The Magic Labyrinth

by Philip José Farmer

  "Ah!" John said. "What was this ruler's name?"

  Frigate looked puzzled. "He was a Czech named Ladislas Podebrad."

  John laughed until the tears came. When he'd finished, he said, "That is a good one. It just so happens that this Podebrad is one of my engineers now."

  "Yeah?" one of Frigate's companions said. "We have a score to settle with him."

  The speaker was about five feet ten inches high. He had a lean muscular body and dark hair and eyes. His face was strong but handsome and distinctive-looking. He wore a cowboy's ten-gallon hat and high-heeled boots, though his only other clothing was a white kiltcloth.

  "Tom Mix at your service, Your Majesty," he said in a Texas drawl.

  He puffed on his cigarette and added, "I'm a specialist in the rope and the boomerang, Sire, and I was once a well-known movie star, if you know what that is."

  John turned to Strubewell. "Have you ever heard of him?"

  "I've read about him," Strubewell said. "He was long before my time, but he was very famous in the twenties and thirties. He was a star of what they called horse operas."

  Burton wondered if it was likely that an agent would know that.

  "We sometimes make movies on the Rex," John said, smiling. "But we don't have horses, as you know."

  "Do I ever!"

  The monarch asked Frigate more about the adventure. The American said that at the same time they'd sighted the dirigible, they'd sprung a leak in an apparatus used to heat the hydrogen in the envelope. While trying to cover the leak in the pipe with some quick-setting glue, they'd vented gas from the bag so they could drop quickly into thicker and warmer air and thus open the ports of the gondola.

  The leak had been fixed, but a wind started blowing them back and the batteries supplying fresh hydrogen had become dead. They decided to land. When they heard that John had sent a launch ahead to this place to announce that he was recruiting, they'd sailed down here as fast as they could.

  "What were you on Earth?"

  "A lot of things, like most people. In my middle age and old age, a writer of science-fiction and detective stories. I wasn't exactly obscure, but I was never near as well known as him."

  He pointed at a medium-sized but muscular man with curly hair and a handsome Irish-looking face.

  "He's Jack London, a great early twentieth-century writer."

  "I'm not too fond of writers," John said. "I've had some on my boat, and they've generally caused a lot of trouble. However . . . who is the Negro who knocked my sergeant on the head without my permission?"

  "Umslopogaas, a Swazi, a native of South Africa of the nineteenth century. He is a great warrior, especially proficient with his axe, which he calls Woodpecker. He also is notable as providing the model for the great fictional Zulu hero of the same name created by another writer, H. Rider Haggard."

  "And he?"

  John pointed at a brown-skinned black-haired man with a big nose. He stood a little over five feet and wore a large green cloth wrapped in turban fashion.

  "That is Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, a much-traveled Iberian Moor, Your Majesty. He lived in your time and is a Sufi. He also happened to have met Your Majesty at your court in London."

  John said, "What?" and stood up. He looked closely at the little man, then shut his eyes. When he opened them, he said, "Yes, I remember him well!"

  The monarch got up and strode around the table, his arms open, speaking the English of his time rapidly and smiling. The others were astonished to see him embrace the little man and kiss him on both cheeks.

  "Jeeze, another Frenchy!" Mix said, but he was grinning.

  After the two had gabbed for some time, John said, "All I have to know is that Nur el-Musafir has traveled far with you and still regards you as his friends. Strubewell, you sign them up and give them instructions. Sergeant Gwalchgwynn, you assign them their cabins. Well, my good friend and mentor, we will talk after I have completed the interviews."

  On the way down the corridor to their quarters, they ran into Loghu. She stopped, turned pale, then red, and screaming, "Peter, you bastard!" she hurled herself at Frigate. He went down with her hands clutching his throat. Laughing, the black and Mix pulled her off of him.

  "You sure got a way with people," Mix said to Frigate.

  "Another case of mistaken identity," Burton said. He explained to Loghu what had happened.

  After he'd quit coughing and feeling his finger-marked neck, Frigate said, "I don't know who this other Frigate was, but he sure must not be likable."

  Reluctantly, Loghu apologized. She was not fully convinced that this Frigate wasn't her former lover.

  Mix muttered, "She can grab me any time she wants to, but not around the neck."

  Loghu overheard him. She said, "If your whacker is as big as your hat, I might just grab it."

  Surprisingly, Mix blushed. When she had hip-swayed away, he said, "Too bold and brassy for me."

  Two days later, they were living together.

  Burton was not content to admit that the resemblance of the two Frigates was just a coincidence. Whenever he had a chance, he talked to the fellow, delving into his background. What startled him was the discovery that this Frigate, like the other, had been a student of his, Burton's, life.

  The American, in his turn, had been watching Burton, though covertly. Every once in a while. Burton caught him staring at him. One night, Frigate cornered him in the grand salon. After looking around to make sure their conversation wasn't overheard, the American said, without preamble and in English, "I'm familiar with the various portraits of Richard Francis Burton. I even had a big blowup of him when he was fifty on the wall in front of my desk. So I think I could recognize him without his mustachios and his forked beard."

  "Yaas?"

  "I recall well a photograph of him taken when he was about thirty. He had only a mustache then, though it was very thick. If I mentally remove the lip-hair . . ."

  "Yaas?"

  "Burton looks remarkably like a certain Dark-Ages Welshman I know. The name he claims is Gwalchgwynn, which, translated into English, is white hawk. Gwalchgwynn is an early form of the Welsh name which became better known much later as Gawain. And Gawain was the knight who, in the earlier King Arthur cycles, was first to seek the Holy Grail. The metal cornucopias we call grails look remarkably like the tower that's supposed to be in the middle of the north polar sea – from what I've heard. You might say it's the Big Grail."

  "Very interesting," Burton said after he'd sipped on his grog. "Another coincidence."

  Frigate looked steadily at him, disconcerting him a trifle. The devil take him. The fellow looked enough like the other to be his brother. Perhaps he was. Perhaps both were agents, and this one was playing with him as the other had.

  "Burton would know all about the Arthurian cycles and the earlier folk tales on which they were based. It would be just like him, if he assumed a disguise – and he was famous on earth for assuming many – to take the name of Gwalchgwynn.

  He would know that it signified a seeker after the Holy Grail, but he wouldn't expect anyone else to."

  "I'm not so dense that I can't see that you think I'm that Burton fellow. But I never heard of him, and I don't care to have you pursue this matter even if it amuses you so much. I am not amused."

  He lifted the glass to his lips and drank.

  "Nur told me when he was visited by the Ethical, the Ethical told him that one of the men he'd picked was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer."

  Burton was able to control himself enough to keep from spitting the drink out.

  Slowly, he put the glass down on the bar.

  "Nur?"

  "You know him. Mr. Burton, the others are waiting in the stage-prop room. Just to show you how sure I am that you're Burton, I'll reveal something. Mix and London used to go under assumed names. But they recently decided to hell with it. Now, Mr. Burton, would you care to go with me there?" Burton considered. Could Frigate and his compan
ions be agents? Were they waiting to seize and question him, turning the tables on him?

  He looked around the crowded and noisy salon. When he saw Kazz, he said, "I'll go with you if you insist on this nonsense. But I'll take my good friend the Neanderthal with me. And we'll be armed."

  When Burton entered the prop room ten minutes later, he was accompanied also by Alice and Loghu.

  When Mix saw Loghu, his jaw dropped in astonishment. "You in on this, too?"

  12

  * * *

  They had agreed never to talk about the Ethical or anything connected with him in their cabins. These might be bugged. Their next meeting was at a table where they played poker. Present were Burton, Alice, Frigate, Nur, Mix, and London. Loghu and Umslopogaas were on duty.

  When Burton had heard Nur's and Mix's story of their visits from X, he had been convinced that they were indeed recruits of the Ethical. Nevertheless, he had listened to what each had to say in detail before he had admitted his real identity. Then he had told his story, holding back nothing.

  Now he was saying, "See you and raise you ten. No, I don't think we should plant eavesdropping devices in the cabins of any of the suspects. We might learn something valuable. But if they find one, then they'll know that X's agents, we could be called that, are on to them. It's too dangerous."

  "I agree," the little Moor said. "Do the rest of you?"

  Even Mix, who'd proposed planting the bugs, nodded. However, he said, "What about Podebrad? I run into him now and then, and all he does is say howdy to me and then pass on grinning like a parson who's just found out his girlfriend ain't pregnant. It galls me. I'd like to tear into the bastard."

  "Me, too," London said. "He figures he's going to get away scot-free after making suckers of us."

  "Attacking him would only get you thrown off the boat," Nur said. "Besides, he is tremendously strong. I believe that he would tear you apart while you were tearing into him."

  "I can take him!" Mix and London said at the same time.

  "You've bloody good reason for revenge," Burton said. "But it's out, for the time being anyway. Surely you can see that?"

  "But why'd he say he was taking us along on the blimp and then desert us like we had B.O.?"

  Nur ed-Din said, "I've thought about that. The only reasonable explanation is that he somehow suspected that we were X's men. That would be one more bit of evidence that he is an Ethical agent."

  "I think he's just a goddamn sadist!" London said.

  "No."

  Burton said, "If he suspects you four, then you'll have to be on guard. The rest of us will, too. I didn't think of what Nur said or I'd not have suggested that we meet in the salon."

  "It's too late to worry about that," Alice said. "Anyway, he isn't going to do anything, if he is an agent, until he gets to the headwaters. Any more than we are."

  Burton won the pot with three jacks and two tens. Alice dealt. Burton thought that Nur must be concentrating on other matters than poker. The Moor won about half the time, and Burton suspected that he could rake in the chips even more often if he cared to. Somehow, the little man seemed to be able to tell what his opponents had in their hand just by looking at their faces.

  "We might as well enjoy the ride," Frigate said.

  Burton looked at him from lowered lids. The fellow had the same adulation for him that the other Frigate had or had pretended to have. Whenever he got the chance, he would ply Burton with questions, most of them about periods in his life which Burton's biographers had only been able to speculate about. But, also like the other, he would question attitudes and beliefs which Burton held dear. His attitude toward women and the colored races, for instance, and his belief in telepathy. Burton had too often had to explain that what he had believed on Earth did, not necessarily hold here. He had seen too much and experienced too much. He had changed in many respects. Now he thought it was a good time to delve into the matter of the pseudo-Frigate.

  "There had to be a very good reason for the so-called coincidence."

  "I've been pondering that, too," The American said. "Fortunately, I was an avid science-fiction reader and writer in that field. So I have a certain flexibility of imagination, which you'll need if you're going to bear with me, because I believe that the Frigate you've known by no coincidence at all is my brother James, dead at the ripe old age of one year!

  "Now, consider the children who died on Earth. One reason, the best, is that if they were raised here, they would jam the planet. There wouldn't be enough living space here. In fact, the population of children deceased before five would be the largest segment of the entire population by far.

  "So what would the Ethicals do with them? They'd resurrect them on another planet, perhaps one like this, perhaps not. Maybe it'd take two planets to hold them comfortably.

  "Anyway, let's assume that this has happened. Unless," he lifted a finger, "unless for some reason they haven't been resurrected as yet. Maybe they're to be raised here after we're gone. Who knows?

  "I don't. But I can speculate. Say that the infants were incarnated on another planet. It couldn't be done with the entire population at once because there would have to be adults to take care of them. And that would crowd a planet the size of Earth. So maybe they're incarnated at a certain rate, that is, so many infants within a certain time. These are raised to adulthood, and then they become the nurses, the teachers, the foster parents of more infants. And so on. Or maybe it's all done at once on more than one planet. I doubt that, though. The energy involved in planet reforming would be enormous. On the other hand, they may use planets which don't have to be re-formed."

  "Keep dealing," London said. "If you don't people'll wonder what the hell we're talking about!"

  "I can open," Mix said.

  They were silent except for announcing their play for a minute. Then Frigate said, "If what I propose were true, well, let me put it this way. Ah . . . I was the eldest child in my family. The oldest alive, that is. My older brother, James, died at one. I was born six months later. Now . . . ah . . . he would be resurrected. And when he grew up, he became an agent for the Ethicals.

  "He was planted here on Resurrection Day. He was assigned to watch Burton. Why would he be assigned? Because the Ethicals knew that, somehow, Burton had awakened in that vast chamber of floating bodies before Resurrection Day, before he was supposed to awake. They must have figured it was no accident, that . . . uh . . . somebody awakened him on purpose. Well, we don't have to speculate on that. We know that's what the Council of Ethicals told Burton when they caught him. He was supposed to have his memory of that erased, but X arranged it so that he kept it.

  "Anyway, the Ethicals were suspicious. So they put this pseudo-Frigate, well, actually he's a real Frigate, on Dick's trail. My brother was to keep an eye on him and report anything suspicious. But like everybody in The Valley, he got caught with his kilt down."

  "I'll take two cards," Burton said. "That's very intriguing, Peter. It seems a wild concept, but it may just be true. However, if your brother was an agent, then what was Monat the Tau Cetan or Arcturan or whatever he is? Certainly, he'd have to be an agent, a strange one true, but nevertheless . . ."

  "Perhaps he's an Ethical!" Alice said.

  Burton, who didn't like to be interrupted, glared.

  "I was just going to say that. But if Monat is an agent, I don't think he's an Ethical, otherwise he'd have been in the Council . . . no, by Allah, he wouldn't have been! If I'd have seen him there, I'd have known that he was one of 'em! And he wouldn't have been able to stay with me. Though why he stuck to me, I don't know.

  "However, Monat's presence means that there is more than one species . . . genus . . . zoological family . . . extra-Terrestrials . . . involved in this."

  "I'll take one card," Frigate said. "As I was about to say . . ."

  "Pardon me," London said. "But how could Peter's brother know about Burton?"

  "I suppose that the children are educated, probably better than they'd be
on Earth. And maybe, just maybe, my brother knew I was his brother. How do we know what incredibly vast and minute knowledge the Ethicals have? Look at the photo of Burton which he found in the kilt of that agent, Agneau. It was taken when Dick was twenty-eight and a subaltern in the East India Army. Doesn't that prove that the Ethicals were on Earth in 1848? Who knows how long they've been walking the streets of Earth taking data? Don't ask me for what purpose."

  "Why would James take your name?" Nur said.

  "Well, I was a rabid Burton fan. I even wrote a novel about him. Maybe it pleased James' sense of humor. I have one. My whole family is known for . . . an odd sense of humor. And so it struck him funny to be his brother, to pretend to be the Peter that he never knew. Maybe he could vicariously relive the life he'd been denied on Earth. Maybe he thought that if he ran into someone who'd known the Frigate family, he could pass himself off as me. Maybe all these reasons are true. Whatever . . . I'm sure he punched out Sharkko, the crooked publisher, to avenge me, which shows that he knew much about my life on Earth."

  Alice said, "But what about the story that agent, Spruce, told? He said he was from the seventy-second century A.D., and he said something about a chronoscope, something which could look back in time."

  "Spruce may have been lying," Burton said.

  "Anyway," Frigate said, "I don't believe there could be a chronoscope or such a thing as time-travel in any form. Well, maybe I shouldn't say that. We're all time-traveling. Forward, the only way there is."

  "What nobody has said," Nur said, "is that somebody had to resurrect the children. It may or may not have been people from the seventy-second century. More probably, it was Monat's people who did it. Note also that it was Monat who did most of the questioning of Spruce. He may have been, in a sense, coaching Spruce."

  "Why?" Alice said.

  That was one question nobody could answer unless the Ethical's story was true. By now, his recruits thought that he might be as big a liar as his colleagues.

  Nur closed that round with the speculation that the agents who'd gotten on the boat early in its voyage had told their post-1983 story and were stuck with it. Agents who'd gotten on later knew that the story might be suspect, so they'd avoided it. For instance, the huge Gaul named Megalosos – his name meant "Great" – claimed that he'd lived about Caesar's time. His saying so, however, didn't make it so. It seems he found Podebrad congenial, though how anyone could was beyond Nur. He could be an agent, too.