The Dark Design (12 page)

“It was on the other side of the grailstone. And the fog was thick, remember, mademoiselle?”

“Ms.”

“And we got to talking of things on Earth, places, people we had known, friends who had come to a bad end, children who had died, how our parents had misunderstood us, enemies, why we were here, and so on, understand? I became depressed, thinking of what might have been on Earth, especially what my cousin Madeleine and I might have done if I had been more mature or had not been so naive at that time. And so…”

“And so you got drunk,” she said, her face grave.

“And offended you, Ms., though I swear that I did not believe that you were a woman. The fog, the baggy clothing, my own addled wits…”

“Forget it,” she said. “Only… I believed you would never forgive me, since you would have lost face after a woman punched you out. Your ego…”

“You must not stereotype!” Cyrano cried.

“And you are right,” she said. “That is a failing I loathe, and yet I find myself doing it all the time. However, so often… well, most people are living stereotypes, aren’t they?”

They stood there, talking for a long time. Jill sipped on the purple passion, feeling her belly slowly warm up. The marijuana fumes became thicker, and she added to their intensity by drawing on the burning joint between her fingers. The voices were becoming louder, and there was much more laughter. Some couples were dancing now, their arms around each other’s necks, shuffling languorously.

Piscator and Jugan seemed to be the only ones who were not drinking. Piscator was smoking a cigarette now, the first, she believed, that he had lit up since she had entered.

The combination of liquor and pot had given her a pleasant halo now. She felt as if her flesh must be leaking a red-colored light. The smoke clouds were forming into almost-shapes. Sometimes, out of the corners of her eyes, she would glimpse a definite figure, a dragon, a smokefish, once, a dirigible. But when she turned her head toward them, she could see only amorphous masses.

When she saw a metal tub float by to one side, she knew that she had had it. No more booze and grass the rest of the night. The reason for the appearance of the tub was apparent, since Cyrano had been telling her about crime and its punishments in the French of his day. A counterfeiter, for instance, was stretched out upon a large wheel. The executioner then broke his arms and legs with an iron bar, sometimes pounding them to a pulp. Executed criminals were hung in chains in marketplaces and left to rot until the bodies fell through the chains. The guts of others were left in big open tubs so that they could remind the citizens of what happened to transgressors.

“And the streets ran with sewage, Ms. Gulbirra. No wonder that those who had the money drenched themselves with perfume.”

“I thought it was because you seldom bathed then.”

“True,” the Frenchman said. “I mean, true that we did not bathe often. It was thought to be unhealthy, un-Christian. But one can get used to the stench of unwashed bodies. I was not often aware of it since I was, as you might say, immersed in it, as unconscious of it as a fish is of water. But here,
hélas
! Where so few clothes are worn and where running water is so at hand, and where one encounters so many who cannot endure the odor of long-dirty humans, then one learns new habits. I, myself, now, I must confess that I saw no reason to be so fastidious, but then after some years I met a woman with whom I fell in love almost as passionately as I had with my cousin. She was Olivia Langdon…”

“You can’t mean Sam Clemens’ wife?”

“But yes. Though of course that meant nothing to me when I first met her and still does not. I understood that he was the great writer of the New World—she told me much about what happened since I had died on Earth—but I do not think much about it. And then Olivia and I wandered down The River and suddenly we were confronted with that classical situation which so many people dread. We met the former, the Terrestrial, spouse of one’s hutmate.

“By then, though I was still fond of her, my passion had cooled off. Each of us did so many things to annoy, even enrage the other, and why not? Is that not something commonplace here, where man and woman may be not only from different nations but from different times? How can the seventeenth-century person mesh with the nineteenth? Well, sometimes such a mismatch can be reshaped to match. But add the temporal differences to those that naturally exist between individuals, and what do you have? Quite often, a hopeless case.

“Livy and I were far up The River when I heard about the boat that was being built. I had heard of the meteorite that fell here, but I did not know that it was Sam Clemens who had seized the meteorite. I wanted to be one of the crew, and especially I wanted to feel a steel rapier in my hand again.

“And so, my dear Ms. Gulbirra, we came to this place. The shock was powerful indeed for Sam. I felt sorry for him, for a while, and regretted having forced this reunion that was not a reunion. Olivia showed no inclination to leave me for Clemens even though our passion was not quite what it had been. She did feel guilt about not feeling love for him. This was all the stranger when it is considered that they were deeply in love on Earth.

“But there had been many frictions, deeply hidden hostilities. She said that when she was in her terminal illness she did not want to see him. This hurt him very much, but she could not help it. And why, I asked her, had she not cared to admit him into her sickroom? She replied that she did not know. Perhaps it was because their only son had died because of Sam’s negligence. Criminal negligence, she called it, though she had never used, or even thought of, that word on Earth.

“I said that that was a long time ago and on another planet. Why did she still hold that fierce grievance within her breast? Did it matter now? Was not little… I forget his name…”

“Langdon,” Jill said.

“… risen from the dead now? And she said, yes, but she would never see Langdon. He had died when he was two, and no one under five years of age at death had been resurrected. At least not here. Maybe on another world. In any event, even if he had been raised here, what chance would she have of running across him? And what if she did? He would be full grown now, he would not even remember her. She would be a stranger to him. And God only knew what kind of a boy he would be. He might have been resurrected among cannibals or Digger Indians and not even known English or table manners.”

Jill grinned and said, “That sounds like something Mark Twain would say, not his wife.”

Cyrano grinned back and said, “She didn’t say that. I made that up, paraphrasing her. There was, of course, much more to her feeling than the accidental death of her baby. Actually, I can’t blame Clemens. Being a writer, he was very absentminded when he was pondering upon a story. I am that way myself. He did not notice that the coverings of the baby had slipped aside and that the icy air was blowing full upon the unprotected infant. He was automatically driving the horse which was drawing the sledge through the snows while his mind was intent upon that other world—his fiction.

“However, Olivia was certain that he was not as absentminded as he believed. She insisted that he could not have been, that some part of his mind must have observed the baby’s situation. He did not really want a son. Unlike most men, he preferred daughters. Besides, the baby was sickly from birth, a nuisance. To Sam, I mean.”

“That’s one thing in his favor,” Jill said. “I mean, that he preferred girls. Though I suppose, to be fair, that it is as neurotic to prefer a female infant as to prefer a male. Still, he did not have that male chauvinism…”

Cyrano said, “You must comprehend that Olivia did not consciously acknowledge all this during her Terrestrial existence. At least, she claimed not to have done so, though I suspect that she had such thoughts, was ashamed of them, and so put them away in the deep, dark files of her soul. But it was here, in this Valley, when she became addicted to chewing the
soi-disant,
the so-called dreamgum, that she perceived her true feelings.

“And so, though she still loved Clemens, in a manner of speaking, she hated him even more.”

“Did she quit using the gum?”

“Yes. It upset her too much. Though she now and then had some ecstatic or fantastic visions, she had too many horrible experiences.”

“She should have stuck with it,” Jill said. “But under proper guidance. However…”

“Yes?”

Jill compressed her lips, than said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t be too bloody critical. I had a guru, a beautiful woman, the best and wisest woman I ever knew, but she couldn’t keep me from running headlong into… well, no need to go into it here… it was too… dismaying? No, horrifying. I chickened out. So I shan’t be criticizing anyone else, shouldn’t anyway. I have been considering taking it up again, but I don’t trust the Second Chancers’ use of it, even though they claim to have excellent, quite safe, techniques. I couldn’t put full confidence in people who have
their
religious beliefs.”

“I was a free thinker, a
libertin,
as we styled ourselves,” Cyrano said. “But now… I do not know. Perhaps there is after all a God. Otherwise, how does one account for
this
world?”

“There are a score of theories,” Jill said. “And no doubt you’ve heard them all.”

“Many, at any rate,” Cyrano said. “I was hoping to hear a new one from you.”

At that moment, several people invaded the conversation. Jill broke off from the clump and drifted around, looking for another clump, a temporary colony, to attach herself to. In the Riverworld, as on Earth, all cocktail or after-dinner parties were alike. You spoke briefly, trying to make yourself heard above all the chatter and music, and then changed partners or groups until you had made a complete circuit. If you were intrigued or even interested in someone, you could make arrangements to see him or her some other time, when you could have a chance for an uninterrupted and quiet conversation.

In the old days, long ago, when she was young in mind, she had often met men or women at such gatherings who enthralled her. But then she had been full of booze or pot or both and so wide open. It was easy to fall in love with a mind or body—or both at the same time. Sobering up usually meant wising up. A disappointment. Not always. Just most of the time.

Here was a gathering all of whom had the bodies of twenty-five-year-olds. Chronologically, she was sixty-one. Some here might actually be one hundred and thirty-two or even more. The youngest could not be under thirty-six.

The index of wisdom should be high, if it was true that age brought wisdom. She had not found that to be true about most people on Earth. Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum. Experience did not by any means give wisdom, that understanding of the basic mechanics of humanity. Most oldsters she had known had been as governed by conditioned reflexes as when they had been nineteen.

So it was expected that people would not have benefited much from their experiences here. However, the hammer blows of death and resurrection had broken open the seals of the minds of many.

For one thing, absolutely no one had expected this type of afterlife, if you could call this an afterlife. No religion had described such a place, such events. Though, to tell the truth, those religions which did promise paradises and hells were remarkably lacking in descriptive detail. Perhaps not so remarkably, since very few persons had actually claimed to have seen the postmortem world.

And there certainly was nothing supernatural about this place and the raising of the dead in it. Everything—well, not everything but almost everything—could be explained in physical, not metaphysical, terms. This did not keep people from originating religious theories or reshaping old ones.

Those religions which had no eschatology of resurrection or immortality in the Western sense, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism were discredited. Those which did have such, Judaism, Islamism, Christianity, were equally discredited. But here, as on Earth, the death of a major religion was the birth pang of a new one. And there were, of course, minorities who refused stubbornly, despite all evidence, to admit that their faith was invalid.

Jill, standing near Samuelo, ex-rabbi, present bishop of the Church of the Second Chance, wondered what his reaction had been that first year on this world. There was no Messiah come to save the Chosen People, nor, indeed, any Chosen People assembled together at Jerusalem on Earth. No Jerusalem, no Earth.

Apparently the shattering of his faith had not shattered him. Somehow he had been able to accept that he had been wrong. Although a superorthodox rabbi of ancient times, he had a flexible mind.

At that moment Jeanne Jugan, who was hostess, offered Samuelo and Rahelo a dish of bamboo tips and fileted fish. Samuelo looked at the fish and said, “What is that?”

“Toadfish,” Jeanne said.

Samuelo tightened his lips and shook his head. Jeanne looked puzzled, since the bishop was obviously hungry and his fingers were only a few centimeters from seizing the tips. These, as far as Jill knew, were not tabu according to the Mosaic laws. But they were on the same plate as the forbidden scaleless fish and so contaminated.