“I accept,” Targoff said. “If you can change your mind, I can change mine. I’ve worked with you, eaten bread with you. I like to think I’m a good judge of character. Tell me, if you were planning this, what would you do?”
Targoff listened carefully. At the end of Burton’s explanation, Targoff nodded. “Much like my plan. Now….”
16
The next day, shortly after breakfast, several guards came for Burton and Frigate. Targoff looked hard at Burton, who knew what Targoff was thinking. Nothing could be done except to march off to Göring’s “palace.” He was seated in a big wooden chair and smoking a pipe. He asked them to sit down and offered them cigars and wine.
“Every once in a while,” he said, “I like to relax and talk with somebody besides my colleagues, who are not overly bright. I like especially to talk with somebody who lived after I died. And to men who were famous in their time. I’ve few of either type, so far.”
“Many of your Israeli prisoners lived after you,” Frigate said.
“Ah, the Jews!” Göring airily waved his pipe. “That is the trouble. They know me too well. They are sullen when I try to talk to them, and too many have tried to kill me for me to feel comfortable around them. Not that I have anything against them. I don’t particularly like Jews, but I had many Jewish friends….”
Burton reddened.
Göring, after sucking on his pipe, continued, “Der Führer was a great man, but he had some idiocies. One of them was his attitude toward Jews. Myself, I cared less. But the Germany of my time was anti-Jewish, and a man must go with the zeitgeist if he wants to get any place in life. Enough of that. Even here, a man cannot get away from them.”
He chattered on for a while, then asked Frigate many questions concerning the fate of his contemporaries and the history of post-war Germany.
“If you Americans had had any political sense, you would have declared war on Russia as soon as we surrendered. We would have fought with you against the Bolshevik, and we would have crushed them.”
Frigate did not reply. Göring then told several “funny,” very obscene stories. He asked Burton to tell him about the strange experience he had had before being resurrected in the valley.
Burton was surprised. Had Göring learned about this from Kazz or was there an informer among the slaves?
He told in full detail everything that had happened between the time he opened his eyes to find himself in the place of floating bodies to the instant when the man in the aerial canoe pointed the metal tube at him.
“The extra-Terrestrial, Monat, has a theory that some beings—call them Whomever or X—have been observing mankind since he ceased to be an ape. For at least two million years. These superbeings have, in some manner, recorded every cell of every human being that ever lived from the moment of conception, probably, to the moment of death. This seems a staggering concept, but it is no more staggering than the resurrection of all humanity and the reshaping of this planet into one Rivervalley. The recordings may have been made when the recordees were living. Or it may be that these superbeings detected vibrations from the past, just as we on Earth saw the light of stars as they had been a thousand years before.
“Monat, however, inclines to the former theory. He does not believe in time travel even in a limited sense.
“Monat believes that the X’s stored these recordings. How, he does not know. But this planet was then reshaped for us. It is obviously one great Riverworld. During our journey up River, we’ve talked to dozens whose descriptions leave no doubt that they come from widely scattered parts, from all over. One was from far up in the northern hemisphere; another, far down in the southern. All the descriptions fall together to make a picture of a world that has been reworked into one zigzagging Rivervalley.
“The people we talked to were killed or died by accident here and were resurrected again in the areas we happened to be traveling through. Monat says that we resurrectees are still being recorded. And when one of us dies again, the up-to-the-minute recordings are being placed somewhere—maybe under the surface of this planet—and played into energy-matter converters. The bodies were reproduced as they were at the moment of death and then the rejuvenating devices restored the sleeping bodies. Probably in that same chamber in which I awoke. After this, the bodies, young and whole again, were recorded and then destroyed. And the recordings were played out again, this time through devices under the ground. Once more, energy-matter converters, probably using the heat of this planet’s molten core as energy, reproduced us above the ground, near the grailstones. I do not know why they are not resurrected a second time in the same spot where they died. But then I don’t know why all our hairs were shaven off or why men’s facial hairs don’t grow or why men were circumcised and women made virgins again. Or why we were resurrected. For what purpose? Whoever put us here has not shown up to tell us why.”
“The thing is,” Frigate said, “the thing is, we are not the same people we were on Earth. I died. Burton died. You died, Hermann Göring. Everybody died. And we cannot be brought back to life!”
Göring sucked on his pipe noisily, stared at Frigate, and then said, “Why not? I am living again. Do you deny that?”
“Yes! I do deny that—in a sense. You are living. But you are not the Hermann Göring who was born in Marienbad Sanatorium at Rosenheim in Bavaria on January 12, 1893. You are not the Hermann Göring whose godfather was Dr. Hermann Eppenstein, a Jew converted to Christianity. You are not the Göring who succeeded von Richthofen after his death and continued to lead his fliers against the Allies even after the war ended. You are not the Reichsmarschal of Hitler’s Germany nor the refugee arrested by Lieutenant Jerome N. Shapiro. Eppenstein and Shapiro, hah! And you are not the Hermann Göring who took his life by swallowing potassium cyanide during his trial for his crimes against humanity!”
Göring tamped his pipe with tobacco and said, mildly, “You certainly know much about me. I should be flattered, I suppose. At least, I was not forgotten.”
“Generally, you were,” Frigate said. “You did have a long-lived reputation as a sinister clown, a failure, and a toady.”
Burton was surprised. He had not known that the fellow would stand up to someone who had power of life and death over him or who had treated him so painfully. But then perhaps Frigate hoped to be killed.
It was probable that he was banking on Göring’s curiosity.
Göring said, “Explain your statement. Not about my reputation. Every man of importance expects to be reviled and misunderstood by the brainless masses. Explain why I am not the same man.”
Frigate smiled slightly and said, “You are the product, the hybrid, of a recording and an energy-matter converter. You were made with all the memories of the dead man Hermann Göring and with every cell of his body a duplicate. You have everything he had. So you think you are Göring. But you are not! You are a duplication, and that is all! The original Hermann Göring is nothing but molecules that have been absorbed into the soil and the air and so into plants and back into the flesh of beasts and men and out again as excrement, und so weiter!
“But you, here before me, are not the original, any more than the recording on a disc or a tape is the original voice, the vibrations issuing from the mouth of a man and detected and converted by an electronic device and then replayed.”
Burton understood the reference, since he had seen an Edison phonograph in Paris in 1888. He felt outraged, actually violated, at Frigate’s assertions.
Göring’s wide-open eyes and reddening face indicated that he, too, felt threatened down to the core of his being.
After stuttering, Göring said, “And why would these beings go to all this trouble just to make duplicates?”
Frigate shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”
Göring heaved up from his chair and pointed the stem of his pipe at Frigate.
“You lie!” he screamed in German. “You lie, scheisshund!”
Frigate quivered as if he expected to
be struck over the kidneys again, but he said, “I must be right. Of course, you don’t have to believe what I say. I can’t prove anything. And I understand exactly how you feel. I know that I am Peter Jairus Frigate, born 1918, died A.D. 2008. But I also must believe, because logic tells me so, that I am only, really, a being who has the memories of that Frigate who will never rise from the dead. In a sense, I am the son of that Frigate who can never exist again. Not flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, but mind of his mind. I am not the man who was born of a woman on that lost world of Earth. I am the byblow of science and a machine. Unless….”
Göring said, “Yes? Unless what?”
“Unless there is some entity attached to the human body, an entity which is the human being. I mean, it contains all that makes the individual what he is, and when the body is destroyed, this entity still exists. So that, if the body were to be made again, this entity, storing the essence of the individual, could be attached again to the body. And it would record everything that the body recorded. And so the original individual would live again. He would not be just a duplicate.”
Burton said, “For God’s sake, Pete! Are you proposing the soul?”
Frigate nodded and said, “Something analagous to the soul. Something that the primitives dimly apprehended and called a soul.”
Göring laughed uproariously. Burton would have laughed, but he did not care to give Göring any support, moral or intellectual.
When Göring had quit laughing, he said, “Even here, in a world which is clearly the result of science, the supernaturalists won’t quit trying. Well, enough of that. To more practical and immediate matters. Tell me, have you changed your mind? Are you ready to join me?”
Burton glared and said, “I would not be under the orders of a man who rapes women; moreover, I respect the Israelis. I would rather be a slave with them than free with you.”
Göring scowled and said, harshly, “Very well. I thought as much. But I had hoped…well, I have been having trouble with the Roman. If he gets his way, you will see how merciful I have been to you slaves. You do not know him. Only my intervention has saved one of you being tortured to death every night for his amusement.”
At noon, the two returned to their work in the hills. Neither got a chance to speak to Targoff or any of the slaves, since their duties happened not to bring them into contact. They did not dare make an open attempt to talk to him, because that would have meant a severe beating.
After they returned to the stockade in the evening, Burton told the others what had happened.
“More than likely Targoff will not believe my story. He’ll think we’re spies. Even if he’s not certain, he can’t afford to take chances. So there’ll be trouble. It’s too bad that this had to happen. The escape plan will have to be cancelled for tonight.”
Nothing untoward took place—at first. The Israelis walked away from Burton and Frigate when they tried to talk to them. The stars came out, and the stockade was flooded with a light almost as bright as a full moon on Earth.
The prisoners stayed inside their barracks, but they talked in low voices with their heads together. Despite their deep tiredness, they could not sleep. The guards must have sensed the tension, even though they could not see or hear the men in the huts. They walked back and forth on the walks, stood together talking, and peered down into the enclosure by the light of the night sky and the flames of the resin torches.
“Targoff will do nothing until it rains,” Burton said. He gave orders. Frigate was to stand first watch; Robert Spruce, the second; Burton, third. Burton lay down on his pile of leaves and, ignoring the murmuring of voices and the moving around of bodies, fell asleep.
It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when Spruce touched him. He rose quickly to his feet, yawned, and stretched. The others were all awake. Within a few minutes, the first of the clouds formed. In ten minutes, the stars were blotted out. Thunder grumbled way up in the mountains, and the first lightning flash forked the sky.
Lightning struck near. Burton saw by its flash that the guards were huddled under the roofs sticking out from the base of the watch houses at each corner of the stockade. They were covered with towels against the chill and the rain.
Burton crawled from his barracks to the next. Targoff was standing inside the entrance. Burton stood up and said, “Does the plan still hold?”
“You know better than that,” Targoff said. A bolt of lightning showed his angry face. “You Judas!”
He stepped forward, and a dozen men followed him. Burton did not wait; he attacked. But, as he rushed forward, he heard a strange sound. He paused to look out through the door. Another flash revealed a guard sprawled facedown in the grass beneath a walk.
Targoff had put his fists down when Burton turned his back on him. He said, “What’s going on, Burton?”
“Wait,” the Englishman replied. He had no more idea than the Israeli about what was happening, but anything unexpected could be to his advantage.
Lightning illuminated the squat figure of Kazz on the wooden walk. He was swinging a huge stone axe against a group of guards who were in the angle formed by the meeting of the two walls. Another flash. The guards were sprawled out on the walk. Darkness. At the next blaze of light, another was down; the remaining two were running away down the walk in different directions.
Another bolt very near the wall showed that, finally, the other guards were aware of what was happening. They ran down the walk, shouting and waving their spears.
Kazz, ignoring them, slid a long bamboo ladder down into the enclosure and then he threw a bundle of spears after it. By the next flash, he could be seen advancing toward the nearest guards.
Burton snatched a spear and almost ran up the ladder. The others, including the Israeli, were behind him. The fight was bloody and brief. With the guards on the walk either stabbed or hurled to their deaths, only those in the watch houses remained. The ladder was carried to the other end of the stockade and placed against the gate. In two minutes, men had climbed to the outside, dropped down, and opened the gate. For the first time, Burton found the chance to talk to Kazz.
“I thought you had sold us out.”
“No. Not me, Kazz,” Kazz said reproachfully. “You know I love you, Burton-naq. You’re my friend, my chief. I pretend to join your enemies because that’s playing it smart. I surprise you don’t do the same. You’re no dummy.”
“Certainly, you aren’t,” Burton said. “But I couldn’t bring myself to kill those slaves.”
Lightning revealed Kazz shrugging. He said, “That don’t bother me. I don’t know them. Besides, you hear Göring. He say they die anyway.”
“It’s a good thing you chose tonight to rescue us,” Burton said. He did not tell Kazz why since he did not want to confuse him. Moreover, there were more important things to do.
“Tonight’s a good night for this,” Kazz said. “Big battle going on. Tullius and Göring get very drunk and quarrel. They fight; their men fight. While they kill each other, invaders come. Those brown men across The River…what you call them?…Onondagas, that’s them. Their boats come just before rain come. They make raid to steal slaves, too. Or maybe just for the hell of it. So, I think, now’s good time to start my plan, get Burton-naq free.”
As suddenly as it had come, the rain ceased. Burton could hear shouts and screams from far off, toward The River. Drums were beating up and down The Riverbanks. He said to Targoff, “We can either try to escape, and probably do so easily, or we can attack.”
“I intend to wipe out the beasts who enslaved us,” Targoff said. “There are other stockades nearby. I’ve sent men to open their gates. The rest are too far away to reach quickly; they’re strung out at half-mile intervals.”
By then, the blockhouse in which the off-duty guards lived had been stormed. The slaves armed themselves and then started toward the noise of the conflict. Burton’s group was on the right flank. They had not gone half a mile before they came upon corpses and wounded, a mi
xture of Onondagas and whites.
Despite the heavy rain, a fire had broken out. By its increasing light, they saw that the flames came from the longhouse. Outlined in the glare were struggling figures. The escapees advanced across the plain. Suddenly, one side broke and ran toward them with the victors, whooping and screaming jubilantly, after them.
“There’s Göring,” Frigate said. “His fat isn’t going to help him get away, that’s for sure.”
He pointed, and Burton could see the German desperately pumping his legs but falling behind the others. “I don’t want the Indians to have the honor of killing him,” Burton said. “We owe it to Alice to get him.”
Campbell’s long-legged figure was ahead of them all, and it was toward him that Burton threw his spear. To the Scot, the missile must have seemed to come out of the darkness from nowhere. Too late, he tried to dodge. The flint head buried itself in the flesh between his left shoulder and chest, and he fell on his side. He tried to get up a moment afterward, but he was kicked back down by Burton.
Campbell’s eyes rolled; blood trickled from his mouth. He pointed at another wound, a deep gash in his side just below the ribs. “You…your woman…Wilfreda…did that,” he gasped. “But I killed her, the bitch….”
Burton wanted to ask him where Alice was, but Kazz, screaming phrases in his native tongue, brought his club down on the Scot’s head. Burton picked up his spear and ran after Kazz. “Don’t kill Göring!” he shouted. “Leave him to me!”
Kazz did not hear him; he was busy fighting with two Onondagas. Burton saw Alice as she ran by him. He reached out and grabbed her and spun her around. She screamed and started to struggle. Burton shouted at her; suddenly, recognizing him, she collapsed into his arms and began weeping. Burton would have tried to comfort her, but he was afraid that Göring would escape him. He pushed her away and ran toward the German and threw his spear. It grazed Göring’s head, and he screamed and stopped running and began to look for the weapon but Burton was on him. Both fell to the ground and rolled over and over, each trying to strangle the other.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat Page 15
