The Dark Design (4 page)

The owners of the grails retreated about fifty paces and waited. Presently, intense blue flames roared upward from the top of the stone to 20 feet or a little over 6 meters. Simultaneously, every one of the stones lining the banks of the lake spat fire and shouted thunder.

A minute later, several of the little dark people climbed onto the stone and handed down the grails. The party sat down under a bamboo roof by a fire of bamboo and driftwood and opened the lids of the cylinders. Inside were racks holding cups and deep dishes, all filled with liquor, food, crystals of instant coffee or tea, cigarettes and cigars.

Burton’s grail contained both Slovene and Italian food. He had been first resurrected in an area consisting mainly of people who had died in the Trieste area, and the grails of these usually gave the type of food they had been accustomed to eat on Earth. About every ten days, however, the grails served something entirely different. Sometimes it was English, French, Chinese, Russian, Persian, or any of a hundred national foods. Occasionally it offered dishes which were disgusting, such as kangaroo meat, burned on the surface and raw underneath, or living grubworms. Burton had gotten this Australian aborigine meal twice.

Tonight the liquor cup contained beer. He hated beer, so he traded it for Frigate’s wine.

The islanders’ grails contained food, much of which reminded Burton of Mexican cuisine. However, the tacos and tortillas were packed with venison, not beef.

While they ate and talked, Burton questioned the locals. From their descriptions, he surmised that they were pre-Columbian Indians who had lived in a wide valley in the Southwest desert. They had been composed of two different tribes speaking related but mutually unintelligible languages. Despite this, the two groups had lived peacefully side by side and had formed a single culture, each of the groups differing only in a few traits.

He decided that they were the people whom the Pima Indians of his time had called Hohokam, The Ancient Ones. These had flourished in the area which the white settlers would call the Valley of the Sun. It was there that the village of Phoenix of the Arizona Territory had been founded, a village which, according to what he had been told, had become a city of over a million population in the late twentieth century.

These people called themselves the Ganopo. In their Terrestrial time they had dug long irrigation ditches with flint and wooden tools and turned the desert into a garden. But they had suddenly disappeared, leaving the American archaeologists to explain why. Various theories had been advanced to account for this. The most widely accepted was that belligerent invaders from the north had wiped them out, though there was no evidence for that.

Burton’s hopes that he could solve this mystery were quickly dissipated. These people had lived and died before their society came to an end.

They all sat up late that night, smoking and drinking the alcohol made from the lichen which coated their rock spire. They told stories, mostly obscene and absurd, and rolled on the ground with laughter. Burton, when he told Arabic tales, found it necessary not to use unfamiliar references or to explain them if they were simple enough to be understood. But they had no trouble grasping the stories of Aladdin and his magic lamp or of how Abu Hasan broke wind.

The latter had been a great favorite with the Bedouins. Burton had often sat around a fire of dried camel dung and sent his listeners into shrieks of laughter though they had heard it a thousand times.

Abu Hasan was a Bedouin who had left his nomadic life to become a merchant of the city of Kaukaban in Yemen. He became very rich, and after his wife died he was urged by his friends to marry again. After some resistance, he gave in and arranged a marriage to a beautiful young woman. There was much feasting of rices of several colors and sherbets of as many more, kids stuffed with walnuts and almonds and a camel colt roasted whole.

Finally, the bridegroom was summoned to the chamber where his bride, clad in many rich robes, waited. He rose slowly and with dignity from his divan but, alas! he was full of meat and drink, and as he walked toward the bridal chamber, lo and behold! he let fly a fart, great and terrible.

On hearing this, the guests turned to each other and talked loudly, pretending not to have noticed this social sin. But Abu Hasan was greatly humiliated, and so, pretending a call of nature, he went down to the horsecourt, saddled a horse, and rode away, abandoning his fortune, his house, his friends, and his bride.

He then took a ship to India, where he became the captain of a king’s bodyguard. After ten years he was seized with a homesickness so terrible that he was about to die of it, and so he set out for home disguised as a poor fakir. After a long and dangerous journey, he drew near to his city, and he looked from the hills upon its walls and towers with eyes flowing with tears. However, he did not dare venture into the city until he knew that he and his disgrace had been forgotten. So he wandered around the outskirts for seven days and seven nights, eavesdropping upon the conversations in street and marketplace.

At the end of that time he chanced to be sitting at the door of a hut, thinking that perhaps he could now venture into the city as himself. And then he heard a young girl say, “O my mother, tell me the day I was born, for one of my companions needs to know that so she can read my future.”

And the mother replied, “You were born, O daughter, on the very night when Abu Hasan farted.”

The listener no sooner heard these words than he rose from the bench and fled, saying to himself, “Truly your fart has become a date, which shall last forever.”

And he did not quit traveling and voyaging until he returned to India and there lived in self-exile until he died, and the mercy of God be upon him.

This story was a great success, but before he told it Burton had to preface his story with the explanation that the Bedouins of that time considered farting in company a disgrace. In fact, it was necessary that everyone within earshot pretend that it had not happened, since the disgraced one would kill anyone who called attention to it.

Burton, sitting cross-legged before the fire, noted that even Alice seemed to enjoy the story. She was a middle-Victorian, raised in a deeply religious Anglican family, her father a bishop and the brother of a baron, descended from John of Gaunt, King John’s son, her mother the granddaughter of an earl. But the impact of Riverworld life and a long intimate association with Burton had dissolved many of her inhibitions.

He had then gone on to the tale of Sinbad the Sailor, though it was necessary to adapt this to the experiences of the Ganopo. They had never seen a sea, so the sea became a river, and the roc which carried off Sinbad became a giant golden eagle.

The Ganopo, in their turn, told stories from their creation myths and the ribald adventures of a folk hero, the trickster Old Man Coyote.

Burton questioned them about the adaptation of their religion to the reality of this world.

“O Burton,” their chief said, “this is not quite the world after death which we had envisioned. It is no land where maize grows higher than a man’s head in one day and deer and jackrabbit give us a good hunt but never escape our spears. Nor have we been reunited with our women and children, our parents and grandparents. Nor do the great ones, the spirits of the mountains and the river, of the rocks and the bush, walk among us and talk to us.

“We do not complain. In fact, we are far happier than in the world we left. We have more food, better food, than we had there, and we do not have to work to get it, though we had to fight to keep it in the early days here. We have far more than enough water, we can fish to our heart’s content, and we do not know the fevers that killed or crippled us nor do we know the aches and pains of old age and its enfeeblements.”

Here the chief frowned, and with his next words a shadow fell upon them and the smiles faded.

“Tell me, you strangers, have you heard anything about the return of death? Of death forever, I mean? We live upon this little island and so do not get many visitors. But from the few we do meet and from those we talk to when we visit the banks, we have heard some strange and troubling stories.

“They say that for some time now no one who has died has been raised again. A person is killed, and he or she does not wake up the next day, his wounds healed, his grail beside him, upon a bank far from the scene of his death. Tell me, is this true or is it just one of those tales that people like to make up to worry others?”

“I do not know,” Burton said. “It is true that we have traveled for thousands of kilometers… I mean, we have passed by an uncountable number of grailstones on our voyage. And for the past year, we have noticed this thing of which you speak.”

He paused for a moment, thinking. From the very second day after the great resurrection, the lesser resurrections, or translations, as they were generally called, had occurred. People were killed or killed themselves or had fatal accidents, but, at dawn the next day, they found themselves alive. However, they were never raised at the scene of their deaths. Always, they found themselves far away, often in a different climatic zone.

Many attributed this to a supernatural agency. Many more, among whom was Burton, did not think that there was any agency except an advanced science which accounted for this. There was no need to call in the supernatural. “No ghosts need apply,” to quote the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Physical explanations sufficed.

Burton knew from his own experience, apparently a unique one, that a dead person’s body could be duplicated. He had seen that in the vast space where he had awakened briefly. Bodies were somehow made from some kind of recording, their wounds healed, diseased flesh regenerated, limbs restored, the ravages of old age repaired, youth restored.

Somewhere under the crust of this planet was an immense thermionic energy-matter converter. Probably, it was fueled by heat from the nickel-iron core. Its machinery operated through the complex of grailstones, the roots of which reached deep under the earth, forming a circuit so complex that it staggered the mind to think of it.

Was the recording of the dead person’s cells made by something in the stones themselves? Or was it made as Frigate had suggested, by unseen orbital satellites which kept an eye upon every living being, much as God was supposed to note even the fall of a sparrow?

Nobody knew, or, if they did, they were keeping the secret to themselves.

Energy-matter conversion through the grailstone system also accounted for the free meals every citizen of The Riverworld found in his grail three times a day. The base of each of the metal cylinders must conceal a tiny converter and an electronic menu. The energy was transmitted through the grailstone complex into the grails. And there electricity became complex matter: beef, bread, lettuce, etcetera, and even luxuries, tobacco, marijuana, booze, scissors, combs, cigarette lighters, lipstick, dreamgum.

The towel-like cloths were also provided via the stone system, but not through the grails. They appeared in a neat pile next to the resurrected body and the grail.

There had to be some sort of mechanism inside the underground roots of the stone complex. This somehow could project through many meters of earth the vastly complicated configuration of molecules of human bodies, grails, and cloths at precisely a centimeter above ground level.

Literally, people and things formed from the air.

Burton had sometimes wondered what would happen if the translatee should happen to be formed in an area occupied by another object. Frigate said that there would be a terrible explosion. This had never happened, at least not to Burton’s knowledge. Thus, the mechanism “knew” how to avoid this intermingling of molecules.

There was, however, as Frigate had pointed out, the volume of atmosphere which the newly formed body had to displace. How were the molecules of air kept from a fatal mingling with the molecules of the body?

No one knew. But the mechanism must somehow remove the air, make vacuums into which the body, grail, and cloths appeared. It would have to be a perfect vacuum, too, something which the science of the late 10th century had not succeeded in making.

And it did it silently, without the explosion of a mass of suddenly displaced air.

The question of how bodies were recorded still did not have a satisfactory answer. Many years ago, a captured agent of the Ethicals, a man calling himself Spruce, had said that a sort of chronoscope, an instrument which could look back in time, recorded the cells of human beings. Of every person who had ever lived from about two million
B.C.
to 2008
A.D.

Burton did not believe this. It did not seem possible that anything could go backward in time, bodily or visually. Frigate had expressed his disbelief, too, saying that Spruce probably had used “chronoscope” in a figurative sense. Or perhaps he had lied.

Whatever the whole truth, the resurrection and the grail food could be explained in purely physical terms.

“What is it, Burton?” the chief said politely. “You have been seized by a spirit?”