The Dark Design (27 page)

Kazz and Besst hunched down uneasily over their food and looked around as if they expected an unwelcome visitor. He muttered in his native tongue, “The-Bear-Who-Collects-The-Bad is walking.”

Besst almost whined. “We must find a hut to hide in. It is not good to be near the water when he walks.”

The others looked as if they were going to seek shelter, too. Burton stood up and said loudly, “One moment, please! I’m interested in finding out if any of you are missing a boat!”

A man said, “Why?”

“Two of my crew deserted last night, and it’s possible that they stole a boat to get away.”

Forgetting about the coming storm, the party scattered to look along the bank. Within a minute, a man reported that his dugout was gone.

“They’re far away by now,” Kazz said. “But did they go up or down The River?”

“If there was a signal system in this area, we could find out quickly enough,” Burton said. “Unless, of course, they beached their boat and went into the hills to hide.”

Alice said, “What do we do now, Dick? If we stay here to look for them, we’ll not be able to get on the
Rex.
”

Burton stifled the impulse to tell her not to point out the obvious to him. She was still simmering; no sense in making her boil again.

“Monat and Frigate can hole up today and sneak out tonight and steal another boat. It would be futile to try to catch them. No, we’ll try to get aboard the paddle wheeler. But those two will come along someday, and when they do…”

“We’ll tear them apart?” Kazz said.

Burton shrugged and spread his palms upward.

“I don’t know. They’ve got the advantage. They can either drop dead on us or lie to us. Until we get to the tower…”

Alice spoke then, her eyes dark with accustomed reverie:

Burton grinned savagely. “Browning would have thought… must think… that this world is even stranger than the setting of his outré poem. I appreciate your sentiment, even if he said it first, Alice. Very well, we will go to the Dark Tower.”

“I don’t know what Alice was talking about,” Kazz said. “Anyway, just how’re we going to get on that boat?”

“If King John has room for us, I’ll offer him our treasure trove, our free-grails. That should appeal even to the ungreediest heart.”

“And if he doesn’t have room?”

He was silent for a moment. That tickle in the back of his brain, that feeling that he had overlooked some linkage between agents, had returned while Alice was speaking. And now he saw, or thought he saw, the means for scratching the itch, the kind of chain binding the agents together.

How did they recognize each other? Monat was no problem; he did not need identification. But what kind of secret signal would the human agents use to identify each other?

If they possessed a Neanderthal’s ability, they could see the negative signal, lack of a sign, in their colleagues’ foreheads. Suppose, though, they did not have this ability? Spruce had been surprised when he found out about Kazz’s optical talent. Though he had not said so, his manner had indicated that he had never heard of such a thing. Evidently, machines were used to detect and translate the symbols into whatever meaning they had. That would probably be done in the PR bubble or whatever HQ was.

If, then, they could not see the symbols with the naked eye, they would have another means of identification.

Suppose, just suppose, that there was a cutoff date. A period of time at which no more people from Earth were resurrected, not, at least, on this planet. According to Monat, Frigate, Ruach, and Spruce, that cutoff date had been 2008
A.D.

What if that was not the true date? What if it were earlier than 2008
A.D.
?

He had no idea what the true date would be, though he had never met anyone, except the agents, who claimed to have lived past 1983
A.D.
From now on, he would question every late-twentieth-centurian he met. And if 1983 was the latest at which anybody had died, then he would be fairly certain that that was the cutoff point.

So… perhaps the Ethicals had contrived a fiction which would enable them to identify each other instantly. That was that they had lived during 2008
A.D.
And, of course, there would be a fixed story about events from 1983, or whatever date it was, to 2008.

Which meant that perhaps it was untrue that the Arcturans had killed most of humanity in that year. The terrible slaughter might never have happened. In fact, anything he had heard about the years 1983-2008 might be a lie. Yet, there was Monat. He was not a Terrestrial. There was no reason to believe that he had not come from a planet of the Bear Watcher.

For the present, there was no way to explain his presence on The Riverworld.

Meanwhile, Burton had two means for catching an Ethical. Kazz was one; the 2008 story was another.

However—humanity lived not only in an
as-if
world, it was a
but-if
world, too—however, just possibly the agents had been recruited from a time past 1983. So, their stories could be true.

There were so many possibilities. For instance, how did he know that Monat, Frigate, and Ruach had told him the truth about what had happened to them when they were away from him? There was that incident when Frigate had claimed he had met the publisher who had cheated him on Earth. Frigate said he had gotten a long-delayed revenge by punching him on the nose.

There were bruises on Frigate, supposedly gotten during the fight with Sharkko and his gang. Those could have come from conflict with others, though. Frigate’s nature was such that he dreaded violence, physical or verbal. He might fantasize revenge, but he would never carry it out.

Suppose, just suppose, that the agents adopted disguises based on real life Terrestrials. What if there was an actual Peter Jairus Frigate somewhere on this planet? The pseudo-Frigate could be pretending to be the man who had had such an intense interest in Burton’s life. That would be one means of getting close to Burton, of making sure that Burton would let him attach himself to Burton. After all, it would be hard for any man to be indifferent to his biographer, to a person who seemed to worship him.

Yet, why would it be necessary for an agent to adopt such a disguise? Why not make up one from whole cloth?

Perhaps it was not necessary, it was just easier, more convenient. As for an agent encountering the person he was pretending to be, that was highly unlikely.

There were so many potentialities, so many questions to be answered.

Alice said, “Dick! What’s the matter?”

He came out of his reverie with a start. Everybody except his crew and the man whose boat had been stolen had fled. The man looked as if he would like to ask for reparations but was hesitating because he had no one to back him up.

And wind was whipping the waves of The River and ruffling the thatches of the huts. The
Snark
thumped against the bumpers of its dock. The light had gone from brownish-yellow to pale gray, making the faces around him even more ghastly. Across the water lightning flashed its fiery tooth, and thunder bellowed like a bear in a cave. Kazz and Besst were obviously longing for him to give the word to look for shelter. The others were only somewhat less nervous.

“I was thinking,” he said. “You asked what we’d do if King John doesn’t have room for us? Well, monarchs have means for making room if they wish to do so. And if he refuses, I’ll find some way to get aboard. I’m not going to be stopped by anything or anybody!”

Lightning struck nearby, cracking as if the back of the world had broken. Kazz and Besst led the headlong flight for the nearest building!

Burton, standing in the heavy rain that had immediately followed the bolt, laughed at them.

He shouted, “On to the Dark Tower!”

In the dream, Peter Jairus Frigate was groping through a fog. He was naked; somebody had stolen his clothes. He had to get home before the sun rose and burned the fog off and exposed him to the derision of the world.

The grass was wet and scratchy. After a while he got tired of walking on the shoulder of the road, and he stepped onto the asphalt pavement. Now and then, as he trudged along, the fog would thin a little, and he could see the trees to his right.

Somehow, he knew that he was far out in the country. Home was a long way off. But if he walked fast enough, he could make it before dawn. Then he’d have to get into the house without waking his parents. The doors and windows would be locked, which meant that he’d have to throw pebbles against the second-story window in the back. The rattle might wake his brother, Roosevelt.

But his brother, though only eighteen, was already a heavy drinker, a skirt chaser, roaring around on his motorcycle with his sideburned, leather-jacketed, dese-and-dem pals from the Hiram Walker Distillery. This was Sunday morning, and so he’d be snoring away, filling the small attic bedroom he shared with Peter with stinking whiskey fumes.

Roosevelt was named after Theodore, not Franklin Delano, whom his father hated. James Frigate abominated “the man in the White House” and loved
The Chicago Tribune,
which was delivered on the doorstep every Sunday. His oldest son loathed the editorials, the whole tone of the paper, except for the comics. Ever since he had learned to read, he’d eagerly awaited every Sunday morning, right after the cocoa, pancakes, bacon, and eggs, for the adventures of Chester Gump and his pals in quest of the city of gold; Moon Mullins; Little Orphan Annie and her big Daddy Warbucks and his pals, the colossal magician Punjab and the sinister The Asp; and Mr. Am, who looked like Santa Claus, was as old as the Earth, and could travel in time. And then there was Barney Google and Smilin’ Jack and Terry and the Pirates. Delightful!

And what was he doing thinking about those great comic-strip characters while walking naked along a country road in dark, wet-with-evil clouds? It wasn’t difficult to figure out why. They brought a sense of warmth and security, happiness even, his belly filled with his mother’s good cooking, the radio turned on low, his father sitting in the best chair reading the opinions of “Colonel Blimp.” Peter would be sprawling on the living room floor with the comics page spread out before him, his mother bustling around in the kitchen feeding his two younger brothers and his infant sister. Little Jeannette, whom he loved so much and who would grow up and go through three husbands and innumerable lovers and a thousand fifths of whiskey, the curse of the Frigates.

All that was ahead, fading now from his mind, absorbed by the fog. Now he was dwelling in the front room, happy… no, it too faded away… he was outside the house, in the backyard, naked and shivering with the cold and the terror of being caught without his clothes and no way of explaining why it happened. He was throwing pebbles against the window, hoping their rattle wouldn’t wake up his little brothers and sister sleeping in the tiny bedroom below and to one side of the attic bedroom.

The house had once been a one-room country schoolhouse outside the mid-Illinois town of Peoria. But the town had grown, houses sprang up all around it, and now the city limits were a half a mile to the north. A second story and indoor plumbing had been added sometime during the growth of this area. This was the first house he had lived in in which there had been an indoor toilet. Somehow, this once-country house became the farmhouse near Mexico, Missouri. Here he, at the age of four, had lived with his mother, father, and younger brother and the family of the farmer who’d rented out two rooms to the Frigates.

His father, a civil and electrical engineer (one year in Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, and a diploma from the International Correspondence School) had worked for a year at the generating plant in Mexico. It was in the farmyard behind the farmhouse that Peter had been horrified on realizing that chickens ate animals and he ate chickens that ate animals. That had been the first revelation that this world was founded on cannibalism.

That was not right, he thought. A cannibal was a creature that ate its own kind. He turned over and passed back into sleep, vaguely aware that he had been half waking between segments of this dream and mulling over each before passing on to the next. Or he had been redreaming the entire dream each time. In one night he would have the same dream several times. Or a dream would recur a number of times over several years.