The Magic Labyrinth

by Philip José Farmer

"Do I look that peculiar?" Sam said. "Yes, I have."

  "What did they say?"

  "That I am nothing and everything. I once heard the village idiot say the same thing."

  SECTION 5

  Burton's Soliloquy

  15

  * * *

  Late at night, while the exceptionally thick and high fog shrouded even the pilothouse, Burton prowled.

  Unable to sleep, he roamed here and there with no place to go in mind – except that of getting away from himself.

  "Damn me! Always trying to outrun my own self! If I had the wits of a cow, I'd stay and wrestle with him. But he can outrun, outwrestle me, the Jacob to my angel. Yet . . . I am Jacob also. I have a broken cog, not a broken thigh, I am an automaton Jacob, a mechanical angel, a robot devil. The ladder to heaven still leans against its window, but I can't find it again.

  "Destiny is happenchance. No, not that. I make my own. Not I, though. That thing which drives me, the devil that rides me. It waits grinning in the dark corner, and when I've reached my hand out to grab the prize, it leaps out and snatches it away from me.

  "My ungovernable temper. The thing that cheats me and laughs and gibbers and runs away to hide and to emerge another day.

  "Ay, Richard Francis Burton, Ruffian Dick, Nigger Dick, as they used to call me in India. They! The mediocrities, the robots running on the tracks of Victoria's railroad . . . they had no interest in the native except to lay the women and eat good food and drink good drink and make a fortune if they could. They couldn't even speak the native language after thirty years in the greatest gem in the queen's crown. A gem, hah! A stinking pesthole! Cholera and its sisters! The black plague and its brothers! Hindus and Moslems laughing behind pukka Sahib's back! The English couldn't even fuck well. The women laughed at them and went to their black lovers for satisfaction after Sahib had gone home.

  "I warned the government two years before it happened, the Sepoy Mutiny, and they laughed at me! Me, the only man in India who knew the Hindu, the Moslem!"

  He paused on the top landing of the grand staircase. Light blazed out, and the sound of revelry tore through the mists without moving them. No curtain there to be moved by a breath.

  "Arrgh! Damn them! They laugh and flirt, and doom waits for them. The world is falling apart. The rider on the black camel waits for them around the next bend of The River. Fools! And I, a fool also.

  "And on this Narrboot, this great vessel of fools, men and women sleep who in their waking hours plot against me, plot against all natives of Earth. No. We're all native to this universe. Citizens of the cosmos. I spit over the railing. Into the mists. The River flows below. It receives that part of me which will never return except in another form of water. H2O. Hell doubled over. That's a strange thought. But aren't all thoughts strangers? Don't they drift along like bottles enclosing messages cast away by that Great Castaway into the sea? And if they chance to lodge in the mind, my mind, I think that I originated them. Or is there a magnetism between certain souls and certain thoughts, and only those with the peculiar field of the thinkers are drawn to the thinkers? And then the individual reshapes them to fit his own character and thinks proudly – if he thinks at all in any sense more than a cow does – that he originated them? Flotsam and jetsam, my thoughts, and I the reef.

  "Podebrad! What are you dreaming of? That tower? Your home? Or are you a secret one or just a Czech engineer? Or both?

  "Fourteen years I've been on this riverboat, and the boat has been driving its paddlewheels up-River for thirty-three. Now I'm captain of the marines of that exalted bastard and regal asshole, King John. Living proof that I can govern my temper.

  "Another year and we arrive at Virolando. There the Rex stops for a while, and we talk to La Viro, La Fondinto, the pope of the poopery of the Church of the Second Chance. Second chance, my sainted aunt's arse! Those who gave it to us don't have a chance now. Caught in their own trap! Hoisted by their own petard, which is French for 'little fart'. As Mix says, we don't have the chance of a fart in a windstorm.

  "Out there on the banks. The sleeping billions. Where is Edward, my beloved brother? A brilliant man, and that gang of thugs beat his brains in, and he never spoke another word for forty years. You shouldn't have gone tiger hunting that day, Edward. The tiger was the Hindu who saw his chance to beat and rob a hated Englishman. Though they'd been doing it to their own people, too.

  "But does it matter now, Edward? You've had your terrible injury healed, and you've been talking as of yore. Perhaps not now, though. Lazarus! Your body rots. No Jesus for you. No 'Arise!'

  "And mother! Where is she! The silly woman who talked my grandfather into willing her vicious brother, his son, a good part of his fortune. Grandpa changed his mind and was on his way to see his solicitor to arrange that I get that money. And he dropped dead before he got to the solicitor, and my uncle threw the fortune away in French gambling halls. And so I could not buy myself a decent commission in the regular army, and I could not finance my explorations as they should have been and so I never became what I should have been.

  "Speke! The unspeakable Speke! You cheated me out of finding the true source of the Nile, you incompetent sneak, you piece of dung from a sick camel! You sneaked back to England after promising you'd not announce our discoveries until I got there, and you lied about me. You paid; you put a bullet into yourself. Your conscience finally got to you. How I wept. I loved you Speke, .though I hated you. How I wept!

  "But if I chance across you now – what? Would you run? Surely you'd not have the perverted courage to hold out your hand for me to shake. Judas! Would I kiss you as Jesus kissed the traitor? Judas! No, I'd kick your arse halfway up a mountain!

  "Sickness, the iron talons of African-disease, gripped me. But I'd have recovered, and I'd have discovered the headwaters of the Nile! Not Speke, not hyena, not jackal Speke! My apologies, Brother Hyena and Sister Jackal. You're only animals and useful in the scheme of things. Speke wasn't worthy to kiss your foul arseholes.

  "But how I wept!

  "The headwaters of the Nile. The headwaters of The River. Having failed to get to one, will I fail to get to the other?

  "My mother never showed any of us, me, Edward, Maria, any affection. She might as well have been our governess. No. Our nannies showed us more love, gave us more time, than she did.

  "A man is what his mother makes him.

  "No! There is something in the soul that rises above the lack of love, that drives me on and on toward . . . what?

  "Father, if I may call you that. No. Not father. Begetter. You wheezing selfish humorless hypochondriac. You forever self-exile and traveler. Where was our home? A dozen foreign lands. You went here and there seeking the health which you thought you didn't have. And we dragged along in your wake. Ignorant women our nannies and drunken Irish clergymen our tutors. Wheeze away, damn you! But no more. You've been cured by the unknowns who made this world. Have you? Haven't you found some excuse to cozen yourself into hypochondria? It's your soul, not your lungs, that has asthma.

  "By Lake Tanganyika, Ujiji, the sickness seized me in demon fingers. In my delirium I saw myself, mocking, gibing, jeering, leering at me. That other Burton which mocks at the world but mostly at me.

  "It couldn't stop me, though, I went on . . . no . . . not then. Speke went on, and he . . . he . . . hee, hee! I laugh, though it startles the revelers and wakes the sleeping. Laugh, Burton, laugh, you Pagliacci! That silly-arse Yank, Frigate, tells me that it was I who became known as the great explorer and your treachery became infamous. I, I, not you, you Unspeakable! I have been vindicated, not you.

  "My misfortune began with my not being a Frenchman. I wouldn't have had to fight against English prejudice, English rigidity, English stupidity. I . . . but I wasn't born a Frenchman, though I am descended from a bastard of the Louis XIII. The Sun-King. Blood will tell.

  "What bloody nonsense! Burton blood, not the Sun-King's, will tell.

  "I traveled, restless-footed, everywher
e. But Omne solum forti patria. Every region is a strong man's home. It was I who was the first European to enter the holy and forbidden city of Harar and come alive out of that Ethiopian hellhole. It was I who made a pilgrimage as Mirza Abdulla Bushiri to Mecca and wrote the most famous, detailed, and true book about it and who could have been torn to pieces if I'd been found out. It was I who discovered Lake Tanganyika. It was I who wrote the first manual of the use of the bayonet for the British army. It was I . . .

  "Why recount to myself these vainglories? It's not what a man's done that counts, it's what he's going to do.

  "Ayesha! Ayesha! My Persian beauty, my first true love! I would've renounced the world, my British citizenship, I would have become a Persian and lived with you until I died. You were most foully murdered, Ayesha! I avenged you, I slew the poisoner with my own hands, choked the life from him and buried his body in the desert. Where are you, Ayesha?

  "Somewhere. And if we met again – what? That ravening love is now a dead lion.

  "Isabel. My wife. The woman . . . did I ever love her? Affection I had. Not the great love I had for Ayesha and still have for Alice. 'Pay, pack, and follow' I told her whenever I left for a journey, and she did so, as obediently and as uncomplaining as a slave. I was her hero, her god, she said, and she set herself a list of rules for the perfect wife. But when I became old and bitter, a neglected failure, she became my nurse, my keeper, my eager, my prison guard.

  "What if I should see her again, this woman who said that she could never love another man on Earth or in Heaven? Not that this world is Heaven. What would I do, say, 'Hello, Isabel. It's been a long time'?

  "No, I'd run like the veriest coward. Hide. Yet . . .

  "And here's the entrance to the engine room. Is Podebrad on duty tonight? What if he is? I cannot confront him until we get to the headwaters.

  "There goes a figure, dim in the mists. Is it an agent of the Ethicals? Or X, the renegade, skulking in the fog? He is always here now, there then, as elusive as the concept of time and eternity, nothingness and somethingness.

  "Who goes there?" I should shout. But he – she – it is gone.

  "While I was in that transition between sleeping and waking, between death and resurrection, I saw God. 'You owe for the flesh,' He said, that bearded old gentleman in the garments of 1890, and in another dream He said, 'Pay up.'

  "Pay what? What is the price?

  "I didn't ask for the flesh, I didn't petition to be born. Flesh, life, should be gratis.

  "I should have detained Him. I should have asked him if a man does have free will or are all his actions, his nonactions, too, determined. .Written down in the world's Bradshaw, so-and-so will arrive at such-a-place at 10:32 a.m. and will depart at 10:40 on track 12. If I am a train on His railway, then I am not responsible for anything I do: Evil and good are not my doing. In fact, there is no evil and good. Without free will, they don't exist.

  "But He won't be detained. And if He were, would I understand his explanation of death and immortality, of determinism and indeterminism, of determinacy and indeterminacy?

  "The human mind cannot grasp these. But if it can't, it's God's fault – if there is a God.

  "When I was surveying the Sind area in India, I became a Sufi, a Master Sufi. But watching them in the Sind and in Egypt and seeing them end by proclaiming themselves to be God, I concluded that extreme mysticism was closely allied to madness.

  "Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, who is a Sufi, says that I do not understand. One, there are fake or deluded Sufis, degenerates of that great discipline. Two, when a Sufi says that he is God, he does not mean that literally. He is saying that he has become one with God, though not God.

  "Great God! I will penetrate to His heart, to the heart of the Mystery and the mysteries. I am a living sword, but I have been attacking with my edge, not with my point. The point is the most deadly, not the edge. I will be from now on the point.

  "Yet, if I'm to find my way through the magic labyrinth, I mush have a thread to follow to the great beast that lives in its heart. Where is that thread? No Ariadne. I will be myself the thread and Ariadne and Theseus. Just as . . . why didn't I think of this before? – I am the labyrinth.

  "Not quite true. What is? It's always not quite. But in human, and divine, affairs, a near-hit is sometimes as good as a direct hit. The larger the exploding shell, the less it matters that it doesn't strike the bull's eye.

  "Yet a sword is no good unless it's well balanced. It has been said of me, I have the wide-reading Frigate for authority, that some have said that I was one in whom Nature ran riot, that I had not one but thirty splendid talents. But I had no sense of balance or of direction either. That I was an orchestra without a director, a fine ship with only one flaw: no compass. As I've said of myself, a blaze of light without focus.

  "If I couldn't do something first, I wouldn't do it.

  "That it's the abnormal, the perverse and the savage, in men, not the divine in their nature, that fascinate me.

  "That, though I was deeply learned, I never understood that wisdom had little to do with knowledge and literature and nothing to do with learning.

  "They were wrong! If they were once right, no more!"

  Burton prowled on and on, looking for he knew not what. He passed down a dim corridor and paused by a door. Within should be Loghu, unless she was dancing in the grand salon, and Frigate. They were together again, having gone through two or three lovers in fourteen years. She had not been able to tolerate him for a long time, but then he'd won her over – though it might be the other Frigate whom she still loved – and now they shared the same quarters. Once more.

  He went on, seeing a shadowy figure faintly outlined in the light over the exit. X? Another sufferer from insomnia? Himself?

  He stood outside the texas and watched the guards pacing back and forth. Watchman, what of the night? Well, what of it?

  On he walked. Where have you been? From walking to and fro, not over this giant world but on this pygmy cosmos of a riverboat.

  Alice was in his cabin again, having left him a little less than fourteen years ago and having returned twice. This time, they would be together forever. Perhaps. But he was glad that she was back.

  He emerged on the landing deck and looked up at the dim light emanating from the control room. Its big clock boomed fourteen strokes. Two a.m.

  Time for Burton to go back to bed and try to storm the citadel of sleep again.

  He looked up at the stars, and, while doing so, a cold wind swept down from the north and cleared the upper deck of the mists – momentarily. Somewhere northward was the tower in the cold and gray mists. In it were, or had been, the Ethicals, the entities who thought they had a right to raise the dead without their permission.

  Did they hold the keys to the mysteries? Not all mysteries, of course. The mystery of being itself, of creation, of space and infinity, time and eternity would never be solved.

  Or would they?

  Was there somewhere, in the tower or deep underground, machine which converted the metaphysical into the physical? Man could handle the physical, and if he didn't know the true nature of the beyond-matter, what of it? He didn't know the true nature of electricity, either, but he had enslaved.it for his own purposes.

  He shook his fist at the north, and he went to bed.

  SECTION 6

  On the Not For Hire: The Thread of Reason

  16

  * * *

  At first, Samuel Clemens had tended to avoid Cyrano de Bergerac as much as possible. The very perceptive Frenchman quickly detected that but seemed not to resent it. If he did, he was successfully hiding his reaction. He was always smiling and laughing, always polite but not cold. He acted as if Clemens liked him and had no reason not to.

  After a while – several years – Sam began to warm up to the man who'd been Sam's Terrestrial wife's lover. They had much in common: a keen interest in people and in mechanical devices, a taste for literature, an abiding devotion to the study of
history, a hatred for hypocrisy and self-righteousness, a loathing for the malevolent aspects of religions, and a deep agnosticism. Though Cyrano was not, like Sam, from Missouri, he shared with him a "show me" attitude.

  Moreover, Cyrano was an adornment at any party but did not try to dominate the conversation.

  So it was that one day Sam talked to his other self, Mark Twain, about his feelings for de Bergerac in the privacy of his suite. The result was that Sam now saw – though he'd always known deep within him – that he'd been very unfair to Cyrano. It wasn't the fellow's fault that Livy had fallen in love with him and had -refused to leave him for her ex-husband after she'd found him. Nor, really, was it Livy's fault. She could only do what her inborn temperament and predetermined circumstances forced her to do. And Sam had been acting as his inborn character, his "watermark," and circumstances forced him to do. Now, as a result of another aspect of his character rising from the depths, plus the inevitable push of events, he had changed his attitude toward Cyrano. After all, he was a good fellow, and he'd learned to shower regularly, to keep his fingernails clean, and to quit urinating in corners at the end of corridors.

  Whether Sam really believed that he was an automaton whose acts were programmed, Sam did not know himself. Sometimes, he thought that his belief in determinism was only an excuse to escape his guilt about certain matters. If this were true, then he was exercising free will in making up the explanation that he wasn't responsible for anything, good or bad, that he did. On the other hand, one aspect of determinism was that it gave humans the illusion that they had free will.

  In either case, Sam welcomed Cyrano into his company and forgave him for what really didn't need forgiving.

  So now, today, Cyrano was one of the group invited by Sam to talk about some puzzling features of what Sam called "The Case of X." The others were Gwenafra (Sam's cabin-mate), Joe Miller, de Marbot, and John Johnston. The latter was huge, over six feet two and weighing 260 pounds without an ounce of excess fat. His head and chest were auburn-haired; he had extraordinarily long arms and hands that looked as large as the paws of a grizzly bear. The blue-gray eyes were often cold or dreamy but they could be warm enough when he was with trusted friends. Born about 1828 in New Jersey and of Scotch descent, he had gone to the West to trap the mountains in 1843. There he had become a legend even among the legendary mountain men, though it took some years before he became famous. When a wandering party of young unblooded Crow braves killed his Flathead Indian wife and unborn baby, Johnston swore a vendetta against the Crows. He killed so many of them that the Crows sent out twenty young men to track him down and kill him, and they were not to return to their tribe until the deed was done. One after the other got to him but were instead slain by Johnston. He cut out their livers and ate them raw, the blood dripping onto his red beard. It was these exploits that earned him the sobriquets of "Liver Eater" and "Crow Killer." But the Crows were a fine tribe, dignified, honorable, and mighty warriors. So one day Johnston decided to call off the feud, and, having informed them of his decision, became their good friend. He was also a chief of the Shoshoni.