The Dark Design

by Philip José Farmer

At that time, Burton and the others had been talking to the local headman in the council house. Kazz had stayed behind to watch their boat. After the woman had gone, Kazz was offered some drinks of lichen-alcohol by several people who wanted to talk to him. These had never seen a Neanderthal before, and the liquor was an inducement to get him to talk. Kazz, easily induced and seduced by free booze, was half-drunk by the time his crewmates returned. Burton had reproached him so harshly that Kazz had never again drunk while on guard duty.

  He also forgot about the woman.

  After bringing Besst out of the trance, Burton sat for a while in thought. Besst and Kazz shifted uneasily and gave each other wondering looks. Finally, he made a decision. There was no longer any use keeping them in the dark. Nor would he exclude Alice from now on. He owed the Stranger nothing, and the fact that he had not reappeared again could mean that he, Burton, had no reason to keep silent. Besides, though he was naturally secretive, he longed now to share his experiences.

  Though he gave only a bare outline, he took over an hour. Both Besst and Kazz were amazed, and they had many questions. He held up his hand for silence.

  “Later! Later! As of now, we must question them. The Arcturan’s a much tougher customer, so we’ll tackle Frigate first.”

  He told them what they must do. Kazz said, “But wouldn’t it be best to knock out Monat and tie him up? What if he wakes up while we’re getting Frigate?”

  “I don’t want to make any more noise than we have to. If Loghu and Alice hear us, we’ll have a brouhaha.”

  “A what?”

  “An uproar. Let’s go.”

  The three of them made their way through the fog. Burton thought of some more questions he would ask Frigate. For instance, Monat, Frigate, and Ruach must have known that Spruce was an agent. There had been plenty of opportunity for them to talk to him while they had been grail-slaves. And Monat had had opportunities after the revolt to hypnotize Kazz so he would see a mark on Spruce. Why had he not done that?

  If Monat had not been able to get to Kazz after the revolt, he should then have told Spruce to leave the area at once. Or, at least, to wear a cloth around his head when conditions were favorable for seeing the mark.

  Could Spruce not have known that they were his fellow agents? They might be so numerous that each was familiar only with a few others. But surely all would know of Monat.

  He stopped, and drew in his breath.

  The Mysterious Stranger had never said anything about having his own agents. Yet, he was a renegade, and he might have enlisted a few highly trusted people. Could Spruce have been one? And could Monat somehow have found this out? And so gotten rid of him by not telling him about Kazz’s visual abilities?

  That did not seem probable. If Monat had found out that Spruce was on the Stranger’s side—and how would he ever be able to do that?—would he not then have hypnotized Spruce? That would enable him to identify the Stranger, supposing, of course, that Spruce knew who he was.

  There was another possibility. Monat knew of Spruce’s ability to kill himself by means of the sphere on his forebrain. Thus, he was not worried that Spruce would be forced to divulge any information at all.

  Also, he may have used Spruce as a messenger. He would have given him some information to pass on when Spruce was resurrected at HQ—if HQ meant headquarters.

  Monat had taken part in Spruce’s inquistion. How amused he must have been at that. Also, it was Monat who had given Spruce some leading questions.

  Had Spruce been prepared by Monat to give the answers he had made? Were they all lies?

  If so, why should he lie? Why were all resurrectees kept in the dark?

  It was quite possible that Spruce, acting on Monat’s orders, had deliberately ensured that Kazz would notice him.

  By then, the three had boarded the Snark. The Neanderthals stayed above. Burton felt his way to the cabin, down the companionway, and, counting the compartment doors, stopped outside Frigate’s and Loghu’s. He opened the door slowly and stepped inside. It was a very small space, just large enough to hold two bunks against the bulkhead and room to climb down from them. The bunk-chambers were the only places where any privacy was available. Even defecation was done in them, in the bamboo chamber pots which were stored in a rack to one side.

  Frigate usually slept in the top bunk. Burton moved forward, his hand outstretched. He would wake him gently, whisper that it was his watch, and then he would follow him to the deck. There Kazz would knock him out, and he would be carried to the hut.

  Since it would be impossible to keep him from killing himself once he was fully conscious, Burton had decided to try to mesmerize him as he was regaining his wits. It would be a chancy procedure, but he would have to try it. Frigate, unlike Spruce, might not be so willing to commit suicide now that there were no more resurrections.

  However, Burton was not sure that the Ethicals’ agents were not resurrected.

  His fingertips felt the smooth sideboard of the bunk. They moved up onto the cloths that served as a mattress. They stopped.

  Frigate was not in his bunk.

  Burton felt along the cloths though he knew that nobody was on the bunk. They were warm. Then he stood for a minute. Had Frigate gone above to relieve himself because he did not want to awake Loghu? Or had he awakened early and decided to talk to his captain a few minutes before going on guard duty?

  Or had he… ? Burton felt furious. Had he sneaked out of bed and now was with Alice?

  Feeling ashamed of himself, he rejected that idea. Alice was honest. She would never betray him. If she wanted another lover, she would have said so. She would have told him and then left him. Nor did he believe that Frigate would ever do anything like that to him, though he may have contemplated it in his mind.

  He bent down and reached out until he touched cloth. His fingers moved along, traced a curve—Loghu’s breast under the cloth—and he backed out and closed the door.

  Silently, his heart thudding so fast he could almost believe that it could be heard throughout the cabin, he moved to Monat’s partition. His ear against the door, he listened. Silence. He straightened, opened the door, and felt into the upper bunk. Monat was not there, but he could be sleeping in the lower bunk. If so, his breathing was not audible.

  His hand slid over unoccupied cloths.

  Cursing softly, he groped back to the deck.

  Kazz stepped out of the fog with his fist raised.

  “Wallah! What’s the matter?”

  “They’re both gone,” Burton said.

  “But… how could that be?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Monat knew that something was wrong. He’s the most sensitive person I’ve ever met; he can read your slightest expression, detect the feeblest nuance in your voice. Or perhaps he heard you wake up Besst, investigated, and guessed the truth. For all I know, he may have been listening to us outside the door of the hut.”

  “Neither Besst or me made any noise. We was as silent as a weasel sneaking up on a rabbit.”

  “I know. Look around. See if our launch is missing.”

  He met Kazz coming around the other way.

  “The boats’re all here.”

  Burton roused Loghu and Alice. While they drank hot coffee, he outlined everything that had happened to him in connection with the Ethicals. They were stunned, but they kept silent until he had finished. Questions hailstormed him then, but he said that he would answer them later. It would be dawn shortly, which meant that they had to put their grails on the stone for breakfast.

  Alice was the only one who had not said anything. It was evident from her narrowed eyes and tight lips that she was furious.

  “I am sorry that I had to keep all this from you,” Burton said. “But surely you can see how necessary it was? What if I told you everything and then the Ethicals grabbed you, as they did me? They could have read your mind and discovered that they had erred in thinking they had erased relevant portions of my memory.”

  “They didn’
t do so,” she said. “Why should they have even thought of that?”

  “How do you know they didn’t?” he said. “You wouldn’t remember it if they had done it.”

  That gave her another shock. Nevertheless, she did not speak again until after breakfast.

  This took place in unusual weather. Normally, the sun quickly burned off the fog. The sky was clear the rest of the day in the tropical zone or until midafternoon in the temperate zones. In the latter, clouds quickly gathered, rain fell for fifteen minutes or so, and then the clouds disappeared.

  This morning, however, black masses rolled between sun and earth. Lightning flickered as if chips of the bright sky above the clouds were falling through. Thunder was the muttering of a giant behind the mountains. A pale light spread over the land, staining it brownish-yellow. The faces around the grailstone looked as if a blight had settled upon them.

  Kazz and Besst hunched down uneasily over their food and looked around as if they expected an unwelcome visitor. He muttered in his native tongue, “The-Bear-Who-Collects-The-Bad is walking.”

  Besst almost whined. “We must find a hut to hide in. It is not good to be near the water when he walks.”

  The others looked as if they were going to seek shelter, too. Burton stood up and said loudly, “One moment, please! I’m interested in finding out if any of you are missing a boat!”

  A man said, “Why?”

  “Two of my crew deserted last night, and it’s possible that they stole a boat to get away.”

  Forgetting about the coming storm, the party scattered to look along the bank. Within a minute, a man reported that his dugout was gone.

  “They’re far away by now,” Kazz said. “But did they go up or down The River?”

  “If there was a signal system in this area, we could find out quickly enough,” Burton said. “Unless, of course, they beached their boat and went into the hills to hide.”

  Alice said, “What do we do now, Dick? If we stay here to look for them, we’ll not be able to get on the Rex.”

  Burton stifled the impulse to tell her not to point out the obvious to him. She was still simmering; no sense in making her boil again.

  “Monat and Frigate can hole up today and sneak out tonight and steal another boat. It would be futile to try to catch them. No, we’ll try to get aboard the paddle wheeler. But those two will come along someday, and when they do…”

  “We’ll tear them apart?” Kazz said.

  Burton shrugged and spread his palms upward.

  “I don’t know. They’ve got the advantage. They can either drop dead on us or lie to us. Until we get to the tower…”

  Alice spoke then, her eyes dark with accustomed reverie:

  “If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly

  I did turn as he pointed; neither pride

  Nor hope rekindling at the end descried, So much as gladness that some end might be.

  “For, what with my world-wide wandering, What with my search drawn out thro’ years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope

  With that obstreperous joy success would bring—

  I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

  “There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame

  I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

  Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set And blew, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’”

  Burton grinned savagely. “Browning would have thought… must think… that this world is even stranger than the setting of his outré poem. I appreciate your sentiment, even if he said it first, Alice. Very well, we will go to the Dark Tower.”

  “I don’t know what Alice was talking about,” Kazz said. “Anyway, just how’re we going to get on that boat?”

  “If King John has room for us, I’ll offer him our treasure trove, our free-grails. That should appeal even to the ungreediest heart.”

  “And if he doesn’t have room?”

  He was silent for a moment. That tickle in the back of his brain, that feeling that he had overlooked some linkage between agents, had returned while Alice was speaking. And now he saw, or thought he saw, the means for scratching the itch, the kind of chain binding the agents together.

  How did they recognize each other? Monat was no problem; he did not need identification. But what kind of secret signal would the human agents use to identify each other?

  If they possessed a Neanderthal’s ability, they could see the negative signal, lack of a sign, in their colleagues’ foreheads. Suppose, though, they did not have this ability? Spruce had been surprised when he found out about Kazz’s optical talent. Though he had not said so, his manner had indicated that he had never heard of such a thing. Evidently, machines were used to detect and translate the symbols into whatever meaning they had. That would probably be done in the PR bubble or whatever HQ was.

  If, then, they could not see the symbols with the naked eye, they would have another means of identification.

  Suppose, just suppose, that there was a cutoff date. A period of time at which no more people from Earth were resurrected, not, at least, on this planet. According to Monat, Frigate, Ruach, and Spruce, that cutoff date had been 2008 A.D.

  What if that was not the true date? What if it were earlier than 2008 A.D.?

  He had no idea what the true date would be, though he had never met anyone, except the agents, who claimed to have lived past 1983 A.D. From now on, he would question every late-twentieth-centurian he met. And if 1983 was the latest at which anybody had died, then he would be fairly certain that that was the cutoff point.

  So… perhaps the Ethicals had contrived a fiction which would enable them to identify each other instantly. That was that they had lived during 2008 A.D. And, of course, there would be a fixed story about events from 1983, or whatever date it was, to 2008.

  Which meant that perhaps it was untrue that the Arcturans had killed most of humanity in that year. The terrible slaughter might never have happened. In fact, anything he had heard about the years 1983-2008 might be a lie. Yet, there was Monat. He was not a Terrestrial. There was no reason to believe that he had not come from a planet of the Bear Watcher.

  For the present, there was no way to explain his presence on The Riverworld.

  Meanwhile, Burton had two means for catching an Ethical. Kazz was one; the 2008 story was another.

  However—humanity lived not only in an as-if world, it was a but-if world, too—however, just possibly the agents had been recruited from a time past 1983. So, their stories could be true.

  There were so many possibilities. For instance, how did he know that Monat, Frigate, and Ruach had told him the truth about what had happened to them when they were away from him? There was that incident when Frigate had claimed he had met the publisher who had cheated him on Earth. Frigate said he had gotten a long-delayed revenge by punching him on the nose.

  There were bruises on Frigate, supposedly gotten during the fight with Sharkko and his gang. Those could have come from conflict with others, though. Frigate’s nature was such that he dreaded violence, physical or verbal. He might fantasize revenge, but he would never carry it out.

  Suppose, just suppose, that the agents adopted disguises based on real life Terrestrials. What if there was an actual Peter Jairus Frigate somewhere on this planet? The pseudo-Frigate could be pretending to be the man who had had such an intense interest in Burton’s life. That would be one means of getting close to Burton, of making sure that Burton would let him attach himself to Burton. After all, it would be hard for any man to be indifferent to his biographer, to a person who seemed to worship him.

  Yet, why would it be necessary for an agent to adopt such a disguise? Why not make up one from whole cloth?

  Perhaps it was not necessary, it was just easier, more convenient. As for an age
nt encountering the person he was pretending to be, that was highly unlikely.

  There were so many potentialities, so many questions to be answered.

  Alice said, “Dick! What’s the matter?”

  He came out of his reverie with a start. Everybody except his crew and the man whose boat had been stolen had fled. The man looked as if he would like to ask for reparations but was hesitating because he had no one to back him up.

  And wind was whipping the waves of The River and ruffling the thatches of the huts. The Snark thumped against the bumpers of its dock. The light had gone from brownish-yellow to pale gray, making the faces around him even more ghastly. Across the water lightning flashed its fiery tooth, and thunder bellowed like a bear in a cave. Kazz and Besst were obviously longing for him to give the word to look for shelter. The others were only somewhat less nervous.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “You asked what we’d do if King John doesn’t have room for us? Well, monarchs have means for making room if they wish to do so. And if he refuses, I’ll find some way to get aboard. I’m not going to be stopped by anything or anybody!”

  Lightning struck nearby, cracking as if the back of the world had broken. Kazz and Besst led the headlong flight for the nearest building!

  Burton, standing in the heavy rain that had immediately followed the bolt, laughed at them.

  He shouted, “On to the Dark Tower!”

  In the dream, Peter Jairus Frigate was groping through a fog. He was naked; somebody had stolen his clothes. He had to get home before the sun rose and burned the fog off and exposed him to the derision of the world.

  The grass was wet and scratchy. After a while he got tired of walking on the shoulder of the road, and he stepped onto the asphalt pavement. Now and then, as he trudged along, the fog would thin a little, and he could see the trees to his right.

  Somehow, he knew that he was far out in the country. Home was a long way off. But if he walked fast enough, he could make it before dawn. Then he’d have to get into the house without waking his parents. The doors and windows would be locked, which meant that he’d have to throw pebbles against the second-story window in the back. The rattle might wake his brother, Roosevelt.