To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (6 page)

W
hen he awoke, he was in the gray light of the false dawn, which the Arabs called the
wolf’s tail
. Monat, Kazz, and the child were still sleeping. He scratched for a while at the itchy spots caused by the rough-edged grass and then crawled out. The fire was out; water drops hung from the leaves of the trees and the tips of the grass blades. He shivered with the cold: But he did not feel tired nor have any ill effects from the drug, as he had expected. He found a pile of comparatively dry bamboo under some grass beneath a tree. He rebuilt the fire with this and in a short time was comfortable. Then he saw the bamboo containers, and he drank water from one. Alice was sitting up in a mound of grass and staring sullenly at him. Her skin was ridged with goose bumps.

“Come and get warm!” he said.

She crawled out, stood up, walked over to the bamboo bucket, bent down, scooped up water, and splashed it over her face. Then she squatted down by the fire, warming her hands over a small flame. If everybody is naked, how quickly even the most modest lose their modesty, he thought.

A moment later, Burton heard the rustle of grass to the east. A naked head, Peter Frigate’s, appeared. He strode from the grass, and was followed by the naked head of a woman. Emerging from the grass, she revealed a wet but beautiful body. Her eyes were large and a dark green, and her lips were a little too thick for beauty. But her other features were exquisite.

Frigate was smiling broadly. He turned and pulled her into the warmth of the fire with his hand.

“You look like the cat who ate the canary,” Burton said. “What happened to your hand?”

Peter Frigate looked at the knuckles of his right hand. They were swelled, and there were scratches on the back of the hand.

“I got into a fight,” he said. He pointed a finger at the woman, who was squatting near Alice and warming herself. “It was a madhouse down by the river last night. That gum must contain a drug of some sort. You wouldn’t believe what people were doing. Or would you? After all, you’re Richard Francis Burton. Anyway, all women, including the ugly ones, were occupied, one way or another. I got scared at what was going on and then I got mad. I hit two men with my grail, knocked them out. They were attacking a ten-year-old girl. I may have killed them; I hope I did. I tried to get the girl to come with me, but she ran away into the night.

“I decided to come back here. I was beginning to react pretty badly from what I’d done to those two men even if they deserved it. The drug was responsible; it must have released a lifetime of rage and frustration. So I started back here and then I came across two more men, only these were attacking a woman, this one. I think she wasn’t resisting the idea of intercourse so much as she was their idea of simultaneous attack, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she was screaming, or trying to, and struggling, and they had just started to hit her. So I hit them with my fist and kicked them and then banged away on them with my grail.

“Then I took the woman, her name’s Loghu, by the way, that’s all I know about her since I can’t understand a word of her language, and she went with me.”

He grinned again. “But we never got there.”

He quit grinning, and shuddered.

“Then we woke up with the rain and lightning and thunder coming down like the wrath of God. I thought that maybe, don’t laugh, that it was Judgment Day, that God had given us free rein for a day so He could let us judge ourselves. And now we were going to be cast into the pit.”

He laughed tightly and said, “I’ve been an agnostic since I was fourteen years old, and I died one at the age of ninety, although I was thinking about calling in a priest then. But the little child that’s scared of the Old Father God and Hellfire and Damnation, he’s still down there, even in the old man. Or in the young man raised from the dead.”

“What happened?” Burton said. “Did the world end in a crack of thunder and a stroke of lightning? You’re still here, I see, and you’ve not renounced the delights of sin in the person of this woman.”

“We found a grailstone near the mountains. About a mile west of here. We got lost, wandered around, cold, wet, jumping every time the lightning struck nearby. Then we found the grailstone. It was jammed with people, but they were exceptionally friendly, and there were so many bodies it was very warm, even if some rain did leak down through the grass. We finally went to sleep, long after the rain quit. When I woke up, I searched through the grass until I found Loghu. She got lost during the night, somehow. She seemed pleased to see me, though, and I like her. There’s an affinity between us. Maybe I’ll find out why when she learns to speak English. I tried that and French and German and tags of Russian, Lithuanian, Gaelic, all the Scandinavian tongues, including Finnish, classical Nahuatl, Arabic, Hebrew, Onondaga Iroquois, Ojibway, Italian, Spanish, Latin, modern and Homeric Greek, and a dozen others. Result: a blank look.”

“You must be quite a linguist,” Burton said.

“I’m not fluent in any of those,” Frigate said. “I can read most of them but can speak only everyday phrases. Unlike you, I am not master of thirty-nine languages—including pornography.”

The fellow seemed to know much about himself, Burton thought. He would find out just how much at a later time.

“I’ll be frank with you, Peter,” Burton said. “Your account of your aggressiveness amazed me. I had not thought you capable of attacking and beating that many men. Your queasiness….”

“It was the gum, of course. It opened the door of the cage.”

Frigate squatted down by Loghu and rubbed his shoulder against hers. She looked at him out of slightly slanted eyes. The woman would be beautiful once her hair grew out.

Frigate continued, “I’m so timorous and queasy because I am afraid of the anger, the desire to do violence, that lies not too deeply within me. I fear violence because I am violent. I fear what will happen if I am not afraid. Hell, I’ve known that for forty years. Much good the knowledge has done me!”

He looked at Alice and said, “Good morning!”

Alice replied cheerily enough, and she even smiled at Loghu when she was introduced. She would look at Burton, and she would answer his direct questions. But she would not chat with him or give him anything but a stern face.

Monat, Kazz, and the little girl, all yawning, came to the fireside.
Burton prowled around the edges of the camp and found that the Triestans were gone. Some had left their grails behind. He cursed them for their carelessness and thought about leaving the grails in the grass to teach them a lesson. But he eventually placed the cylinders in depressions on the grailstone.

If their owners did not return, they would go hungry unless someone shared their food with them. In the meantime, the food in their grails would have to be untouched. He would be unable to open them. They had discovered yesterday that only the owner of a grail could open it. Experimentation with a long stick had determined also that the owner had to touch the grail with his fingers or some part of his body before the lid would open. It was Frigate’s theory that a mechanism in the grail was keyed to the peculiar configuration of skin voltage of the owner. Or perhaps the grail contained a very sensitive detector of the individual’s brain waves.

The sky had become bright by then. The sun was still on the other side of the 20,000-foot-high eastern mountain. Approximately a half hour later, the grailrock spurted blue flame with a roll of thunder. Thunder from the stones along the river echoed against the mountain.

The grails yielded bacon and eggs, ham, toast, butter, jam, milk, a quarter of a cantaloupe, cigarettes, and a cupful of dark brown crystals which Frigate said was instant coffee. He drank the milk in one cup, rinsed it out in water in a bamboo container, filled the cup with water, and set it by the fire. When the water was boiling, he put a teaspoonful of the crystals into the water and stirred it. The coffee was delicious, and there were enough crystals to provide six cups. Then Alice put the crystals into the water before heating it over the fire and found that it was not necessary to use the fire. The water boiled within three seconds after the crystals were placed into the cold water.

After eating, they washed out the containers and replaced them in the grails. Burton strapped his grail onto his waist. He intended to explore, and he certainly was not going to leave the grail on the stone. Though it could do no one but himself any good, vicious people might take it just for the pleasure of seeing him starve.

Burton started his language lessons with the little girl and Kazz, and Frigate got Loghu to sit in on them. Frigate suggested that a universal language should be adopted because of the many many languages and dialects, perhaps fifty to sixty thousand, that mankind had used in his
several million years of existence and which he was using along the river. That is, provided that all of mankind had been resurrected. After all, all he knew about was the few square miles he had seen. But it would be a good idea to start propagating Esperanto, the synthetic language invented by the Polish oculist, Doctor Zamenhof, in 1887. Its grammar was very simple and absolutely regular, and its sound combinations, though not as easy for everybody to pronounce as claimed, were still relatively easy. And the basis of the vocabulary was Latin with many words from English and German and other West European languages.

“I had heard about it before I died,” Burton said. “But I never saw any samples of it. Perhaps it may become useful. But, in the meantime, I’ll teach these two English.”

“But most of the people here speak Italian or Slovenian!” Frigate said.

“That may be true, though we haven’t any survey as yet. However, I don’t intend to stay here, you can be sure of that.”

“I could have predicted that,” Frigate muttered. “You always did get restless; you had to move on.”

Burton glared at Frigate and then started the lessons. For about fifteen minutes, he drilled them in the identification and pronunciation of nineteen nouns and a few verbs: fire, bamboo, grail, man, woman, girl, hand, feet, eye, teeth, eat, walk, run, talk, danger, I, you, they, us. He intended that he should learn as much from them as they from him. In time, he would be able to speak their tongues, whatever they were.

The sun cleared the top of the eastern range. The air became warmer, and they let the fire die. They were well into the second day of resurrection. And they knew almost nothing about this world or what their eventual fate was supposed to be or Who was determining their fate.

Lev Ruach stuck his big-nosed face through the grass and said, “May I join you?”

Burton nodded, and Frigate said, “Sure, why not?”

Ruach stepped out of the grass. A short pale-skinned woman with great brown eyes and lovely delicate features followed him. Ruach introduced her as Tanya Kauwitz. He had met her last night, and they had stayed together, since they had a number of things in common. She was of Russian-Jewish descent, was born in 1958 in the Bronx, New York City, had become an English schoolteacher, married a businessman who made a million and dropped dead when she was forty-five, leaving her
free to marry a wonderful man with whom she had been in love for fifteen years. Six months later, she was dead of cancer. Tanya, not Lev, gave this information and in one sentence.

“It was hell down on the plains last night,” Lev said. “Tanya and I had to run for our lives into the woods. So I decided that I would find you and ask if we could stay with you. I apologize for my hasty remarks of yesterday, Mr. Burton. I think that my observations were valid, but the attitudes I was speaking of should be considered in the context of your other attitudes.”

“We’ll go into that some other time,” Burton said. “At the time I wrote that book, I was suffering from the vile and malicious lies of the moneylenders of Damascus, and they….”

“Certainly, Mr. Burton,” Ruach said. “As you say, later. I just wanted to make the point that I consider you to be a very capable and strong person, and I would like to join your group. We’re in a state of anarchy, if you can call anarchy a state, and many of us need protection.”

Burton did not like to be interrupted. He scowled and said, “Please permit me to explain myself. I….”

Frigate stood up and said, “Here come the others. Wonder where they’ve been?”

Only four of the original nine had come back, however. Maria Tucci explained that they had wandered away together after chewing the gum, and eventually ended up by one of the big bonfires on the plains. Then many things had happened; there had been fights and attacks by men on women, men on men, women on men, women on women, and even attacks on children. The group had split up in the chaos. She had met the other three only an hour ago while she was searching in the hills for the grailstone.

Lev added some details. The results of chewing the narcotic gum had been tragic, amusing, or gratifying, depending, apparently, upon individual reaction. The gum had had an aphrodisiac effect upon many, but it also had many other effects. Consider the husband and wife who had died in Opcina, a suburb of Trieste, in 1899. They had been resurrected within six feet of each other. They had wept with joy at being reunited when so many couples had not been. They thanked God for their good luck, though they also had made some loud comments that this world was not what they had been promised. But they had had fifty years of married bliss and now looked forward to being together for eternity.

Only a few minutes after both had chewed the gum, the man had strangled his wife, heaved her body into the river, picked up another woman in his arms, and run off into the darkness of the woods with her.

Another man had leaped upon a grailstone and delivered a speech that lasted all night, even through the rain. To the few who could hear, and the even fewer who listened, he had demonstrated the principles of a perfect society and how these could be carried out in practice. By dawn, he was so hoarse he could only croak a few words. On Earth, he had seldom bothered to vote.

A man and a woman, outraged at the public display of carnality, had forcefully tried to separate couples. The results: bruises, bloody noses, split lips, and two concussions, all theirs. Some men and women had spent the night on their knees praying and confessing their sins.