There were only twenty islanders—short, dark people whose native language was unknown to Burton. They spoke a degraded form of Esperanto, however, so there was little language barrier.
The grailstone was a massive mushroom-shaped structure of gray red-flecked granite. The surface of its top was as high as Burton’s chest and bore seven hundred round indentations in concentric circles.
Shortly before sunset, each person put in one of the shadow holes a tall cylinder of gray metal. English-speakers called it a grail, a pandora (or its shortened form, dora), a tucker box, lunch pail, glory bucket, and so on. The most popular name was that given it by the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance. This was the Esperanto pandoro. Though the gray metal was as thin as a sheet of newspaper except for the base, it was unbendable, unbreakable, and indestructible.
The owners of the grails retreated about fifty paces and waited. Presently, intense blue flames roared upward from the top of the stone to 20 feet or a little over 6 meters. Simultaneously, every one of the stones lining the banks of the lake spat fire and shouted thunder.
A minute later, several of the little dark people climbed onto the stone and handed down the grails. The party sat down under a bamboo roof by a fire of bamboo and driftwood and opened the lids of the cylinders. Inside were racks holding cups and deep dishes, all filled with liquor, food, crystals of instant coffee or tea, cigarettes and cigars.
Burton’s grail contained both Slovene and Italian food. He had been first resurrected in an area consisting mainly of people who had died in the Trieste area, and the grails of these usually gave the type of food they had been accustomed to eat on Earth. About every ten days, however, the grails served something entirely different. Sometimes it was English, French, Chinese, Russian, Persian, or any of a hundred national foods. Occasionally it offered dishes which were disgusting, such as kangaroo meat, burned on the surface and raw underneath, or living grubworms. Burton had gotten this Australian aborigine meal twice.
Tonight the liquor cup contained beer. He hated beer, so he traded it for Frigate’s wine.
The islanders’ grails contained food, much of which reminded Burton of Mexican cuisine. However, the tacos and tortillas were packed with venison, not beef.
While they ate and talked, Burton questioned the locals. From their descriptions, he surmised that they were pre-Columbian Indians who had lived in a wide valley in the Southwest desert. They had been composed of two different tribes speaking related but mutually unintelligible languages. Despite this, the two groups had lived peacefully side by side and had formed a single culture, each of the groups differing only in a few traits.
He decided that they were the people whom the Pima Indians of his time had called Hohokam, The Ancient Ones. These had flourished in the area which the white settlers would call the Valley of the Sun. It was there that the village of Phoenix of the Arizona Territory had been founded, a village which, according to what he had been told, had become a city of over a million population in the late twentieth century.
These people called themselves the Ganopo. In their Terrestrial time they had dug long irrigation ditches with flint and wooden tools and turned the desert into a garden. But they had suddenly disappeared, leaving the American archaeologists to explain why. Various theories had been advanced to account for this. The most widely accepted was that belligerent invaders from the north had wiped them out, though there was no evidence for that.
Burton’s hopes that he could solve this mystery were quickly dissipated. These people had lived and died before their society came to an end.
They all sat up late that night, smoking and drinking the alcohol made from the lichen which coated their rock spire. They told stories, mostly obscene and absurd, and rolled on the ground with laughter. Burton, when he told Arabic tales, found it necessary not to use unfamiliar references or to explain them if they were simple enough to be understood. But they had no trouble grasping the stories of Aladdin and his magic lamp or of how Abu Hasan broke wind.
The latter had been a great favorite with the Bedouins. Burton had often sat around a fire of dried camel dung and sent his listeners into shrieks of laughter though they had heard it a thousand times.
Abu Hasan was a Bedouin who had left his nomadic life to become a merchant of the city of Kaukaban in Yemen. He became very rich, and after his wife died he was urged by his friends to marry again. After some resistance, he gave in and arranged a marriage to a beautiful young woman. There was much feasting of rices of several colors and sherbets of as many more, kids stuffed with walnuts and almonds and a camel colt roasted whole.
Finally, the bridegroom was summoned to the chamber where his bride, clad in many rich robes, waited. He rose slowly and with dignity from his divan but, alas! he was full of meat and drink, and as he walked toward the bridal chamber, lo and behold! he let fly a fart, great and terrible.
On hearing this, the guests turned to each other and talked loudly, pretending not to have noticed this social sin. But Abu Hasan was greatly humiliated, and so, pretending a call of nature, he went down to the horsecourt, saddled a horse, and rode away, abandoning his fortune, his house, his friends, and his bride.
He then took a ship to India, where he became the captain of a king’s bodyguard. After ten years he was seized with a homesickness so terrible that he was about to die of it, and so he set out for home disguised as a poor fakir. After a long and dangerous journey, he drew near to his city, and he looked from the hills upon its walls and towers with eyes flowing with tears. However, he did not dare venture into the city until he knew that he and his disgrace had been forgotten. So he wandered around the outskirts for seven days and seven nights, eavesdropping upon the conversations in street and marketplace.
At the end of that time he chanced to be sitting at the door of a hut, thinking that perhaps he could now venture into the city as himself. And then he heard a young girl say, “O my mother, tell me the day I was born, for one of my companions needs to know that so she can read my future.”
And the mother replied, “You were born, O daughter, on the very night when Abu Hasan farted.”
The listener no sooner heard these words than he rose from the bench and fled, saying to himself, “Truly your fart has become a date, which shall last forever.”
And he did not quit traveling and voyaging until he returned to India and there lived in self-exile until he died, and the mercy of God be upon him.
This story was a great success, but before he told it Burton had to preface his story with the explanation that the Bedouins of that time considered farting in company a disgrace. In fact, it was necessary that everyone within earshot pretend that it had not happened, since the disgraced one would kill anyone who called attention to it.
Burton, sitting cross-legged before the fire, noted that even Alice seemed to enjoy the story. She was a middle-Victorian, raised in a deeply religious Anglican family, her father a bishop and the brother of a baron, descended from John of Gaunt, King John’s son, her mother the granddaughter of an earl. But the impact of Riverworld life and a long intimate association with Burton had dissolved many of her inhibitions.
He had then gone on to the tale of Sinbad the Sailor, though it was necessary to adapt this to the experiences of the Ganopo. They had never seen a sea, so the sea became a river, and the roc which carried off Sinbad became a giant golden eagle.
The Ganopo, in their turn, told stories from their creation myths and the ribald adventures of a folk hero, the trickster Old Man Coyote.
Burton questioned them about the adaptation of their religion to the reality of this world.
“O Burton,” their chief said, “this is not quite the world after death which we had envisioned. It is no land where maize grows higher than a man’s head in one day and deer and jackrabbit give us a good hunt but never escape our spears. Nor have we been reunited with our women and children, our parents and grandparents. Nor do the great ones, the spirits of the mountains
and the river, of the rocks and the bush, walk among us and talk to us.
“We do not complain. In fact, we are far happier than in the world we left. We have more food, better food, than we had there, and we do not have to work to get it, though we had to fight to keep it in the early days here. We have far more than enough water, we can fish to our heart’s content, and we do not know the fevers that killed or crippled us nor do we know the aches and pains of old age and its enfeeblements.”
Here the chief frowned, and with his next words a shadow fell upon them and the smiles faded.
“Tell me, you strangers, have you heard anything about the return of death? Of death forever, I mean? We live upon this little island and so do not get many visitors. But from the few we do meet and from those we talk to when we visit the banks, we have heard some strange and troubling stories.
“They say that for some time now no one who has died has been raised again. A person is killed, and he or she does not wake up the next day, his wounds healed, his grail beside him, upon a bank far from the scene of his death. Tell me, is this true or is it just one of those tales that people like to make up to worry others?”
“I do not know,” Burton said. “It is true that we have traveled for thousands of kilometers… I mean, we have passed by an uncountable number of grailstones on our voyage. And for the past year, we have noticed this thing of which you speak.”
He paused for a moment, thinking. From the very second day after the great resurrection, the lesser resurrections, or translations, as they were generally called, had occurred. People were killed or killed themselves or had fatal accidents, but, at dawn the next day, they found themselves alive. However, they were never raised at the scene of their deaths. Always, they found themselves far away, often in a different climatic zone.
Many attributed this to a supernatural agency. Many more, among whom was Burton, did not think that there was any agency except an advanced science which accounted for this. There was no need to call in the supernatural. “No ghosts need apply,” to quote the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Physical explanations sufficed.
Burton knew from his own experience, apparently a unique one, that a dead person’s body could be duplicated. He had seen that in the vast space where he had awakened briefly. Bodies were somehow made from some kind of recording, their wounds healed, diseased flesh regenerated, limbs restored, the ravages of old age repaired, youth restored.
Somewhere under the crust of this planet was an immense thermionic energy-matter converter. Probably, it was fueled by heat from the nickel-iron core. Its machinery operated through the complex of grailstones, the roots of which reached deep under the earth, forming a circuit so complex that it staggered the mind to think of it.
Was the recording of the dead person’s cells made by something in the stones themselves? Or was it made as Frigate had suggested, by unseen orbital satellites which kept an eye upon every living being, much as God was supposed to note even the fall of a sparrow?
Nobody knew, or, if they did, they were keeping the secret to themselves.
Energy-matter conversion through the grailstone system also accounted for the free meals every citizen of The Riverworld found in his grail three times a day. The base of each of the metal cylinders must conceal a tiny converter and an electronic menu. The energy was transmitted through the grailstone complex into the grails. And there electricity became complex matter: beef, bread, lettuce, etcetera, and even luxuries, tobacco, marijuana, booze, scissors, combs, cigarette lighters, lipstick, dreamgum.
The towel-like cloths were also provided via the stone system, but not through the grails. They appeared in a neat pile next to the resurrected body and the grail.
There had to be some sort of mechanism inside the underground roots of the stone complex. This somehow could project through many meters of earth the vastly complicated configuration of molecules of human bodies, grails, and cloths at precisely a centimeter above ground level.
Literally, people and things formed from the air.
Burton had sometimes wondered what would happen if the translatee should happen to be formed in an area occupied by another object. Frigate said that there would be a terrible explosion. This had never happened, at least not to Burton’s knowledge. Thus, the mechanism “knew” how to avoid this intermingling of molecules.
There was, however, as Frigate had pointed out, the volume of atmosphere which the newly formed body had to displace. How were the molecules of air kept from a fatal mingling with the molecules of the body?
No one knew. But the mechanism must somehow remove the air, make vacuums into which the body, grail, and cloths appeared. It would have to be a perfect vacuum, too, something which the science of the late 10th century had not succeeded in making.
And it did it silently, without the explosion of a mass of suddenly displaced air.
The question of how bodies were recorded still did not have a satisfactory answer. Many years ago, a captured agent of the Ethicals, a man calling himself Spruce, had said that a sort of chronoscope, an instrument which could look back in time, recorded the cells of human beings. Of every person who had ever lived from about two million B.C. to 2008 A.D.
Burton did not believe this. It did not seem possible that anything could go backward in time, bodily or visually. Frigate had expressed his disbelief, too, saying that Spruce probably had used “chronoscope” in a figurative sense. Or perhaps he had lied.
Whatever the whole truth, the resurrection and the grail food could be explained in purely physical terms.
“What is it, Burton?” the chief said politely. “You have been seized by a spirit?”
Burton smiled and said, “No, I was just thinking. We too have talked to many who said that no one has been translated for a year in their areas. Of course, this may just mean that the places through which we voyaged may not have had any translatees. It is possible that there have been translatees elsewhere. After all, The River may be…”
He paused. How could he put across the concept of a River which was possibly 10,000,000 or more kilometers long to people who did not understand any number above twenty?
“It may be so long that a man who sailed from one end of The River to the other would take as many years to do it as the combined lifetimes of your grandfather, father, and yourself on Earth.
“Thus, even though there may be as many deaths as there are blades of grass between two grailstones, that still would not be much compared to the number who live along The River. Even though we have voyaged very far, we still have not gone far compared to the length of The River. So, there may be many areas where the dead have risen.
“Also, not as many people die now as in the first twenty years here. The many, many little states have been permanently established. Few slave states now exist. People have made states which keep order among their own citizens and protect them from other states. The evil people who lusted for power and the food and goods of others were killed off. It is true they popped up elsewhere, but in other areas they found themselves without their supporters. Things are fairly well settled now, though, of course, there are still accidents, mainly from fishing, and individuals do kill, though chiefly from passion.
“There are not so many dying nowadays. It is possible that the areas through which we went just were not the areas in which translatees appeared.”
“Do you really believe that?” the chief said. “Or are you saying that merely to make us feel happy?”
Burton smiled again. “I do not know.”
“Perhaps,” the chief said, “it is as the shamans of the Church of the Second Chance tell us. That this world is only a stepping-stone, a way station, to another. A world even better than this one. The shamans say that when a person becomes a very good man here, much better than he was on Earth, he goes on to a world where the great spirits truly dwell. Though the shamans do insist that there is only one great spirit. I cannot believe that, since everybody knows that there are many spirits, both
high and low.”
“That is what they say,” Burton replied. “But how should they know any more than you or I know?”
“They say that one of the spirits that made this world appeared to the man who founded their church. This spirit told the man that this was so.”
“Perhaps the man who claims this is mad or a liar,” Burton said. “In any event, I would have to talk to this spirit myself. And he would have to prove that he was indeed a spirit.”
“I do not trouble myself about such matters,” the chief said. “It is better to leave the spirits alone, to enjoy life as it is and to be one whom the tribe finds good.”
“Perhaps that is the wisest course,” Burton said.
He did not believe this. If he did, why was he so determined to get to the headwaters of The River and to the sea behind the mountains ringing the north pole, the sea that was said to have at its center a mighty tower in which the secret makers and rulers of this world lived?
The chief said, “I mean no offense, Burton, but I am one who can see into a person. You smile and you tell funny stories, but you are troubled. You are angry. Why do you not quit voyaging on that small vessel and settle down? You have a good woman, all, in fact, that any man needs. This is a good place. There is peace, and thieves are unknown, except for an occasional passerthrough. There are not many fights except between men who want to prove that one is stronger than the other or between a man and his woman because they cannot get along with each other. Any sensible person would enjoy this area.”
“I am not offended,” Burton said. “However, for you to understand me, you would have to listen to the story of my life, here and on Earth. And even then you might not understand. How could you when I don’t understand it myself?”
Burton fell silent then, thinking of another chief of a primitive tribe who had told him much the same thing. This was in 1863 when Burton, as Her Majesty’s consul for the west African island of Fernando Po and the Bight of Biafra, visited Gélélé, king of Dahomey. Burton’s mission was to talk the king into stopping the bloody annual human sacrifices and the slave trade. His mission had failed, but he had collected enough data to write two volumes.
The Dark Design Page 3