“If you compare the exterior and interior of the grail,” Monat said, “you will observe an approximate five-centimeter difference in depth. The false bottom must conceal a molar circuitry which is able to convert energy to matter. The energy, obviously, comes during the discharge from the rocks. In addition to the e-m converter, the grail must hold molar templates…? molds…? which form the matter into various combinations of elements and compounds.
“I’m safe in my speculations, for we had a similar converter on my native planet. But nothing as miniature as this, I assure you.”
“Same on Earth,” Frigate said. “They were making iron out of pure energy before A.D. 2002, but it was a very cumbersome and expensive process with an almost microscopic yield.”
“Good,” Burton said. “All this has cost us nothing. So far….”
He fell silent for a while, thinking of the dream he had when awakening.
“Pay up,” God had said. “You owe for the flesh.”
What had that meant? On Earth, at Trieste, in 1890, he had been dying in his wife’s arms and asking for…what? Chloroform? Something. He could not remember. Then, oblivion. And he had awakened in that nightmare place and had seen things that were not on Earth nor, as far as he knew, on this planet. But that experience had been no dream.
8
They finished eating and replaced the containers in the racks within the grails. Since there was no water nearby, they would have to wait until morning to wash the containers. Frigate and Kazz, however, had made several buckets out of sections of the giant bamboo. The American volunteered to walk back to the river, if some of them would go with him, and fill the sections with water. Burton wondered why the fellow volunteered. Then, looking at Alice, he knew why. Frigate must be hoping to find some congenial female companionship. Evidently he took it for granted that Alice Hargreaves preferred Burton. And the other women, Tucci, Malini, Capone, and Fiorri, had made their choices of, respectively, Galleazzi, Brontich, Rocco, and Giunta. Babich had wandered off, possibly for the same reason that Frigate had for wishing to leave.
Monat and Kazz went with Frigate. The sky was suddenly crowded with gigantic sparks and great luminous gas clouds. The glitter of jampacked stars, some so large they seemed to be broken-off pieces of Earth’s moon, and the shine of the clouds, awed them and made them feel pitifully microscopic and ill-made.
Burton lay on his back on a pile of tree leaves and puffed on a cigar. It was excellent, and in the London of his day would have cost at least a shilling. He did not feel so minute and unworthy now. The stars were inanimate matter, and he was alive. No star could ever know the delicious taste of an expensive cigar. Nor could it know the ecstasy of holding a warm well-curved woman next to it.
On the other side of the fire, half or wholly lost in the grasses and the shadows, were the Triestans. The liquor had uninhibited them, though part of their sense of freedom may have come from joy at being alive and young again. They giggled and laughed and rolled back and forth in the grass and made loud noises while kissing. And then, couple by couple, they retreated into the darkness. Or at least, made no more loud noises.
The little girl had fallen asleep by Alice. The firelight flickered over Alice’s handsome aristocratic face and bald head and on the magnificent body and long legs. Burton suddenly knew that all of him had been resurrected. He definitely was not the old man who, during the last sixteen years of his life, had paid so heavily for the many fevers and sicknesses that had squeezed him dry in the tropics. Now he was young again, healthy, and possessed by the old clamoring demon.
Yet he had given his promise to protect her. He could make no move, say no word which she could interpret as seductive.
Well, she was not the only woman in the world. As a matter of fact, he had the whole world of women, if not at his disposal, at least available to be asked. That is, he did if everybody who had died on Earth was on this planet. She would be only one among many billions (possibly thirty-six billion, if Frigate’s estimate was correct). But there was, of course, no such evidence that this was the case.
The hell of it was that Alice might as well be the only one in the world, at this moment, anyway. He could not get up and walk off into the darkness looking for another woman, because that would leave her and the child unprotected. She certainly would not feel safe with Monat and Kazz, nor could he blame her. They were so terrifyingly ugly. Nor could he entrust her to Frigate—if Frigate returned tonight, which Burton doubted—because the fellow was an unknown quantity.
Burton suddenly laughed loudly at his situation. He had decided that he might as well stick it out for tonight. This thought set him laughing again, and he did not stop until Alice asked him if he was all right.
“More right than you will ever know,” he said, turning his back to her. He reached into his grail and extracted the last item. This was a small flat stick of chicle-like substance. Frigate, before leaving, had remarked that their unknown benefactors must be American. Otherwise, they would not have thought of providing chewing gum.
After stubbing out his cigar on the ground, Burton popped the stick into his mouth. He said, “This has a strange but rather delicious taste. Have you tried yours?”
“I am tempted, but I imagine I’d look like a cow chewing her cud.”
“Forget about being a lady,” Burton said. “Do you think that beings with the power to resurrect you would have vulgar tastes?”
Alice smiled slightly and said, “I really wouldn’t know,” and placed the stick in her mouth. For a moment, they chewed idly, looking across the fire at each other. She was unable to look him full in the eyes for more than a few seconds at a time.
Burton said, “Frigate mentioned that he knew you. Of you, rather. Just who are you, if you will pardon my unseemly curiosity?”
“There are no secrets among the dead,” she replied lightly. “Or among the ex-dead, either.”
She had been born Alice Pleasance Liddell on April 25, 1852. (Burton was thirty then.) She was the direct descendant of King Edward III and his son, John of Gaunt. Her father was dean of Christ Church College of Oxford and coauthor of a famous Greek-English lexicon. (Liddell and Scott! Burton thought.) She had had a happy childhood, an excellent education, and had met many famous people of her times: Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, the Prince of Wales, who was placed under her father’s care while he was at Oxford. Her husband had been Reginald Gervis Hargreaves, and she had loved him very much. He had been a “country gentleman,” liked to hunt, fish, play cricket, raise trees, and read French literature. She had three sons, all captains, two of whom died in the Great War of 1914–1918. (This was the second time that day that Burton had heard of the Great War.)
She talked on and on as if drink had loosened her tongue. Or as if she wanted to place a barrier of conversation between her and Burton.
She talked of Dinah, the tabby kitten she had loved when she was a child, the great trees of her husband’s arboretum, how her father, when working on his lexicon, would always sneeze at twelve o’clock in the afternoon, no one knew why…at the age of eighty, she was given an honorary Doctor of Letters by the American university, Columbia, because of the vital part she had played in the genesis of Mr. Dodgson’s famous book. (She neglected to mention the title and Burton, though a voracious reader, did not recall any works by a Mr. Dodgson.)
“That was a golden afternoon indeed,” she said, “despite the official meteorological report. On July 4, 1862, I was ten…my sisters and I were wearing black shoes, white openwork socks, white cotton dresses, and hats with large brims.”
Her eyes were wide, and she shook now and then as if she were struggling inside herself, and she began to talk even faster.
“Mr. Dodgson and Mr. Duckworth carried the picnic baskets…we set off in our boat from Folly Bridge up the Isis, upstream for a change. Mr. Duckworth rowed stroke; the drops fell off his paddle like tears of glass on the smooth mirror of the Isis, and….”
Burton heard the last w
ords as if they had been roared at him. Astonished, he gazed at Alice, whose lips seemed to be moving as if she were conversing at a normal speech level. Her eyes were now fixed on him, but they seemed to be boring through him into a space and a time beyond. Her hands were half-raised as if she were surprised at something and could not move them.
Every sound was magnified. He could hear the breathing of the little girl, the pounding of her heart and Alice’s, the gurgle of the workings of Alice’s intestines and of the breeze as it slipped across the branches of the trees. From far away, a cry came.
He rose and listened. What was happening? Why the heightening of senses? Why could he hear their hearts but not his? He was also aware of the shape and texture of the grass under his feet. Almost, he could feel the individual molecules of the air as they bumped into his body.
Alice, too, had risen. She said, “What is happening?” and her voice fell against him like a heavy gust of wind.
He did not reply, for he was staring at her. Now, it seemed to him, he could really see her body for the first time. And he could see her, too. The entire Alice.
Alice came toward him with her arms held out, her eyes half-shut, her mouth moist. She swayed, and she crooned, “Richard! Richard!”
Then she stopped; her eyes widened. He stepped toward her, his arms out. She cried, “No!” and turned and ran into the darkness among the trees.
For a second, he stood still. It did not seem possible that she, whom he loved as he had never loved anybody, could not love him back.
She must be teasing him. That was it. He ran after her, and called her name over and over.
It must have been hours later when the rain fell against them. Either the effect of the drug had worn off or the cold water helped dispel it, for both seemed to emerge from the ecstasy and the dreamlike state at the same time. She looked up at him as lightning lit their features, and she screamed and pushed him violently.
He fell on the grass, but reached out a hand and grabbed her ankle as she scrambled away from him on all fours.
“What’s the matter with you?” he shouted.
Alice quit struggling. She sat down, hid her face against her knees, and her body shook with sobs. Burton rose and placed his hands under her chin and forced her to look upward. Lightning hit nearby again and showed him her tortured face.
“You promised to protect me!” she cried out.
“You didn’t act as if you wanted to be protected,” he said. “I didn’t promise to protect you against a natural human impulse.”
“Impulse!” she said. “Impulse! My God, I’ve never done anything like this in my life! I’ve always been good! I was a virgin when I married, and I stayed faithful to my husband all my life! And now…a total stranger! Just like that! I don’t know what got into me!”
“Then I’ve been a failure,” Burton said, and laughed. But he was beginning to feel regret and sorrow. If only it had been her own will, her own wish, then he would not now be having the slightest bite of conscience. But that gum had contained some powerful drug, and it had made them behave as lovers whose passion knew no limits. She had certainly cooperated as enthusiastically as any experienced woman in a Turkish harem.
“You needn’t feel the least bit contrite or self-reproachful,” he said gently. “You were possessed. Blame the drug.”
“I did it!” she said. “I…I! I wanted to! Oh, what a vile low whore I am!”
“I don’t remember offering you any money.”
He did not mean to be heartless. He wanted to make her so angry that she would forget her self-abasement. And he succeeded. She jumped up and attacked his chest and face with her nails. She called him names that a highbred and gentle lady of Victoria’s day should never have known.
Burton caught her wrists to prevent further damage and held her while she spewed more filth at him. Finally, when she had fallen silent and had begun weeping again, he led her toward the campsite. The fire was wet ashes. He scraped off the top layer and dropped a handful of grass, which had been protected from the rain by the tree, onto the embers. By its light, he saw the little girl sleeping huddled between Kazz and Monat under a pile of grass beneath the irontree. He returned to Alice, who was sitting under another tree.
“Stay away,” she said. “I never want to see you again! You have dishonored me, dirtied me! And after you gave your word to protect me!”
“You can freeze if you wish,” he said. “I was merely going to suggest that we huddle together to keep warm. But, if you wish discomfort, so be it. I’ll tell you again that what we did was generated by the drug. No, not generated. Drugs don’t generate desires or actions; they merely allow them to be released. Our normal inhibitions were dissolved, and neither one of us can blame ourself or the other.
“However, I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy it, and you’d be a liar if you claimed you didn’t. So, why gash yourself with the knives of conscience?”
“I’m not a beast like you! I’m a good Christian God-fearing virtuous woman!”
“No doubt,” Burton said dryly. “However, let me stress again one thing. I doubt if you would have done what you did if you had not wished in your heart to do so. The drug suppressed your inhibitions, but it certainly did not put in your mind the idea of what to do. The idea was already there. Any action that resulted from taking the drug came from you, from what you wanted to do.”
“I know that!” she screamed. “Do you think I’m some stupid simple serving girl? I have a brain! I know what I did and why! It’s just that I never dreamed that I could be such…such a person! But I must have been! Must be!”
Burton tried to console her, to show her that everyone had certain unwished-for elements in their nature. He pointed out that the dogma of original sin surely covered this; she was human, therefore, she had dark desires in her. And so forth. The more he tried to make her feel better, the worse she felt. Then, shivering with cold, and tired of the useless arguments, he gave up. He crawled in between Monat and Kazz and took the little girl in his arms. The warmth of the three bodies and the cover of the grass pile and the feel of the naked bodies soothed him. He went to sleep with Alice’s weeping coming to him faintly through the grass cover.
9
When 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 w
oman, 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.”
To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat Page 6
