The Dark Design

  Piscator dipped a glass in a huge glass bowl full of skull-bloom and handed it to her. She sipped on it while he told her how happy he was to see her here. He sounded as if he really meant it. She found herself warming to him, though she did remind herself that he came from a culture which conditioned males to regard females as pleasure and work objects. Then she warned herself—for the ten thousandth time?—that she must not be as guilty of prejudice as others. Find the facts first and study them before judgment.

  Her host led her around, introducing her briefly. Firebrass waved at her from a corner. Cyrano smiled thinly and bowed. They had encountered each other a number of times since that morning, but each had been aloof though polite. She did not want it that way. After all, he had apologized, and she was very curious about this flamboyant seventeenth-centurian.

  She said hello to Ezekiel Hardy and David Schwartz, whom she saw every day in the office inside the hangar and in the factories nearby. Hardy and Schwartz were friendly enough; they had learned by now that she was thoroughly knowledgeable in her field. In many, in fact. She had bridled her impatience and anger at their ignorance and their assumed superiority. It had paid off, though she did not know how long she could repress herself.

  “Don’t bottle up,” she told herself. “Empty yourself.”

  How many times had she done that, or tried to do that? And it had seemed to work so many times, though not always by any means. Yet, here was this Japanese, Ohara, calling himself by the goofy name of Piscator—how weird—telling her that Zen was nonsense. Well, not exactly nonsense. But he had certainly indicated that it was overrated. She had not liked to hear that. It struck her below the belt of her self-image; it injured her. Which it should not have done. She should have laughed at him, even if only inwardly. But he had seemed so sure.

  One of the women she was introduced to was Jeanne Jugan. Piscator mentioned that she had once been a servant in her native France but then had become one of the founders of the Roman Catholic religious order of the Little Sisters of the Poor, established in 1839 in Brittany.

  “I am his disciple,” Jugan said, nodding at Piscator.

  Jill’s eyebrows rose. “Oh!” She had no chance to continue the conversation. Piscator steered her away with a light touch on the elbow.

  “You may talk to her later.”

  Jill wondered what particular religion, sect, or mental discipline Piscator belonged to. He wasn’t a member of the Church of the Second Chance. A Chancer always wore a hornfish spiral vertebra or its wooden facsimile on a string from his neck.

  However, the next person she met did wear that emblem, three, in fact, indicating that he was a bishop. Samuelo, short, very dark, and hawk faced, had been born sometime around the middle of the second century A.D. He had been a rabbi of the Jewish community at Nehardea in Babylonia. According to Piscator, he was somewhat famous in his time for his knowledge of traditional law and for some attainments in science. One of his feats was the compilation of a calendar of the Hebrew year. His chief claim to fame, however, lay in his efforts to adjust the Jewish law to the law of the land in which the Jews of the Diaspora lived.

  “His principle was The law of the state is the binding law,” Piscator said.

  Samuelo introduced his wife, Rahelo. She was even shorter, though not as dark, and she had very broad hips and heavy legs, but a face of startling sensuality. Replying to Jill’s questions, she said that she had been born in the Krakow ghetto in the fourteenth century A.D. Piscator would tell Jill later that Rahelo had been abducted by a Polish nobleman and imprisoned for a year in his castle. Tiring of her, he had then kicked her out, though not without a fat purse of gold coins. Her husband had murdered her because she had not had the grace to kill herself because of her dishonor.

  Samuelo sent Rahelo running several times to get him a drink from a bowl filled with nonalcoholic bloom juice. He also gestured for her to light his cigar. She obeyed quickly and then resumed her position behind him.

  Jill felt like kicking Rahelo for putting up with her ancient degradation and Samuelo for his ancient complacency. She could visualize him at prayers, thanking God that he was not born a woman.

  Later, Piscator said to her, “You were furious with the bishop and his wife.”

  She did not ask him how he knew. She said, “It must have been a hell of a shock for him to wake up here and find out that he was not one of God’s chosen people. That everybody, idol worshipper, cannibal, swine eater, uncircumcised dog of an infidel, all God’s children, were here, all were chosen.”

  “We were all shocked,” Piscator said. “And terrified. Weren’t you?”

  She stared at him for a moment, then laughed, and said, “Of course. I was an atheist, and I still am. I was sure that I was just so much flesh that would become so much dust. And that was that. I was horribly frightened when I awoke here. But at the same time, well, not at first but a little later, I was relieved. So, I thought, there is eternal life. Then, even later, I saw such strange things, and we were in such a strange place, nothing like heaven or hell, you know…”

  “I know,” he said. He smiled. “I wonder what Samuelo thought when he saw that the uncircumcised goyim of Earth had been resurrected without their foreskins? That must have been as puzzling as the fact that men could no longer grow beards. On the one hand, God had performed a briss upon all the Gentiles who needed it and so He must be a Jewish god. On the other hand, a man could no longer sport the full beard demanded by God, so He surely could not be a Jewish god.

  “It was, and is, such things that should have and should be changing our patterns of thinking,” Piscator said.

  He came close, looking up at her with dark brown eyes set in fleshy slits. “The Second Chancers have some excellent ideas about why we have been raised from the dead and who has done it. They are not too far wrong about the way, or ways, one must take to attain the goal. A goal which mankind should desire and the gate to which our unknown benefactors have opened for us. But exactness is rightness. The inexact Church has wandered off the main road, or, I should say, the only road. Which is not to say that there is not more than one road.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “You sound as weird as those Chancers.”

  “We shall see—if you care to see,” he said. He excused himself and walked to the big table, where he started talking to a man who had just entered.

  Jill sauntered toward Jeanne Jugan, intending to ask her what she meant by calling herself Piscator’s disciple. De Bergerac, however, placed himself in front of her. He was smiling broadly now.

  “Ah, Ms. Gulbirra! I must beg your pardon for that unfortunate incident again! It was the liquor which caused me to behave so unforgivably, well not unforgivably I hope, but so barbarically! It is seldom that I drink more than an ounce or two, since I abominate the dulling of my senses. Alcohol makes one a swine, and I do not care for the beast on the hoof, though I adore him sliced and fried in a pan or roasted on a spit. But that night we were fishing…”

  “I didn’t see any fishing equipment,” she said.

  “It was on the other side of the grailstone. And the fog was thick, remember, mademoiselle?”

  “Ms.”

  “And we got to talking of things on Earth, places, people we had known, friends who had come to a bad end, children who had died, how our parents had misunderstood us, enemies, why we were here, and so on, understand? I became depressed, thinking of what might have been on Earth, especially what my cousin Madeleine and I might have done if I had been more mature or had not been so naive at that time. And so…”

  “And so you got drunk,” she said, her face grave.

  “And offended you, Ms., though I swear that I did not believe that you were a woman. The fog, the baggy clothing, my own addled wits…”

  “Forget it,” she said. “Only… I believed you would never forgive me, since you would have lost face after a woman punched you out. Your ego…”

  “You must not stereotype!” C
yrano cried.

  “And you are right,” she said. “That is a failing I loathe, and yet I find myself doing it all the time. However, so often… well, most people are living stereotypes, aren’t they?”

  They stood there, talking for a long time. Jill sipped on the purple passion, feeling her belly slowly warm up. The marijuana fumes became thicker, and she added to their intensity by drawing on the burning joint between her fingers. The voices were becoming louder, and there was much more laughter. Some couples were dancing now, their arms around each other’s necks, shuffling languorously.

  Piscator and Jugan seemed to be the only ones who were not drinking. Piscator was smoking a cigarette now, the first, she believed, that he had lit up since she had entered.

  The combination of liquor and pot had given her a pleasant halo now. She felt as if her flesh must be leaking a red-colored light. The smoke clouds were forming into almost-shapes. Sometimes, out of the corners of her eyes, she would glimpse a definite figure, a dragon, a smokefish, once, a dirigible. But when she turned her head toward them, she could see only amorphous masses.

  When she saw a metal tub float by to one side, she knew that she had had it. No more booze and grass the rest of the night. The reason for the appearance of the tub was apparent, since Cyrano had been telling her about crime and its punishments in the French of his day. A counterfeiter, for instance, was stretched out upon a large wheel. The executioner then broke his arms and legs with an iron bar, sometimes pounding them to a pulp. Executed criminals were hung in chains in marketplaces and left to rot until the bodies fell through the chains. The guts of others were left in big open tubs so that they could remind the citizens of what happened to transgressors.

  “And the streets ran with sewage, Ms. Gulbirra. No wonder that those who had the money drenched themselves with perfume.”

  “I thought it was because you seldom bathed then.”

  “True,” the Frenchman said. “I mean, true that we did not bathe often. It was thought to be unhealthy, un-Christian. But one can get used to the stench of unwashed bodies. I was not often aware of it since I was, as you might say, immersed in it, as unconscious of it as a fish is of water. But here, hélas! Where so few clothes are worn and where running water is so at hand, and where one encounters so many who cannot endure the odor of long-dirty humans, then one learns new habits. I, myself, now, I must confess that I saw no reason to be so fastidious, but then after some years I met a woman with whom I fell in love almost as passionately as I had with my cousin. She was Olivia Langdon…”

  “You can’t mean Sam Clemens’ wife?”

  “But yes. Though of course that meant nothing to me when I first met her and still does not. I understood that he was the great writer of the New World—she told me much about what happened since I had died on Earth—but I do not think much about it. And then Olivia and I wandered down The River and suddenly we were confronted with that classical situation which so many people dread. We met the former, the Terrestrial, spouse of one’s hutmate.

  “By then, though I was still fond of her, my passion had cooled off. Each of us did so many things to annoy, even enrage the other, and why not? Is that not something commonplace here, where man and woman may be not only from different nations but from different times? How can the seventeenth-century person mesh with the nineteenth? Well, sometimes such a mismatch can be reshaped to match. But add the temporal differences to those that naturally exist between individuals, and what do you have? Quite often, a hopeless case.

  “Livy and I were far up The River when I heard about the boat that was being built. I had heard of the meteorite that fell here, but I did not know that it was Sam Clemens who had seized the meteorite. I wanted to be one of the crew, and especially I wanted to feel a steel rapier in my hand again.

  “And so, my dear Ms. Gulbirra, we came to this place. The shock was powerful indeed for Sam. I felt sorry for him, for a while, and regretted having forced this reunion that was not a reunion. Olivia showed no inclination to leave me for Clemens even though our passion was not quite what it had been. She did feel guilt about not feeling love for him. This was all the stranger when it is considered that they were deeply in love on Earth.

  “But there had been many frictions, deeply hidden hostilities. She said that when she was in her terminal illness she did not want to see him. This hurt him very much, but she could not help it. And why, I asked her, had she not cared to admit him into her sickroom? She replied that she did not know. Perhaps it was because their only son had died because of Sam’s negligence. Criminal negligence, she called it, though she had never used, or even thought of, that word on Earth.

  “I said that that was a long time ago and on another planet. Why did she still hold that fierce grievance within her breast? Did it matter now? Was not little… I forget his name…”

  “Langdon,” Jill said.

  “… risen from the dead now? And she said, yes, but she would never see Langdon. He had died when he was two, and no one under five years of age at death had been resurrected. At least not here. Maybe on another world. In any event, even if he had been raised here, what chance would she have of running across him? And what if she did? He would be full grown now, he would not even remember her. She would be a stranger to him. And God only knew what kind of a boy he would be. He might have been resurrected among cannibals or Digger Indians and not even known English or table manners.”

  Jill grinned and said, “That sounds like something Mark Twain would say, not his wife.”

  Cyrano grinned back and said, “She didn’t say that. I made that up, paraphrasing her. There was, of course, much more to her feeling than the accidental death of her baby. Actually, I can’t blame Clemens. Being a writer, he was very absentminded when he was pondering upon a story. I am that way myself. He did not notice that the coverings of the baby had slipped aside and that the icy air was blowing full upon the unprotected infant. He was automatically driving the horse which was drawing the sledge through the snows while his mind was intent upon that other world—his fiction.

  “However, Olivia was certain that he was not as absentminded as he believed. She insisted that he could not have been, that some part of his mind must have observed the baby’s situation. He did not really want a son. Unlike most men, he preferred daughters. Besides, the baby was sickly from birth, a nuisance. To Sam, I mean.”

  “That’s one thing in his favor,” Jill said. “I mean, that he preferred girls. Though I suppose, to be fair, that it is as neurotic to prefer a female infant as to prefer a male. Still, he did not have that male chauvinism…”

  Cyrano said, “You must comprehend that Olivia did not consciously acknowledge all this during her Terrestrial existence. At least, she claimed not to have done so, though I suspect that she had such thoughts, was ashamed of them, and so put them away in the deep, dark files of her soul. But it was here, in this Valley, when she became addicted to chewing the soi-disant, the so-called dreamgum, that she perceived her true feelings.

  “And so, though she still loved Clemens, in a manner of speaking, she hated him even more.”

  “Did she quit using the gum?”

  “Yes. It upset her too much. Though she now and then had some ecstatic or fantastic visions, she had too many horrible experiences.”

  “She should have stuck with it,” Jill said. “But under proper guidance. However…”

  “Yes?”

  Jill compressed her lips, than said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t be too bloody critical. I had a guru, a beautiful woman, the best and wisest woman I ever knew, but she couldn’t keep me from running headlong into… well, no need to go into it here… it was too… dismaying? No, horrifying. I chickened out. So I shan’t be criticizing anyone else, shouldn’t anyway. I have been considering taking it up again, but I don’t trust the Second Chancers’ use of it, even though they claim to have excellent, quite safe, techniques. I couldn’t put full confidence in people who have their religious beliefs.”
br />   “I was a free thinker, a libertin, as we styled ourselves,” Cyrano said. “But now… I do not know. Perhaps there is after all a God. Otherwise, how does one account for this world?”

  “There are a score of theories,” Jill said. “And no doubt you’ve heard them all.”

  “Many, at any rate,” Cyrano said. “I was hoping to hear a new one from you.”

  At that moment, several people invaded the conversation. Jill broke off from the clump and drifted around, looking for another clump, a temporary colony, to attach herself to. In the Riverworld, as on Earth, all cocktail or after-dinner parties were alike. You spoke briefly, trying to make yourself heard above all the chatter and music, and then changed partners or groups until you had made a complete circuit. If you were intrigued or even interested in someone, you could make arrangements to see him or her some other time, when you could have a chance for an uninterrupted and quiet conversation.

  In the old days, long ago, when she was young in mind, she had often met men or women at such gatherings who enthralled her. But then she had been full of booze or pot or both and so wide open. It was easy to fall in love with a mind or body—or both at the same time. Sobering up usually meant wising up. A disappointment. Not always. Just most of the time.

  Here was a gathering all of whom had the bodies of twenty-five-year-olds. Chronologically, she was sixty-one. Some here might actually be one hundred and thirty-two or even more. The youngest could not be under thirty-six.

  The index of wisdom should be high, if it was true that age brought wisdom. She had not found that to be true about most people on Earth. Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum. Experience did not by any means give wisdom, that understanding of the basic mechanics of humanity. Most oldsters she had known had been as governed by conditioned reflexes as when they had been nineteen.