The Gods of Riverworld

  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 who 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 clatter. 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 facedown 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 up 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 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 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 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 are 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 to 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 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 his 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 no 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 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 any punishment or any kind of retribution. She wished that she could forget about him, but she just could not.

  The dullness came into her face and voice again, and she became silent.

  Nur talked to her but reported that he could find no wedge to open her and let in some light. Her soul had become darkened. He hoped that it would not remain so forever.

  “But you don’t know if she’ll … stay the same?” Burton said.

  Nur shrugged. “No one can know. Except perhaps Star Spoon.”

  Burton was frustrated and, hence, angry. He could not take his anger out on her, so he vented it on Frigate and Nur. Understanding what was affecting him, they endured his insults for a while. Then Nur said that he would see Burton again when Burton was rational. Frigate seemed to feel that he should absorb more than Nur had, perhaps for old times’ sake or perhaps because some part of him enjoyed the tongue-lashing. An hour after Nur had left, Frigate got up from his chair, threw his half-full glass against the wall, said, “I’m getting out of here,” and did so.

  A few minutes later, Star Spoon entered. She looked at the spilled whiskey and his brooding face. Then, surprisingly, she went to him and kissed him on the lips.

  “I’m much improved now,” she said. “I think I can be the cheery woman you want me to be, what I want to be. You’ll have no reason to worry about me from now on. That is, except…”

  “I’m very happy,” he said. “I think. There’s something that is still bothering you?”

  “I … I am not ready to go to bed with you yet. I would like to, but I can’t. I do believe, though, Dick, that the time will come when I can, and I’ll be completely willing. Just bear with me. The time will come.”

  “As I said, I’m very happy. I can wait. Only, this is so sudden. What caused this metamorphosis?”

  “I don’t know. It just happened.”

  “Very curious,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll know someday. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t mind if we kissed just a little longer, would you? I promise not to get carried away.”

  “Of course not.”

  Life for Burton returned to the routine it had had before Dunaway’s violation. Star Spoon was more talkative, even aggressive at times during the parties. Verbally aggressive, in that she was more willing to argue, to present her views. However, she spent as much time with the Computer as she had when she was deeply troubled. Burton did not mind. He had his own projects.

  28

  All human beings, Nur thought, reported that time seemed to them to have gone much slower when they were infants. Time speeded up a little when they became prejuveniles, got a little faster when they were juveniles, and stepped up the pace even more when they became young adults. When you were in your sixties, what had been a smooth and slow stream, a leisurely flowing and broad river when one was young, became a narrow roaring channel. By the seventies, it was a short waterfall, time hurtling by. By the eighties, it was a deep mountain cataract, water, time itself, shooting by, disappearing over the edge of life, which was near one’s feet, a precipice over which time rushed by as if eager to destroy itself. And you, too.

  If you were an old man or woman of ninety, looking back, childhood seemed to be a long, long, long, highway reaching to an unimaginable distant horizon. But the last forty years … how short they had been, how swift.

  Then you died, and you awoke on a bank of The River and your body was that which you had when you were twenty-five, except that any physical defects you had had then were repaired. It would seem then that, being young again, you would experience time as a slowed-down stream. Childhood would not seem so remote in your memory, nor would it seem to you as long as it had been before you became twenty-five again.

  Not so. The young body held a brain young in tissue but old with memory and experience. If you were eighty when you died on Earth and had lived forty years on the Riverworld, and thus were one hundred and twenty years old, in fact, then time was a series of rapids. It hurried you along, hustled and pushed you. Keep going, keep going, it said. No rest for you. You don’t have the time. No rest for me either. r />
  Nur’s living body had existed for one hundred and sixty-one years. And so, when he looked back at his childhood, he saw it as an everstretching length. The older he got, the longer childhood seemed to him. If he should live to be a thousand, he would think that childhood had lasted seven hundred years; young adulthood, two hundred; middle age, fifty-nine; time since then; a year.

  His companions had mentioned this phenomenon now and then, but they did not dwell on it. Only he, as far as he knew, had pondered about it. It shocked him when Frigate mentioned that they had been here only a few months. Actually, almost seven months had passed. Burton had put off going to his private world for a few weeks. Or so he had said. In reality, he had taken two months.

  What made it easier for them—himself, too—to be unaware of the passage of time was that they no longer watched the calendar. They could have told the Computer to display the month and day on the wall every morning, but here, where time meant no more than it had to Homer’s lotus eaters, they had neglected to do so. They should have been shaken when Turpin announced that he was celebrating Christmas, but they had had no reference point to measure the passage of time.

  It was this failure to notice the passage of time, this supermañana attitude, that had caused them to put off something they had been eager to do shortly after getting here. That was the resurrection of those comrades who had died while trying to get to the tower. Joe Miller the titanthrop, Loghu, Kazz the Neanderthal, Tom Mix, Umslopogaas, John Johnston, and many others. These had earned the right to be brought to the tower, and the eight who had made it had intended to do that. They spoke about it now and then, though not often. Somehow, for various reasons, they kept putting it off.