Lord Tyger

by Philip José Farmer

  One of the busts serving as book ends was Tarzan and had been created for Boygur by a man called Gutzon Borglum. "It was made secretly," Boygur said. "Only Borglum and I knew of the deal, and it cost me plenty."

  The other bust was of Ras and had been done by a sculptor who had studied photographs and films of Ras.

  There were many paintings of Tarzan, most of them by St. John, whom Boygur said was the great illustrator of The Book and The Hero.

  There were also five photographs of Ras taken at various ages. Ras had been told about, them by Yusufu, who had had to explain first what "photographs" were. One showed him as a baby in Mariyam's arms with Yusufu nearby and, in the distant background, five gorillas feeding or watching the human beings. A second was of Ras at about the age of five, a naked little boy with long, black hair playing with a baby gorilla while two females ate bamboo shoots nearby. A third showed him fishing from a dugout in the lake. A fourth had been taken inside the log cabin by the lake shore a year before it had burned down when hit by lightning. The angle was from his right, and he was sitting at the rough wooden desk and studying a big picture book, while two large candles burned before him. He realized now, because of what Yusufu had told him, that a hidden camera had taken that photograph.

  The fifth photograph showed Ras, when he was sixteen, coming down a hill with the body of a leopard draped over his shoulders. The photograph also showed the dried blood smeared over his chest and shoulders and the claw marks. This was the time that Ras had been jumped by the gorilla-eater while Ras was hunting him. Ras had lost his knife in the first minute of fighting, but he had been able to tear himself loose, literally, and grab the leopard by the tail. The leopard had jumped into the air and at the same time had turned to get at him. Ras never knew later how he had done it, but he had whirled the big cat, which must have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds, around and around, gripping its tail with both hands and working a step at a time toward the nearest tree. The final step forward and the final whirl had slammed the head and shoulders of the leopard against the trunk of the tree. While the half-unconscious beast had tried to stagger to its feet, Ras had searched for and found the knife and got it into the throat of the leopard before he could recover. Later, Ras had been furious with Yusufu and Mariyam because neither had believed his story of how he had killed it.

  Now he remembered that the copter had appeared while he had been coming down the hill with the carcass on his shoulders.

  On a table was a huge, framed photograph of a much younger and beardless Boygur standing in some strange place with two men. The signatures beneath were of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Johnny Weissmuller.

  Also on the table was a number of all-paper books that Boygur had referred to as magazines. The nearest was titled The Burroughs Bulletin and had an intriguing illustration on its cover. Under different circumstances he would have examined it in detail.

  Of the many animal heads on the wall, one was a lion's. There was an ugly beast with two horns on its nose, an elephant head twice as large as that of the largest river elephant Ras had ever seen, and the head of a tiger, which he recognized because he remembered the pictures of tigers in the books in the cabin. This striped and awesome and beautiful cat was the beast after which he had been named. It was also, as Yusufu had explained, the name of his Norman ancestor, a great warrior who had crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror.

  Ras had tried to visualize the Normans and the English Channel and Robert le Tigre and the other things Yusufu told of, but he could not do so, and the fact that Yusufu was vague about them did not help him. He did not see why he should be proud of being descended from English aristocracy when he had never seen an English aristocrat.

  Neither had he seen nor known anything of this man Burroughs, whom Boygur called The Master.

  Yusufu had said to him, the evening of the ascent of the pillar, "You must understand, my son, that this man Burroughs is not responsible for what Boygur believes or for the deeds of Boygur. The Tarzan books are only books that tell stories of this wild man of the jungle, who had been raised by great apes and has become a superman. Millions of people have read these stories--which are not true but are made up--and enjoyed them. And movies have been made of Tarzan--many movies--and people enjoyed them. In fact, I was an actor in a Tarzan movie years ago, before you were born. So were Mariyam and the others. We were in America then, and that is where I learned English.

  "Many people, as I said, enjoy or even love these stories of Tarzan. To some, he is The Hero. But Boygur is insane, my son. He loved the stories too much. He became convinced that they were real, perhaps because he was small and skinny and weak of body and had to suffer much from larger, stronger people when he was a child and a young man. Perhaps he dreamed of becoming a giant who could defeat all other men and even great, dangerous beasts such as the lion with his bare hands or with only a knife. And he had to work hard, very hard, and suffered great poverty when he was young. He dreamed of a life of freedom and of ease from hard labor and contempt and unceasing demands. He dreamed of becoming this Tarzan. He was not mad enough to believe that he himself was this wild and free man of the jungle. But he was mad enough to think that he could live as a Tarzan through another person. And so, when he had made his fortune, when he had become what they call a multimillionaire, he determined to raise his own Tarzan.

  "It was an evil thing he did, but Boygur does not know it. He is of this world--otherwise, he would not have been able to become so wealthy--but he is also not of this world."

  The man now sitting with bound hands and feet on the leather sofa did not look as if he had possessed such great power and controlled so many people. Although small and thin, he would have been a handsome old man if his eyes had not been so baggy and ringed with black and his face so scratched and bloody and his beard so dirty and bloody. He had a full head of long, wavy, white hair, a broad and high forehead, thick, white eyebrows, a nose like the arc of a descending arrow, deep hollows under his cheeks, and thin lips. Even trussed up and bloodied and haggard, he had dignity, or would have had it if he had not wet his pants with terror when he had been pulled up by the rope.

  "You do not understand, Ras," he said as he had said many times since being captured. "I made you what you are. If it were not for me, you would be nothing. You would only be a city-dweller, a businessman or teacher, a nonentity, a nothing. But you are Ras Tyger, and there is nobody in this world like you. You are indeed the Tarzan of this world."

  This was something that Ras did not understand. He asked again for clarification, and Boygur told him again. He insisted that he was not crazy. He knew that no such being as Tarzan of the Apes, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, existed on this particular Earth, in this particular universe. There were no language-using "great apes"; gorillas and monkeys and baboons did not talk; gorillas were not aggressive or rapers of human females; lions dwelt in savannahs or semideserts and did not infest the jungle; and there was no lost city with half-ape descendants of colonists from ancient Atlantis.

  Not in this universe, anyway. But there were parallel universes, worlds that existed in the same space occupied by this world but at "right angles" to this world. And in one of these, perhaps in more than one, differing slightly each from each, there was such an Earth as Burroughs had described in his books. This Earth was similar to ours, except in those not very great differences. Burroughs knew about it, because he had a psychic key to it, and he had learned the story of Tarzan from The Hero himself. Sometimes the gates between the worlds opened, and Tarzan, and others, came through and told Burroughs their stories. And Burroughs, to make the stories appeal to Earth people, set the stories on this Earth and this universe. He said nothing, of course, of the existence of parallel universes. So Boygur had decided to create his own Hero, modeled after the Hero of the Master. Now Ras understood, didn't he?

  Ras said, "No. I understand nothing--almost nothing--of what you say."

  Yusufu had heard the same explana
tion from Boygur, and he had told Ras, but he had not succeeded in bringing any light.

  "You will understand someday," Boygur said. "You are not educated yet, not in what the so-called civilized world calls education, anyway. But you will come into your inheritance, your birthright. You are an English lord, a viscount. Once the world knows about you, you'll get the title back from your cousin. It's unfortunate that your cousin sold the ancestral castle and estates to pay off taxes. If I'd known about it in time, I would have purchased them to keep for you. But you wouldn't want to live there, in England, anyway, would you? You'd prefer to live on a plantation in Africa, wouldn't you? Of course, Africa isn't what it used to be. There's little room for a white man any more. But you could carve out your own empire, perhaps stay in this valley, become king of the Sharrikt--they're a lost race and live in a lost city in an unknown valley--or..."

  The old man babbled.

  Ras thought of what Yusufu had told him. Somewhere in that cloudy country outside this valley, in a city called Pretoria, in a country called South Africa, a handsome man and a beautiful woman had lived. The man was the second son of a North-of-England lord, and he had come to South Africa to make a new life after a big war. His older brother had inherited the title after the father had died.

  Ivor Montaux-Tyger Thorsbight had married the daughter of a Scottish baron, also an emigre, and they had had a son. And the baby, when a year old, had been kidnapped by Boygur because he met all of Boygur's specifications. He had been descended from English nobility, and he had been black-haired and gray-eyed.

  The baby had been brought to this valley and given into the care of a gorilla female who had lost her baby--because Boygur had killed it--but who had been conditioned to accept another infant and to nurse it. Six months later, after several illnesses, the baby had died of pneumonia.

  The parents had grieved for a long time, even after the search for the stolen infant had been given up. A year and a half later, they had had another male baby, and this, too, had been stolen, despite the parents' intense watchfulness.

  Ras, thinking of him, said, "My brother lived because you gave him all kinds of assistance. But he was raised among the gorillas, and these have no language, and so Jib got beyond the age at which he could learn a language."

  "I didn't know about that until it was too late," Boygur said. "I found out when I couldn't do anything about it that infants have to learn a language of some sort at an early age or their brain or nervous system becomes inflexible as far as language learning is concerned."

  "And so my brother became as dumb as a gorilla," Ras said. "And sickly and miserable. Better for him if he had died of pneumonia, too."

  "I didn't do it on purpose, you know," Boygur said. "I had nothing but the best intentions."

  "He could say three or four words," Ras said. "I taught him to say Wahss. My name. Wahss was as close as he could ever get."

  He felt a lump in his throat and an ache in his chest. Suddenly, he was weeping.

  Boygur said, "Nobody regretted more than I did that he was little better than an idiot. But a man has to learn by experience. Certainly, you are no idiot. Far from it. You are, literally, a superman."

  Somewhere in that nebulous land outside the cliffs were two graves. In one was the mother who had died of grief after her third baby had been stolen. The parents had gone to England, because they supposed that the baby would be safer there. But, despite all their vigilance and safeguards, the baby had been taken away and they had never seen it again. A year after his wife's death, the husband had jumped off a boat in the Channel.

  And so Boygur, knowing that a human baby could not be raised by apes and still be human, not in this world, anyway, had used the dwarfs as substitutes. They were a traveling acrobatic troupe accused of theft and murder in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Boygur had bribed the authorities and gotten them free, but they had had to promise to raise the baby in the river valley high in the Mendebo Mountains of Ethiopia. They were to pretend to be apes. The baby, of course, having no knowledge of what was or was not a true human being, would not know the difference. After Ras had become eighteen years old, they would be given their freedom.

  Little Ras had been an affectionate and good-natured baby. But he was also unafraid and aggressive, and so Boygur had named him Ras Tyger--Ras because that was Amharic for Lord, and Tyger after that Norman ancestor who had founded the house of Bettrick.

  Many things were explained now, but many more were not. He did know why Mariyam had become so confused and confusing with her reasons for this and that. Mariyam may even have been a little insane, but she had not been evil, and she had loved him. Ras had loved the Amharic dwarf even as he loved Yusufu, the half-Swahili, half-Arab dwarf.

  The cabin on the lake shore was modeled after the cabin of Tarzan's father and mother in the first Tarzan book. Ras was to wonder about the two human skeletons and the infant gorilla skeleton, to find the hunting knife, to puzzle over the picture books, and to teach himself to read English, as Tarzan had supposedly done. But Ras had been more interested in using the paper and pencils to draw pictures like those in the books. Yusufu had been forced to teach him how to read, although he had done it out of sight or hearing of any of Boygur's spy devices. And, later, Yusufu had taught him to speak English, English with a Swahili accent, because Swahili was Yusufu's mother tongue. Yusufu had done it just to spite Boygur, although Boygur had never known about it. If he had learned of it, he would have killed Yusufu.

  There was the golden locket with the woman's picture in it. Ras had found that in the cabin and had worn it around his neck. Six months afterward, it had disappeared, presumably stolen by a chimpanzee while Ras was swimming in the lake. The picture in the locket had been a portrait of his genuine mother.

  There were many things in the cabin, but it had burned down, and everything in it had been destroyed.

  "Things went their own way," Boygur muttered, as if he was thinking of the direction he had wanted reality to take and the direction that it had preferred to take.

  "Why did you kill my mother?" Ras said. "Why did you shoot her with a Wantso arrow so that I would think they had killed her?"

  "Your mother?" Boygur said. He blinked. "Oh, you mean Mariyam! Why, son, it was necessary! The Hero's ape foster mother was shot through the heart by a savage black, and The Hero took vengeance on the killer and his tribe. There wasn't any chance of the Wantso ever getting close enough to Mariyam to do her any harm. I'd put the fear of the Ghost-Land into the Wantso before you were born so they'd stay out of that area.

  "But I had to kill Mariyam so you'd revenge her death. Besides, the Wantso were corrupting, debasing, you. I knew you were laying the black women, and that was something that The Hero would never do. I wanted them dead, and I wanted you to fulfill your natural destiny by killing them. That part of The Book, at least, would come true."

  Ras wanted to smash the old man against the wall. But he said, "Why did your men, those in the copter, kill all the Wantso? I had slain almost all their men by myself. They had me surrounded, but I would have killed the few men left. You did not have to kill the women and children."

  Boygur said, angrily, "That was the fault of those two idiots! They thought you were about to be killed, and so they began shooting and couldn't stop, or at least that's what they said! They said they knew I hated all the Wantso, so they didn't see anything wrong with shooting them all, wiping them out. I reprimanded them for doing it without my orders, but the damage was done."

  "And why did you try to kill Eeva Rantanen?"

  "Because she wasn't supposed to be here! I didn't want her to spoil everything. I had just flown in the girl you were destined to meet, this Jane Potter, a beautiful blonde from Baltimore, a virgin, just right for you, very close to The Master's description of The Hero's mate. In a few days I would have arranged for her to seem to escape and to meet you. But she didn't have strength of character. Instead of trying to escape, she became hysterical, she went on a hunger str
ike, and she tried to kill herself."

  "Where did you get her?"

  "She was on a safari in Kenya with her father, who is, by the way, a professor. But he's not absent-minded or old. You can't have everything, however; you have to compromise. I was happy to get a girl who seemed to be very close to the specifications."

  Ras did not know what he was talking about unless he meant that the abducted girl was similar to the girl in The Book.

  Boygur said, slowly, "So you climbed up the side of the rock? Who would have believed that it could be done? Yet, The Hero would have done it, so why not you? Really, I haven't failed, after all. You have done everything The Hero has done, or at least you could do it if you had to. I regret that you've never had a chance to fight a lion with just a knife or make friends with an elephant or killed a gorilla in hand-to-hand combat. But you're young..."

  Ras got to his feet and said, "And you are old, and have lived long beyond your time. You should have died at birth. You have killed, or caused to be killed, my oldest brother, and you have caused my other brother to become an idiot and to live sick and cold and wretched--oh, how wretched and lonely he must have been!--and then you killed him. You caused my true parents to die of grief. You killed my second mother, Mariyam, whom I loved dearly. You made me kill many innocent Wantso, and your men killed the rest. You robbed me of my true life with my true parents. You have made me into something modeled after a thing that never existed. You are as evil as a man can be."

  Boygur shouted, "What are you talking about? I love you! I have always loved you! Believe me, I grieved because I couldn't take the place of Yusufu and personally direct you in every move, see you made no mistakes and became as heroic a man as the man The Master wrote about! I made you into a man like no other!"