Gods of Riverworld (29 page)

Turpin had replied, “Yeah, but you have to go through certain stages to get there, and being proud you’re black is one of them.”

“A very good point,” Nur had said. “However, one shouldn’t get stuck in a stage. Climb on to the next one.”

They went down to the vestibule, as Turpin called it. Long before they reached it, the loud music and chatter and shrill laughter and the tsunami of alcohol, burning drugs, and tobacco smote them. Everybody was inside, including those who’d passed out. These had been carried in by the androids and were lined along a wall.

“Mingle, folks!” Turpin shouted, and he waved his hand at the crowd. He did not feel he had to introduce his guests; he had shown their faces and names on the computer screens. However, his guests hesitated. It was not easy to just walk up to a group and start talking. The Dowists were repelled and scandalized and obviously were regretting having come here. Turpin, seeing this, gestured to a small group that had been standing at the far end of the bar. The group made its way through the throng to the guests and began conversation. Their host had picked them out to break the ice, and he had done well. Or so it seemed in the beginning. Some of them were Second Chancers or New Christians; these went to the Dowists. Though they differed in some fundamental principles, all three religions were pacifist and theoretically tolerant. They also had a common bond in that they abhorred excessive use of alcohol and any use of tobacco or other drugs.

The man appointed to keep Burton company was six feet three inches tall, broad-shouldered, huge-chested, and massively limbed. He was wearing a white doeskin headband, a white kidskin vest, a white doeskin belt with a broad silver buckle on which was an alto relief wolf’s head, tight white doeskin trousers, and white doeskin boots reaching to just below his knees. His face was broad and high-cheeckboned, and his nose was large, long, and aquiline. He looked more like Sitting Bull than a Negro, except for his everted lips and kinky hair. When he smiled, he was craggily handsome.

He introduced himself with a conventional handshake, announcing in a rich basso that he was Bill Williams and was pleased to know Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Burton was not sure that his use of the title was not a put-on.

“Tom Turpin didn’t appoint me to act as your faithful Indian guide and bodyguard,” he said, grinning. “I volunteered.”

“Oh?” Burton said, raising his eyebrows. “May I ask why?”

“You may. I read about you; you intrigue me. Besides, Turpin has told me much about how you led him and the others across the mountains and into the tower.”

“I’m flattered,” Burton said. “However, I do have a slight bone to pick with you. Why did you almost run over me with your motorcycle?”

Williams laughed and said, “If I’d tried, I would’ve made it.”

“And the pejorative?”

“I just felt like it. Choppers bring out the meanness in me. I also wanted to test your mettle. I didn’t mean anything personally.”

“It makes you feel good to upset Whitey?”

“Sometimes. If you’re truly objective, you won’t blame me.”

“Hasn’t sixty-seven years on The River changed your attitude any?”

“That’s something you never get rid of. I don’t let it bother me though. It’s like a dull toothache you get used to,” Williams said. “Want a drink?”

“White wine. Any kind.”

Burton had decided to stay sober.

“Let’s get it in one of the rooms upstairs. It’ll be quieter there, and we won’t have to shout to hear ourselves.”

“Very well,” Burton said, wondering what Williams was up to.

They got into the elevator with a laughing, shouting, giggling crowd. On the way up there were cries of protest as the riders groped each other. Someone passed gas before they reached the second floor, and there were shouts of amused outrage. When the doors opened, the culprit, the man blamed, anyway, was thrown headlong onto the floor.

“Everybody’s feeling good, real good,” Williams murmured. “Won’t be so later on, though. You armed?”

Burton patted his jacket pocket.

“Beamer.”

The rooms they passed were, except for one, packed and loud. Here a dozen men and women were sitting and watching a movie on a wall-screen. Burton, curious, stopped to look in. It was one that Frigate had insisted he see, the actors Laurel and Hardy selling Christmas trees in Los Angeles in July. The viewers were laughing uproariously.

“They’re New Christians,” Williams said. “Quiet, harmless folks. They couldn’t refuse Turpin’s invitation, they’re so polite. But they don’t hold with most of the goings-on here.”

They found an empty room far down the hall around the corner. On the way, Burton admired the reproductions of oil paintings. Rembrandt, Rubens, David’s “Death of Marat,” many by Russians, Kiprensky, Surikov, Ivanov, Repin, Levitan, and others.

“Why so many Slavs?” Burton said.

“There’s a reason.”

They got their drinks from a converter. Burton sat down and lit up a cigar.

After a silence, Williams said, “I’m not American, you know.”

Burton puffed out smoke and said, “You would have fooled me if Turpin had not told me you were Russian.”

“I was born Rodion Ivanovitch Kazna in 1949 in the black ghetto of the city of Kiev.”

“Amazing,” Burton said. “I didn’t know that there were Negroes … no, I take that back. There were some Russian black slaves. Pushkin was descended from one.”

“What very few people knew, and that Russian government took good care to conceal, was that about twelve million blacks were living in segregated areas of Russian cities. They were the descendants of slaves. The common Russian didn’t want to mix with them any more than the whites of America did with their blacks, and the government, secretly, or course, approved and enforced that policy. Despite which, there was some interracial screwing, as always. Can’t keep the blood pure no matter how you try. A stiff prick has no bias, and all that. One of my great-grandfathers was a white Russian, and a grandfather was an Uzbek. Turkic-speaking, he never did learn to speak Russian well, a Mongol.

“I was taught Marxist doctrine, however. I became a devout follower of Marx’s principles. As he laid them down, not as they were practiced in Russia. I joined the party, but it didn’t take me long to find out that I wasn’t going to rise very high in it. I’d always have to take the back seat and do the janitoring, as it were.

“I would have tried the army, but blacks were always sent to Siberia to guard the Chinese frontier. The Politburo didn’t want any of us stationed on the western front. We’d have caused attention, and investigation would have revealed that we were kept down. That would’ve looked bad for the Soviets, since they were always pointing out the inequality of blacks in America. So they kept everything under a lid.

“I did very well in school, even though our schools were inferior to the whites’. I had a driving ambition to rise to the top, but that wasn’t my only motive. I wanted to learn, to know everything. I read far more than required; I did especially well in languages. That was one of the things that attracted me to you, you know. Your mastery of so many languages.

“The bigshots heard of me mainly because they were looking for blacks they could send as agitators and infiltrators to the States. They asked me to volunteer my services, and I did. Not too eagerly on the surface, of course. I didn’t want them to think that I only wanted to go so I could disappear in Harlem. As a matter of fact, I had no intention of betraying them. I knew what they were and how they looked on me, but I was a Russian Marxist and I loathed capitalism.

“One of the things I fully realized, though, was that Marx’s dream of the withering of the state when the proletariat had gained control of the world just was not possible. I’d have rather believed in the second coming of Christ; that, at least, could possibly happen, though it’s highly improbable. Once a ruling class has the power in its hands, it won’t ever let go. Not until revolutionist take the power from them, and then the new rulers try to make sure they keep in power. The natural withering away of the state, no laws or police force or regulations or bureaucracy, everybody governing himself with love and pure kindness of heart and unselfishness, that’s a crock of bullshit. Nobody really believed in it, but the party members pretended they did.

“Nobody pushed that dogma too much, though. If you got enthusiastic about it, you’d be marked down as a fool or a counterrevolutionary.”

Williams had slipped off a Polish freighter and into the wilds of Harlem. There he worked his F&A (Fomenting and Agitating) among various black and white liberal groups. But three weeks after he landed he got gonorrhea.

“That was my first but by no means last dose. The Fates were against me. No sooner was I cured of that filthy disease than I caught it again. I was in the U.S. of Gonococcia and no way out. After I got over that second case, I decided to try sexual abstinence. That didn’t work. I was just too horny. So, I told myself, twice bitten, never again. It’s a statistical improbability that I’ll get infected again. But I did.”

His KGB contact found out about his dose, reported it to his superior, and relayed a message to Williams. Your social diseases are interfering with your security and efficiency. Stay away from women and dirty toilet seats or else!

After that, every time Williams’ contact met him, he asked him if he had gonorrhea. Williams, who was avoiding women and so getting a reputation as a homosexual, could truthfully tell the contact that he did not have the clap. Fortunately, the contact did not ask him if he had syphilis. Williams, at that time, was suffering from the onslaught of the dread Spirochaeta pallida.

“I’ll swear I don’t know where or from whom I got it. I’d been as chaste as Robinson Crusoe—up to the time he met Friday. I don’t know. Some people are accident-prone. Could I be one of those rare and unfortunate persons, cursed by the Fates or by Dialectic Materialism, who could be infected by bacteria borne on the breeze, slipping through the keyhole? Was I VD-prone? The lone sexual ranger destined to stumble onto bandits, the Jesse Jameses of Germs? I do know one thing. I sure wasn’t getting much spying, fomenting, and agitating done. I was spending too much time in doctors’ offices.”

When Williams learned that the FBI and perhaps the CIA had been questioning his physicians about him, he reported this to his contact. Order came back within the hour for him to go to Los Angeles and infiltrate the Black Muslims. The contact gave Williams a bus ticket, explaining that the KGB could not afford airline passage for him.

While riding westward, as every young man should, Williams contracted gonorrhea in the back seat of a Greyhound.

“Yeah, you’re laughing again, Burton! It does sound funny now. But, believe me, it wasn’t so funny to me then.”

Williams’ story, in its many details, convoluted windings, and lengthy asides, had consumed an hour. Burton was interested in it, but he felt that he had stayed away from the others too long.

Bill Williams managed to become a member of the Black Muslims. But when they found out that he had gonorrhea—contracted in Los Angeles after the Greyhound dose had been cured—they kicked him out. Then, having discovered that he was a spy—they mistakenly thought that he was an FBI agent—they put an assassin on his trail.

His story became, from this point, somewhat confusing. Burton could have used a diagram to keep it clear, what with all the flights, doublings back, shootings, and mishaps Williams had suffered. He had fled to Chicago, then to San Francisco, where he had gotten into a brawl in a gay bar, been beaten up and raped. Afflicted with gonorrhea fore and aft, as he put it, he had gone to a city in Oregon. Not, however, until he had financed his trip by mugging the KGB contact, who had refused to give him any money at all.

Star Spoon appeared in the doorway. She said softly, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Come in,” Burton said. “You’ve met Bill Williams, haven’t you?”

She bowed and said, “So nice to see you again, Mr. Williams. Dick, you seem to be deep in conversation. My apologies for interrupting you. I’ll return to the party, if you don’t mind.”

Burton asked her where she would be, and she said that Turpin was with a small select group in his suite. He had asked her to find Burton and invite him to the party.

“I’ll be along in a while,” Burton said.

She bowed again, said good-bye to Williams, and left.

“A beautiful woman,” Williams said, and he sighed.

“She knows how to keep a man happy.”

“Do you know how to make
her
happy?”

“Of course!” Burton said.

“Don’t get hot around the collar, nothing personal. I’d say she’s a quiet but deep one. I’m pretty good at character analysis on short order. I’ve had to be. Matter of survival.”

“She’s had a very hard life,” Burton said. “It’s a wonder she’s kept her sanity.”

“You trying to be subtle and tell me I’m not the only one who’s had a rough time?”

“You’re overly sensitive, my friend.”

Williams took thirty minutes more to finish his story. He had married a deeply religious black woman who, unfortunately, could not say No to her overpassionate minister. Result: Williams caught the clap again. Overcoming the desire to find her and kill her, he had decided to go hunting instead and sublimate his wish for violence by shooting birds and rabbits. While he was in the woods, he was fatally wounded by a shotgun blast from behind a bush. Dying, he wondered which of the many candidates had shot him. An agent of the KGB, the CIA, the Black Muslims, the Albanians, or the Salvation Army? Actually, the SA itself was not after him, but a soldier in its ranks was. While in Los Angeles, he had pretended to be converted to Christianity during a sermon given by a Major Barbarao. Then he had joined the Army, but a corporal, Rachel Goggin, had fallen in love with him and he with her. At that time, he thought that he was clean, free of VD, but after he and Rachel had made love, he discovered that his nemesis had struck again. Moreover, Rachel had caught the disease from him.

Williams had promised to marry her, but his enemies were closing in, and he had left her to save his own life. Corporal Goggin had apparently gone psychotic because of his unexplained desertion and because of her overreaction to infection with a disease that he had become quite accustomed to. He heard, while he was in Portland, that a woman resembling Rachel was asking about him and that she was packing a gun.