The Dark Design (3 page)

He lay for a while, rigid as a corpse, thinking,
Here I am, a one-hundred-and-one-year-old man in the body of a twenty-five-year-old.

The Ethicals had softened the hardened arteries of the candidates. But they had not been able to do anything about atherosclerosis of the soul. That repair was apparently left up to the candidate.

The dreams were going backward in time. The inquisition by the Ethicals had come last. But now he was dreaming that he was experiencing again the dream he’d had just before he awoke to the Last Trump. However, he was watching himself in the dream; he was both participant and spectator.

God was standing over him as he lay on the grass, as weak as a newly born baby. This time, He lacked the long, black, forked beard, and He was not dressed like an English gentleman of the fifty-third year of Queen Victoria’s reign. His only garment was a blue towel wrapped around His waist. His body was not tall, as in the original dream, but was short and broad and heavily muscled. The hairs on His chest were thick and curly and red.

The first time, Burton had looked into God’s face and seen his own. God had had the same black straight hair, the same Arabic face with the deep, dark eyes like spear points thrusting from a cave, the high cheekbones, the heavy lips, and the thrust-out, deeply cleft chin. However, His face no longer bore the scars of the Somali spear that had sliced through Burton’s cheek, knocking out teeth, its edge jammed into his palate, its point sticking out the other cheek.

The face looked familiar, but he couldn’t name its owner. It certainly was not that of Richard Francis Burton.

God still had the iron cane. Now He was poking Burton in the ribs.

“You’re late. Long past due for the payment of your debt, you know.”

“What debt?” the man on the grass said.

The Burton who was watching suddenly realized that fog was swirling around him, casting veils between the two before him. And a gray wall, expanding and contracting as if it were the chest of a breathing animal, was behind them.

“You owe for the flesh,” God said. He poked the ribs of the man on the grass. Somehow, the standing Burton felt the pain.

“You owe for the flesh and the spirit, which are one and the same thing.”

The man on the grass struggled to get onto his feet. He said, gasping, “Nobody can strike me and get away without a fight.”

Somebody snickered, and the standing Burton became aware of a dim, tall figure in the fog beyond.

God said, “Pay up, sir. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to foreclose.”

“Damned moneylender!” the man on the grass said. “I ran into your kind in Damascus.”

“This is the
road to
Damascus. Or it should be.”

The dark figure snickered again. The fog enclosed all. Burton awoke, sweating, hearing the last of his whimperings.

Alice turned and said sleepily, “Are you having a nightmare, Dick?”

“I’m all right. Go back to sleep.”

“You’ve been having many nightmares lately.”

“No more than on Earth.”

“Would you like to talk?”

“When I dream, I
am
talking.”

“But to yourself.”

“Who knows me better?” He laughed softly.

“And who can deceive you better,” she said a little tartly.

He did not reply. After a few seconds, she was breathing with the gentle rhythm of the untroubled. But she would not forget what had been said. He hoped that morning would not bring another quarrel.

He liked arguing; it enabled him to explode. Lately, however, their fights had left him unsatisfied, ready at once for another.

It was so difficult to blaze away at her without being overheard on this small vessel. Alice had changed much during their years together, but she still retained a ladylike abhorrence of, as she put it, washing their dirty linen in public. Knowing this, he pressed her too hard, shouted, roared, getting pleasure out of seeing her shrink. Afterward, he felt ashamed because he had taken advantage of her, because he had caused her shame.

All of which made him even more angry.

Frigate’s footsteps sounded on the deck. Burton thought of relieving Frigate early. He would not be able to get back to sleep; he’d suffered from insomnia most of his adult life on Earth and much here, too. Frigate would be grateful to get to bed. He had trouble staying awake when on watch.

He closed his eyes. Darkness was replaced by grayness. Now he saw himself in that colossal chamber without walls, floor, or ceiling. Naked, he was floating in a horizontal position in the abyss. As if suspended on an invisible, unfelt spit, he was turning slowly. Rotating, he saw that there were naked bodies above, to the sides, and below. Like him, their heads and pubic regions were shaven. Some were incomplete. A man nearby had a right arm which was skinless from the elbow down. Turning, he saw another body that had no skin at all and no muscles in the face.

At a distance was a skeleton with a mess of organs floating inside it.

Everywhere, the bodies were bounded at head and foot by red metallic-looking rods. They rose from the unseen floor and ascended to the unseen ceiling. They stood in rows as far as he could see, and in a vertical line between each pair hovered the wheeling bodies, rank on rank of sleepers, bodies as far down, bodies as far up, as the eye could encompass.

They formed vertical and horizontal lines stretching into gray infinity.

This time, watching, he felt some of the bewilderment and the terror of the first moment of awakening.

He, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Her Majesty’s consul at the city of Trieste in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had died on Sunday, October 19, 1890.

Now he was alive in a place that was like no heaven or hell he had ever heard of.

Of all the millions of bodies he could see, he was the only one alive. Or awake.

The rotating Burton would be wondering why he was singled out for this unsought honor.

The watching Burton now knew why.

It was that Ethical whom Burton called X, the unknown quality, who had roused him. The renegade.

Now the suspended man had touched one of the rods. And that had broken some kind of circuit, and all the bodies between the rods had started to fall, Burton among them.

The watcher felt almost as much terror as when it had first occurred. This was a primal dream, the universal human dream of falling. Doubtless, it originated from the first man, the half-ape half-sentient, for whom the fall was a dread reality, not just a nightmare. The half-ape had leaped from one branch to another, thinking in his pride that he could span the gulf. And he had fallen because of his pride, which distorted his judgment.

Just as Lucifer’s fall had been caused by his pride.

Now that other Burton had grabbed a rod and was hanging on while the bodies, still turning slowly, hurtled past him, a cataract of flesh.

Now he looked up and saw an aerial machine, a green canoe shape, sinking down through the space between nearby rods. It was wingless, propellerless, apparently buoyed up by some kind of device unknown to the science of his day.

On its bow was a symbol: a white spiral which ended pointing to the right and from which point white threads flared.

In the reality, two men had looked over the side of the flying machine. And then, suddenly, the falling bodies slowed in their fall, and an invisible force seized him and brought his legs up and tore him loose from the rod. He floated upward, revolving, went past and above the canoe, and stopped. One of the men pointed a pencil-sized metal object at him.

Screaming with rage and hate and frustration, that Burton shouted, “I’ll kill! I’ll kill!”

The threat was an empty one, as empty as the darkness that stilled his fury.

Now, only one face looked over the edge of the machine. Though he could not see the man’s face, Burton thought it looked familiar. Whatever the features, they belonged to X.

The Ethical chuckled.

Burton sat upright and grabbed for the throat of X.

“For God’s sake, Dick! It’s me, Pete!”

Burton opened his hands from around Frigate’s throat. Starlight as bright as Earth’s full moon beamed in through the open doorway and silhouetted Frigate.

“It’s your watch, Dick.”

“Please be less noisy,” Alice murmured.

Burton rolled off the bed and felt the suit hanging from a peg. Though he was sweating, he shivered. The little cabin, hot from the night-long radiation of two bodies, was cooling now. The cold fog was pressing in.

Alice said, “Brrr!” and sounds indicated she was pulling the thick towels over her. Burton caught a glimpse of her white body before it was covered. He glanced at Frigate, but the American had turned and was heading up the ladder. Whatever his faults, he was not a Peeping Tom. Not that he could really blame the fellow if he had taken a look. He was more than half in love with Alice. He had never said so, but it was obvious to Burton, to Alice, and to Loghu, Frigate’s bunkmate.

If anybody was to blame, it was Alice. She had long ago lost her Victorian modesty. Though she would deny it, she may have, subconsciously, of course, teased Frigate with a quick flash of herself.

Burton decided not to bring that subject up. Though he was angry at both Frigate and Alice, he’d look like a fool if he said anything about this. Alice, like most people, bathed in The River in the nude, seemingly indifferent to the passersby. Frigate had seen her hundreds of times without clothing.

The night suit was composed of a number of thick towels held together by magnetic tabs underneath the cloth. Burton opened it and fitted the cloths to make a hooded garment around legs and body. He buckled on a belt of hornfish skin holding scabbards containing a flint knife, a chert axe, and a wooden sword. The edges of the latter were lined with tiny flint chips and its end held a sharp hornfish’s horn. He removed from a rack a heavy ash spear tipped with horn and went up the ladder.

Gaining the deck, he found that his head was above the fog. Frigate was his same height, and his head seemed to float bodiless above the swirling wool of the mists. The sky was bright, though The Riverworld had no moon. It blazed with stars and with vast, shining gas clouds. Frigate believed that this planet was near the center of Earth’s galaxy. But it could be inside some other galaxy, for all anybody knew.

Burton and his friends had built a vessel and had sailed from Theleme. The
Hadji II
, unlike its predecessor, was a cutter, a fore-and-aft rigged single-master. Aboard it were Burton, Hargreaves, Frigate, Loghu, Kazz, Besst, Monat Grrautut, and Owenone. The latter was a woman of ancient pre-Hellenic Pelasgia who did not mind at all sharing the Arcturan’s bunk. With his peculiar crew (Burton had a not always fortunate talent for collecting an unhomogeneous band of followers), he had voyaged upRiver for twenty-five years. One of the men with whom he had shared many adventures, Lev Ruach, had decided to stay in Theleme.

The
Hadji II
had not gotten as far as Burton had hoped. Since the crew had little elbow room, its members were in too close and constant contact with each other. It had been necessary to take long shore leaves so they could cool off their cabin fever.

Burton had decided that it was about time for another long liberty when the boat had sailed into this area. This was one of the rare widenings of The River, a lake about 20 miles or 32 kilometers long and 6 miles or 9.6 kilometers wide. At its western end the lake narrowed into a strait about a quarter-mile or 321 meters wide. The current boiled through this, but fortunately the prevailing wind here was behind a vessel going upstream. If the
Hadji II
had had to sail against the wind, it would have had little space to tack.

After looking at the strait, Burton thought that the passage could be made, though it would be close. However, now was the time to take a long rest. Instead of putting into one of the banks, he had stopped the boat alongside one of the scores of rocks that jutted up from the middle of the lake. These were tall spires with some level land at their bases. Some of them had grailstones, and around these were gathered a few huts.

The island-spire nearest the strait had a few floating docks. They would have been more convenient if they had been on the downcurrent side, but they were not, so the boat was taken alongside one. It was secured by lines to the posts and against the bumpers, bags of tough skins of alligator-fish filled with grass. The island’s inhabitants approached them cautiously. Burton quickly assured them of his peaceful intentions, and he politely asked if his crew could use the grailstone.

There were only twenty islanders—short, dark people whose native language was unknown to Burton. They spoke a degraded form of Esperanto, however, so there was little language barrier.

The grailstone was a massive mushroom-shaped structure of gray red-flecked granite. The surface of its top was as high as Burton’s chest and bore seven hundred round indentations in concentric circles.

Shortly before sunset, each person put in one of the shadow holes a tall cylinder of gray metal. English-speakers called it a grail, a pandora (or its shortened form, dora), a tucker box, lunch pail, glory bucket, and so on. The most popular name was that given it by the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance. This was the Esperanto
pandoro.
Though the gray metal was as thin as a sheet of newspaper except for the base, it was unbendable, unbreakable, and indestructible.