To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (8 page)

As they walked across the plain, he thought about her, turning his head now and then to look back at her. That hairless head made her face look so much older but the hairlessness made her look so childlike below the navel. They all bore this contradiction, old man or woman above the neck, young child below the belly button.

He dropped back until he was by her side. This put him behind Frigate and Loghu. The view of Loghu would yield some profit even if his attempt to talk to Alice resulted in nothing. Loghu had a beautifully rounded posterior; her buttocks were like two eggs. And she swayed as enchantingly as Alice.

He spoke in a low voice, “If last night distressed you so much, why do you stay with me?”

Her beautiful face became twisted and ugly.

“I am not staying with
you
! I am staying with the
group
! Moreover, I’ve been thinking about last night, though it pains me to do so. I must be fair. It was the narcotic in that hideous gum that made both of us behave the…way we did. At least, I know it was responsible for my behavior. And I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

“Then there’s no hope of repetition?”

“How can you ask that! Certainly not! How dare you?”

“I did not force you,” he said. “As I have pointed out, you did what you would do if you were not restrained by your inhibitions. Those inhibitions are good things—under certain circumstances, such as being the lawful wedded wife of a man you love in the England of Earth. But Earth no longer exists, not as we knew it. Neither does England. Neither
does English society. And if all of mankind has been resurrected and is scattered along this river, you still may never see your husband again. You are no longer married. Remember….’
til death do us part?
You have died, and, therefore, parted. Moreover,
there is no giving into marriage in heaven.
”

“You are a blasphemer, Mr. Burton. I read about you in the newspapers, and I read some of your books about Africa and India and that one about the Mormons in the States. I also heard stories, most of which I found hard to believe, they made you out to be so wicked. Reginald was very indignant when he read your
Kasidah.
He said he’d have no such foul atheistic literature in his house, and he threw all your books into the furnace.”

“If I’m so wicked, and you feel you’re a
fallen
woman, why don’t you leave?”

“Must I repeat everything? The next group might have even worse men in it. And, as you have been so kind to point out, you did not force me. Anyway, I’m sure that you have some kind of heart beneath that cynical and mocking air. I saw you weeping when you were carrying Gwenafra and she was crying.”

“You have found me out,” he said, grinning. “Very well. So be it. I will be chivalrous, I will not attempt to seduce you or to molest you in any way. But the next time you see me chewing the gum, you would do well to hide. Meanwhile, I give my word of honor, you have nothing to fear from me as long as I am not under the influence of the gum.”

Her eyes widened, and she stopped. “You plan to use it again?”

“Why not? It apparently turned some people into violent beasts, but it had no such effect on me. I feel no craving for it, so I doubt it’s habit-forming. I used to smoke a pipe of opium now and then, you know, and I did not become addicted to it, so I don’t suppose I have a psychological weakness for drugs.”

“I understood that you were very often deep in your cups, Mr. Burton. You and that nauseating creature, Mr. Swinburne….”

She stopped talking. A man had called out to her, and, though she did not understand Italian, she understood his obscene gesture. She blushed all over but walked briskly on. Burton glared at the man. He was a well-built brown-skinned youth with a big nose, a weak chin, and close-set eyes. His speech was that of the criminal class of the city of Bologna, where Burton had spent much time while investigating Etruscan relics and graves.
Behind him were ten men, most of them as unprepossessing and as wicked-looking as their leader, and five women. It was evident that the men wanted to add more women to the group. It was also evident that they would like to get their hands on the stone weapons of Burton’s group. They were armed only with their grails or with bamboo sticks.

B
urton spoke sharply, and his people closed up. Kazz did not understand his words, but he sensed at once what was happening. He dropped back to form the rear guard with Burton. His brutish appearance and the hand axe in his huge fist checked the Bolognese somewhat. They followed the group, making loud comments and threats, but they did not get much closer. When they reached the hills, however, the leader of the gang shouted a command, and it attacked.

The youth with the close-set eyes, yelling, swinging his grail at the end of the strap, ran at Burton. Burton gauged the swing of the cylinder and then launched his bamboo spear just as the grail was arcing outward. The stone tip went into the man’s solar plexus, and he fell on his side with the spear sticking in him. The subhuman struck a swinging grail with a stick, which was knocked out of his hand. He leaped inward and brought the edge of the hand axe against the top of the head of his attacker, and that man went down with a bloody skull.

Little Lev Ruach threw his grail into the chest of a man and ran up and jumped on him. His feet drove into the face of the man, who was getting up again. The man went backward; Ruach bounded up and gashed the man’s shoulder with his chert knife. The man, screaming, got to his feet and raced away.

Frigate did better than Burton had expected him to, since he had turned pale and begun shaking when the gang had first challenged them. His grail was strapped to his left wrist while his right held a hand axe. He charged into the group, was hit on the shoulder with a grail, the impact of which was lessened when he partially blocked it with his grail, and he fell on his side. A man lifted a bamboo stick with both hands to bring it down on Frigate, but he rolled away, bringing his grail up and blocking the stick as it came down. Then he was up, his head butting into the man
and carrying him back. Both went down, Frigate on top, and his stone axe struck the man twice on the temple.

Alice had thrown her grail into the face of a man and then stabbed at him with the fire-sharpened end of her bamboo spear. Loghu ran around to the side of the man and hit him across the head with her stick so hard that he dropped to his knees.

The fight was over in sixty seconds. The other men fled with their women behind them. Burton turned the screaming leader onto his back and pulled his spear out of the pit of his stomach. The tip had not gone in more than half an inch.

The man got to his feet and, clutching the streaming wound, staggered off across the plains. Two of the gang were unconscious but would probably survive. The man Frigate had attacked was dead.

The American had turned from pale to red and then back to pale. But he did not look contrite or sickened. If his expression held anything, it was elation. And relief.

He said, “That was the first man I’ve ever killed! The first!”

“I doubt that it’ll be the last,” Burton said. “Unless you’re killed first.”

Ruach, looking at the corpse, said, “A dead man looks just as dead here as on Earth. I wonder where those who are killed in the afterlife go?”

“If we live long enough, we might find out. You two women gave a very fine account of yourselves.”

Alice said, “I did what had to be done,” and walked away. She was pale and shaking. Loghu, on the other hand, seemed exhilarated.

They got to the grailstone about a half-hour before noon. Things had changed. Their quiet little hollow contained about sixty people, many of whom were working on pieces of chert. One man was holding a bloody eye into which a chip of stone had flown. Several more were bleeding from the face or holding smashed fingers.

Burton was upset but he could do nothing about it. The only hope for regaining the quiet retreat was that the lack of water would drive the intruders away. That hope went quickly. A woman told him that there was a small cataract about a mile and a half to the west. It fell from the top of the mountain down the tip of an arrowhead-shaped canyon and into a large hole which it had only half-filled. Eventually, it should spill out and take a course through the hills and spread out on
the plain. Unless, of course, stone from the mountain base was brought down to make a channel for the stream.

“Or we make water pipes out of the big bamboo,” Frigate said.

They put their grails on the rock, each carefully noting the exact location of his, and they waited. He intended to move on after the grails were filled. A location halfway between the cataract and the grailstone would be advantageous, and they might not be so crowded.

The blue flames roared out above the stone just as the sun reached its zenith. This time, the grails yielded an antipasto salad, Italian black bread with melted garlic butter, spaghetti and meatballs, a cupful of dry red wine, grapes, more coffee crystals, ten cigarettes, a marijuana stick, a cigar, more toilet paper and a cake of soap, and four chocolate creams. Some people complained that they did not like Italian food, but no one refused to eat.

The group, smoking their cigarettes, walked along the base of the mountain to the cataract. This was at the end of the triangular canyon, where a number of men and women had set up camp around the hole. The water was icy cold. After washing out their containers, drying them, and refilling the buckets, they went back in the direction of the grailstone. After a half mile, they chose a hill covered by pines except for the apex, on which a great irontree grew. There was plenty of bamboo of all sizes growing around them. Under the direction of Kazz and of Frigate, who had spent a few years in Malaysia, they cut down bamboo and built their huts. These were round buildings with a single door and a window in the rear and a conical thatched roof. They worked swiftly and did not try for nicety, so that by dinnertime everything except the roofs was finished. Frigate and Monat were picked to stay behind as guards while the others took the grails to the stone. Here they found about 300 people constructing lean-tos and huts. Burton had expected this. Most people would not want to walk a half mile every day three times a day for their meals. They would prefer to cluster around the grailstones. The huts here were arranged haphazardly and closer than necessary. There was still the problem of getting fresh water, which was why he was surprised that there were so many here. But he was informed by a pretty Slovene that a source of water had been found close by only this afternoon. A spring ran from a cave almost in a straight line up from the rock. Burton investigated. Water had broken out from a cave and was trickling down the face of the cliff into a basin about fifty feet wide and eight deep.

He wondered if this was an afterthought on the part of Whoever had created this place.

He returned just as the blue flames thundered.

Kazz suddenly stopped to relieve himself. He did not bother to turn away; Loghu giggled; Tanya turned red; the Italian women were used to seeing men leaning against buildings wherever the fancy took them; Wilfreda was used to anything; Alice, surprisingly, ignored him as if he were a dog. And that might explain her attitude. To her, Kazz was not human and so could not be expected to act as humans were expected to act.

There was no reason to reprimand Kazz for this just now, especially when Kazz did not understand his language. But he would have to use sign language the next time Kazz proceeded to relieve himself while they were sitting around and eating. Everybody had to learn certain limits, and anything that upset others while they were eating should be forbidden. And that, he thought, included quarreling during mealtimes. To be fair, he would have to admit that he had participated in more than his share of dinner disputes in his lifetime.

He patted Kazz on top of the breadloaf-shaped skull as he passed him. Kazz looked at him and Burton shook his head, figuring that Kazz would find out why when he learned to speak English. But he forgot his intention, and he stopped and rubbed the top of his own head. Yes, there was a very fine fuzz there.

He felt his face, which was as smooth as ever. But his armpits were fuzzy. The pubic area was, however, smooth. That might be a slower growth than scalp hair, though. He told the others, and they inspected themselves and each other. It was true. Their hair was returning, at least, on their heads and their armpits. Kazz was the exception. His hair was growing out all over him except on his face.

The discovery made them jubilant. Laughing, joking, they walked along the base of the mountain in the shadow. They turned east then and waded through the grass of four hills before coming up the slope of the hill they were beginning to think of as home. Halfway up it, they stopped, silent. Frigate and Monat had not returned their calls.

After telling them to spread out and to proceed slowly, Burton led them up the hill. The huts were deserted, and several of the little huts had been kicked or trampled. He felt a chill, as if a cold wind had blown on him. The silence, the damaged huts, the complete absence of the two, was foreboding.

A minute later, they heard a halloo and turned to look down the hill. The skin-heads of Monat and Frigate appeared in the grasses and then they were coming up the hill. Monat looked grave, but the American was grinning. His face was bruised over the cheek, and the knuckles of both hands were torn and bloody.

“We just got back from chasing off four men and three women who wanted to take over our huts,” he said. “I told them they could build their own, and that you’d be back right away and beat hell out of them if they didn’t take off. They understood me all right, they spoke English. They had been resurrected at the grailstone a mile north of ours along the river. Most of the people there were Triestans of your time, but about ten, all together, were Chicagoans who’d died about 1985. The distribution of the dead sure is funny, isn’t it? There’s a random choice operating along here, I’d say.

“Anyway, I told them what Mark Twain said the devil said.
You Chicagoans think you’re the best people here whereas the truth is you’re just the most numerous.
That didn’t go over very well; they seemed to think that I should be buddy-buddies with them because I was an American. One of the women offered herself to me if I’d change sides and take their part in appropriating the huts. She was the one who was living with two of the men. I said no. They said they’d take the huts anyway, and over my dead body if they had to.

“But they talked more brave than they were. Monat scared them just by looking at them. And we did have the stone weapons and spears. Still, their leader was whipping them up into rushing us, when I took a good hard look at one of them.

“His head was bald so he didn’t have that thick straight black hair, and he was about thirty-five when I first knew him, and he wore thick shell-rimmed glasses then, and I hadn’t seen him for fifty-four years. But I stepped up closer, and I looked into his face, which was grinning just like I remembered it, like the proverbial skunk, and I said, “
Lem? Lem Sharkko!
It is
Lem Sharkko
, isn’t it?”

“His eyes opened then, and he grinned even more, and he took my hand,
my hand
, after all he’d done to me, and he cried out as if we were long-lost brothers, “It is, it is! It’s Pete Frigate! My God, Pete Frigate!”

“I was almost glad to see him and for the same reason he said he was glad to see me. But then I told myself, ‘This is the crooked publisher that cheated you out of $4,000 when you were just getting started
as a writer and ruined your career for years. This is the slimy schlock dealer who cheated you and at least four other writers out of a lot of money and then declared bankruptcy and skipped. And then he inherited a lot of money from an uncle and lived very well indeed, thus proving that crime
did
pay. This is the man you have not forgotten, not only because of what he did to you and others but because of so many other crooked publishers you ran into later on.’”

Burton grinned and said, “I once said that priests, politicians, and publishers would never get past the gates of heaven. But I was wrong, that is, if this is heaven.”

“Yeah, I know,” Frigate said. “I’ve never forgotten that you said that. Anyway, I put down my natural joy at seeing a familiar face again, and I said, ‘Sharkko…’”

“With a name like that, he got you to trust him?” Alice said.

“He told me it was a Czech name that meant
trustworthy.
Like everything else he told me, it was a lie. Anyway, I had just about convinced myself that Monat and I should let them take over. We’d retire and then we’d run them out when you came back from the grailstone. That was the smart thing to do. But when I recognized Sharkko, I got so
mad
! I said, grinning, ‘Gee, it’s really great to see your face after all these years. Especially here where there are no cops or courts!’

“And I hit him right in the nose! He went over flat on his back, with his nose spouting blood. Monat and I rushed the others, and I kicked one, and then another hit me on the cheek with his grail. I was knocked silly, but Monat knocked one out with the butt of his spear and cracked the ribs of another; he’s skinny but he’s awful fast, and what
he
doesn’t know about self-defense—or offense! Sharkko got up then and I hit with my other fist but only a glancing blow along his jaw. It hurt my fist more than it hurt his jaw. He spun around and took off, and I went after him. The others took off, too, with Monat beating them on the tail with his spear. I chased Sharkko up the next hill and caught him on the downslope and punched him but good! He crawled away, begging for mercy, which I gave him with a kick in the rear that rolled him howling all the way down the hill.”

Frigate was still shaking with reaction, but he was pleased.

“I was afraid I was going to turn chicken there for a while,” he said. “After all, all that had been so long ago and in another world, and maybe we’re here to forgive our enemies—and some of our friends—and be
forgiven. But on the other hand, I thought, maybe we’re here so we can give a little back of what we had to take on Earth. What about it, Lev? Wouldn’t you like a chance to turn Hitler over a fire? Very slowly over a fire?”

“I don’t think you could compare a crooked publisher to Hitler,” Ruach said. “No, I wouldn’t want to turn him over a fire. I might want to starve him to death, or feed him just enough to keep him alive. But I wouldn’t do that. What good would it do? Would it make him change his mind about anything, would he then believe that Jews were human beings? No, I would do nothing to him if he were in my power except kill him so he couldn’t hurt others. But I’m not so sure that killing him would mean he’d stay dead. Not here.”