers.

The Computer could also show what the citizens could not see. Frigate’s screen displayed in all their many-colored splendor the
wathans
attached to the heads and whirling just above them. He had had enough experience by now to tell at a glance when a
wathan
was shot with “bad” colors or had a “bad” structure, though “bad” did not necessarily mean “evil.” Broad bands of black or red could indicate character weaknesses as much as “evil” traits. Their waning and waxing and writhing—the three W’s, Frigate thought—reflected mental-emotional tensions and shifts in both the conscious and unconscious minds. In the entire nervous system, in fact. A sick person could have a lot of black in his or her
wathan.
That entity was not interpreted easily; it took a very skilled person or the Computer to read a
wathan
correctly and even then the reading could be in error.

18

At this moment, his eye was caught by a man whose
wathan
was almost entirely black and red with a flicker of purple here and there. He was a Caucasian, about six feet tall, well-built, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and, if his face had not been so red and distorted, might have been passably good-looking. He was screaming in English at a woman who was much smaller and seemed frightened. She kept backing away, her eyes wide, while the man advanced with waving fists. Though he spoke so rapidly and in such a garbled way that Frigate could not understand him well, Frigate got the idea that the man was accusing the woman of being unfaithful. The people around the two were watching them warily but none was trying to interfere.

Suddenly, the man’s
wathan
became wholly black, and he grabbed the woman by her long hair and began hitting her with his right fist. She slumped to her knees and tried to put her hands over her face. Jerking at her hair viciously, he slammed his fist on top of her head, then punched her on the nose and mouth. She quit screaming and sagged, held up only by his grip on her hair. Blood ran from her gaping mouth; teeth fell out in the red pool on the grass.

Men jumped on him and pulled him, raving, away from her. The woman lay unmoving on the ground.

A man came running from a hut, stopped when he got to the woman, knelt down, moaning, and took the woman in his arms. He rocked her for a moment, then let her down gently, rose, and strode back to the hut. The man who had struck the woman was released, and now he was excusing himself for the attack. She was a slut, a whore, a fucking cunt, she was his woman, and no woman of his screwed another man. She deserved what she had gotten. More. As for Tracy, the man who had laid his woman, he, Bill Standish, would kill him in good time.

If you do, one of the men who had grabbed him said, you’ll hang. You may hang anyway.

The man who had gone into the hut charged out with a long stone-tipped spear in his hand. Standish saw him and started running for The River. The man who had threatened hanging yelled at Tracy to put the spear down, but Tracy ignored him. He ran by the group and hurled his spear, and its point went into Standish’s back near the right shoulder-bone. Standish fell face forward into the shallow water but struggled up and reached back and managed to get hold of the far end of the spear butt. Tracy was on him then and had knocked him down. Some of the men ran to the two and grabbed the screaming Tracy and pulled him away from Standish. By then, Standish, his skin very pale, his mouth hanging open, had wrenched the flint blade from his back. Before the others could stop him, Standish had plunged the stone tip into Tracy’s belly.

Frigate felt as if he were going to throw up, but he managed to watch the drama until its end. He had plans for Standish.

One of the men who had run after Standish had a big oak club. He slammed Standish over the head. Standish seemed to melt into his own flesh and slumped into the water. He was dragged out onto the shore, his head lolling. A man examined him. Looking up, he said, “You shouldn’t have hit him so hard, Ben. He’s dead.”