The Dark Design (30 page)

The Frisco Kid, sitting on a folding bamboo chair and smoking a cigarette, ran his eyes up and down Frigate.

“Peter Jairus Frigate, heh? American. Midwest. Right? You look strong enough, but what’s your nautical experience?”

“Not much on Earth,” Peter said. “I used to sail a small boat on the Illinois River. But I’ve done a lot here. I sailed on a large single-masted catamaran for three years and I put in a year on a two-masted schooner like yours.”

That was a lie. He’d only shipped on the two-master for three months. But that was enough for him to know, literally, the ropes.

“Hm. Did these ships make short local trips or were they on long voyages?”

“Long ones,” Frigate said. He was glad he hadn’t referred to the vessels as boats. Some sailors were very touchy about the distinction between “boats” and “ships.” For Frigate, anything on a river was a boat. But Farrington was a seafaring man, even if there were no more seas.

“In those areas,” he added, “the wind was usually from upRiver. So we were sailing close-hauled most of the time.”

“Yeah, anybody can sail with the wind,” Martin Farrington said.

“
Why
do you want to sign up?” Rider asked suddenly.

“Why? I’m fed up with life here. Rather, I’m dissatisfied with doing the same old thing day after day. I…”

“You know how it is on a ship,” Farrington said. “It’s cramped, and you spend most of your time with just a few people. And it’s pretty much the same old thing day after day.”

“I know that, of course,” Frigate said. “Well, I’d like to travel to the end of The River, for one thing. The catamaran I was on was going there, but it got burned during an attack by slavers. The schooner was sunk by a dragonfish while we were helping some locals fish for it. It was Moby Dick and the
Pequod
all over again.”

“You were Ishmael?” Rider said.

Frigate looked at him. Rider was supposed to have been able to quote great chunks of Shakespeare, to be well read indeed. But that could have been Hollywood publicity crap.

“You mean, was I the lone survivor? No, six of us got to shore. It was scary, though.”

“Was… ?”

Farrington stopped, cleared his throat, and looked at Rider. Rider raised thick, dark eyebrows. Farrington was evidently considering how to rephrase the question.

“Who were the captains of these two crafts?”

“The catamaran captain was a Frenchman named DeGrasse. The schooner captain was a rough son-of-a-bitch named Larsen. A Norwegian of Danish birth. He’d been captain of a sealer, I believe.”

Nothing he said about Larsen was true. But Peter couldn’t resist testing Farrington’s reaction.

The captain’s eyes narrowed, then he smiled. He said slowly, “Was Larsen nicknamed
Wolf
?”

Peter kept his face blank. He wasn’t falling for that trap. If Farrington thought that he was trying to tell him circuitously that he recognized him, Farrington would not take him on.

“No. If he had a nickname, it was ‘Bastard.’ He was about six and a half feet tall and very dark for a Scandinavian. His eyes were as black as an Arab’s. Did you know him?”

Farrington relaxed. He dubbed out his cigarette on a baked-clay ashtray, and lit up another. Rider said, “How good are you with that bow?”

“I’ve been practicing for thirty years. I’m no Robin Hood, but I can shoot six arrows in twenty seconds with reasonable accuracy. I’ve studied the martial arts for twenty years. I never look for a fight and I avoid one if it’s possible. But I’ve been in about forty major actions and a lot of minor ones. I’ve been badly wounded four times.”

Rider said, “When were you born?”

“In 1918.”

Martin Farrington looked at Rider, then said, “I suppose you saw a lot of movies when you were a kid?”

“Didn’t everybody?”

“And what about your education?”

“I got a B.A. in English literature with a minor in philosophy and I was a compulsive reader. Lord, how I miss reading!”

“Me, too,” Farrington said.

There was a pause. Rider said, “Well, our memories of Earth get dimmer every day.”

Which meant that if Frigate had seen Rider in the films and Farrington on the dust jackets of books, he did not remember them. The captain’s question about his education might, however, have a double interest. He would want a crewman who could talk intelligently about many matters. On Earth, Farrington’s forecastle companions had been brutal and illiterate, not exactly his soul mates. So, for that matter, had been most of the people he knew until he had gone to college.

“We seem to have about ten in all to interview,” Farrington said. “We’ll make our choice after we’ve talked to everybody. We’ll let you know before noon.”

Peter wanted desperately to be chosen, but he was afraid that too much eagerness might put them off. Since they were, for some reason, traveling under pseudonyms, they might be wary of someone who was trying too hard to sign on. Why, he did not know.

“One thing we forgot,” Rider said. “We don’t have room for more than one hand. You can’t take your woman along. Is that okay?”

“No problem.”

“You can take turns with Abigail,” Rider said. “If you don’t mind sharing with three others. And if she likes you, of course. But she hasn’t shown many antipathies so far.”

“She’s a luscious woman,” Peter said. “But that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Mustafa kind of likes you,” Farrington said, grinning. “He’s been eyeing you.”

Frigate looked at the Turk, who winked, and he blushed.

“That appeals even less.”

“Just make that plain, and you won’t be bothered by him or Binns,” Farrington said. “I’m no homo, but I saw a lot of buggery. Any man who sails under the mast has; every ship, naval or commercial, has been a viper’s nest of sodomy since Noah. Those two are real he-men, aside from their lack of interest in the fair sex. And they’re damn good sailors. So just tell them to back off. If, that is, we accept you. But I don’t want any bitching about being hard up. You can catch up when we go ashore, and if we lose a man you can get a woman for your bunkmate. She has to be a good sailor, though. Everyone pulls his weight on this ship.”

“Abigail’s looking more appealing by the second,” Frigate said.

Farrington and Rider laughed, and Frigate moved on.

For a while, he stood by the dock area. This was a shallow bay which had been hacked with much labor out of the bank. Stone cut from the base of the mountains had been carried down here and used to line the shore. Wooden docks had been extended from the bank, but these held mainly small catboats, lugboats, and catamarans. Two giant rafts with masts were tied up here, too. These were used for dragonfishing. A number of warcanoes, capable of holding forty men each, were beached near the rafts. Canoes and rowboats were putting out now for fishing. By noon, The River would be heavily salted with small and large boats.

The
Razzle Dazzle
was too large to fit within the piers. It was anchored near the mouth of the bay behind a breakwater of large black rocks. It was a beautiful ship, long and low, built of oak and pine. There wasn’t a nail in it, and the pegs had been cut with flint. The sails were made of treated outer skin of the dragonfish, so thin they were translucent. The oaken figurehead was a full-busted mermaid holding a torch.

The ship was a wonder, and the wonder was how its crew had managed to avoid having it taken from them. Many had been murdered for much lesser craft.

Feeling anxious, he walked past Farrington and Rider. The interviews were by no means over. Word had gotten around, and now there were about twenty men and ten women waiting in line. If this continued, the questioning might take all day. There was nothing he could do about it, so he shrugged and went back home. Eve was gone, which was just as well. There was no need to tell her what he was doing until he found out if he was leaving. If he was turned down, he’d say nothing to her.

Part of his duty as a Ruritanian citizen was to assist in alcohol-making. He might as well work off a half-day today. The labor would help keep him from worrying. He walked through the passes between the hills until these gave out. There were four more hills to climb, each increasingly higher. The trees were thicker here; the huts, fewer. Presently he was on top of the highest hill, which was at the base of the mountain. Its smooth stone ran straight up for an estimated 1228 meters or about 6000 feet. A waterfall thundered about 91 meters or 100 yards away, spilling thousands of liters a minute into a pool. From this, the water ran in a broad channel which would thread a course through the hills to The River.

Frigate passed by the fires, the wooden, glass, and stone equipment, and the odor of alcohol. He climbed up a bamboo ladder until he was on a platform placed against an area of stone from which lichen had not yet been removed. He reported to a foreman, who gave him a chert scraper. The foreman took from a rack a pine stick with Frigate’s initials cut into it. It bore alternating horizontal and vertical lines, the former indicating the days he’d worked, the latter the number of months.

“Next year you’ll be using a stick to scrape off the stuff,” the foreman said. “We’ll be saving the chert and flint for weapons.”

Peter nodded and went to work.

In time, the supply of flint would be exhausted. Technology on The Riverworld would go backward. Instead of progressing from a wooden to a stone age, humanity would reverse the procedure.

Frigate wondered how he was going to get his flint-tipped weapons out of the state. If he sailed on Farrington’s craft he would, according to the law, have to leave his precious stones behind.

The time put in by Frigate on this work was estimated by the foreman. Except for the sun, there were few clocks of any type. The little glass available was used in the alcohol-making process, so there were not even hourglasses. For that matter, the sand used to make the glass had been imported from a state 800 kilometers downRiver. That had cost Ruritania several boatloads of tobacco and booze and piles of dragonfish and hornfish skins and bones. The tobacco and alcohol had been contributed by the citizens from their grails. Frigate had given up smoking and drinking for two months during this time of sacrifice. When it was over, he continued his abstinence from smoking, trading his cigarettes and cigars for whiskey. But, as had happened on Earth and here, he had slipped back into the arms of Demon Nicotine.

He worked hard, scraping off the thick green-blue plant growth from the black rock and stuffing it into the bamboo buckets. Others lowered the buckets on ropes to the ground, where their contents were dumped into vats.

Shortly before noon, he knocked off for the lunch hour. Before going down the ladders, he looked out over the hills. Far below, the white hull of the
Razzle Dazzle
shone in the bright sun. Somehow, he was going to be on it when it up-anchored.

Peter walked back to the hut, noted that Eve wasn’t there, and went on down to the plain. The line of interviewers did not look any shorter. He passed along the edge of the plain where its short grass abruptly stopped and the long grass of the hills began. What made for the line of demarcation? Were there chemicals in the hill soil that halted the encroachment of plain grass? Or was it vice versa? Or both? And why?

The archery range was about half a kilometer south of the dock area. He practiced shooting at a target of grass on a bamboo tripod for about thirty minutes. Then he went to the gymnasium area and ran sprints and made long jumps and engaged in judo, karate, and spear-fighting for two hours. At the end of the time, he was sweating and tired. But he was bursting with joy. It was wonderful to have a twenty-five-year-old body, the tiredness and feebleness of middle and old age gone, the aches and pains, the fat, the hernia, the ulcer, the headaches, the long-sightedness, all no more. Replacing it, the ability to run or swim swiftly and far, to feel sexual desire every night (and a good part of the day).

The worst thing he had done on Earth was to get a desk job as a technical writer at the age of thirty-eight and then at fifty-one, to become a full-time fiction writer. He should have stayed in the steel mill. It was monotonous work, but while his body was handling the hot, heavy work, his mind was busy dreaming up stories. At night he would read or write.

It was when he had started to sit on his butt all day that he had begun drinking so heavily. And his reading had diminished, too. It was too easy after working on a typewriter eight hours a day to sit in front of the TV all evening and swill bourbon or scotch. TV, the worst thing that had happened to the twentieth century. After the atom bomb and overpopulation, of course.

No, he told himself, that wasn’t fair. He didn’t have to be a boob before the tube. He could have used the self-discipline which enabled him to write to turn the set off except at highly selected times. But the lotus-eater syndrome had gotten him. Besides, there were programs on TV which were really excellent, both entertaining and educational.

Still, this world was good in that there were no TVs or automobiles or atom bombs or gross national production or paychecks or mortgages or medical bills. Or air or water pollution and almost no dust. And nobody gave a damn about communism or socialism or capitalism, because they didn’t exist. Well, that was not quite true. Most states did have a sort of primitive communism.