R.W. III - The Dark Design

  Two of the crew were Arabs. One was Nur el-Musafir (The Traveler). The other had been the wife of a captain of a South Arabian ship which had traded with the southwest African empire of Monomotapa in the twelfth century A.D.

  The Chinese crewman had ended his Earthly life by drowning when Kubla Khan's invasion fleet was destroyed by a storm enroute to Japan.

  There were two eighteenth-centurians, Edmund Tresillian, a Cornishman who lost a leg in 1759 during the capture of Hood's Vestal of the French Bellona off Cape Finisterre. Pensionless, and with a wife and seven children, he was reduced to begging. Caught stealing a purse, he died in prison of a fever while waiting for his trial. The second man, "Red" Cozens, had been a midshipman on the Wager, a rebuilt Indiaman merchant accompanying Admiral Anson' s flotilla on its voyage around the world. It had been wrecked off the coast of Patagonia. After innumerable sufferings and hardships, part of its crew had gotten to civilization, where the Spanish government of Chile imprisoned them for a while. However, poor Cozens had been shot and killed by a Captain Cheap a few days after the wreck in the mistaken belief that he was a mutineer.

  John Byron, the poet's grandfather, also a midshipman then, had criticized Cheap for this in The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (Commodore in a Late EXPEDITION round the WORLD) Containing An Account of the Great Distresses Suffered by Himself and His Companions on the Coast of Patagonia, from the Year 1740, till their Arrival in England, 1746, etc., London, 1768.

  Frigate had owned a first edition of this book, in which he had found a description of an animal encountered by Byron which had to be a giant sloth.

  He would have liked to have run across Byron. The little man had to have been incredibly tough to survive his experiences. Later, he had become an admiral, nicknamed "Foul Weather Jack" by his sailors. Just about every time he put out to sea, his fleet was hit by a bad storm.

  Other interesting crew members were a late-twentieth-century Rhode Island millionaire and yachtsman; an eighteenth-century Turk, a bos'n's mate who had died of syphilis, a common sailor's disease then; and Abigail Rice, Earthly wife of an early– nineteenth-century second mate on a New Bedford whaler. Binns, the yachtsman, and Mustafa, the Turk, were obviously in love with each other.

  As Peter would find out later, Cozens, Tresillian, and Chang shared Abigail Rice. This made Frigate wonder what she had been doing while her husband was spending two to three years chasing whales. Perhaps nothing she shouldn't have been doing. Perhaps she had been so sexually starved on Earth that she had exploded here.

  And then there was Umslopogaas. Pogaas for short. He was a Swazi, son of a king of that South African nation which had been enemies of the great Zulu people. He had lived during the expansion of the British and the Boers and the conquests of the bloody military genius, Shaka. On Earth, he had killed twelve warriors in duels; here, at least fifty.

  He would have been unnoticed by history, despite his fighting prowess, if he had not happened to be attached in his old age to the mission of Sir Theophilus Shepstone. With Shepstone was a young man, H. Rider Haggard, who had been much attracted by the stately figure and the tall stories of the old Swazi. Haggard was to immortalize Umslopogaas in three novels, Nada the Lily, She and Allen, and Allan Quatermain. However, he made the Swazi a Zulu, which must have disturbed his model.

  Now Pogaas lounged near the ship, leaning on a long-handled war-axe of flint. He was tall and slim and his legs were extraordinarily long. His features were not Negroid but Hamitic, thin lipped, hawk nosed, and high cheek boned. He seemed friendly enough, but there was something about his bearing that told all but the most insensitive that he was not to be trifled with. He was also the only person on the crew who did not help handle the ship. His specialty was fighting.

  Frigate was tinkled pink, when he discovered the identity of this man. Imagine that! Umslopogaas!

  After talking to various crew members, Frigate went back to a spot near the two officers. From what he heard, they were in no hurry to get to any particular place. The captain did, however, comment that he would like to get to the headwaters of The River some day. Which was, to say, in a hundred years or so.

  Frigate finally spoke up, asking the captain and Rider about their Terrestrial origins. Farrington said he'd been born in California, but he gave no birthdate or place. Rider said he'd been born in Pennsylvania in 1880. Yes, he had spent a lot of time, most of his life, in fact, in the West.

  Frigate swore softly. He had thought the two looked familiar. However, they wore their hair longer than on Earth and the lack of Terrestrial clothes gave them a different appearance. What Rider needed was a big white ten-gallon hat and a flashy pseudo-Western coat and breeches and a pair of ornamented cowboy's boots. And a horse to sit upon.

  As a child, Frigate had seen him in just such garments and on a horse. That had been during a parade preceding a circus – Sells and Floto? Never mind. Frigate had stood with his father on Adams Street

  , just south of the courthouse, and waited eagerly for his favorite Western film hero to ride by. And so the hero had, but, being drunk, he had fallen off his horse. Unhurt, he had swung into the saddle again, riding off to the mingled laughter and cheers of the crowd. He must have sobered up after that, for he gave a great demonstration of riding and roping in the Wild West Show following the main events.

  At that time, Frigate regarded drunkards as moral lepers and thus should have been completely disillusioned about Rider. But his worship of Rider was so intense that he was willing to forgive him. What a little prig he'd been!

  Frigate was well acquainted with Farrington's portrait since he'd seen it so many times in biographies and on the back of dust jackets. Frigate had begun reading his works at the age of ten, and when he was fifty-seven he had contributed a foreword to a collection of Farrington's fantasies and science fiction,

  For some reason, both his heroes were traveling under false names. He, Peter Frigate, was not going to expose them – not unless he had to. No, he wouldn't do it even then, but if he were forced to threaten them with exposure, he would do so. He'd do almost anything to get aboard the Razzle Dazzle.

  After a while, the Frisco Kid announced that he and Tex would now interview anyone who'd like to sign on as a deckhand. Two folding chairs were set up on the end of the dock, and the "employment" line formed in front of the seated officers. Frigate immediately got into the line. Three men and a woman were ahead of him. This gave him a chance to listen to the questioning and to decide what he would tell his prospective employers.

  Chapter 30

  * * *

  The Frisco Kid, sitting on a folding bamboo chair and smoking a cigarette, ran his eyes up and down Frigate.

  "Peter Jairus Frigate, heh? American. Midwest. Right? You look strong enough, but what's your nautical experience?"

  "Not much on Earth," Peter said. "I used to sail a small boat on the Illinois River. But I've done a lot here. I sailed on a large single-masted catamaran for three years and I put in a year on a two – masted schooner like yours."

  That was a lie. He'd only shipped on the two-master for three months. But that was enough for him to know, literally, the ropes.

  "Hm. Did these ships make short local trips or were they on long voyages?"

  "Long ones," Frigate said. He was glad he hadn't referred to the vessels as boats. Some sailors were very touchy about the distinction between "boats" and "ships." For Frigate, anything on a river was a boat. But Farrington was a seafaring man, even if there were no more seas.

  "In those areas," he added, "the wind was usually from up-River. So we were sailing close-hauled most of the time."

  "Yeah, anybody can sail with the wind," Martin Farrington said.

  "Why do you want to sign up?" Rider asked suddenly.

  "Why? I'm fed up with life here. Rather, I'm dissatisfied with doing the same old thing day after day. I . . ."

  "You know how it is on a ship," Farrington said. "It's cramped, and you spend most of your time with
just a few people. And it's pretty much the same old thing day after day."

  "I know that, of course," Frigate said. "Well, I'd like to travel to the end of The River, for one thing. The catamaran I was on was going there, but it got burned during an attack by slavers. The schooner was sunk by a dragonfish while we were helping some locals fish for it. It was Moby Dick and the Pequod all over again."

  "You were Ishmael?" Rider said.

  Frigate looked at him. Rider was supposed to have been able to quote great chunks of Shakespeare, to be well read indeed. But that could have been Hollywood publicity crap.

  "You mean, was I the lone survivor? No, six of us got to shore. It was scary, though."

  "Was . . . ?"

  Farrington stopped, cleared his throat, and looked at Rider. Rider raised thick, dark eyebrows. Farrington was evidently considering how to rephrase the question.

  "Who were the captains of these two crafts?"

  "The catamaran captain was a Frenchman named DeGrasse. The schooner captain was a rough son-of-a-bitch named Larsen. A Norwegian of Danish birth. He'd been captain of a sealer, I believe."

  Nothing he said about Larsen was true. But Peter couldn't resist testing Farrington's reaction.

  The captain's eyes narrowed, then he smiled. He said slowly, "Was Larsen nicknamed Wolf?"

  Peter kept his face blank. He wasn't falling for that trap. If Farrington thought that he was trying to tell him circuitously that he recognized him, Farrington would not take him on.

  "No. If he had a nickname, it was 'Bastard.' He was about six and a half feet tall and very dark for a Scandinavian. His eyes were as black as an Arab's. Did you know him?"

  Farrington relaxed. He dubbed out his cigarette on a baked-clay ashtray, and lit up another. Rider said, "How good are you with that bow?"

  "I've been practicing for thirty years. I'm no Robin Hood, but I can shoot six arrows in twenty seconds with reasonable accuracy. I've studied the martial arts for twenty years. I never look for a fight and I avoid one if it's possible. But I've been in about forty major actions and a lot of minor ones. I've been badly wounded four times."

  Rider said, "When were you born?"

  "In 1918."

  Martin Farrington looked at Rider, then said, " I suppose you saw a lot of movies when you were a kid?"

  "Didn't everybody?"

  "And what about your education?"

  "I got a B. A. in English literature with a minor in philosophy and I was a compulsive reader. Lord, how I miss reading!"

  "Me, too," Farrington said.

  There was a pause. Rider said, "Well, our memories of Earth get dimmer every day."

  Which meant that if Frigate had seen Rider in the films and Farrington on the dust jackets of books, he did not remember them. The captain's question about his education might, however, have a double interest. He would want a crewman who could talk intelligently about many matters. On Earth, Farrington's forecastle companions had been brutal and illiterate, not exactly his soulmates. So, for that matter, had been most of the people he knew until he had gone to college.

  "We seem to have about ten in all to interview,'' Farrington said. "We'll make our choice after we've talked to everybody. We'll let you know before noon."

  Peter wanted desperately to be chosen, but he was afraid that too much eagerness might put them off. Since they we're, for some reason, traveling under pseudonyms, they might be wary of someone who was trying too hard to sign on. Why, he did not know.

  "One thing we forgot," Rider said. "We don't have room for more than one hand. You can't take your woman along. Is that okay?"

  "No problem."

  "You can take turns with Abigail," Rider said. "If you don't mind sharing with three others. And if she likes you, of course. But she hasn't shown many antipathies so far."

  "She's a luscious woman," Peter said. "But that sort of thing doesn't appeal to me."

  "Mustafa kind of likes you," Farrington said, grinning. "He's been eyeing you."

  Frigate looked at the Turk, who winked, and he blushed.

  "That appeals even less."

  "Just make that plain, and you won't be bothered by him or Binns," Farrington said. "I'm no homo, but I saw a lot of buggery. Any man who sails under the mast has; every ship, naval or commercial, has been a viper's nest of sodomy since Noah. Those two are real he-men, aside from their lack of interest in the fair sex. And they're damn good sailors. So just tell them to back off. If, that is, we accept you. But I don't want any bitching about being hard up. You can catch up when we go ashore, and if we lose a man you can get a woman for your bunkmate. She has to be a good sailor, though. Everyone pulls his weight on this ship."

  "Abigail's looking more appealing by the second," Frigate said.

  Farrington and Rider laughed, and Frigate moved on.

  For a while, he stood by the dock area. This was a shallow bay which had been hacked with much labor out of the bank. Stone cut from the base of the mountains had been carried down here and used to line the shore. Wooden docks had been extended from the bank, but these held mainly small catboats, lugboats, and catamarans. Two giant rafts with masts were tied up here, too. These were used for dragonfishing. A number of warcanoes, capable of holding forty men each, were beached near the rafts. Canoes and rowboats were putting out now for fishing. By noon, The River would be heavily salted with small and large boats.

  The Razzle Dazzle was too large to fit within the piers. It was anchored near the mouth of the bay behind a breakwater of large black rocks. It was a beautiful ship, long and low, built of oak and pine. There wasn't a nail in it, and the pegs had been cut with flint. The sails were made of treated outer skin of the dragonfish, so thin they were translucent. The oaken figurehead was a full-busted mermaid holding a torch.

  The ship was a wonder, and the wonder was how its crew had managed to avoid having it taken from them. Many had been murdered for much lesser craft.

  Feeling anxious, he walked past Farrington and Rider. The interviews were by no means over. Word had gotten around, and now there were about twenty men and ten women waiting in line. If this continued, the questioning might take all day. There was nothing he could do about it, so he shrugged and went back home. Eve was gone, which was just as well. There was no need to tell her what he was doing until he found out if he was leaving. If he was turned down, he'd say nothing to her.

  Part of his duty as a Ruritanian citizen was to assist in alcohol-making. He might as well work off a half-day today. The labor would help keep him from worrying. He walked through the passes between the hills until these gave out. There were four more hills to climb, each increasingly higher. The trees were thicker here; the huts, fewer. Presently he was on top of the highest hill, which was at the base of the mountain. Its smooth stone ran straight up for an estimated 1228 meters or about 6000 feet. A waterfall thundered about 91 meters or 100 yards away, spilling thousands of liters a minute into a pool. From this, the water ran in a broad channel which would thread a course through the hills to The River.

  Frigate passed by the fires, the wooden, glass, and stone equipment, and the odor of alcohol. He climbed up a bamboo ladder until he was on a platform placed against an area of stone from which lichen had not yet been removed. He reported to a foreman, who gave him a chert scraper. The foreman took from a rack a pine stick with Frigate's initials cut into it. It bore alternating horizontal and vertical lines, the former indicating the days he'd worked, the latter the number of months.

  "Next year you'll be using a stick to scrape off the stuff," the foremen said. "We'll be saving the chert and flint for weapons."

  Peter nodded and went to work.

  In time, the supply of flint would be exhausted. Technology on The Riverworld would go backward. Instead of progressing from a wooden to a stone age, humanity would reverse the procedure.

  Frigate wondered how he was going to get his flint-tipped weapons out of the state. If he sailed on Farrington' s craft he would, according to the
law, have to leave his precious stones behind.

  The time put in by Frigate on this work was estimated by the foreman. Except for the sun, there were few clocks of any type. The little glass available was used in the alcohol-making process, so there were not even hourglasses. For that matter, the sand used to make the glass had been imported from a state 800 kilometers down-River. That had cost Rumania several boatloads of tobacco and booze and piles of dragonfish and hornfish skins and bones. The tobacco and alcohol had been contributed by the citizens from their grails. Frigate had given up smoking and drinking for two months during this time of sacrifice. When it was over, he continued his abstinence from smoking, trading his cigarettes and cigars for whiskey. But, as had happened on Earth and here, he had slipped back into the arms of Demon Nicotine.

  He worked hard, scraping off the thick green-blue plant growth from the black rock and stuffing it into the bamboo buckets. Others lowered the buckets on ropes to the ground, where their contents were dumped into vats.

  Shortly before noon, he knocked off for the lunch hour. Before going down the ladders, he looked out over the hills. Far below, the white hull of the Razzle Dazzle shone in the bright sun. Somehow, he was going to be on it when it up-anchored.

  Peter walked back to the hut, noted that Eve wasn't there, and went on down to the plain. The line of interviewers did not look any shorter. He passed along the edge of the plain where its short grass abruptly stopped and the long grass of the hills began. What made for the line of demarcation? Were there chemicals in the hill soil that halted the encroachment of plain grass? Or was it vice versa? Or both? And why?

  The archery range was about half a kilometer south of the dock area. He practiced shooting at a target of grass on a bamboo tripod for about thirty minutes. Then he went to the gymnasium area and ran sprints and made long jumps and engaged in judo, karate, and spear-fighting for two hours. At the end of the time, he was sweating and tired. But he was bursting with joy. It was wonderful to have a twenty– five– year-old body, the tiredness and feebleness of middle and old age gone, the aches and pains, the fat, the hernia, the ulcer, the headaches, the long-sightedness, all no more. Replacing it, the ability to run or swim swiftly and far, to feel sexual desire every night (and a good part of the day).