The Dark Design (5 page)

Burton smiled and said, “No, I was just thinking. We too have talked to many who said that no one has been translated for a year in their areas. Of course, this may just mean that the places through which we voyaged may not have had any translatees. It is possible that there have been translatees elsewhere. After all, The River may be…”

He paused. How could he put across the concept of a River which was possibly 10,000,000 or more kilometers long to people who did not understand any number above twenty?

“It may be so long that a man who sailed from one end of The River to the other would take as many years to do it as the combined lifetimes of your grandfather, father, and yourself on Earth.

“Thus, even though there may be as many deaths as there are blades of grass between two grailstones, that still would not be much compared to the number who live along The River. Even though we have voyaged very far, we still have not gone far compared to the length of The River. So, there may be many areas where the dead have risen.

“Also, not as many people die now as in the first twenty years here. The many, many little states have been permanently established. Few slave states now exist. People have made states which keep order among their own citizens and protect them from other states. The evil people who lusted for power and the food and goods of others were killed off. It is true they popped up elsewhere, but in other areas they found themselves without their supporters. Things are fairly well settled now, though, of course, there are still accidents, mainly from fishing, and individuals do kill, though chiefly from passion.

“There are not so many dying nowadays. It is possible that the areas through which we went just were not the areas in which translatees appeared.”

“Do you really believe that?” the chief said. “Or are you saying that merely to make us feel happy?”

Burton smiled again. “I do not know.”

“Perhaps,” the chief said, “it is as the shamans of the Church of the Second Chance tell us. That this world is only a stepping-stone, a way station, to another. A world even better than this one. The shamans say that when a person becomes a very good man here, much better than he was on Earth, he goes on to a world where the great spirits truly dwell. Though the shamans do insist that there is only one great spirit. I cannot believe that, since everybody knows that there are many spirits, both high and low.”

“That is what they say,” Burton replied. “But how should they know any more than you or I know?”

“They say that one of the spirits that made this world appeared to the man who founded their church. This spirit told the man that this was so.”

“Perhaps the man who claims this is mad or a liar,” Burton said. “In any event, I would have to talk to this spirit myself. And he would have to prove that he was indeed a spirit.”

“I do not trouble myself about such matters,” the chief said. “It is better to leave the spirits alone, to enjoy life as it is and to be one whom the tribe finds good.”

“Perhaps that is the wisest course,” Burton said.

He did not believe this. If he did, why was he so determined to get to the headwaters of The River and to the sea behind the mountains ringing the north pole, the sea that was said to have at its center a mighty tower in which the secret makers and rulers of this world lived?

The chief said, “I mean no offense, Burton, but I am one who can see into a person. You smile and you tell funny stories, but you are troubled. You are angry. Why do you not quit voyaging on that small vessel and settle down? You have a good woman, all, in fact, that any man needs. This is a good place. There is peace, and thieves are unknown, except for an occasional passerthrough. There are not many fights except between men who want to prove that one is stronger than the other or between a man and his woman because they cannot get along with each other. Any sensible person would enjoy this area.”

“I am not offended,” Burton said. “However, for you to understand me, you would have to listen to the story of my life, here and on Earth. And even then you might not understand. How could you when I don’t understand it myself?”

Burton fell silent then, thinking of another chief of a primitive tribe who had told him much the same thing. This was in 1863 when Burton, as Her Majesty’s consul for the west African island of Fernando Po and the Bight of Biafra, visited Gélélé, king of Dahomey. Burton’s mission was to talk the king into stopping the bloody annual human sacrifices and the slave trade. His mission had failed, but he had collected enough data to write two volumes.

The drunken, bloody-minded, lecherous king had acted highhandedly with him, whereas when Burton had visited Benin its king had crucified a man in his honor. Still, they had gotten along rather well, considering the circumstances. In fact, on a previous visit, Burton had been made an honorary captain of the king’s Amazon guard.

Gélélé had said that Burton was a good man but too angry.

Primitive people were good at reading character. They had had to be to survive.

Monat, the Arcturan, sensing that Burton’s withdrawal was lowering the high spirits of the occasion, began to tell stories of his native planet. Monat had somewhat awed the islanders at first because of his obviously nonhuman origin. However, he had no trouble in warming them, since he knew exactly how to make a human being feel at ease. He should have; he had had to do this every day of his life on The Riverworld.

After a while, Burton arose and said that his crew should be getting to bed. He thanked the Ganopo for their hospitality but said that he had changed his mind about staying there for several days. His original intention to rest there while he studied them was gone.

“We would like very much for you to stay here,” the chief said. “For a few days or for many years. Whichever you prefer.”

“I thank you for that,” Burton said. He quoted the words of a character from
The Thousand and One Nights.
“Allah afflicted me with a love of travel.”

He then quoted himself, “Travelers, like poets, are mostly an angry race.”

That at least made him laugh, and he went to the boat feeling less gloomy. Before going to bed, he set the watches. Frigate protested that a guard wasn’t needed in this isolated place where the few inhabitants seemed to be honest. He was overruled, which was no surprise to him. He knew that Burton thought that acquisitiveness was the mainspring of human action.

Burton was thinking of this and other events of last night, including the dreams. He stood for a while, smoking a cigar, while Frigate stood by him. The assemblage of closely packed stars and wide-spreading gas sheets paled as they silently watched. Dawn would be coming within a half-hour. Its light would wash out most of the celestial objects, would spread out for some time before the sun finally cleared the northern mountain wall.

They could see the fog, like a woolly blanket, covering The River and the plains on both banks. It lapped against the tree-covered hills, on the sides of which were a few lights. Beyond the hills of the valley were the mountains, inclined at an angle of forty-five degrees for the first thousand feet or 305 meters or so, then ascending straight up, smooth as a mirror, for 10,000 feet or about 3048 meters.

During his first years here, Burton had estimated the mountains to be about 20,000 feet or 6096 meters high. He was not the only one to make that error when only the eye was available for calculation. After he had been able to construct rather crude surveying instruments, however, he had determined that the mountain walls were, generally, twice as low as he had thought. Their blue-gray or black rock created an illusion. Perhaps this was because the valley was so narrow, and the walls made the dwellers feel even more pygmyish.

This was a world of illusions, physical, metaphysical, and psychological. As on Earth, so here.

Frigate had lit a cigarette. He had quit smoking for a year, but now, as he put it, he had “fallen from grace.” He was almost as tall as Burton. His eyes were hazel. His hair was almost as black as his companions, though it reflected a reddish undercoating in sunlight. His features were irregular: bulging supraorbital ridges, a straight nose of average size but with large nostrils, full lips, the upper very long, a clefted chin. The latter seemed to recede because of his unusually short jaw.

On Earth he had been, among many other things, one of that rare but vigorous breed which collected all literature by, about, and relevant to Burton. He had also written a biography of him but had eventually novelized it as
A Rough Knight for the Queen.

On first meeting him, Burton had been puzzled when Frigate had identified himself as a science fiction writer.

“What in Gehenna is that?”

“Don’t ask me to define science fiction,” Frigate had said. “No one was ever able to give it a completely satisfactory definition. However, what it is… was… was a genre of literature in which most of the stories took place in a fictional future. It was called science fiction because science was supposed to play a large part in it. The development of science in the future, that is. This science wasn’t confined to physics and chemistry but also included extrapolations of the sociological and psychological science of the author’s time.

“In fact, any story that took place in the future was science fiction. However, a story written in 1960, for instance, which projected a future of 1984, was still classified as science fiction in 1984.

“Moreover, a science fiction story could take place in the present or the past. But the assumption was that the story was possible because it was based on the science of the author’s time, and he merely extrapolated, more or less rigorously, what a science could develop into.

“Unfortunately, this definition included stories in which there was no science or else science poorly understood by the author.

“However (there are a lot of howevers in science fiction), there were many stories about things which could not possibly happen, for which there was no scientific evidence whatsoever. Like time travel, parallel worlds, and faster-than-light drives. Living stars, God visiting the Earth in the flesh, insects tall as buildings, world deluges, enslavement through telepathy, and more in an endless list.”

“How did it come to be named science fiction?”

“Well, actually, it was around a long time before a man named Hugo Gernsback originated the label. You’ve read the Jules Verne novels and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein,
haven’t you? Those were considered to be science fiction.”

“It sounds as if it were just fantasy,” Burton had said.

“Yes, but all fiction is fantasy. The difference between mundane fantasy, what we called mainstream literature, and science fiction was that mainstream stories were about things which could have happened. They also always took place in the past or the present.

“Science fiction stories were about things that could not happen or were highly improbable. Some people wanted to name it speculative literature, but the term never caught on.”

Burton never thoroughly understood what science fiction was, but he did not feel bad about it. Frigate couldn’t explain it clearly either, though he could give numerous examples.

“Actually,” Frigate had said, “science fiction was one of those many things that don’t exist but nevertheless have a name. Let’s talk about something else.”

Burton had refused to drop the subject. “Then you were in a profession which didn’t exist?”

“No, the profession of writing science fiction existed. It was just that science fiction per se was nonexistent. This is beginning to sound like a dialog in
Alice in Wonderland.
”

“Was the money you made from your writings also nonexistent?”

“Almost. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I didn’t starve in a garret, but I also wasn’t driving a gold-plated Cadillac.”

“What’s a Cadillac?”

Thinking of that now, Burton found it strange that the woman who slept with him was the Alice who had been the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s two masterpieces.

Suddenly, Frigate said, “What’s that?”

Burton looked eastward toward the strait. Unlike the areas above and below it, the strait had no banks. High hills rose abruptly along its length, hills which were smooth walls. Below the strait something—no, two objects—were moving toward him, seemingly suspended above the fog.

He climbed a rope ladder to get a better look. The two objects were not suspended in the air. Their lower parts were just hidden by the mists. The nearest was a wooden structure with what seemed to be a human figure on its top. The second, much farther back, was a large, round, black object.

He called down. “Pete! I think it’s a raft! A very large one! It’s moving with the current, and it’s headed directly toward us! There’s a tower with a pilot on it. He isn’t moving, though, just standing there. Surely…”

No, not surely. The man on the tower had not moved. If he were awake, he would have seen that the raft was on a collision course.

Burton hooked an arm around a rope, cupped his hands, and bellowed warnings. The figure leaning against the guardrail did not move. Burton stopped shouting at him.