To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (20 page)

“What’s that?”

“You’d better stay away from the dreamgum yourself. So far, you’ve been lucky. But one of these days, it’ll take hold of you as it did me. Your devils won’t be mine, but they’ll be just as monstrous and terrifying to you.”

“Nonsense! I’ve nothing to hide from myself!” Burton laughed loudly. “I’ve chewed enough of the stuff to know.”

He walked away, but he was thinking of the warning. He had used the gum twenty-two times. Each time had made him swear never to touch the gum again.

On the way back to the hills, he looked behind him. The dim white figure of Göring was slowly sinking into the black-and-silver waters of The River. Burton saluted, since he was not one to resist the dramatic gesture. Afterward, he forgot Göring. The pain in the back of his head, temporarily subdued, came back sharper than before. His knees turned to water, and, only a few yards from his hut, he had to sit down.

He must have become unconscious then, or half-conscious since he had no memory of being dragged along the grass. When his wits cleared, he found himself lying on a bamboo bed inside a hut.

It was dark with the only illumination the starlight filtering in through the tree branches outside the square of window. He turned his head and saw the shadowy and pale-white bulk of a man squatting by him. The man was holding a thin metal object before his eyes, the gleaming end of which was pointed at Burton.

A
s soon as Burton turned his head, the man put the device down. He spoke in English. “It’s taken me a long time to find you, Richard Burton.”

Burton groped around on the floor for a weapon with his left hand, which was hidden from the man’s view. His fingers touched nothing but dirt. He said, “Now you’ve found me, you damn Ethical, what do you intend doing with me?”

The man shifted slightly and he chuckled. “Nothing.” He paused, then said, “I am not one of Them.” He laughed again when Burton gasped. “That’s not quite true. I am
with
Them, but I am not
of
Them.”

He picked up the device which he had been aiming at Burton.

“This tells me that you have a fractured skull and a concussion of the brain. You must be very tough, because you should be dead, judging from the extent of the injury. But you may pull out of it, if you take it easy. Unfortunately, you don’t have time to convalesce. The Others know you’re in this area, give or take thirty miles. In a day or so, They’ll have you pinpointed.”

Burton tried to sit up and found that his bones had become soft as taffy in sunlight, and a bayonet was prying open the back of his skull. Groaning, he lay back down.

“Who are you and what’s your business?”

“I can’t tell you my name. If—or much more likely when—They catch you, They’ll thread out your memory and run it off backward to the time you woke up in the preresurrection bubble. They won’t find out what made you wake before your time. But They will know about this conversation. They’ll even be able to see me but only as you see me, a pale shadow with no features. They’ll hear my voice too, but They won’t recognize it. I’m using a transmuter.

“They will, however, be horrified. What they have slowly and
reluctantly been suspecting will all of a sudden be revealed as the truth. They have a traitor in Their midst.”

“I wish I knew what you were talking about,” Burton said.

The man said, “I’ll tell you this much. You have been told a monstrous lie about the purpose of the Resurrection. What Spruce told you, and what that Ethical creation, the Church of the Second Chance, teaches—are lies! All lies! The truth is that you human beings have been given life again only to participate in a scientific experiment. The Ethicals—a misnomer if there ever was one—have reshaped this planet into one Rivervalley, built the grailstones, and brought all of you back from the dead for one purpose. To record your history and customs. And, as a secondary matter, to observe your reactions to Resurrection and to the mixing of different peoples of different eras. That is all it is: a scientific project. And when you have served your purpose, back into the dust you go!

“This story about giving all of you another chance at eternal life and salvation because it is Their ethical duty—lies! Actually, my people do not believe that you are worth saving. They do not think you have ‘souls’!”

Burton was silent for a while. The fellow was certainly sincere. Or, if not sincere, he was very emotionally involved, since he was breathing so heavily.

Finally, Burton spoke. “I can’t see anybody going to all this expense and labor just to run a scientific experiment, or to make historical recordings.”

“Time hangs heavy on the hands of immortals. You would be surprised what we do to make eternity interesting. Furthermore, given all time, we can take our time, and we do not let even the most staggering projects dismay us. After the last Terrestrial died, the job of setting up the Resurrection took several thousands of years, even though the final phase took only one day.”

Burton said, “And you?
What
are you doing? And
why
are you doing whatever you’re doing?”

“I am the only true Ethical in the whole monstrous race! I do not like toying around with you as if you were puppets, or mere objects to be observed, animals in a laboratory! After all, primitive and vicious though you be, you are sentients! You are, in a sense, as…as….”

The shadowy speaker waved a shadowy hand as if trying to grasp a
word out of the darkness. He continued, “I’ll have to use your term for yourselves. You’re as
human
as we. Just as the subhumans who first used language were as human as you. And you are our forefathers. For all I know, I may be your direct descendant. My whole people could be descended from you.”

“I doubt it,” Burton said. “I had no children—that I know of, anyway.”

He had many questions, and he began to ask them. But the man was paying no attention. He was holding the device to his forehead. Suddenly, he withdrew it and interrupted Burton in the middle of a sentence. “I’ve been…you don’t have a word for it…let’s say…listening. They’ve detected my…
wathan
…I think you’d call it an aura. They don’t know whose
wathan
, just that it’s an Ethical’s. But They’ll be zeroing in within the next five minutes. I have to go.”

The pale figure stood up. “You have to go, too.”

“Where are you taking me?” Burton said.

“I’m not. You must die; They must find only your corpse. I can’t take you with me; it’s impossible. But if you die here, They’ll lose you again. And we’ll meet again. Then…!”

“Wait!” Burton said. “I don’t understand. Why can’t They locate me? They built the Resurrection machinery. Don’t They know where my particular resurrector is?”

The man chuckled again. “No. Their only recordings of men on Earth were visual, not audible. And the location of the resurrectees in the preresurrection bubble was random, since They had planned to scatter you humans along The River in a rough chronological sequence but with a certain amount of mixing. They intended to get down to the individual basis later. Of course, They had no notion then that I would be opposing Them. Or that I would select certain of Their subjects to aid me in defeating the Plan. So They do not know where you, or the others, will next pop up.

“Now, you may be wondering why I can’t set your resurrector so that you’ll be translated near your goal, the headwaters. The fact is that I did set yours so that the first time you died, you’d be at the very first grailstone. But you didn’t make it; so I presume the Titanthrops killed you. That was unfortunate, since I no longer dare to go near the bubble until I have an excuse. It is forbidden for any but those authorized to enter the preresurrection bubble. They are suspicious; They suspect
tampering. So it is up to you, and to chance, to get back to the north polar region.

“As for the others, I never had an opportunity to set their resurrectors. They have to go by the laws of probabilities, too. Which are about twenty million to one.”

“Others?” Burton said. “Others? But why did you choose us?”

“You have the right aura. So did the others. Believe me, I know what I’m doing; I chose well.”

“But you intimated that you woke me up ahead of time…in the preresurrection bubble, for a purpose. What did it accomplish?”

“It was the only thing that would convince you that the Resurrection was not a supernatural event. And it started you sniffing on the track of the Ethicals. Am I right? Of course, I am. Here!”

He handed Burton a tiny capsule. “Swallow this. You will be dead instantly and out of Their reach—for a while. And your brain cells will be so ruptured They’ll not be able to read them. Hurry! I
must
go!”

“What if I don’t take it?” Burton said. “What if I allow Them to capture me now?”

“You don’t have the aura for it,” the man said.

Burton almost decided not to take the capsule. Why should he allow this arrogant fellow to order him around?

Then he considered that he should not bite off his nose to spite his face. As it was, he had the choice of playing along with this unknown man or of falling into the hands of the Others.

“All right,” he said, “but why don’t you kill me? Why make me do the job?”

The man laughed and said, “There are certain rules in this game, rules that I don’t have time to explain. But you are intelligent, you’ll figure out most of them for yourself. One is that we
are
Ethicals. We can give life, but we can’t directly take life. It is not unthinkable for us or beyond our ability. Just very difficult.”

Abruptly, the man was gone. Burton did not hesitate. He swallowed the capsule. There was a blinding flash.…

A
nd light was full in his eyes, from the just-risen sun. He had time for one quick look around, saw his grail, his pile of neatly folded towels—and Hermann Göring.

Then Burton and the German were seized by small dark men with large heads and bandy legs. These carried spears and flint-headed axes. They wore towels but only as capes secured around their thick short necks. Strips of leather, undoubtedly human skin, ran across their disproportionately large foreheads and around their heads to bind their long, coarse black hair. They looked semi-Mongolian and spoke a tongue unknown to him.

An empty grail was placed upside down over his head; his hands were tied behind him with a leather thong. Blind and helpless, stone-tipped spears digging into his back, he was urged across the plain. Somewhere near, drums thundered, and female voices wailed a chant.

He had walked three hundred paces when he was halted. The drums quit beating, and the women stopped their singsong. He could hear nothing except for the blood beating in his ears. What the hell was going on? Was he part of a religious ceremony which required that the victim be blinded? Why not? There had been many cultures on Earth which did not want the ritually slain to view those who shed his blood. The dead man’s ghost might want to take revenge on his killers.

But these people must know by now that there were no such things as ghosts. Or did they regard
lazari
as just that, as ghosts that could be dispatched back to their land of origin by simply killing them again?

Göring! He, too, had been translated here. At the same grailstone. The first time could have been coincidence, although the probabilities against it were high. But three times in succession? No, it was…

The first blow drove the side of the grail against his head, made him half-unconscious, sent a vast ringing through him and sparks of light before his eyes, and knocked him to his knees. He never felt the second blow, and so awoke once more in another place—

A
nd with him was Hermann Göring.

“You and I must be twin souls,” Göring said. “We seem to be yoked together by Whoever is responsible for all this.”

“The ox and the ass plow together,” Burton said, leaving it to the German to decide which he was. Then the two were busy introducing themselves, or attempting to do so, to the people among whom they had arrived. These, as he later found out, were Sumerians of the Old or Classical period; that is, they had lived in Mesopotamia between 2500 and 2300
B.C.
The men shaved their heads (no easy custom with flint razors), and the women were bare to the waist. They had a tendency to short squat bodies, pop-eyes, and (to Burton) ugly faces.

But if the index of beauty was not high among them, the pre-Columbian Samoans who made up 30 percent of the population were more than attractive. And, of course, there was the ubiquitous 10 percent of people from anywhere-everyplace, twentieth-centurians being the most numerous. This was understandable, since the total number of these constituted a fourth of humanity. Burton had no scientific statistical data, of course, but his travels had convinced him that the twentieth-centurians had been deliberately scattered along The River in a proportion to the other peoples even greater than was to be expected. This was another facet of the Riverworld setup which he did not understand. What did the Ethicals intend to gain by this dissemination?

There were too many questions. He needed time to think, and he could not get it if he spent himself with one trip after another on The Suicide Express. This area, unlike most of the others he would visit, offered some peace and quiet for analysis. So he would stay here for a while.

And then there was Hermann Göring. Burton wanted to observe his strange form of pilgrim’s progress. One of the many things that he
had not been able to ask the Mysterious Stranger (Burton tended to think in capitals) was about the dreamgum. Where did it fit into the picture? Another part of the Great Experiment?

Unfortunately, Göring did not last long.

The first night, he began screaming. He burst out of his hut and ran toward The River, stopping now and then to strike out at the air or to grapple with invisible beings and to roll back and forth on the grass. Burton followed him as far as The River. Here Göring prepared to launch himself out into the water, probably to drown himself. But he froze for a moment, began shuddering, and then toppled over, stiff as a statue. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing outside him. All vision was turned inward. What horrors he was witnessing could not be determined, since he was unable to speak.

His lips writhed soundlessly, and did not stop during the ten days that he lived. Burton’s efforts to feed him were useless. His jaws were locked. He shrank before Burton’s eyes, the flesh evaporating, the skin falling in, and the bones beneath resolving into the skeleton. One morning, he went into convulsions, then sat up and screamed. A moment later he was dead.

Curious, Burton did an autopsy on him with the flint knives and obsidian saws available. Göring’s distended bladder had burst and poured urine into his body.

Burton proceeded to pull Göring’s teeth out before burying him. Teeth were trade items, since they could be strung on a fishgut or a tendon to make much-desired necklaces. Göring’s scalp also came off. The Sumerians had picked up the custom of taking scalps from their enemies, the seventeenth-century Shawnee across The River. They had added the civilized embellishment of sewing scalps together to make capes, skirts, and even curtains. A scalp was not worth as much as teeth in the trade mart, but it was worth something.

It was while digging a grave by a large boulder at the foot of the mountains that Burton had an illuminating flash of memory. He had stopped working to take a drink of water when he happened to look at Göring. The completely stripped head and the features, peaceful as if sleeping, opened a trapdoor in his mind.

When he had awakened in that colossal chamber and found himself floating in a row of bodies, he had seen this face. It had belonged
to a body in the row next to his. Göring, like all the other sleepers, had had his head shaved. Burton had only noted him in passing during the short time before the Warders had detected him. Later, after the mass Resurrection, when he had met Göring, he had not seen the similarity between the sleeper and this man who had a full head of blondish hair.

But he knew now that this man had occupied a space close to his.

Was it possible that their two resurrectors, so physically close to each other, had become locked in phase? If so, whenever his death and Göring’s took place at the same approximate time, then the two would be raised again by the same grailstone. Göring’s jest that they were twin souls might not be so far off the mark.

Burton resumed digging, swearing at the same time because he had so many questions and so few answers. If he had another chance to get his hands on an Ethical, he would drag the answers out of him, no matter what methods he had to use.

The next three months, Burton was busy adjusting himself to the strange society in this area. He found himself fascinated by the new language that was being formed out of the clash between Sumerian and Samoan. Since the former were the most numerous, their tongue dominated. But here, as elsewhere, the major language suffered a Pyrrhic victory. Result of the fusion was a pidgin, a speech with greatly reduced flexion and simplified syntax. Grammatical gender went overboard; words were syncopated; tense and aspect of verbs were cut to a simple present, which was used also for the future. Adverbs of time indicated the past. Subtleties were replaced by expressions that both Sumerian and Samoan could understand, even if they seemed at first to be awkward and naive. And many Samoan words, in somewhat changed phonology, drove out Sumerian words.

This rise of pidgins was taking place everywhere up and down the Rivervalley. Burton reflected that if the Ethicals had intended to record all human tongues, They had best hurry. The old ones were dying out, transmuting rather. But for all he knew, They had already completed the job. Their recorders, so necessary for accomplishing the physical translation, might also be taking down all speech.

In the meantime, in the evenings, when he had a chance to be alone, he smoked the cigars so generously offered by the grails and tried to
analyze the situation. Whom could he believe, the Ethicals or the Renegade, the Mysterious Stranger? Or were both lying?

Why did the Mysterious Stranger need him to throw a monkey wrench into Their cosmic machinery? What could Burton, a mere human being, trapped in this valley, so limited by his ignorance, do to help the Judas?

One thing was certain. If the Stranger did not need him, he would not have concerned himself with Burton. He wanted to get Burton into that Tower at the north pole.

Why?

It took Burton two weeks before he thought of the only reason that could be.

The stranger had said that he, like the other Ethicals, would not directly take human life. But he had no scruples about doing so vicariously, as witness his giving the poison to Burton. So, if he wanted Burton in the Tower, he needed Burton to kill for him. He would turn the tiger loose among his own people, open the window to the hired assassin.

An assassin wants pay. What did the Stranger offer as pay?

Burton sucked the cigar smoke into his lungs, exhaled and then downed a shot of bourbon. Very well. The Stranger would try to use him. But let him beware. Burton would also use the Stranger.

At the end of three months, Burton decided that he had done enough thinking. It was time to get out.

He was swimming in The River at the moment and, following the impulse, he swam to its middle. He dived down as far as he could force himself before the not-to-be-denied will of his body to survive drove him to claw upward for the dear air. He did not make it. The scavenging fishes would eat his body and his bones would fall to the mud at the bottom of the one thousand-foot-deep River. So much the better. He did not want his body to fall into the hands of the Ethicals. If what the Stranger had said was true, They might be able to unthread from his mind all he had seen and heard if They got to him before the brain cells were damaged.

He did not think They had succeeded. During the next seven years, as far as he knew, he escaped detection of the Ethicals. If the Renegade knew where he was, he did not let Burton know. Burton doubted that anyone did; he himself could not ascertain in what part of the Riverplanet he was, how far or how near the Tower headquarters. But he was
going, going, going, always on the move. And one day he knew that he must have broken a record of some sort. Death had become second nature to him.

If his count was correct, he had made 777 trips on The Suicide Express.