R.W. III - The Dark Design

  "It would have been better that way. It's bad enough when you love each other but can't get along. But to have love just die out, cold! I can't stand indifference."

  "You've stood a lot more than that," he said. "If we'd still been in love, I would've stayed here or I would've tried to get them to take us both."

  "And then you would've resented me. No, this may not be the best way, but it's the only way."

  He pulled her to him to kiss her, but she gave him her cheek.

  "Goodbye, Peter."

  "I won't forget you."

  "A lot of good that'll do us," she said, and she walked away.

  Peter went back under the roof. People crowded around to congratulate him. He didn't feel happy. Eve had upset him, and he felt uncomfortable when he was the focus of public attention. Then Bullitt was shaking his hand.

  "We'll be sorry to see you go, Frigate," he said. "You've been a model citizen. However, there is one thing."

  He turned to the sergeant-at-arms next to him and said, "Mr. Armstrong, please confiscate Mr. Frigate's weapons."

  Peter did not protest, since he had sworn to give them up if he quit Ruritania. However, he had not given his word not to steal them back. Early that morning, while it was still dark, he did just that.

  He told himself that he had put in too much labor making the weapons to give them up. Besides, he had been wounded once in the service of this state. Ruritania owed him those weapons.

  He had not gotten more than a kilometer up The River when he felt like going back and surrendering the weapons. That fit of honesty lasted for a day, and then he was cured.

  Or he thought that he was! The recurring dream came back again. This time it progressed past the point where he was standing naked outside the house. He threw pebbles against the window of the bedroom but repeated casts failed to wake Roosevelt. He went around trying the doors and windows, and when he got to the front door, he found it unlocked. He crept in through the front room, into the small kitchen, and he took the two steps needed to get to the door opposite the bathroom. This led up a steep stairway to the attic, a section of which had been made into a tiny bedroom. He would have to go slowly, walking on the ends of the steps. They squeaked abominably if he stepped in their middle.

  It was then that he saw that the doors to his parents' bedroom and the younger children's were open. Moonlight came in. (Never mind that it had been dawn just as he opened the front door. This was a dream.) By its bright light he saw that his parents' big old-fashioned brass bed was empty. And so was his little sister's. He looked around the corner and saw that the bunkbeds of Mungo and James, Junior were also deserted.

  Nor was Roosevelt in his bed.

  In a panic, he looked out the back window. The doghouse in the backyard was empty.

  Everybody, even the dog, had gone off without a word.

  What nameless crime had he committed?

  Chapter 32

  * * *

  "The training blimp will be completed within a month," Firebrass said. "Jill Gulbirra is the most experienced aeronaut by far, so she'll take charge of the training. In fact, I'm making her captain of the trainer. How about that, Jill? If you can't be commander of the big ship, you will be unchallenged chief honcho of the little one. Don't ever say I never did anything for you."

  The other men offered her their congratulations, though some did so sourly. Cyrano seemed genuinely delighted, and if he had not been aware of her dislike for being touched, would doubtless have embraced her tightly and kissed her. On impulse, Jill pulled him to her and gave him a quick hug. After all, he was trying to make up for his offensive behavior on the Riverbank.

  Twenty minutes later, she, Firebrass, Metzing, Piscator, and ten engineers began working on the blueprints for the big airship. The specifications had been determined during three weeks of hard work, usually twelve to fourteen hours a day. Instead of drawing lines on paper, however, they made blueprints on the cathode-ray tube of a computer. This was much faster, mistakes or alterations were erased quickly, and the computer itself double-checked the proportions. Of course, the computer had to be programmed first, and Jill participated in this. She loved this sort of work. It was creative and gave her a chance to play with mathematical relations.

  Nevertheless, it did cause nervous tension. To relieve this and to stay in good physical shape, Jill fenced for two hours almost every day. Sword exercise here was not what it had been on Earth. The light, supple foil was discarded for the heavier, stiffer rapier. Moreover, every point of the body was a target, requiring that the fencers wear padded garments on their legs.

  "We are not playing now," Cyrano told her. "You will be learning to fence for more than just points. The time may come when you will be striving in deadly earnest to keep your opponent from running you through while you try to pierce him from front to back."

  She had been an excellent fencer. A great teacher, an Olympic champion, had told her that she could become a top contender in world competition if she would devote enough time to training. That had been impossible since her job required too much time away from the fencing courts. But when she had a chance to practice, she had taken it. She loved fencing; it was in some respects a very physical form of chess, which she also loved.

  It was a joy to take a blade in hand again and to relearn all the long-unused, but not quite forgotten, skill. It was an even greater joy to find that she could beat most of her male opponents. Though she looked awkward, once she had gripped the handle of the rapier, she became all grace and liquid speed.

  There were two men she could not master. One was Radaelli, the Italian master, author of Istruzione per la scherma di spada a di sciabola, published in 1885. The other, the indisputable champion, was Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.

  Jill was surprised at this. For one thing, fencing in his time had not yet developed into a fine art. It was not until near the end of the eighteenth century that the art neared its apex of technique. Cyrano had died in the middle of the seventeenth century before the foil had been invented, when men fought, often to the death, with techniques somewhat primitive, if spectacular. The Italians had put together the basic structure of modern swordplay by the early seventeenth century, but not until the beginning of the nineteenth century had the techniques reached the ultimate.

  Thus Cyrano had established a reputation as the greatest swordsman of all times without having to compete with the more sophisticated fencers of a later age. Jill had believed that his reputation had been wildly exaggerated. After all, no one knew if the famous incident of the Porte de Nesle was true or not. No one except the Frenchman himself, and he would not talk about it.

  However, he had learned all later refinements from Radaelli and Borsody. Within four months of starting his education, he was steadily out scoring his mentors. In five months, he was unbeatable. So far, at least.

  Though rusty at first, Jill soon gained polish and began to give him a better battle. Never once, however, did she win more than one point of the total five within the six-minute limit of a match. And he always made four points before she got one. This led her to believe that he was giving her the one point to soften the defeat. Once, after a match in which she became furious because of her frustration, she accused him of patronizing her.

  "Even if I were in love with you and desired very much to keep from hurting your feelings," he said, "I would not do that! It would be dishonest, and while it is said that all is fair in love and war, it is not so for me. No, you have gotten your points fairly because of your quickness and skill."

  "But if we were playing for keeps," she said, "with unblunted points, you would have killed me every time. You always strike first."

  He raised his mask and wiped his forehead. "True. But surely you are not thinking about challenging me to a duel? You are still not angry with me are you?"

  "About that incident on the bank? No. Not about that."

  "About what, then, if I may be so bold to ask?"

  She would say noth
ing then, and he would raise his eyebrows and shrug his shoulders in a completely Gallic manner.

  Cyrano was better than she. No matter how much she practiced, no matter how hard her determination to best him, because he was a man, because she did not like to lose to anybody, male or female, she always lost. Once, when she had jeered at his ignorance and superstitions and so had made him furious (she had done it on purpose), he had attacked her with such vigor that he had touched her five times in one and a half minutes. Instead of losing his head, he had become even more a being of cold fire, moving with certitude and swiftness, doing everything exactly right, one hundred percent anticipatory of her every movement.

  It was she who was humiliated.

  Rightfully so, she told herself, and she apologized, though it was a double humiliation to do so.

  "I was terribly wrong to sneer at your lack of knowledge of science and at your mistaken beliefs,'' she said. "It is not your fault that you were born in 1619, and I should not have taunted you with that. I did so just to make you so mad I'd get an edge on you. It was a rotten thing to do. I promise not to do it again, and I most abjectly beg your pardon. I did not really mean it."

  "Then you said those nasty vicious things merely as a trick?'' he said. "A verbal device to gain points? There was nothing personal in those so-cutting remarks?"

  She hesitated a moment, then said, "I have to be honest. My main purpose was to make you lose your head. But I was not so cool myself. At the moment, I did feel that you were an ignorant simpleton, a living fossil. But that was my own anger speaking out in me.

  "Actually, you were far ahead of your time. You rejected the superstitions and the barbarisms of your time, as far as anybody is able to reject his culture. You were an exceptional man, and I honor you for being that. And you'll never hear such words from me again.''

  She hesitated again, then said, "But is it true that you repented on your deathbed?"

  The Frenchman's face became red. He grimaced and said, "But yes, Ms. Gulbirra, I did indeed say that I was sorry for my blasphemies and my unbelief and I asked the good God for His pardon. I, who had been a violent atheist since the age of thirteen! I, who hated the fat, smug, oily, stinking, ignorant, hypocritical, parasitical priests! And their unfeeling, merciless, cruel God!

  "But you do not know, you who lived in a freer and more permissive age, you do not know the horrors of hellfire, of eternal damnation! You cannot know what it was to have the fear of hell soaking you, drowning you! It was taught us from earliest childhood, ground into our flesh, our bones, our deepest mind!

  '' And so, when I knew for sure that I was dying from a combination of that filthy disease with the lovely bucolic name of syphilis and a blow on the head from that beam, fallen accidentally or dropped by an enemy of mine, and I who only wanted to love all mankind, and womankind, too . . . where was I?

  "Ah, yes, knowing for sure that I was to die, and with the terrors of the devils and of eternal tortures swarming around me, I gave in to my sister, the toothless bitch and withered nun, and my good, too good friend, Le Bret, and I said, yes, I repent, I will save my soul, and you may rejoice, dear sister, dear friend, I will probably go to purgatory, but you will pray me out of it, won't you?

  "Why not? I was frightened as I had never been in all my life, and yet, and yet, 1 did not wholly believe that I was destined for damnation. I had some reservations, believe me. But then, it could not hurt to repent. If Christ was indeed available for salvation, not costing a centime, mind you, and there was a heaven and a hell, then I would be a fool not to save my worthless skin and invaluable soul.

  "On the other hand, if all was emptiness, nothingness, once one had died, what had I to lose? I would make my sister and that superstitious but kind-hearted Le Bret happy."

  ''He wrote a glowing panegyric of you after you died," she said. "It was his preface to your Voyage to the Moon, which he edited two years after you died."

  ''Ah! I hope he did not make me out to be a saint!" Cyrano cried.

  "No, but he did give you a fine character, a noble if not quite saintly one. However, other writers . . . well, you must have had many enemies."

  "Who attempted to blacken my name and reputation after I was dead and couldn't defend myself, the cowards, the pigs!"

  "I don't remember," she said. "And it doesn't actually matter now, does it? Besides, only scholars know the names of your detractors. Unfortunately, most people only know you as the romantic, bombastic, witty, pathetic, somewhat Don-Quixotish hero of a play by a Frenchman written in the late nineteenth century.

  "There was a belief for a long time that you were insane by the time you had written The Voyage to the Moon and The Voyage to the Sun. That was because your books were so heavily censored. By the time the churchly Grundies had slashed your texts, much of it made no sense. But the text was eventually restored as much as possible, and by the time I was born, an unexpurgated text had been published in English."

  "I am happy to hear that! I knew from what Clemens and others said that I had become a literary Olympian, if not a Zeus at least a Ganymede, a cupbearer in the ranks of the exalted. But your sneering remark that I was superstitious hurt me very much, mademoiselle. It is true, as you observed, that I believed that the waning moon did suck up the marrow from the bones of animals. Now you say that that is sheer rot. Very well, I accept that. And I was wrong, along with millions of others of my time and God knows how many before my time.

  "But this was a minuscule, a harmless error. What did it matter, what injury did it do to anyone, to have this misconception? The superstition, the grave error, that really harmed people, many millions of human beings, I assure you, was the stupid, barbarous belief in sorcery, in the ability of human beings to wreak evil through spells, chants, black cats, and the enlistment of devils as allies. I wrote a letter against that ignorant and vicious belief, that social system, rather. I contended that the grotesque legal sentences and the savagely cruel tortures and executions inflicted upon insane or innocent people in the name of God and the battle against Evil were themselves the essence of evil.

  "Now, it is true that this letter I speak of. Against Sorcerers, was not published while I was alive. With good reason. I would have been tortured and burned alive. It was, however, circulated among my friends. It did show that I was not as you made me out to be. I was ahead of my time in many respects, though I was not, of course, the only person in that unhappy situation."

  "I know this," she said. "And I apologized once. Would you have me do it again?"

  "It is not necessary," he said. His broad smile made him look handsome, or at least attractive, despite his large nose.

  Jill picked up her grail by its handle and said, "Just about dinnertime."

  Jill knew something about the man called Odysseus, having heard occasional references. He had appeared without notice, seemingly from nowhere, when Clemens' and King John's forces were battling invaders who wanted to seize the meteorite ore. He had killed the enemy leader with a well-placed arrow, worked havoc among the other officers, and so had given the defenders the advantage they needed for victory.

  Odysseus of Ithaca claimed to be the historical Odysseus on whom Homer's mythical character was based. He was one of the host who had fought before the walls of Troy, though he stated that the real Troy was not where the scholars said it was. Its location was elsewhere, much further south on the coast of Asia Minor.

  Jill, first hearing about this, had not known whether to believe that the man was truly Odysseus or not. There were so many impostors on the Riverworld. But there was one thing that made her think that he might actually be the historical Ithacan. Why should he say that Troy Vila, which even the archaeologists and Hellenists of her day had said was the true Ilion, was not the genuine site? Why would he claim that the historical Troy was some place else?

  Whatever the reason, he was no longer around. He had disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. Agents sent to track him down had failed. Firebrass h
ad continued to search for him after Clemens left on the Mark Twain. One of the searchers, Jim Sorley, had finally found some trace of the Greek, though it showed only that he had not been murdered by John's men.

  Jill had wondered several times why Odysseus had volunteered to fight for Clemens' side. Why would a stranger who had seemingly blundered onto the battle pick out one force and risk his life for it? What had he to gain, especially since it seemed that he had known none of the participants on either force? She had once asked Firebrass about this, and he had said that he just did not know. Sam Clemens might be able to enlighten her, but he had never volunteered a word on the subject.

  Firebrass had added, "However, Odysseus may have been here for the same reason that Cyrano and I were. We wanted to get on the paddlewheeler so we could get to the polar sea."

  She thought it was strange that no one had thought of building a dirigible until shortly before the second riverboat was completed. Why take decades traveling to the arctic region on a surface vessel when an airship could get there in a few days?

  Firebrass said, grinning, "Just one of those mysteries of life. Man, pardon me, humanity, sometimes can't see the nose on his own face. Then somebody comes along and holds up a mirror to him."

  "If mankind had a nose like mine," Cyrano said, "he would never have that trouble."

  In this case the person with the mirror had been August von Parseval. On Earth he had been a major in the German Army, and he had also designed airships for a German company. His type of dirigible was used by both the German and the British governments between 1906 and 1914.

  Shortly before the Mark Twain was ready to leave Parolando, von Parseval had come along. He was amazed that no one had suggested that a Luftschiff would be a faster means of transportation than a boat.

  After Firebrass bad mentally kicked himself for this oversight, he had hastened to Clemens, taking the German with him.

  Surprisingly, Clemens said that he had long ago considered building a dirigible. After all, had he not written Tom Sawyer Abroad? Had not Tom, Jim, and Huckleberry traveled from Missouri to the Sahara in a balloon?