Whatever the motivation, the idea was very dangerous and stupid. Salisbury had let the search for Kelly drop because he had not heard from her nor had his police spies heard that she was disclosing anything about the affair. As long as she kept her mouth shut, she was no peril to the establishment that Salisbury represented. Now, however, on receiving a message demanding money for silence, Salisbury put the machinery of retribution in motion.
Urged by Salisbury, Gull lost no time in reacting. The prime minister had given him orders to put the lid back on, but Salisbury probably had no glimmering of how Gull intended to do this. Certainly, desperate as he was to silence the blackmailers, he would have been horrified if he had known what Gull intended. It was one thing to imprison a lower-class woman in a series of hospitals and workhouses for life, a regrettable but necessary deed from Salisbury's viewpoint. But to murder and butcher the women was a deed that Salisbury could not have ordered. Once the slayings had started, however, Salisbury could only let them go on and do his best to protect "Jack the Ripper."
John Netley was the coachman who had driven Prince Eddy to the Sickert home and other places where Eddy did what a prince of the realm was not supposed to do. Gull had insured his silence with threats and bribes after Eddy and Alice Crook had been abducted. Knowing Netley's character, Gull now told him, in general terms, what his plans were for the blackmailers. Netley was eager to serve him. And, since Sickert knew the principals in the affair, was well acquainted with the East End, and had accepted money to keep his mouth shut about Eddy and Crook, Sickert was enlisted by Gull. Though reluctant to take part in the murders, he knew that if he did not, he would himself be killed.
The coach, driven by Netley, holding Sickert and Gull, drove into the Whitechapel area. After a number of reconnoiterings, Gull and Sickert lured Mary Anne Nichols into their coach by requesting her services. Flattered that two such elegant gentlemen would even look at her, though doubtless wondering what kinky acts they had in mind, Nichols got into the coach. Gull offered her a glass of wine containing a drug (Knight had suggested he used poisoned grapes), and, when she was unconscious, he cut her throat from left to right, disemboweled her and stabbed her. Sickert leaned out of the coach and vomited.
Afterward, the coach drove to the dark and momentarily deserted street of Bucks Row, where Netley and Sickert carried the body from the coach and laid it out. They knew the schedule of the patrolman, but, even so, they drove off only a few minutes before he arrived.
Eight days later, the three struck again. Anne Siffey, alias Chapman, was found dead in the backyard of No. 29,
Hanbury Street
. Her throat had been deeply cut from left to right and back again. Her small intestines and a flap of the abdomen were on her right side near the shoulder, still attached by a cord to the rest of the intestines in the body. Two skin flaps from the lower abdominal region were lying in a pool of blood above the left shoulder.
This time, Gull had the unconscious woman taken from the coach to the backyard, where he performed the ritualistic mutilations in the dim light.
On September 29, Gull killed two whores. The first murder was hastily done because Long Liz Stride refused to get into the coach. Netley and Sickert left the coach, seized her, and held her while Gull cut her throat. But Gull did not have the time to do what he would have liked. He heard loud voices nearby and so did not want to risk being seen carrying her body into the coach. The three left hurriedly.
Later that evening, the second murder was done with plenty of time for execution. Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square (not a part of the Whitechapel area), part of her nose slashed off, the right ear lobe almost cut off, her face and throat worked over with a sharp instrument, her bowels removed, and her left kidney and uterus missing.
Unfortunately, from Gull's viewpoint — and Eddowes' — Sickert had mistaken Eddowes for Marie Kelly. She had not been Kelly's confidante, was totally unaware of the Eddy-Crook events, and died because the painter had thought, in the dim light, that she was Marie Jeannette Kelly. Though he had discovered his error immediately after her throat was cut, Gull insisted on performing the ritual. Why waste his time? Besides, she was just a whore, and if, by any chance, some policeman had an inkling of the plot, she would be a false clue.
In the late evening of November 9, the last and most important target, Kelly, was subjected to the most savage butchering of all. The ritual took two hours. And the Jack the Ripper murders ceased.
Burton had located the recordings of Gull, Netley, Kelly, Crook, Sickert, Salisbury, Prince Eddy, and Stride. For some reason the Computer could not explain, Chapman's and Nichols' were unavailable. The Computer, however, continued looking for them.
Burton viewed the events from the meeting of Eddy with Annie Crook through the slaying of Kelly via the eyes and ears of the recordings. He replayed some of these several times, though he vomited twice, the first time watching Gull working on Eddowes, the second time during Kelly's dissection. He had thought that he had a strong stomach, but he had overestimated its tolerance.
He then had the Computer run some of the episodes from the Riverworld life of each of the participants in the Ripper affair. Annie Elizabeth Crook had been raised on The River with her sanity restored but with most of her memory from 1888 to 1920 missing.
Sir William Gull's schizophrenia seemed to have been eliminated. Twenty years after the first resurrection, he had become converted to a religious sect, the Dowists, by the founder himself, Lorenzo Dow.
John Netley, the coachman, had been deeply affected by the shock of drowning in the Thames and then awakening on the Riverbank. For six months, his behavior could have been described as Christian-like (according to the ideal, not the practice .of most Christians). Once the shock had worn off and he was fairly sure that he was not going to be punished for his sins, he reverted to his Earthly self, an opportunistic, lecherous, self-centered, and cold-blooded criminal.
Walter Sickert, the painter, early converted to the Church of the Second Chance and rose to the rank of bishop.
Long Liz Stride and Marie Kelly were resurrected in The Valley within a few feet of each other. For five years, they had been good friends and close neighbors. Neither had continued as a prostitute, though they had taken a series of lovers, and they drank as much as they could get. Then Stride had gotten religion and joined a popular Buddhist sect, the Nichirenites. Kelly had left her, gone up-River, and, after many adventures, settled down in a peaceful area. Both had died during the terrible times following the grailstone shutdown on the right bank of The River.
The long journeys of all were ended, for the time being, anyway. They were locked up in the physical recordings and the wathans that floated whirling in the central well.
22
* * *
His investigation of the Ripper affair was completed; the mystery, solved. Now he could take residence in his private world, but, for some unfathomable reason, he was still reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, he could not put off moving long. It irked him to be unconsciously opposing himself; he would not put up with it.
Before going, though, he considered what he had been living through, vicariously, these past two weeks. He was shaken and appalled, especially by the world as seen through the eyes of the whores. He had witnessed many savage and grisly deeds and much injustice and oppression, but none matched the grisliness and inhumanity of the deed that was the East End of London in the 1880s. In this relatively small area were jampacked eight hundred thousand people, hungry most of the time, eating swill and glad to have it, drunk if they could afford it and often when they could not, dwelling in small, dirty rooms with sweating peeling walls alive with vermin, cruel to each other, ignorant, superstitious, and, worst condition of all, hopeless.
Burton knew that the lives of the East Enders had been wretched, but not until he had lived in it, even if in a secondhand manner, was he made sick and guilty by the mere existence of that hellhole. Guilty because he now understood tha
t he and all others who had ignored it were responsible.
From one viewpoint, perverted but nevertheless valid, the Ripper had done a deed of mercy when he had put those hungry, gaunt, diseased and hopeless whores out of their deep misery.
Also, unwittingly, he had forced the England outside of the East End to look at the inferno they had turned their eyes away from. The result had been a great cry for change, and many buildings had been torn down to make way for better housing. But in time the poverty and pain had resumed its former level — it had never subsided much — and the East End was forgotten by those who did not have to live there.
Frigate, when told by Burton of the results of his investigation, was intrigued. He said, "What you should do is track down those absentee landlords who made money from the horribly poor and deliver them to oblivion."
"That's Marxism," Burton said.
"I despised the practice of communism, but it had some great ideals," Frigate said. "I also despised the practice of capitalism, many aspects of it anyway."
"But it had its ideals," Burton said.
He had looked at Frigate and then laughed. "Has any social-political-economic system ever gotten anywhere near its ideals? Haven't they all been corrupted?"
"Of course. So . . . the corrupters should be punished."
Nur el-Musafir had pointed out what they knew but had ignored.
"It does not matter what they . . . we . . . did on Earth. What matters is what we're doing now. If the corrupter and the corrupted have changed for the better, then they should be rewarded as much as those who have always been virtuous. Now, let me define virtue and the virtuous . . ." He smiled.
"No, I think not. You are tired of the sage of the tower, as you sometimes call me. My truths make you uneasy even though you agree with me."
Frigate said, "About this business of wondering whom to resurrect to be our companions. Take Cleopatra, for instance. You and I would like to see her in the flesh and hear her story, find out the truth of what went on then. But she liked to stick sharp pins in her slave-girls' breasts, and she could enjoy their screams and writhings. Shakespeare ignored that when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra. So did George Bernard Shaw in his Caesar and Cleopatra. From a literary viewpoint, they were right. Could you believe in or care about the genius and greatness of Cleopatra and Caesar or sorrow over their tragedy if you saw their barbaric sadism and callous murderousness? We, however, live in the real world, not that of fiction. So, would you want Cleopatra or Caesar or Antony as your neighbor?"
"Nur would say that depends upon how they are now."
"He's right, of course. He's always right. Nevertheless . . ."
He spoke to Nur.
"You're an elitist. You believe, and you're probably right, that very few have the inborn ability to become Sufi or its philosophical-ethical equivalent. You maintain that even fewer will Go On. The majority just don't have it in them to attain the ethical level to do that. Too bad, but that's the way it is. Nature is wasteful with bodies, and she is just as wasteful with souls. Nature has arranged that most flies will become food for birds and frogs, and she has also arranged that most souls will not achieve salvation but will, even though they don't die like the flies, fail to reach the level set for them. A few Go On, but most are like the flies who become food."
"The difference," Nur said, "is that flies are brainless and soulless but human beings are sentient and are aware of what they must do. Should be aware, anyway."
Burton said, "Would Nature, God, if you will, be that wasteful, that callous?"
"He gave mankind free will," Nur said. "It is not God's fault that there is such a waste."
"Yes, but you yourself have said that genetic .defects, chemical imbalances, accidents to the brain, and social environment can influence a person's behavior."
"Influence, yes. Determine, no. No. I must qualify that. There are certain situations and conditions where a person cannot use his free will. But . . . that is not so here, not in the Riverworld."
"What if the Ethicals had not given us a second chance?"
Nur smiled and held up his palms outward.
"Ah, but He did arrange it so that the Ethicals did give us another chance."
"Which, according to you, most people are blowing."
"You believe it, too, don't you?"
Burton and Frigate felt uncomfortable. They usually did when they talked with Nur about serious subjects.
That was the last conversation he had in the apartment. As soon as the screens had faded, Burton went into the corridor. He thought for a moment of canceling the codeword so that someone else could use the rooms. However, he might need a place to run to, a place where no one could find him.
Carrying no possessions except the beamer, wearing only a towel-kilt and sandals, he passed through the doorway. Immediately, a screen appeared on the wall across the corridor. Ignoring the picture — his father approaching him threateningly, for what reason Burton did not remember — Burton started to get into the flying chair parked by the wall. Then he turned away from it to face the length of the hall. A roaring was coming from that direction. His hand started toward his beamer but stopped as he recognized the sound.
Presently, a huge black motorcycle zoomed around the corner of the hall several hundred yards away. Its driver was leaning the vehicle deeply to take the turn at high speed. Then the machine straightened up, and, accompanied by a wall-screen displaying an event in the driver's past, headed toward Burton. The rider, a big black man wearing a visored helmet and a black leather outfit, flashed big white teeth at him.
Burton stood by the chair, refusing to move even though the handlebar of the cycle missed him by only an inch.
"Watch it, motherfucker!" the man shouted, and his laughter dopplered back to Burton.
Burton swore, and he had the Computer form a screen for him so that he could put in a call to Tom Turpin. He had to wait for several minutes before Turpin's grinning face appeared. He was surrounded by his entourage, men and women flashily dressed, talking loudly and laughing shrilly. Tom was wearing an early twentieth-century suit with a bright and clashing checked design and a scarlet derby with a long white feather. A huge cigar was in his mouth. He had gained at least ten pounds since Burton had last seen him.
"How you doing, baby?"
"I'm not having as good a time as you," Burton said sourly. "Tom, I have a complaint, a legitimate one."
"We sure don't want no illegitimate gripes, do we?" Torn said, and he puffed out thick green smoke.
"You people are speeding through the halls on motorcycles and cars and God only knows what else," Burton said. "I've not only almost been hit twice, but the stink of gas and horse shit is most obnoxious. Can't you do something about them? They're dangerous and offensive."
"Hell, no, I can't do anything about it," Tom said, still smiling. "They're my people, yeah, and I'm the king here. But I don't have no police force, you know. Besides, the robots clean up the horsepoppy, and the ventilators clean up the smoke. And you can hear them coming, can't you? Just stand aside. Anyway, it must be boring and lonely down there. Don't they give you a thrill, make you feel like you ain't alone? Tell you, Dick, you been living too long by yourself. It sours your milk. Why don't you get a woman? Hell, get four or five. Maybe you won't be so bitchy then."
"You won't do anything about it?"
"Can't. Won't. Them niggers are really uppity."
He grinned. "There goes the neighborhood, right? Tell you what, Dick. You just shoot them next time they annoy you. Won't nobody be hurt permanently. I'll just resurrect them, and we'll all have a good laugh. Course, next time, they might shoot you. See you, Dick. Have a good day."
The screen faded out.
Burton was seething. There was, however, little he could do about the situation unless he wanted to start a miniwar. Which he did not. Nevertheless . . . He got into his chair and took off for his private world. There he would be disturbed by no one, and, when he populated it, he woul
d make sure that his companions would be not only agreeable but sensitive. Yet he loved an argument, and he found verbally violent quarrels most satisfying.
Going around the corner from which the black rider had come, Burton almost hit the heads of five people. Startled, he moved the controls on the arm so that his chair lifted above them. They had ducked, but if the chair had been a little lower, it would have struck the group.
His heart pounding hard because of the unexpectedness of the encounter, he stopped the chair, revolved it, and set it down on the floor. The two men and three women were strangers, but they did not seem to be dangerous. They were naked and so had no place to hide weapons. Moreover, they were obviously frightened and unsure of themselves. They did not approach him, though they did call out to him in English. British English, one with the accent of a cultured man, one with a Cockney accent, one with a Scotch burr, one with an Irish lilt, and one with a foreign accent, probably Scandinavian.
Burton had taken two steps toward them when he stopped.
"My God!"
He recognized them now. Gull, Netley, Crook, Kelly and Stride.
23
* * *
Burton usually reacted swiftly to any situation and was seldom jellied with astonishment or fear. But seeing these five here was so unexpected and so impossible that he could only stare at them for a few seconds. If they had been unknown to him, he would have been surprised, but that he knew them so well, and thought them locked up in the recordings, locked his brain.
They, of course, were in a far worse state than he. They had no idea of where they were or why they had been raised. At least, judging from their expressions, they had not been told anything. Whoever had resurrected them here must have left them to their own devices. Probably, thought Burton, his brain beginning to flicker with a little fire, probably it's no coincidence that they were placed near me. But who . . . who in the name of God? . . . could have done this? And why?
Riverworld05- Gods of Riverworld (1983) Page 19
