The Magic Labyrinth (8 page)

They had agreed never to talk about the Ethical or anything connected with him in their cabins. These might be bugged. Their next meeting was at a table where they played poker. Present were Burton, Alice, Frigate, Nur, Mix, and London. Loghu and Umslopogaas were on duty.

When Burton had heard Nur’s and Mix’s story of their visits from X, he had been convinced that they were indeed recruits of the Ethical. Nevertheless, he had listened to what each had to say in detail before he had admitted his real identity. Then he had told his story, holding back nothing.

Now he was saying, “See you and raise you ten. No, I don’t think we should plant eavesdropping devices in the cabins of any of the suspects. We might learn something valuable. But if they find one, then they’ll know that X’s agents, we could be called that, are on to them. It’s too dangerous.”

“I agree,” the little Moor said. “Do the rest of you?”

Even Mix, who’d proposed planting the bugs, nodded. However, he said, “What about Podebrad? I run into him now and then, and all he does is say howdy to me and then pass on grinning like a parson who’s just found out his girlfriend ain’t pregnant. It galls me. I’d like to tear into the bastard.”

“Me, too,” London said. “He figures he’s going to get away scot-free after making suckers of us.”

“Attacking him would only get you thrown off the boat,” Nur said. “Besides, he is tremendously strong. I believe that he would tear you apart while you were tearing into him.”

“I can take him!” Mix and London said at the same time.

“You’ve bloody good reason for revenge,” Burton said. “But it’s out, for the time being anyway. Surely you can see that?”

“But why’d he say he was taking us along on the blimp and then desert us like we had BO?”

Nur ed-Din said, “I’ve thought about that. The only reasonable explanation is that he somehow suspected that we were X’s men. That would be one more bit of evidence that he is an Ethical agent.”

“I think he’s just a goddamn sadist!” London said.

“No.”

Burton said, “If he suspects you four, then you’ll have to be on guard. The rest of us will, too. I didn’t think of what Nur said or I’d not have suggested that we meet in the salon.”

“It’s too late to worry about that,” Alice said. “Anyway, he isn’t going to do anything, if he is an agent, until he gets to the headwaters. Any more than we are.”

Burton won the pot with three jacks and two tens. Alice dealt. Burton thought that Nur must be concentrating on other matters than poker. The Moor won about half the time, and Burton suspected that he could rake in the chips even more often if he cared to. Somehow, the little man seemed to be able to tell what his opponents had in their hand just by looking at their faces.

“We might as well enjoy the ride,” Frigate said.

Burton looked at him from lowered lids. The fellow had the same adulation for him that the other Frigate had or had pretended to have. Whenever he got the chance, he would ply Burton with questions, most of them about periods in his life which Burton’s biographers had only been able to speculate about. But, also like the other, he would question attitudes and beliefs which Burton held dear. His attitude toward women and the colored races, for instance, and his belief in telepathy. Burton had too often had to explain that what he had believed on Earth did not necessarily hold here. He had seen too much and experienced too much. He had changed in many respects.

Now he thought it was a good time to delve into the matter of the pseudo-Frigate.

“There has to be a very good reason for the so-called coincidence.”

“I’ve been pondering that, too,” the American said. “Fortunately, I was an avid science-fiction reader and writer in that field. So I have a certain flexibility of imagination, which you’ll need if you’re going to bear with me, because I believe that the Frigate you’ve known by no coincidence at all is my brother James, dead at the ripe old age of one year!

“Now, consider the children who died on Earth. One reason, the best, is that if they were raised here, they would jam the planet. There wouldn’t be enough living space here. In fact, the population of children deceased before five would be the largest segment of the entire population by far.

“So what would the Ethicals do with them? They’d resurrect them on another planet, perhaps one like this, perhaps not. Maybe it’d take two planets to hold them comfortably.

“Anyway, let’s assume that this has happened. Unless,” he lifted a finger, “unless for some reason they haven’t been resurrected as yet. Maybe they’re to be raised here after we’re gone. Who knows?

“I don’t. But I can speculate. Say that the infants were incarnated on another planet. It couldn’t be done with the entire population at once because there would have to be adults to take care of them. And that would crowd a planet the size of Earth. So maybe they’re incarnated at a certain rate, that is, so many infants within a certain time. These are raised to adulthood, and then they become the nurses, the teachers, the foster parents of more infants. And so on. Or maybe it’s all done at once on more than one planet. I doubt that, though. The energy involved in planet reforming would be enormous. On the other hand, they may use planets which don’t have to be reformed.”

“Keep dealing,” London said. “If you don’t people’ll wonder what the hell we’re talking about!”

“I can open,” Mix said.

They were silent except for announcing their play for a minute. Then Frigate said, “If what I propose were true, well, let me put it this way. Ah…I was the eldest child in my family. The oldest alive, that is. My older brother, James, died at one. I was born six months later. Now…ah…he would be resurrected. And when he grew up, he became an agent for the Ethicals.

“He was planted here on Resurrection Day. He was assigned to watch Burton. Why would he be assigned? Because the Ethicals knew that, somehow, Burton had awakened in that vast chamber of floating bodies before Resurrection Day, before he was supposed to awake. They must have figured that it was no accident, that…uh…somebody awakened him on purpose. Well, we don’t have to speculate on that. We know that’s what the Council of Ethicals told Burton when they caught him. He was supposed to have his memory of that erased, but X arranged it so that he kept it.

“Anyway, the Ethicals were suspicious. So they put this pseudo-Frigate, well, actually he’s a real Frigate, on Dick’s trail. My brother was to keep an eye on him and report anything suspicious. But like everybody in The Valley, he got caught with his kilt down.”

“I’ll take two cards,” Burton said. “That’s very intriguing, Peter. It seems a wild concept, but it may just be true. However, if your brother was an agent, then
what
was Monat the Tau Cetan or Arcturan or whatever he is? Certainly, he’d have to be an agent, a strange one true, but nevertheless…”

“Perhaps he’s an Ethical!” Alice said.

Burton, who didn’t like to be interrupted, glared.

“I was just going to say that. But if Monat is an agent, I don’t think he’s an Ethical, otherwise he’d have been in the Council…no, by Allah, he wouldn’t have been! If I’d have seen him there, I’d have known that he was one of ’em! And he wouldn’t have been able to stay with me. Though why he stuck to me, I don’t know.

“However, Monat’s presence means that there is more than one species…genus…zoological family…extra-Terrestrials…involved in this.”

“I’ll take one card,” Frigate said. “As I was about to say…”

“Pardon me,” London said. “But how could Peter’s brother know about Burton?”

“I suppose that the children are educated, probably better than they’d be on Earth. And maybe, just maybe, my brother knew I was his brother. How do we know what incredibly vast and minute knowledge the Ethicals have? Look at the photo of Burton which he found in the kilt of that agent, Agneau. It was taken when Dick was twenty-eight and a subaltern in the East India Army. Doesn’t that prove that the Ethicals were on Earth in 1848? Who knows how long they’ve been walking the streets of Earth taking data? Don’t ask me for what purpose.”

“Why would James take your name?” Nur said.

“Well, I was a rabid Burton fan. I even wrote a novel about him. Maybe it pleased James’ sense of humor. I have one. My whole family is known for…an odd sense of humor. And so it struck him funny to be his brother, to pretend to be the Peter that he never knew. Maybe he could vicariously relive the life he’d been denied on Earth. Maybe he thought that if he ran into someone who’d known the Frigate family, he could pass himself off as me. Maybe all these reasons are true. Whatever…I’m sure he punched out Sharkko, the crooked publisher, to avenge me, which shows that he knew much about my life on Earth.”

Alice said, “But what about the story that agent, Spruce, told? He said he was from the seventy-second century
A.D
., and he said something about a chronoscope, something which could look back in time.”

“Spruce may have been lying,” Burton said.

“Anyway,” Frigate said, “I don’t believe there could be a chronoscope or such a thing as time-travel in any form. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. We’re all time-traveling. Forward, the only way there is.”

“What nobody has said,” Nur said, “is that somebody had to resurrect the children. It may or may not have been people from the seventy-second century. More probably, it was Monat’s people who did it. Note also that it was Monat who did most of the questioning of Spruce. He may have been, in a sense, coaching Spruce.”

“Why?” Alice said.

That was one question nobody could answer unless the Ethical’s story was true. By now, his recruits thought that he might be as big a liar as his colleagues.

Nur closed that round with the speculation that the agents who’d gotten on the boat early in its voyage had told their post-1983 story and were stuck with it. Agents who’d gotten on later knew that the story might be suspect, so they’d avoided it. For instance, the huge Gaul named Megalosos—his name meant “Great”—claimed that he’d lived about Caesar’s time. His saying so, however, didn’t make it so. It seems he found Podebrad congenial, though how anyone could was beyond Nur. He could be an agent, too.

De Marbot’s eyes proved that the resurrection machinery did not always work perfectly.

Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot, had been born in 1782 with brown eyes. Not until long after Resurrection Day did he find out that they had changed color. That was when a woman called him Blue-eyes.

“
Sacre bleu!
Is it true?”

He hastened to borrow a mica mirror which had recently been brought in a trading boat—mica was rare—and he saw his face for the first time in ten years. It was a merry face with its roundness, its snub nose, its ever-ready smile, its twinkling eyes. Not at all unhandsome.

But the eyes were a light
blue.

“Merde!”

Then he reverted to Esperanto.

“If I ever get within sword range of the abominable abominations who did this to me…!”

He returned fuming to the woman who lived with him, and he repeated his threat.

“But you don’t have a sword,” she said.

“Must you take me so literally? Never mind. I will get one someday; there must be iron somewhere in this stony planet.”

That night he dreamed of a giant bird with rusty feathers and vulture’s beak which ate rocks and the droppings of which were steel pellets. But there were no birds at all on this world, and if there had been there would have been no
oiseau de fer.

Now he had metal weapons, a sabre, a cutlass, an épée, a stiletto, a long knife, an ax, a spear, pistols, and a rifle. He was the brigadier general of the marines, and he was very ambitious to be full general. But he loathed politics, and he had neither interest nor ability in the dishonorable game of intrigue. Besides, only by the death of Ely S. Parker could he be general of the marines of the
Not For Hire,
and that would have saddened him. He loved the jolly Seneca Indian.

Almost all the postpaleolithics aboard were over six feet, some of them huge. The paleolithics had small men among them, but these, with their massive bones and muscles, did not have to be so tall. De Marbot was the pygmy among them, only five feet four inches high, but Sam Clemens liked him and admired his feistiness and courage. Sam also liked to hear stories of de Marbot’s campaigns and to have people under him who had once been generals, admirals, and statesmen. “Humility is good for them, builds their character,” Sam said. “The Frenchy is a first-rate commander, and it amuses me to see him ordering those big apes around.”

De Marbot was certainly experienced and capable. After joining the republican army of France when he was seventeen, he rose rapidly in rank to aide-de-camp to Marshal Augereau, commanding the VII Corps in the war against Prussia and Russia from 1806 to 1807. He fought under Lannes and Masséna in the Peninsular War, and he’d gone through the Russian campaign in the War of 1812 and the terrible retreat from Moscow, and, among others, the German campaign in 1813. He’d been wounded eleven times, severely at Hanau and Leipzig. When Napoleon returned from his exile at Elba, he promoted de Marbot to general of brigade, and de Marbot was wounded at the bloody battle of Waterloo. De Marbot was exiled by the Bourbon king, but he returned to his native land in 1817. After serving under the July monarchy at the siege of Antwerp, he was rewarded some years later by being made a lieutenant general. From 1835 to 1840, he was in the Algerian expeditions, and at the age of sixty was wounded for the last time. He retired after the fall of King Louis Philippe in 1848. He wrote his memoirs, which so delighted Arthur Conan Doyle that he used him as the basis of his fictional character, Brigadier Gerard. The main difference between the literary and the real-life character was that de Marbot was intelligent and perceptive, whereas Gerard, though gallant, was not very bright.

When he was seventy-two years old, the brave soldier of Napoleon died in bed in Paris.

It was a measure of Clemens’ affection for him that he had told him about the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical.

Today the Riverboat was docked while Clemens interviewed volunteers for a post aboard. The hideous events after the right-bank stones had failed were two months behind the crew, and The River was now free of the stench and jampack of rotting bodies.

De Marbot, clad in a duraluminum helmet topped by a roach of glue-stiffened fish-leather strips and a duraluminum cuirass, looking like the popular conception of a Trojan warrior, walked up and down the long line of candidates. His job was to pre-interview them. In this way, he could sometimes eliminate the unfit and so save his captain time and work.

Near the middle of the line he saw four men who seemed to know each other well. He stopped by the first, a tall muscular dark man with huge hands. His color and very wavy hair could only mean that he was a quadroon, and he was.

At de Marbot’s polite inquiry, he said that his name was Thomas Million Turpin. He’d been born in Georgia sometime around 1873—he wasn’t sure just when—but his parents had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, when he was young. His father operated the Silver Dollar, a tavern in the red-light district. In his youth Tom and his brother Charles had purchased a share of the Big Onion Mine near Searchlight, Nebraska, and worked it, but, failing to find gold after two years, had roamed the west for a while before returning to St. Louis.

Turpin had settled down in the District and worked as a bouncer and piano player, among other things. By 1899 he was the most important man in the area, controlling the music, liquor, and gambling. His Rosebud Café, the center of his little empire, was famous throughout the nation. Downstairs it was a tavern-restaurant and upstairs a “hotel,” a whorehouse.

Turpin, however, was more than a big-time political boss. He was, according to his own statement, a great piano player, though he admitted he wasn’t quite as good as Louis Chauvin. A frontiersman in syncopated music, he’d been known as the father of ragtime in St. Louis, and his “Harlem Rag,” published in 1897, was the first ragtime piece published by a Negro. He’d written the famous “St. Louis Rag” for the opening of the world fair there, but that had been postponed. He died in 1922, and since he’d been on the Riverworld had wandered up and down.

“I hear there’s a piano on your boat,” he said, grinning. “I’d sure like to get my hands on them ivories.”

“There are ten pianos,” de Marbot said. “Here. Take this.”

He handed Turpin a wand of wood six inches long and incised with the initials: M.T.

“When you get to the table, give this to the captain.”

Sam would be happy. He loved ragtime, and he once had said that he couldn’t get enough players of popular music on his boat. Moreover, Turpin looked big and capable. He had to be to have bossed the rough black red-light district.

The man behind him was a wild-looking Chinese named Tai-Peng. He was about five feet ten inches tall and had large glowing green eyes and a demonic face. His black hair hung to his waist, and three irontree blooms were stuck in its crown. He claimed in a loud shrill voice to have been a great swordsman, lover, and poet in his time, which was that of the T’ang dynasty in the eighth century
A.D.

“I was one of the six Idlers of the Bamboo Stream and also of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. I can compose poetry on the spot in my native Turkish, in Chinese, in Korean, in English, in French, and in Esperanto. When it comes to swordplay, I am as quick as a hummingbird and as deadly as a viper.”

De Marbot laughed and said he didn’t choose the recruits. But he gave the Chinese a wand and moved on to the man behind Tai-Peng.

This was a short man, though still taller than de Marbot, dark-skinned, black-eyed, fat, and with a bulging Buddha’s belly. His eyelids were slightly epicanthic, and his nose was aquiline. His clefted chin was massive. He, he said, was Ah Qaaq, and he came from the eastern coast of a land which de Marbot would call Mexico. His people had called the area in which they lived the Land of Rain. He didn’t know exactly when he lived according to the Christian calendar, but from his talks with a scholarly man it must have been around 100
B.C.
His native tongue was Mayan; he was a citizen of the people that later cultures had called Olmec.

“Ah, yes,” de Marbot said. “I have heard talk of the Olmecs. We have some very learned men at the captain’s table.”

De Marbot understood that the “Olmecs” had founded the first civilization in Mesoamerica and that all others in pre-Columbian times had derived from it, the later Mayas, the Toltecs, the Aztecs, what have you. The man, if he was an ancient Mayan, did not have the artificially flattened head and the squint-eyes so favored by that people. But on reflection de Marbot realized that these, of course, would have been rectified by the Ethicals.

“You’re that rarity, a fat man,” de Marbot said. “We of the
Not For Hire
lead an extremely active life, no room for indolents and overeaters, and we also require that the candidate have something special to qualify him.”

Ah Qaaq said in a high voice, though not as high as the Chinese’s, “The fat cat may look soft, but it is very strong and very quick. Let me show you.”

He took the handle of his flint-headed ax, a piece of oak eighteen inches long and two inches thick, and he snapped it as if it were a sugar-stick. Then he picked up the head and let the Frenchman heft it.

“About ten pounds, that one, I’d say,” de Marbot said.

“Watch!”

Ah Qaaq took the ax head and hurled it as if it were a baseball. Eyes wide, de Marbot watched it soar high and far before it struck the grass.

“
Mon Dieu!
No one but the mighty Joe Miller could throw that as far! I congratulate you,
sinjoro
. Here. Take this.”

“I am also an excellent archer and axman,” Ah Qaaq said quietly. “You won’t regret taking me aboard.”

The man behind the Olmec was exactly his height and had a squat Herculean physique. He even looked like Ah Qaaq with his eaglish nose and rounded clefted chin. But he had no fat, and though he was almost as dark, he was no Amerindian. His name, he said, was Gilgamesh.

“I have arm-wrestled Ah Qaaq,” Gilgamesh said. “Neither of us can defeat the other. I am also a great axman and archer.”

“Very good! Well, my captain will be pleased with your tales of Sumeria, of which I’m sure you have plenty. And he will also be pleased to have a king and a god aboard. Kings he’s met, though he’s not been too happy with most of them. Gods, well, that’s a different story. The captain has never met a god before! Here. Take this!”

He moved on, and when he was out of sight and earshot of the Sumerian—if he was one—laughed until he rolled on the grass. After a while he got up, wiped off the tears, and resumed his interviewing.

The four were accepted with six others. When they marched up the gangplank onto the boiler deck, they saw Monat the extra-Terrestrial standing by the railing, his keen eyes sweeping over them. They were startled, but de Marbot told them to go on. He would explain all about the strange creature later on.

The recruits did not meet Monat that evening as planned. Two women quarreled about a man and started shooting at each other. Before the argument was settled, one woman was badly wounded and the other had jumped off the boat, her grail in one hand and a box of possessions in the other. The man decided to leave also since he preferred the woman who’d done the shooting. The boat was stopped, and he was let off. Sam was so upset that he called off the introductions in the grand salon until the next day.

Sometime that night, Monat Grrautut disappeared.

No one had heard a cry. No one had seen anything suspicious. The only clue was a bloodstain on the aft railing of the A deck promenade, and that might have been an oversight by the cleanup squads after the battles over the left-bank stones.

Clemens suspected that one of the four new recruits might have been responsible. These, however, claimed steadfastly that they were asleep in their bunks, and no one had any evidence to refute them.

While Sam pondered the case and wished he had Sherlock Holmes aboard, the
Not For Hire
forged ahead. Three days after Monat’s disappearance, Cyrano de Bergerac flagged the boat down. Sam cursed when he saw him. He’d hoped that they would pass Cyrano during the night, but there he was, and at least fifty of the crew had also seen him.

The Frenchman came aboard smiling and quickly kissing his male friends on the cheeks and his female friends on the mouth lingeringly. When he came into the control room, he cried, “Captain! What a tale I have!”

Clemens thought sourly that that could be said of any dog.