Gods of Riverworld: The Fifth Book of the Riverworld Series

  "I'll be along in a while," Burton said.

  She bowed again, said goodbye to Williams, and left.

  "A beautiful woman," Williams said, and he sighed.

  "She knows how to keep a man happy."

  "Do you now how to make her happy?"

  "Of course!" Burton said.

  "Don't get hot around the collar, nothing personal. I'd say she's a quiet but deep one. I'm pretty good at character analysis on short order. I've had to be. Matter of survival."

  "She's had a very hard life," Burton said. "It's a wonder she's kept her sanity."

  "You trying to be subtle and tell me I'm not the only one who's had a rough time?"

  "You're overly sensitive, my friend."

  Williams took thirty minutes more to finish his story. He had married a deeply religious black woman who, unfortunately, could not say No to her overpassionate minister. Result: Williams caught the clap again. Overcoming the desire to find her and kill her, he had decided to go hunting instead and sublimate his wish for violence by shooting birds and rabbits. While he was in the woods, he was fatally wounded by a shotgun blast from behind a bush. Dying, he wondered which of the many candidates had shot him. An agent of the KGB, the CIA, the Black Muslims, the Albanians, or the Salvation Army? Actually, the SA itself was not after him, but a soldier in its ranks was. While in Los Angeles, he had pretended to be converted to Christianity during a sermon given by a Major Barbara. Then he had joined the Army, but a corporal, Rachel Goggin, had fallen in love with him and he with her. At that time, he thought that he was clean, free of VD, but after he and Rachel had made love, he discovered that his nemesis had struck again. Moreover, Rachel had caught the disease from him.

  Williams had promised to marry her, but his enemies were closing in, and he had left her to save his own life. Corporal Goggin had apparently gone psychotic because of his unexplained desertion and because of her overreaction to infection with a disease that he had become quite accustomed to. He heard, while he was in Portland, that a woman resembling Rachel was asking about him and that she was packing a gun.

  "Everybody except Goodwill Industries was after my ass, and I wasn't too sure about them."

  "And what have you learned from these, ah, Candidean experiences?"

  "You sound like Nur."

  "You've talked to him?"

  "Sure," Williams said. "I know everybody here. Very well."

  "Yes, but what was the lesson?" Burton said.

  "That I'd been the plaything of life but I wasn't going to be any more. I made sure of that on The River, I fought for power and I got it. If I was in a situation where I was the underdog, I became the overdog as soon as possible. I was tired of being kicked around, the one who got shafted. So . . ."

  "Nobody's victimizing you here, am I correct?" Burton said. He rose from his chair.

  "And nobody's going to."

  Williams smiled, his expression a curious blend of amusement and malice.

  "Just sit down for a minute. Then you can go. Hasn't something been perplexing you for these past two weeks? Something you just can't account for?"

  Burton frowned and said slowly, "I can't recall anything."

  His forehead cleared. "Unless . . . yes, I have been wondering . . . but you couldn't have had anything to do with it . . . I have been wondering who resurrected Netley, Gull, Crook, Stride and Kelly."

  "You mean those involved in the Jack- the- Ripper case?"

  Burton was startled but tried not to show it. "How do you know who they are?"

  "Oh, was watching you watch their memory files."

  Burton reared from the chair, his face red and contorted.

  "Damn you, you've been spying on me! Why do you think you have the right . . .?"

  Williams, still smiling, though his eyes were narrowed, rose from his chair.

  "Hold it right there! If you think it's OK to spy on others, why shouldn't others spy on you? Don't throw stones in a glass house, my friend."

  Burton was speechless for a moment. Then he said, "There's a vast difference. I observed the dead. You're spying on the living, your neighbors!"

  "You didn't observe the living from the grailstones along the River?"

  "You soiled my privacy!"

  "You can't soil the soiled," Williams said. He was still smiling, but his body stance showed that he was ready to repel attack.

  "Very well," Burton said. "You still haven't told me why you took it on yourself to raise those pathological murderers."

  "They were, but they aren't. The reason I did . . . I'm a collector and a student of religious types. I got interested on Earth, I had much experience with them, you know. The Marxists . . . they're religious, though they'd deny it, the Black Muslims, the Salvation Army, the Buddhists, the Southern Methodists, you know how many of them I became involved with. I am religious, too, though not in a conventional sense. I am the one who raised the New Christians and the Nichirenites and the Second Chancers who live in Turpinville, and I raised Gull the Dowist. I left it to him to resurrect his fellows, which he did. I have plans for bringing others in."

  Burton did not know whether or not to believe him He snorted and strode out of the room. Williams called, "Don't go away mad, Sir Richard!" and he laughed uproariously.

  27

  * * *

  On his way to the elevator, Burton looked back down the hall. Williams was going down the steps, apparently to join the crowd of revelers in the vestibule. The man looked up and waved at him through the railing uprights. He was grinning as if he had been enjoying himself hugely. Had Williams been telling him the truth or had he been fantasizing? The Riverworld was a place where men and women should no longer have reason to lie. They had been delivered from the societies and institutions that had forced them, or made them think they were forced, to form protective self and public images. But most of them seemed unaware of that or found it hard to discard old and unnecessary habits.

  However, climbing the steps was a good idea. He needed the exercise. He turned the corner, passing by the elevator, and strode down the long hallway toward the stairway. The music and voices that he had faintly heard in the other hall faded away. The only sound was that of his footsteps. But, as he passed the door of the room next to the stairwell, he thought he heard a scream. He stopped. It had not been loud. So faint was it, he might have imagined it. No! There it was again, and it seemed to come through the door.

  The rooms were insulated but were not, like the tower walls, absolutely soundproof. He placed his ear against the intricately carved oak door. He could not hear the screams now, but a man was yelling in the room. The words were not clear; the tone was. It was threatening and angry.

  He tried the doorknob. It turned, but the door would not budge. He hesitated. For all he knew, the two inside, if there were only two, might not want to be disturbed. If they turned on him because he was interfering in a matter strictly between lovers, he would be embarrassed. On the other hand, he was not easily embarrassed, and he would feel that he had been remiss if he could have prevented a crime.

  He knocked hard on the wood three times, then kicked it twice. A woman started to scream, but she was cut off.

  "Open up in there!" Burton shouted, and he struck the door again.

  A man shouted. It sounded like, "Go away, motherfucker!" but Burton was not sure.

  He took his beamer from his jacket and cut a circle around the lock. When he had pushed the knob and the lock through, he stepped to one side. It was well that he had. Three shots boomed, and three bullets pierced the thick wood. The man — he supposed it was a man was firing — had a heavy handgun, perhaps a .45 automatic. Burton yelled, "Come out unarmed! Your hands on your head! I have a beamer!"

  The man snarled a series of curses and said that he would kill whoever tried to come in.

  "It's no use! You're trapped!" Burton said. "Come on out, hands to your head!"

  "You can —"

  The man's voice was cut off by a thud and a clatt
er. Then Star Spoon's voice, high and trembling, said, "I knocked him out, Dick!"

  Burton pushed the door in and sprang in, beamer ready. A large naked black man was lying face down on the thick Oriental rug, blood on the back of his head. A gold statuette, smeared with blood, lay by his side.

  He swore. She was naked, and her face and arms were blue with bruises. One eye was beginning to swell up. Her clothes were scattered in shreds over the room. She ran weeping and sobbing to him, and he held her shaking body close to his. But, seeing the man push himself up from the floor, Burton released her. He picked the .45 automatic up, reversed it, and slammed the man on the back of his neck. Without a sound, the man crumpled.

  "What happened?" Burton said.

  She had trouble getting the words out. He took her to a table and poured out a glass of wine. She drank, though most of it ran down her chin and neck. Still crying, she choked out a story, most of which he had guessed. She had been on her way to the stairwell when the man had stepped out of the door ahead of her. Smiling, he had asked her name. She had told him and then had tried to get by him, but he had grabbed her arm. He wanted to party, he said. He had never had a Chinese woman before, and she sure was a doll. And so on.

  Star Spoon had struggled as he pulled her into the room. The man's whiskey breath sickened her when he kissed her. When she had tried to scream, he clapped his hand over her mouth, slammed the door shut, hurled her so hard she fell on the floor, locked the door and ripped her clothes from her.

  By the time Burton arrived, she had been raped three times.

  He made sure that the man was tied up, got a tranquilizer from the converter, and gave it and a glass of water to her. He put her into the shower and then held the douche bag while, still trembling and weeping, she washed herself out.

  After he had toweled her dry, he ordered some clothes from the converter, helped her get dressed, and put her down on a sofa. He used the computer console to call Turpin. Turpin, hearing the report, scowled and said, "I'll fix that son of a bitch!"

  He looked at the man on the floor and said, "That's Crockett Dunaway. A real troublemaker. I've had my eye on him for some time. You wait until I get down there."

  A few minutes later, Tom Turpin, followed by the other members of the party, entered. Alice, Sophie and Aphra took Star Spoon in charge at once and carried her into the room next door. Turpin got a hypodermic full of adrenaline and injected it into Dunaway's buttock. After a minute, Dunaway groaned and got to his hands and knees. When he saw the others, his eyes widened. He croaked, "What you doing here?"

  Turpin did not answer. Dunaway got to his feet and staggered to a chair, sat down, bent over and held his head in his hands. "Man, I got a headache killing me!"

  "That's not all that's going to kill you," Turpin said harshly.

  Dunaway raised his head. His bloodshot, slightly crossed eyes looked at Turpin. "What you talking about? That bitch come on me, and when I obliged her, she started screaming for help. You can't blame me for what that slant-eyed whore done. She must've heard her man coming, and so she pretended like she wasn't having none of me."

  "She couldn't have heard me," Burton said. "I wasn't making any sound in the hall. If I hadn't heard her scream, I would've gone right on by the door. You're guilty as hell, man."

  "I swear 'fore God I ain't," Dunaway said. "That bitch asked me to give her a good time."

  "There's no use arguing about it," Turpin said. "We'll just run off your memory and get at the truth."

  Dunaway grunted and shot out of the chair. He was headed for the door, but his legs gave way, and he crumpled on the floor.

  "Uh, huh!" Turpin said. "I thought so. Dunaway, no one gets away with rape here. You've had it, man!"

  Dunaway raised his head. Saliva ran from his open mouth. "No, I swear to God . . .!"

  Turpin told his two bodyguards to set Dunaway in a chair before the computer console. "We'll know in a few minutes what's what!"

  Dunaway tried to struggle, but the two blows had sapped his strength. He was set down in the chair, and a bodyguard asked the Computer to extract Dunaway's memories of the past hour and display them. Dunaway sat trembling and gibbering while his guilt was shown.

  "I'm not only going to kill you," Turpin said, "I'm destroying your body-record. You ain't never going to get a chance to do this to a woman again. You've had it, Dunaway!"

  The man's screams were snapped off by the ray from Turpin's beamer. Dunaway fell over in the chair, a narrow hole, cauterized at the edges, on each side of his head.

  "Throw him in the converter and incinerate him," Turpin said to the bodyguards.

  Nur said, "Are you really going to dissolve his recording?"

  "Why not? He won't ever be any different."

  "You are not God."

  Turpin scowled, and then he laughed. "You're insidious, Nur. You've been bending my ear so long with all that religious philosophical hoop- de- la you got me confused. OK. So I don't destroy him? And then, when he goes back to The Valley, he's going to rape and beat other women. You want that on your conscience?"

  "The Ethicals in their wisdom set it up so that anyone, no matter how vicious, will live until this project is ended. No exceptions. I trust them. They must know what they're doing."

  "Yeah?" Turpin said. "If they're so smart, how come they didn't catch on to Loga? Why didn't they make provisions for someone like him? He's wrecked their schedule and their program."

  "I am not certain that they didn't make provisions for someone like him," Nur said calmly.

  "Mind explaining that?" Turpin said.

  "I have no explanation now."

  Tom Turpin took his time lighting up a big cigar. Then he said, "OK. I'll go along with you. Up to a point. Just now, nobody's being sent back to The Valley, so Dunaway ain't going to do anybody any harm. But when . . . if . . . the Computer starts sending them back, it ain't going to send Dunaway back until I say so. Which may be never. I don't know just now what I'm going to do when that time comes."

  "There are millions of Dunaways waiting to be released like pent-up hyenas," Burton said. "What good is it going to do to judge just one?"

  "It's your woman that was raped!" Turpin said.

  "But she is not my property, and I won't speak for her," Burton said. "Why . . . since she is the victim, why don't you let her be the judge?"

  Alice, having just come from the bedroom, had overheard him. She said, "Well, Dick! So she isn't your property and she can speak for herself! Imagine Richard Burton saying that! You have changed!"

  "I suppose I have."

  "Too bad you didn't do it before, not immediately after, we parted," Alice said. "That doesn't make me feel very good, you know. You live with the Chinese woman for a very little while, and she works all sorts of changes in you."

  "She had nothing to do with it."

  "Who did then, God? Oh, you're impossible."

  Nur said, "How is she?"

  "As well as can be expected after . . . that. Aphra, Sophie and I will take care of her for a few days. If that's all right with you, Dick?"

  "Of course," he said, somewhat stiffly. "It is most generous . . . compassionate . . . of you."

  Star Spoon had fallen asleep under the influence of a drug recommended by the Computer. Burton and Frigate Carried her out on a stretcher through a side entrance and placed her in the back of a huge steam-driven Dobler automobile. Turpin drove it over the winding road to the entrance. Here Burton transferred her to his .chair, and, with her on his lap, flew the chair the short distance to his world's entrance and the long distance to the Arabian Nights castle in the center. The others followed him. After Star Spoon had been undressed and put in bed by the women, Alice and Sophie came out from her room.

  "She should be all right by the time she wakes up," Sophie said. "Physically, that is. Mentally and emotionally . . . ?"

  The women would take care of Star Spoon in shifts. As soon as she awoke, Burton would be called. He protested that that was
not necessary. He would sit by her bed until she awoke and then do his best to comfort her.

  "Let us do something, too," Sophie said.

  Burton said that he would go along with them; he understood why they insisted. They empathized deeply with Star Spoon because they, too, had been raped more than once. They also needed to take care of her; that compulsion, if you could call it a compulsion, was part of their natures.

  "Born nurses," Burton said to Frigate.

  "How lucky can you get?"

  The American was not being facetious. He envied people who wanted to use themselves for the benefit of others.

  Star Spoon got up in time for breakfast. Though she drank only a little tea and ate part of a piece of toast, she was well enough to take some part in the conversation. She seemed glad to have the three women with her, and they even got her to laugh several times. However, she did not want Burton to hold her, and she responded to his attempts to talk with her with uncompleted sentences or nods or shakes of her head.

  After two days, the three women left. Star Spoon immediately quit staring into space for long periods and busied herself with various projects with the Computer.

  "She's withdrawing," Burton told Nur and Frigate. "I won't say it's just into herself. She seems to be burying herself with work with the Computer. She'll stop whatever she's doing — she won't talk about that much — and listen while I talk. But I've spent hours, days, trying to get her back to her old self, and I've failed."

  "Yet," Frigate said, "she's been raped before."

  "This may have been the final trauma. The last and the unendurable wound."

  He did not tell them that she had become animated and genuinely interested for a short time when he had asked her what she wanted to do to Dunaway. She had replied that she did not want to destroy his recording. He certainly deserved oblivion forever, but she could not bring herself to do that. Dunaway should be punished, if he would learn anything from it. She doubted that very much. Finally, she said that she was going to forget about any punishment or any kind of retribution. She wished that she could forget about him, but she just could not.