The Magic Labyrinth

by Philip José Farmer

  Thus, Loghu had taken a very old and still effective method. Without actually saying so, she had suggested that she might be willing to share John's bed. Burton hadn't liked it. He felt like a whoremonger, and it also angered him that it was a woman who had done what he couldn't do. He wasn't as upset as he would have been on Earth or even here many years ago. This world had given him a good opportunity to see what women could do once the inhibitions and strictures of Terrestrial society had been removed. Moreover, it was he who had written: Women the world over are what men have made them. That might have been true in Victorian times, but it no longer applied.

  While going back to the boat, Loghu introduced the others. All except Burton were using their native names. He had decided this time not to use his old half-Arab, half-Pathan guise, not to be Mirza Abdullah Bushiri or Abdul Hassan or any of the many similar guises he'd used on Earth and here. This time, for a reason he didn't explain to his companions, he was posing as Gwalchgwynn, a Dark-Age Welshman who'd lived when the Britons were making their final stand against the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

  "It means 'White Hawk,' Your Majesty," he said.

  "So?" John said. "You are very dark for a white hawk."

  Kazz, the Neanderthal male, rumbled, "He is a great swordsman and marksman, Your Majesty. He would be a good fighter for you."

  "Perhaps I'll give him a chance to demonstrate his skill sometime," John said.

  John looked through lowered lids at Kazz. John was five feet four inches in stature, but he looked tall alongside the Neanderthal. Kazz was squat and big-boned, as all early Old Stone Agers were. His breadloaf-shaped head, the low slanting forehead, thick shelving brows, broad flat nose, and very protruding jaws didn't make him handsome. But he was not subhuman-appearing like the Neanderthals in illustrations or the early reconstructions in museums. He was hairy but no more than the most hirsute of Homo sapiens.

  His mate, Besst, was several inches shorter than he and just as unprepossessing.

  John was interested in the two of them, however, They were small, but their strength was enormous, and both male and female would be good warriors. The low brows did not necessarily front a low intelligence since the gamut of brilliance to stupidity was the same in Neanderthals as in that of modern humanity.

  Half of John's complement was early Paleolithic: John, nicknamed Lackland because for a long time he'd not been able to possess the states he claimed title to, was the younger brother of King Richard I the Lion-hearted, the monarch to whom the legendary Robin Hood remained loyal while John ruled England as regent. He had broad shoulders and an athletic sturdy frame, a heavy jaw, tawny hair, blue eyes, and a terrible temper, though that was nothing unusual for a medieval king. He'd had a very bad reputation during and after his death, though he was no worse than many kings before or since and better than his brother. Contemporary and later chroniclers united to present an unfair portrait of him. He was so loathed that it became a tradition that no one of the British royal family should be named John.

  Richard had designated his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, as his heir. John had refused to accept this, and, while fighting Arthur, had captured him and then imprisoned him in the castle of Falaise and later in Rouen. There Richard's nephew disappeared under circumstances which made most people believe that John had slain him and then thrown the weighted body into the Seine. John had never denied or confirmed the accusations.

  Another blot on his record, .though no larger or blacker than that on the records of many monarchs, was the undeniable fact that he had caused to be starved to death the wife and son of an enemy, the Baron de Braose.

  There were many more stories, some of which were true, about his evil deeds. But not until many centuries later did objective historians record that he had also done much good for England.

  Burton didn't know much about John's life on the River-world except that he had stolen Samuel Clemens' boat. He also knew that it would not be discreet to mention this to John.

  The monarch himself was their guide. He showed them almost everything from the lowest deck to the top, the boiler, main, hurricane, flight, and texas deck, an extension from the lower story of the two-story pilothouse. While they were in the pilothouse, Alice told the king that she was his descendant through his son, John of Gaunt.

  "Indeed," he said. "Were you then a princess or a queen?"

  "Not even of the nobility," she said. "Though I was of the gentry. My father was a relative of Baron Ravensworth. I was born in the Year of Our Lord 1852, when Victoria, another descendant of yours, was queen."

  The king's tawny eyebrows rose.

  "You are the first descendant of mine I've ever met. A very pretty one, too."

  "Thank you, Sire."

  Burton burned even more. Was John contemplating incest, however rarified the consanguinity might be?

  John had apparently been considering taking all of them on as crewmembers, and Alice's distant kinship decided him. After they had gone to the grand salon for a drink, he told them that they could, if they wished, travel the river with him. He told them in detail, first, what the general duties of the crew were and what the discipline consisted of, and then demanded they swear an oath of fealty to him.

  So far, John had not followed up on his intimations that Loghu go to bed with him, but he undoubtedly meant to. Burton asked if he could talk to the others privately for a minute. John graciously gave permission, and they went to a corner to talk.

  "I don't mind," Loghu said. "I might even like it. I've never been mounted by a king. Anyway, I have no man now and I haven't since that bastard Frigate ran out on us. John isn't a bad looker at all, even if he is shorter than I am."

  On Earth, Alice would have been horrified. But she'd seen too much and changed too much; most of her Victorian attitudes had long dissipated.

  "As long as it's voluntary," she said, "then it's not wrong."

  "I'd do it if it were wrong," Loghu said. "We have too much at stake for me to be squeamish."

  "I don't like it," Burton said. He was relieved but didn't want to admit it. "But if we miss this boat, we may not get a chance to get on the other. I'd say that boarding the Mark Twain would be as difficult as it would be for a politician to get into Heaven.

  "However, if he should mistreat you . . ."

  "Oh, I can take care of myself," Loghu said. "If I can't throw that runt clear across the cabin, I've lost my touch! As a last resort I can crack his nuts."

  Alice hadn't changed so much that she didn't blush.

  "He might even make you his Number One mistress," Kazz said. "Haw! That'd make you queen then! Hail, Queen Loghu!"

  "I'm more worried about his current mistress than I am about him," Loghu said. "John wouldn't stab me in the back, though he might try to take me in the rear, but his woman might put a knife in my spine."

  "I still feel like a pimp," Burton said.

  "Why should you? You don't own me."

  They returned to John and told him that they wished to take the oath.

  John ordered drinks for the occasion. After these, he had his executive officer, a huge late-twentieth-century Yank named Augustus Strubewell, make arrangements for the swearing-in that evening.

  Two days later, the Rex up-anchored and set out up-River. Alice was attached as a nurse to the staff of one of the boat's physicians, a Doctor Doyle. Loghu was to be trained as a pilot, after which she would be officially a pilot second-class, extra. The duties would require only that she substitute if one of the second-class pilots was unavailable. She would have plenty of spare time unless John kept her busy in his suite, which he did for some time to come. The woman she dispossessed seemed to be angry about it, but was only pretending. She'd been getting as tired of John as he of her.

  Kazz and Burton were ranked as privates in the marines. Kazz was an axeman; Burton, a pistoleer and rapiersman. Besst was put among the women archers.

  One of the first things that Burton did was find out who on the boat claimed to
have lived past A.D. 1983. There were four. One was Strubewell. He'd been with John when he hijacked the boat.

  8

  * * *

  When the reverend Mr. Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland, he prefaced it with a poem. It begins with "All in the golden afternoon" and compresses that famous journey by boat up the Isis during which Dodgson was teased by the real Alice into writing down the tale he'd composed to please the "cruel Three."

  On that day of July 4, 1852, golden in memory only because it actually was cool and wet, Dodgson, who would be the Dodo in Alice and the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, was accompanied by Reverend Duckworth, who naturally became the Duck. Lorina, aged thirteen, was the Lory, and Alice, age ten, Dodgson's favorite, was of course Alice. Edith, the youngest sister, aged eight, would be the Eaglet.

  The three little girls were the daughters of Bishop Liddell, whose surname rhymed with fiddle, as evidenced by a poem about the bishop sung by the rowdy Oxford students. Dodgson's verse refers to the girls in Latin ordinals according to the ages. Prima, Secunda, and Tertia.

  It seemed to Alice now, as she stood in the middle of Richard's and her cabin, that she had in truth played the part of Secunda during her Earthly life. Certainly on this world she was Secunda. Richard Burton regarded few men as his equal and no women, not even his wife and perhaps especially his wife, as equals.

  She hadn't minded. She was dreamy, gentle and introverted. As Dodgson had written of her:

  Still she haunts me, phantomwise.

  Alice moving under skies

  Never seen by waking eyes.

  That would become true in more senses than Dodgson could have dreamed of. Now she was under a sky in which even at the blaze of noon she could see near the tops of the mountains the faint phantom glow of a few giant stars. And in the moonless night sky was the blaze of great gas sheets and enormous stars which shed the light of a full moon.

  Under the light of day and night, she had been content, even eager, to have Richard make the decisions. These had often involved violence, and, contrary to her nature, she had fought like an Amazon. Though she did not have the physique of a Penthesilea, she did have the courage.

  Life on the Riverworld had often been harsh, cruel, and bloody. After dying on Earth, she'd awakened naked and with all body hair shaven, in the body she'd had when she was twenty-five, though she'd died when eighty-two. Around her was not the room of the house in which she'd died, her sister Rhoda's in Westerham, Kent. Instead towering unbroken mountain ranges enclosed the plains and the foothills and the river in the middle of the valley. As far as she could see, people stood on the banks, all naked, hairless, young and in shock, screaming, weeping, laughing hysterically, or in horror-struck silence.

  She knew no one and had by impulse attached herself to Burton. However, one of the items in her grail was a chiclelike stick containing some sort of psychedelic substance. She'd chewed it, and then she and Burton had copulated furiously all night and also done things she then regarded as perverted and some things which she still did.

  She'd loathed herself in the morning and felt like killing herself. Burton she'd hated as she'd never hated anyone. But she continued to stay with him since anyone she switched to might be worse. Also she had to admit that he too was under the gum's influence, and he did not press her to renew, as she then thought of it, their carnal acquaintance. Burton would have used an Anglo-Saxonism, as he called it, to describe their coupling.

  In time she'd fallen in love with him – had, in fact, been in love that night – and they began living together. Living together was not exactly accurate since a good half of her time she spent by herself in their hut. Burton was the most restless man she'd ever known. After a week in one place he must be up and moving: From time to time they'd had quarrels, he doing most of the quarreling, though by now she could hold her own. Eventually he disappeared for years and returned with a story that turned out to be the essence of cock-and-bull.

  She was very hurt when she finally found out that he'd kept his most important secret from her for years. He'd been visited one night by a robed and masked being who said that he was an Ethical, one of the Council which governed those responsible for the resurrections of thirty-five billion or so Terrestrials.

  The story went that these Ethicals had raised humanity to life to perform certain experiments. They meant to let humankind die, never to be resurrected again. One of the Council, this Ethical, this "man," was secretly opposing this.

  Burton was skeptical. But when the other Ethicals tried to seize him, Burton had run. He was forced to kill himself several times, utilizing the principle of resurrection, to get far away from his pursuers. After a while he decided that he might as well keep going. After 777 suicides, he awoke in the Council room of the twelve. These had told him what he knew already from X, that is, that there was a renegade among them. So far, they hadn't been able to detect who he or she was. But they would.

  Now that they had caught him, they would keep him under permanent surveillance. The memory of his visits from the Ethicals, in fact, everything since he'd first known X, would be wiped out of his mind.

  Burton, however, on waking on the banks of The River, had found his memory unimpaired. Somehow, X has succeeded in averting the erasure and in fooling his colleagues.

  Burton reasoned also that X must have arranged it so that the Ethicals couldn't find him whenever they wished to. Burton had gone up-River then, looking for the others whom X had recruited. Just when and how they could help him, X wouldn't say, though he promised to reveal the time and the methods at a later time.

  Something had gone wrong. X hadn't appeared for years, and the resurrections had suddenly stopped.

  Then Burton had found out that the Peter Jairus Frigate and the Tau Cetan, who'd been with Burton from the beginning, were either Ethicals or the Ethicals' agents. Before Burton could seize them, the two had fled.

  Burton could no longer hide his secret from his companions. Alice was shocked by the story, stunned.. Later, she became furious. Why hadn't he told her the truth long ago? Burton had explained that he wanted to protect her. If she knew the truth, she might be subject to abduction and questions and God only knew what else by the Ethicals.

  Since that time, she'd been slowly burning. The repressed anger had now and then broken out, and the flames had scorched Burton. He, always willing to burn back, had quarreled with her. And though they'd always reconciled afterward, Alice knew that the day of parting had to come soon.

  She should have made the break before signing on the Rex. But she also wanted to know the answers to the mysteries of the Riverworld. If she stayed behind, she would always regret not having gone on. So she had boarded with Richard, and here she was in their cabin wondering what to do next.

  Also, she had to confess that there was more to her being here than the desire to reveal mysteries. For the first time in her life on this world, she had hot and cold running water and a comfortable toilet and bed and air-conditioning and a grand salon in which she could see movies and stage plays and hear music, classical and popular, played by orchestras which used the instruments known on Earth, not the clay and skin and bamboo substitutes used on the banks. There was also bridge and whist and other games. All these comforts of body and soul and others were hers. They would be hard to give up.

  It was indeed a strange situation for a bishop's daughter born May 4, 1852, next to Westminster Abbey. Her father was not only the dean of ChristChurchCollege but famous as the co-editor of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon. Her mother was a beautiful and cultured woman who looked as if she were Spanish. Alice Pleasance Liddell came to Oxford when she was four and almost immediately made friends with the shy, stammering mathematician- clergyman with the offbeat sense of humor. Both lived in Tom Quad so that their meetings were frequent.

  As the daughters of a bishop of royal and noble descent, she and her sisters had not been allowed to play with other children v
ery often. They were educated principally by their governess, Miss Prickett, a woman who strove mightily to teach her girls but had not enough education herself. Nevertheless, Alice enjoyed all the advantages of a privileged Victorian childhood. John Ruskin was her drawing teacher. She often managed to eavesdrop on the conversations of her father's dinner guests: the Prince of Wales, Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, and many other notables and greats.

  She was a pretty child, dark, her straight hair in bangs, her face a reflection of her quiet dreaming soul when she was pensive but bright and eager when stimulated, especially by Dodgson's wild stories. She read a lot and was largely self-educated.

  She liked to play with her black cat, Dinah, and to tell her stories which were never as good as the reverend's. Her favorite song was "Star of Evening," which Dodgson was to satirize in Alice as the Mock Turtle's song, "Turtle Soup."

  Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

  Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

  The real Alice's favorite section of the book, however, was that about the Cheshire Cat. She loved cats, and even when she'd grown up she would occasionally talk to her pet as if it were human when no one else was around.

  She'd grown up to be a good-looking woman with a splendid physique and something special about her, an indefinable misty air which had attracted Dodgson when she was a child and had also drawn Ruskin and others. To them she was the "child of pure unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder."

  Despite her adult attractiveness, she did not get married until she was twenty-eight, which made her an old maid in Victorian 1880. Her husband, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves of the estate of Cuffnells, near Lyndhurst, Hampshire, was educated at Eton and ChristChurch, and became a justice of the peace, living a very quiet life with Alice and her three sons. He liked to read, especially French literature, to ride and hunt, and he had a huge arboretum which included Douglas pines and redwoods.