The Dark Design

by Philip José Farmer

  It seemed probable that they had fallen into the gap made when the lashings of the logs of the raft had been torn loose. But the current would by now surely have carried the intact part against the rock, crushing everything between it and the rock. Had they been carried around the corner of the spire and were now drifting with the current?

  If so, they were in a tangle of logs and pieces from the boat. They kept bumping against him and Loghu.

  She moaned and said, “I think my leg’s broken, Dick. It hurts so.”

  The log to which they were clinging was very thick and long, its ends so distant they could not be seen through the fog. They had to dig into the rough bark with their fingers. It would not be long before they would lose their grip.

  Suddenly Monat’s voice tore through the grayness.

  “Dick! Loghu! Are you out there?”

  Burton shouted, and a moment later something rapped along the log. It struck his fingers, causing him to yell with pain and to slip back into the water. He struggled back up, and then the end of a pole shot like a striking snake in ambush from the fog. It grazed his left cheek. A little to the right and it would have stunned him, perhaps broken his skull.

  He seized it and called out that he was to be pulled in.

  “Loghu’s here, too,” he said. “Be careful with that pole!”

  He was dragged in by Monat to the edge of the raft where Kazz pulled him out with a single heave. Monat then stuck the pole into the darkness. A minute later, Loghu was drawn in. She was half-unconscious.

  “Get some cloths and wrap her up in them. Keep her warm,” he told Kazz.

  “Will do, Burton-naq,” the Neanderthal said. He turned and was enfolded in the mist.

  Burton sat down on the wet, smooth surface of the raft. “Where are the others? Is Alice all right?”

  “They’re all here except Owenone,” Monat said. “Alice seems to have some broken ribs. Frigate hurt his knee. As for the boat, it’s gone.”

  Before he could recover from this shock, he saw torches flaring. They drew nearer, casting light enough for him to see their bearers. There were a dozen of them, short, dark-faced Caucasians with large, hooked noses, clad from head to foot in cloths of many stripes and colors. Their only arms were flint knives, all sheathed.

  One of them spoke in a language which Burton thought was Semitic. If so, it was an ancient form of that family. He could understand a few words here and there, though. He replied in Esperanto, and the speaker switched to that.

  There followed a swift dialog. Apparently, the man on the tower had fallen asleep because he had been drinking. He had survived the fall from the tower when the raft had crashed into the island and toppled him and the man whom Burton had seen climb up to him.

  The second man had not been so lucky. He had died of a broken neck. As for the luck of the pilot, it had run out on him. He had been thrown overboard by his enraged fellows.

  The great grinding noises Burton had heard before the boat struck came from the collision of the tip of the V-shaped prow with the docks and then the hard rock of the beach. This had crumpled the front half of the V and torn loose many of the fish-leather lashings. The V had also absorbed much of the shock, preventing more of the raft from being ripped apart.

  A section of the northwest side had been ripped off, but it was forced on by the main body. It was this jumble of massive logs which had rammed into the Hadji II, crushing the lower half of the back part. After the torn-off front half of the boat had fallen into the water, the back half, knocked apart by the great blow, had fallen down from—and through—the log jam.

  Burton had been thrown forward by the impact against the rock, had fallen back onto the deck, and then had been tilted off it as it slid into the water.

  The crew was indeed lucky that no one had been killed or seriously hurt. No, Owenone was yet to be accounted for.

  There were more things to find out. Just now, the wounded had to be attended to. He made his way to where the others lay beneath the blaze of three torches. Alice put out her arms to him and cried when he embraced her.

  “Don’t squeeze me,” she said. “My side hurts.”

  A man came to him and said that he had been appointed to take care of them. The two women were carried by some raftsmen, while Frigate, groaning, hobbled along supported by Kazz. By then the daylight had increased somewhat so they could see farther. After progressing for perhaps 61 meters or over 200 feet, they stopped before a large bamboo hut thatched with the great irontree leaves. This was secured to the raft by leather ropes tied at one end to pegs fitted into drilled holes in the logs.

  Inside the hut was a stone platform on which a small fire burned. The injured were laid near this on bamboo beds. By then the fog was getting thinner. The light increased and presently they were startled by a noise like a thousand cannon shells exploding at once. No matter how often they heard it, they jumped.

  The grailstones had spouted their energy.

  “No breakfast for us,” Burton said.

  He raised his head abruptly.

  “The grails? Did anyone get the grails?”

  Monat said, “No, they were lost with the boat.” His face twisted with grief, and he wept. “Owenone must have drowned!”

  They looked at each other in the firelight. Their faces were still pale from their ordeal; even so, they lost a shade of color.

  Some of them groaned. Burton cursed. He too felt grief for Owenone, but he and his crew were beggars, dependent upon the charity of others. It was better to be dead than without a grail, and in the old days those who had lost theirs could, and often did, commit suicide. The next day they would wake up, far from their friends and mates, but at least with their own source of food and luxuries.

  “Well,” Frigate said, “we can eat fish and acorn bread.”

  “For the rest of our lives?” Burton said, sneering. “Which may be forever for all we know.”

  “Just trying to look on the bright side of things,” the American said. “Though even that is pretty dim.”

  “Why don’t we deal with things as they come up?” Alice said. “For the moment, I’d like my ribs seen to, and I’m sure poor Loghu would like her broken bone set and splinted.”

  The man who had conducted them there arranged for treatment of the injured. After this was done and the pains of his patients had been eased with pieces of dreamgum, he went outside. Burton, Kazz, and Monat followed him outside. By then the sun was burning away the fog. Within a few minutes it would all be gone.

  The scene was appalling. The entire V-shaped prow of the raft had broken up when its point had ridden up onto the beach and its port side had smashed into a corner of the spire. The docks and the boats of the Ganopo were smashed, buried somewhere in the pile of logs on the beach. The main part of the raft had also slid for at least 13 meters onto the shore. Several hundreds of the raftspeople were standing at the edge of the wreck, talking animatedly but doing nothing constructive.

  To the left, logs were jammed against the sheer wall of the spire by the current. There was no sign of the Hadji II, or of Owenone. Burton’s hope that he might be able to retrieve at least a few grails was not going to be realized.

  He looked around the raft. Even though it had lost its forepart, it was still immense. It had to be at least 660 feet or 201 meters long with a breadth at its widest of 122 meters. Its stern was also V-shaped.

  In the center was the large, round, black object he had seen floating above the mists. It was the head of an idol 30 feet or over 9 meters tall. Black, squat, and ugly, it dominated the raft. It was sitting cross-legged, and its spine bore lizardlike crests. The head was a demon’s, its blue eyes glaring, its wide, snarling mouth displaying many great white sharkfish teeth.

  These, Burton assumed, had been removed from a dragonfish and set within the scarlet gums.

  In the middle of its huge paunch was a round hole. Inside this was a stone hearth on which a small pile of wood blazed. Its smoke rose within the body an
d curled out of the batlike ears of the idol.

  Forward, near the edge of the raft, the watchtower lay on its side, its supports broken off at the base by the force of the collision. A body still lay near it.

  There were some large buildings here and there with many smaller ones among them. A few of the smaller ones had collapsed, and one of the big constructions leaned crazily.

  He counted ten tall masts with square-rigged sails and twenty shorter ones with fore-and-aft rigs. All of the sails were furled.

  Alongside the edges were a number of racks holding boats of various sizes.

  Behind the idol was the largest building of all. He supposed that this was the house of the chief or perhaps a temple. Or both.

  Presently wooden trumpets blew and drums beat. Seeing the people streaming toward the great building, Burton decided to join them. They congregated between the idol and the building. Burton stood behind the mob where he could hear the proceedings but at the same time examine the statue. A little discreet scratching with a flint knife revealed that it was adobe covered with a black paint. He wondered where the paint for the body, eyes, and gums had been obtained. Pigments were rare, much to the sorrow of artists.

  The chief, or the head priest, was taller than the others though still half a head shorter than Burton. He wore a cape and kilt with blue, black, and red stripes and an oaken crown with six points. His right hand held a long shepherd’s staff of oak. He spoke from a platform at the building’s entrance, gesturing often with the staff, his black eyes fiery, his mouth spewing a torrent of which Burton understood not one word. After about half an hour he got down from the platform, and the crowd broke up into various work parties.

  Some of these went to the island to clear away the logs which had broken from the prow and piled onto the main body. Others went to the starboard rearside, where the V-shaped stern joined the main part. These lifted huge oars and fitted them to locks. Then, like a gang of galley slaves, working to a rhythm beat out on a drum, they began rowing.

  Apparently, they were trying to bring the stern around so that the current would catch it on one side and then swing the entire raft. As soon as the vessel presented enough of its starboard side to the current, it would be turned around enough to be free of the island.

  That was the theory, but the practice failed. It became apparent that the log jam would have to be cleared first and then leverage applied to push the front part from the beach.

  Burton wished to talk to the headman, but he had gone around to the front of the idol and was bowing rapidly and chanting to it. Whatever Burton had learned or not learned, he knew that it was dangerous to interrupt a religious ritual.

  He strolled around, stopping to look at the dugouts, canoes, and small sailboats in racks or on slides along the edge of the raft. Then he poked around the larger buildings. Most of these had doors which were barred on the outside. Making sure that no one was noticing him, he entered several.

  Two were storehouses of dried fish and acorn bread. One was crammed with weapons. Another was a boat shed containing two half-finished dugouts and the pine framework of a canoe. In time the latter would be covered with fish-skin. The fifth building held a variety of artifacts: boxes of oak rings for trading, spiral bones and the unicornlike horns of the hornfish, piles of fish- and human-leather, drums, bamboo flutes, harps with hornfish guts for strings, skulls fashioned into drinking cups, ropes of fiber and fish-skin, piles of dried dragonfish intestines suitable for sails, stone lamps for burning fish-oil, boxes of lipstick, face-paint, marijuana, cigarettes, cigars, lighters (all doubtless saved up for trading or tribute), about fifty ritual masks, and many more items.

  When he went into the sixth building, he smiled. This was where the grails were kept. The tall gray cylinders were stacked in wooden racks, waiting for their owners. He counted three hundred and fifty. One grail for each of the approximately three hundred and ten raftspeople meant that there were forty extra grails.

  A few minutes’ inspection showed him that all but thirty were tagged. The others had cords tied around the handles of the tops, the other ends of which cords were connected to baked clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing. These were the names of their owners. He examined some of the incised marks, which looked like those he had seen in photographs of Babylonian and Assyrian documents.

  He tried to raise the lids of a number of the tagged cylinders but failed, of course. There was some sort of mechanism preventing anyone but its owner from opening it. There were several theories about the operation, one being that a sensitive device inside the grail detected the electrical field of the owner’s skin and then activated an opening mechanism.

  However, the untagged grails were of a different kind, called “freebies” by some English-speakers.

  When over thirty-six billion of Earth’s dead had awakened whole and young along the immense stretch of The River, they had found a personal grail at their side. At the same time, each of the grailstones bore in its central depression one grail. This apparently had been provided by the resurrectors to show the new citizens just how their grails worked.

  Each stone had vomited noise and light, and when the thunder and lightning had ceased, curious people had climbed onto the stones to look into the grails left there. The lids were raised, and the contents were revealed. Wonder of wonders, joy of joys! The hollow interior held snap-down racks on which were dishes and cups full of food and various goodies.

  The next time the stones discharged, the private grails were on the stones, and these, too, supplied everything they needed and more, though human nature was such that many people complained because there wasn’t more variety.

  The freebies had become very valuable; people bullied and thieved and killed to get them. If a person had a private grail and a freebie, he or she had twice as much food and luxuries as he or she was supposed to get.

  Burton himself had never owned one, but here were thirty on racks before him.

  The problem of the lost grails was solved—if he could get the headman to part with them. After all, his raft was responsible for the loss of the boat and the grails. He owed the crew of the Hadji II.

  So far, he and his crew had been treated decently. He could think of other groups he had met that would have done nothing for them except throw them overboard—after mass-raping the women and perhaps sodomizing the men.

  However, there might be a limit to the raftspeople’s hospitality. The free grails were anything but free. This group might even have stolen these. However they got them, they would be saving them for emergencies, such as replacements for those they lost or as tribute if they ran into a particularly hostile and powerful group.

  Burton left the building, barred the door after him, and walked around pondering. If he asked the chief to give him seven grails, he could be refused. That would make the man suspicious, and he would set up guards over this building. Not to mention the fact that he might get nervous having potential thieves around and would ask them, politely or otherwise, to leave.

  Passing by the idol, he saw that the chief had stopped praying and was walking toward the island. Apparently, he intended to supervise the activities there.

  Burton decided to ask him now about the grails. No use putting off the issue.

  The man who sits on his arse sits on his fortune.

  Mutu-sha-ili was his native name, meaning “man of god,” but to Esperanto speakers he was Metuael. In English, Methusaleh.

  For a delirious moment, Burton wondered if he had met the model for the long-lived patriarch of the Old Testament. No, Metuael was a Babylonian, and he had never heard of Hebrews until he had come to The Riverworld. He had been an inspector of granaries on Earth, but here he was the founder and head of a new religion and commander of the great raft.

  “One night many years ago, while a storm raged outside, I was sleeping. And a god came to me in my dream, a god named Rushhub. I had never heard of this god, but he told me that he had once been a mighty god of my ancestor
s. Their descendants, however, had abandoned him, and in my lifetime on Earth only a small village at the edge of the kingdom had still worshipped him.

  “But gods do not die, though they may take other forms and new names, or even become nameless, and he had lived in the dreams of many people through many generations. Now he had decided that the time was come to leave the dreamworld. Thus, he told me that I must arise and go forth and preach the worship of Rushhub. I must gather together a group of the faithful and build a giant raft and take my people down The River upon it.

  “After many years, perhaps several generations as we knew generations on Earth, we would come to the end of The River, where it empties into a hole in the base of the mountains that ring the top of this world.

  “There, we would go through the underworld, a great dark cavern, and then we would come out into a bright sea surrounding a land where we would live forever in peace and happiness with the gods and goddesses themselves.

  “But before the raft was launched we must make a statue of the god Rushhub and set it upon the raft and worship it as the symbol of Rushhub. So do not say, as so many have said, that we are idolaters who mistake the physical symbol for the body of the god itself.”

  Burton thought the man was crazy, though he was discreet enough not to say so. He and his crew had fallen into the hands of fanatics. Fortunately, the god had told Metuael that his worshippers must harm no one unless it was in self-defense. However, he knew from experience that “self-defense” could mean whatever a person or group wanted it to mean.

  “Rushhub himself told me that just before we enter the underworld, we must break the idol into little bits and cast them into The River. He did not say why we should do so. He merely said that by the time we reach the cavern, we will understand.”

  “That is all very well for you,” Burton said. “But you are responsible for destroying our boat. Also, we have lost our grails.”