"Why recount to myself these vainglories? It's not what a man's done that counts, it's what he's going to do.
"Ayesha! Ayesha! My Persian beauty, my first true love! I would've renounced the world, my British citizenship, I would have become a Persian and lived with you until I died. You were most foully murdered, Ayesha! I avenged you, I slew the poisoner with my own hands, choked the life from him and buried his body in the desert. Where are you, Ayesha?
"Somewhere. And if we met again – what? That ravening love is now a dead lion.
"Isabel. My wife. The woman . . . did I ever love her? Affection I had. Not the great love I had for Ayesha and still have for Alice. 'Pay, pack, and follow' I told her whenever I left for a journey, and she did so, as obediently and as uncomplaining as a slave. I was her hero, her god, she said, and she set herself a list of rules for the perfect wife. But when I became old and bitter, a neglected failure, she became my nurse, my keeper, my eager, my prison guard.
"What if I should see her again, this woman who said that she could never love another man on Earth or in Heaven? Not that this world is Heaven. What would I do, say, 'Hello, Isabel. It's been a long time'?
"No, I'd run like the veriest coward. Hide. Yet . . .
"And here's the entrance to the engine room. Is Podebrad on duty tonight? What if he is? I cannot confront him until we get to the headwaters.
"There goes a figure, dim in the mists. Is it an agent of the Ethicals? Or X, the renegade, skulking in the fog? He is always here now, there then, as elusive as the concept of time and eternity, nothingness and somethingness.
"Who goes there?" I should shout. But he – she – it is gone.
"While I was in that transition between sleeping and waking, between death and resurrection, I saw God. 'You owe for the flesh,' He said, that bearded old gentleman in the garments of 1890, and in another dream He said, 'Pay up.'
"Pay what? What is the price?
"I didn't ask for the flesh, I didn't petition to be born. Flesh, life, should be gratis.
"I should have detained Him. I should have asked him if a man does have free will or are all his actions, his nonactions, too, determined. .Written down in the world's Bradshaw, so-and-so will arrive at such-a-place at 10:32 a.m. and will depart at 10:40 on track 12. If I am a train on His railway, then I am not responsible for anything I do: Evil and good are not my doing. In fact, there is no evil and good. Without free will, they don't exist.
"But He won't be detained. And if He were, would I understand his explanation of death and immortality, of determinism and indeterminism, of determinacy and indeterminacy?
"The human mind cannot grasp these. But if it can't, it's God's fault – if there is a God.
"When I was surveying the Sind area in India, I became a Sufi, a Master Sufi. But watching them in the Sind and in Egypt and seeing them end by proclaiming themselves to be God, I concluded that extreme mysticism was closely allied to madness.
"Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, who is a Sufi, says that I do not understand. One, there are fake or deluded Sufis, degenerates of that great discipline. Two, when a Sufi says that he is God, he does not mean that literally. He is saying that he has become one with God, though not God.
"Great God! I will penetrate to His heart, to the heart of the Mystery and the mysteries. I am a living sword, but I have been attacking with my edge, not with my point. The point is the most deadly, not the edge. I will be from now on the point.
"Yet, if I'm to find my way through the magic labyrinth, I mush have a thread to follow to the great beast that lives in its heart. Where is that thread? No Ariadne. I will be myself the thread and Ariadne and Theseus. Just as . . . why didn't I think of this before? – I am the labyrinth.
"Not quite true. What is? It's always not quite. But in human, and divine, affairs, a near-hit is sometimes as good as a direct hit. The larger the exploding shell, the less it matters that it doesn't strike the bull's eye.
"Yet a sword is no good unless it's well balanced. It has been said of me, I have the wide-reading Frigate for authority, that some have said that I was one in whom Nature ran riot, that I had not one but thirty splendid talents. But I had no sense of balance or of direction either. That I was an orchestra without a director, a fine ship with only one flaw: no compass. As I've said of myself, a blaze of light without focus.
"If I couldn't do something first, I wouldn't do it.
"That it's the abnormal, the perverse and the savage, in men, not the divine in their nature, that fascinate me.
"That, though I was deeply learned, I never understood that wisdom had little to do with knowledge and literature and nothing to do with learning.
"They were wrong! If they were once right, no more!"
Burton prowled on and on, looking for he knew not what. He passed down a dim corridor and paused by a door. Within should be Loghu, unless she was dancing in the grand salon, and Frigate. They were together again, having gone through two or three lovers in fourteen years. She had not been able to tolerate him for a long time, but then he'd won her over – though it might be the other Frigate whom she still loved – and now they shared the same quarters. Once more.
He went on, seeing a shadowy figure faintly outlined in the light over the exit. X? Another sufferer from insomnia? Himself?
He stood outside the texas and watched the guards pacing back and forth. Watchman, what of the night? Well, what of it?
On he walked. Where have you been? From walking to and fro, not over this giant world but on this pygmy cosmos of a riverboat.
Alice was in his cabin again, having left him a little less than fourteen years ago and having returned twice. This time, they would be together forever. Perhaps. But he was glad that she was back.
He emerged on the landing deck and looked up at the dim light emanating from the control room. Its big clock boomed fourteen strokes. Two a.m.
Time for Burton to go back to bed and try to storm the citadel of sleep again.
He looked up at the stars, and, while doing so, a cold wind swept down from the north and cleared the upper deck of the mists – momentarily. Somewhere northward was the tower in the cold and gray mists. In it were, or had been, the Ethicals, the entities who thought they had a right to raise the dead without their permission.
Did they hold the keys to the mysteries? Not all mysteries, of course. The mystery of being itself, of creation, of space and infinity, time and eternity would never be solved.
Or would they?
Was there somewhere, in the tower or deep underground, machine which converted the metaphysical into the physical? Man could handle the physical, and if he didn't know the true nature of the beyond-matter, what of it? He didn't know the true nature of electricity, either, but he had enslaved.it for his own purposes.
He shook his fist at the north, and he went to bed.
SECTION 6
On the Not For Hire: The Thread of Reason
16
* * *
At first, Samuel Clemens had tended to avoid Cyrano de Bergerac as much as possible. The very perceptive Frenchman quickly detected that but seemed not to resent it. If he did, he was successfully hiding his reaction. He was always smiling and laughing, always polite but not cold. He acted as if Clemens liked him and had no reason not to.
After a while – several years – Sam began to warm up to the man who'd been Sam's Terrestrial wife's lover. They had much in common: a keen interest in people and in mechanical devices, a taste for literature, an abiding devotion to the study of history, a hatred for hypocrisy and self-righteousness, a loathing for the malevolent aspects of religions, and a deep agnosticism. Though Cyrano was not, like Sam, from Missouri, he shared with him a "show me" attitude.
Moreover, Cyrano was an adornment at any party but did not try to dominate the conversation.
So it was that one day Sam talked to his other self, Mark Twain, about his feelings for de Bergerac in the privacy of his suite. The result was that Sam now saw – though
he'd always known deep within him – that he'd been very unfair to Cyrano. It wasn't the fellow's fault that Livy had fallen in love with him and had -refused to leave him for her ex-husband after she'd found him. Nor, really, was it Livy's fault. She could only do what her inborn temperament and predetermined circumstances forced her to do. And Sam had been acting as his inborn character, his "watermark," and circumstances forced him to do. Now, as a result of another aspect of his character rising from the depths, plus the inevitable push of events, he had changed his attitude toward Cyrano. After all, he was a good fellow, and he'd learned to shower regularly, to keep his fingernails clean, and to quit urinating in corners at the end of corridors.
Whether Sam really believed that he was an automaton whose acts were programmed, Sam did not know himself. Sometimes, he thought that his belief in determinism was only an excuse to escape his guilt about certain matters. If this were true, then he was exercising free will in making up the explanation that he wasn't responsible for anything, good or bad, that he did. On the other hand, one aspect of determinism was that it gave humans the illusion that they had free will.
In either case, Sam welcomed Cyrano into his company and forgave him for what really didn't need forgiving.
So now, today, Cyrano was one of the group invited by Sam to talk about some puzzling features of what Sam called "The Case of X." The others were Gwenafra (Sam's cabin-mate), Joe Miller, de Marbot, and John Johnston. The latter was huge, over six feet two and weighing 260 pounds without an ounce of excess fat. His head and chest were auburn-haired; he had extraordinarily long arms and hands that looked as large as the paws of a grizzly bear. The blue-gray eyes were often cold or dreamy but they could be warm enough when he was with trusted friends. Born about 1828 in New Jersey and of Scotch descent, he had gone to the West to trap the mountains in 1843. There he had become a legend even among the legendary mountain men, though it took some years before he became famous. When a wandering party of young unblooded Crow braves killed his Flathead Indian wife and unborn baby, Johnston swore a vendetta against the Crows. He killed so many of them that the Crows sent out twenty young men to track him down and kill him, and they were not to return to their tribe until the deed was done. One after the other got to him but were instead slain by Johnston. He cut out their livers and ate them raw, the blood dripping onto his red beard. It was these exploits that earned him the sobriquets of "Liver Eater" and "Crow Killer." But the Crows were a fine tribe, dignified, honorable, and mighty warriors. So one day Johnston decided to call off the feud, and, having informed them of his decision, became their good friend. He was also a chief of the Shoshoni.
He died in 1900 at the Veterans' Hospital in Los Angeles and was buried in the crowded cemetery there. But in the 1970s, a group who knew that he could never rest there, not the man who became vexed if his nearest neighbor was within fifty miles, had his bones taken to a mountainside in Colorado and reburied there.
"Liver Eating" Johnston had mentioned several times on the boat that he'd never been forced to kill a white man (while on Earth), not even a Frenchy. This remark had made de Marbot and Cyrano a little uneasy at first, but they had come to like and admire the huge mountaineer.
After they'd had a few drinks and some cigarettes and cigars and chatted idly, Sam brought up the subject he most wanted to talk about.
"I've been doing some thinking about the man who called himself Odysseus," he said. "You remember what I said about him? He came to our help when we were battling von Radowitz, and it was his archery that killed off the general and his officers. He claimed to be the historical Odysseus, the real man to whom the legends and fairy tales were attached later and whose exploits furnished Homer with the materials for his Odyssey."
"I never knew him," Johnston said, "but I'll take yer word fur it."
"Yes. Well, he said that he also had been contacted by an Ethical and sent down-River to help us. After the battle he hung around for a while, but when he went up-River on a trading expedition, he disappeared. Dropped out of sight like he'd fallen through a trapdoor.
"What makes him particularly important is that he had a strange tale to tell about the Ethical. Now, the one that talked to me, X, the Mysterious Stranger, was a man. At least, his voice was certainly a male's, though I suppose it could have been disguised. Anyway. Odysseus told me that his Ethical was a woman!"
Sam puffed out green smoke and looked at the brass arabesques on the ceiling as if they were hieroglyphs that held answers to his questions.
"Now, what could that mean?"
Gwenafra said, "That he was either telling the truth or lying."
"Right! Give that pretty woman there a big cigar! Either there are two Ethicals who have become renegades or the self-named Odysseus was a liar. If a liar, then he would have to be my Ethical, X. Personally, I think he was mine, yours, too, Cyrano and John, and I think he was lying. Otherwise, why didn't X tell us that there were two of his kind and that one was a woman? That would have been very important. I know he didn't have much time to talk to us because the other Ethicals were hot on his trail, breathing down his neck. But surely that item of information was one he wouldn't have neglected to impart."
"Why would he lie?" de Marbot said.
"Because . . ." Here Sam pointed his cigar at the arabesques. "He knew that we might get caught by the other Ethicals. And they might get from us this false information. Then they'd be confused and even more alarmed. What? Two traitors in their midst? Holy smoke! And if they put us to some sort of lie-detector, they'd see that we weren't lying. After all, we believed what Odysseus told us. What X told us, I should say. It was just his way of confusing the issue still further! There! What do you think of that?"
There was a short silence, then Cyrano said. "But if that is true, we have seen the Ethical! And we know what he looks like!"
"Not necessarily true," Gwenafra said. "He surely must have numerous aids for disguise."
"Undoubtedly," Cyrano said. "But can he change his height and his physique? Hair and eye color perhaps and some other things. But not . . ."
"I think we may take it that he's short and has a very muscular body," Clemens said. "But so have several billion other men. What we've done is to eliminate the possibility that there's a female Ethical who's also a renegade. At least, I believe so."
"Mought be," Johnston said, "that he was an agent who found out that we'd been contacted by X, and he was trying to confuse us."
"I don't think so," Sam said. "If he was an agent who'd known that much, we'd have had the Ethicals on us faster than a wardman would sell his mother to gain a few votes. No. That Odysseus was Mr. X."
"But," Gwenafra said, "that . . . that takes us deeper than that. What about Gulbirra's description of Barry Thorn? He resembled Odysseus in some respects. Could he have been X? And what about that so-called German, Stern, who tried to kill Firebrass? What was he? If he was an agent, he would've been Firebrass' colleague. After all, we think Firebrass was an agent, and he was blown up by X so that he couldn't get into the tower ahead of him. Firebrass lied to us when he told us he was one of X's recruits. He . . ."
"No," Cyrano said. "I mean, yes. He seems to have been an agent of the other Ethicals. But if he knew so much about us, why didn't he inform the Ethicals and bring them down on our necks?"
"Because," Sam said, "for some reason, he couldn't tell the Ethicals. I think that was because about then the big troubles started in the tower. Why or how, I don't know. But it seems to me that about the time Odysseus disappeared, rather, X vanished, that the whole project of the Ethicals went shebang. We didn't notice it at the time, but it was shortly thereafter that the resurrections ceased. It wasn't until the Not For Hire was some distance on its way that we began getting reports that the resurrections had stopped. When we were in Parolando, we noticed it but thought it was just a local phenomenon."
"Hmm," Cyrano said, "I wonder if that Hermann Göring fellow, the missionary killed by Hacking's men, was resurrected? He
was a strange one, that."
"He was a troublemaker, that one," Sam said. "Anyway, maybe Firebrass did tell the Ethicals that he'd gotten hold of some of X's recruits. But the Ethicals told him they wouldn't do anything about it for a while. Firebrass was to learn all he could from us before they moved in. He would also tell them if he saw anybody who looked like X so they could jump him then and there. Who knows? But . . . I wonder if Firebrass planted any bugs on us so he'd know when X came to visit us again. Only, he never did."
Cyrano said, "I believe that he, X, got stranded after he, as Odysseus, left us."
"Then why didn't he rejoin us as Odysseus?"
Cyrano shrugged.
"Because he missed the Not For Hire," Sam snapped. "We went by him during the night. But he'd heard that Firebrass was building a dirigible to go straight to the tower. That would be even better for him than the Not For Hire. But as Odysseus, an ancient Hellene, he wouldn't be qualified for a post on the airship. So he became Barry Thorn, a much-experienced Canadian aeronaut."
"But I," Cyrano said, "was of the seventeenth century, yet I was a pilot on the Parseval. And John de Greystock was of a much earlier time yet he was made captain of the blimp."
"Despite that," Sam said, "X would have a much better chance to get on the Parseval if he had experience. Only . . . I wonder where he got it? Why would an Ethical know all about a dirigible?"
"If you live a very long time or are immortal, perhaps you learn everything about everything in order to pass the time," Gwenafra said.
SECTION 7
Göring's Past
17
* * *
Hermann Göring woke up sweating and groaning. "Ja, mein Führer! Ja, mein Führer! Ja, mein Führer! Ja, ja, ja!"
R.W. IV - The Magic Labyrinth Page 11
