The Magic Labyrinth (6 page)

Two men were waiting impatiently at the table. Aphra made the introductions, giving a slight biography of each.

The man at the west end of the table was Lazzaro Spallanzani, born
A.D.
1729, died 1799. He had been one of the more well-known natural scientists of his time and was chiefly noted for his experiments with bats to determine how they could fly through total darkness. He’d discovered that they did so by use of a form of sonar, though that term wasn’t known in his day. He was short, slim, dark, and obviously Italian though he spoke Esperanto.

The man who sat at the north end was Ladislas Podebrad, a Czech. He was of medium height (for the middle and late twentieth century), very broad, muscular, and thick-necked. His hair was yellow, and his eyes were cold and blue. The eyebrows were very thick and yellowish. His eaglish nose was large, and his massive chin was deeply clefted. Though his hands were broad—as big as a bear’s, thought Alice, who tended to exaggerate—and the fingers were relatively short, he handled the cards like a Mississippi riverboat gambler.

Aphra commented that he’d been picked up only eight days ago and that he was an electromechanical engineer with a doctor’s degree. She also said—and here Alice was suddenly very interested—that Podebrad had attracted John’s attention when John saw him standing by the wreck of an airship on the left bank. After hearing Podebrad’s story and his qualifications, John had invited him to come aboard as an engineer’s mate in the engine room. The duraluminum keel and gondola of the semirigid dirigible had been cut up and put in a storage room in the
Rex
.

Podebrad didn’t talk much, seeming to be one of those bridge players who was all intent on the game. But since Behn and Spallanzani chattered back and forth, Alice was emboldened to ask him some questions. He replied tersely, but gave no outward signs of being annoyed. This didn’t mean that he wasn’t; his face was stony throughout the playing.

Podebrad explained that he had been head of a state far far downRiver called Nova Bohemujo, Esperanto for New Bohemia. He’d been qualified for the position since he’d also been head of a government post in Czechoslovakia and a prominent member of the Communist party. He no longer was a Communist, though, since that ideology was as useless and irrelevant as capitalism was here. Also, he’d been very attracted to the Church of the Second Chance, though he’d never joined.

He’d had a recurring dream that there were large deposits of iron and other minerals deep under the area of Nova Bohemujo. After much urging, he’d gotten his people to dig for them. This was a long and wearisome task and wore out many flint, chert, and wood tools, but his zeal had kept them at it. Besides, it gave them something to do.

“You must realize that I am not at all superstitious,” Podebrad said in a basso profundo. “I despise oneiromancy, and I would have ignored this series of dreams, no matter how sustained and compelling they were. That is, under most circumstances I would have. It seemed to me that they were the expressions of my unconscious, a term I don’t like to use, since I reject Freudianism, but useful here to describe the phenomena I was experiencing. They were, at first, only the expressions of my wishes to find metal, or so I thought. Then I came to believe that there might be another explanation, though the first was really no explanation. Perhaps there was an affinity between metal and myself, some sort of earth current that put me in its circuit, that is, the metal was one pole and I the other so that I felt the flow of energy.”

And he says he isn’t superstitious,
Alice thought.
Or is he kidding me?

Richard, however, would have gone for that sort of rot. He believed that there was an affinity between himself and silver. When he’d suffered from ophthalmia in India, he’d placed silver coins on his eyes, and, when he had gout in his old age, he’d put them on his feet.

“Though I do not believe in dreams as manifestations of the unconscious, I do believe that they may be a medium for transmission of telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception,” Podebrad said. “Much experimentation was done with ESP in the Soviet Union. Whatever the reason, I felt strongly that there was metal deep under the surface of Nova Bohemujo. And there
was.
Iron, bauxite, cryolite, vanadium, platinum, tungsten, and other ores. All jumbled together, not in a natural stratum. Evidently whoever reformed this planet had piled the ores there during the process.”

All this was said between bidding, of course. Podebrad talked as if he hadn’t been interrupted, picking up exactly where he’d left off.

Podebrad had industrialized his state. His people had been armed with steel swords and fiberglass bows and firearms. He’d built two armored steamboats, neither nearly as large as the
Rex.

“Not for conquest but for defense. The other states were jealous of our mineral wealth and would have liked to possess it, but they didn’t dare attack. My ultimate object, however, was to build a large boat with screw propellers to travel to the headwaters of The River. I didn’t know at that time that there were two giant boats already coming up The River. If I had known, I would have built my own vessel anyway.

“Eventually I fell in with some adventurers who proposed to get to the headwaters by means of an airship. Their idea intrigued me and soon after I made the blimp and set out in it. But a storm wrecked it. I and my crew got out alive, and then the
Rex
came along.”

The game was over a few minutes later with Podebrad and Alice winners and Spallanzani angrily demanding why Podebrad had led with a diamond instead of a club. The Czech refused to tell him but said that he should be able to figure it out for himself. He congratulated Alice on her correct playing. Alice thanked him, but she still didn’t know any more than Spallanzani how Podebrad had done it.

Before they parted, however, she said, “
Sinjorino
Behn forgot to say exactly when you were born and died on Earth.”

He looked sharply at her.

“Perhaps that is because she doesn’t know. Why do you want to know?”

“Oh, I’m just interested in that sort of thing.”

He shrugged and said, “
A.D.
1912 to 1980.”

Alice hurried off to find Burton before she had to go on duty and learn to set bones and make plaster-of-paris casts. She caught him in the corridor on the way to their cabin. He was sweating, his dark skin looking like oiled bronze. He’d just finished two hours of stick-fighting and fencing and had half an hour before he fell in for drill.

On the way to the cabin, she told him about Podebrad. He asked her why she seemed so excited about the Czech.

“It’s nonsense, that about his dream,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I think about it. I think he’s an agent who got stranded and who knew where that deposit of ores was. He used the dream as an excuse to get his people to dig it up. Then he built the blimp and tried to get to the tower itself, not just the headwaters. He must have!”

“Oh, reeeally,” Burton drawled in that infuriating manner. “What other slight evidence do you have, if it’s even slight? After all, the chap didn’t live past 1983.”

“That’s what
he
said! But how do we know that some agents…you’ve said so yourself…haven’t changed their story? Anyway…”

She paused, her whole being radiating eagerness.

“Yaas?”

“You described the council of twelve. He looks like he might be the one called Thanabur or maybe the one called Loga!”

That rocked him. But after a few seconds, he said, “Describe this man again.”

When he’d heard her out he shook his head.

“No. Both Loga and Thanabur had green eyes. Loga was redheaded, and Thanabur was brown-haired. This Podebrad has yellow hair and blue eyes. He may look much like them, but I suppose there are millions who do.”

“But Richard! Hair color can be changed! He wasn’t wearing those plastic lenses that can change the eye color that Frigate told us about. But don’t you think the Ethicals would have the means to change eye color without obvious aids?”

“It’s possible. I’ll take a look at the fellow.”

After showering, he bustled down to the grand salon. Not finding Podebrad there he returned to the engine room. Later when he next met Alice, Burton said, “We’ll have to see. He could be Thanabur or Loga. If one can be a chameleon, the other can. But it’s been twenty-eight years since I saw them, and our meeting was very brief. I really can’t say.”

“Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

“I can’t very well arrest him on John’s boat! No. We’ll just have to watch him, and if we get something to justify our suspicions, then we’ll see what we can do.

“Remember Spruce the agent. When we caught him, he killed himself just by thinking a sort of code and releasing poison into his system from that little black ball in his brain. It’ll be very tricky if we do act, and we can’t until we’re sure. Personally, I think it’s just a coincidence. Now, Strubewell…there’s someone we don’t have any doubt about. Well, not much perhaps. After all, it’s only a theory that anyone claiming to be post-1983 is an agent. It
is
possible that we just haven’t met many.”

“Well, I’ll be playing bridge a lot with Podebrad, if I don’t come a duffer. I’ll watch him.”

“Be very careful, Alice. If he is one of Them, he’ll be very observant. In fact, you shouldn’t have asked him about the dates. That may have put him on his guard. You should have found out from someone else.”

“Can’t you ever give me full credit?” she said, and she walked out.

Loghu was no longer the king’s favorite.

King John had become so smitten with a very pretty redhead with large blue eyes whom he’d seen on the bank that he decided to stay in the area for a while. The boat was anchored by a large dock the locals had built long ago. After two days to make sure that the people here were as friendly as they pretended to be, John permitted shore leave. He didn’t say anything to anybody at first about his sudden attack of irresistible lechery, but his behavior made that obvious.

Loghu didn’t especially care that she had to leave the grand suite after John had talked the woman into going to bed with him. She wasn’t in love with him. Besides, she was more than somewhat interested in one of the locals, a big dark Tokharian. Though he wasn’t of her century, he was of her nation, and they had many things to talk about between lovemaking. However, she was humiliated that she had lasted such a short time with the monarch, and she was heard to mutter that she might just push John overboard some dark night. There
had
been, there
were
now, there
would be
many who would like to remove him from the living.

Burton stood guard duty the first night. The next, he moved into a hut with Alice near the dock. The people here, most of whom were Early Minoan Cretans, were hospitable and fun-loving. They danced and sang around the bonfires in the evening until their allotment of lichen alcohol was gone and then reeled to bed to sleep or couple or “pluralize,” as Burton called it. He was happy to stay here for a few weeks anyway because he’d have a chance to add the language to his now long list. He mastered its basic grammar and vocabulary quickly since it was closely related to Phoenician and Hebrew. There were, however, many words which were non-Semitic, these having been borrowed from the aboriginals of Crete while the conquerors from the Middle East were assimilating them. They all spoke Esperanto, of course, though it deviated somewhat from the artificial tongue invented by Dr. Zamenhof.

John had no trouble getting his new mistress to agree to go to bed with him. But he had a problem. There was no cabin space for Loghu, and he couldn’t throw her off the boat without a good reason. Autocratic though he was, he was able to override her rights. His crew would see to that. Remembering the Magna Carta, he did not buck them, but he was undoubtedly trying to think of a way to get rid of Loghu which would seem justifiable.

On the fourth night of shore leave, while John was in his grand suite with Blue-eyes, and Burton was with Alice in their small but comfortable quarters, a helicopter dropped out of the night sky onto the landing deck of the
Rex.

Burton would find out very much later that the raiders came from the airship
Parseval
and had been ordered to capture King John if they could or to kill him if they couldn’t. All he knew then was that the gunfire on the
Rex
meant bad trouble. He put on a cloth around his waist and fastened it with the magnetic tabs inside the material. Then, grabbing a rapier and a fully loaded pistol from the table by the bed, he ran outside while Alice was still yelling to him.

He could hear men screaming and shouting in the midst of shots and then a great explosion apparently in the engine room. He ran as fast as he could toward the boat. There were lights on in the pilothouse; somebody was at the controls. Then the paddle wheels began to turn. The boat started moving backwards, but Burton leaped onto the promenade of the boiler deck just before the lines tied to the pilings pulled them down and the dock collapsed.

A moment later, a stranger came down the stairs from the lowest story of the pilothouse. Burton emptied his pistol at him but missed. Cursing, he dropped the gun and proceeded toward the fellow. Then the slippery one showed up again with a rapier in his hand.

Never had Burton faced such a demon with the sword! No wonder. The tall thin demon was Cyrano de Bergerac! Playfully he introduced himself during a lull in the swordplay but Burton saw no such reason to waste breath. Both were slightly wounded—a good indication that they were evenly matched. Somebody shouted, Burton’s attention was distracted and that was enough. The Frenchman drove his blade deep into Burton’s thigh.

He fell to the deck, helpless. The agony came a few seconds later, making him clench his teeth to keep from screaming. De Bergerac was a gallant man. He made no effort to kill Burton, and, when one of his men appeared a moment after, de Bergerac told him not to shoot Burton.

The helicopter lifted off shortly thereafter as men shot at it from the deck. Before it had gotten a hundred feet, however, a naked white body appeared in the beam of a searchlight and then dropped into the darkness. Somebody had either leaped or been thrown from the craft. Burton guessed that it was King John.

Groaning, Burton wrapped the heavily bleeding wound in a cloth, tied its ends, and forced himself to hobble to the steps leading up to the pilothouse base. The
Rex
was drifting downRiver, and there was nothing to do about it. John was hauled aboard moments later, unconscious, an arm and a leg broken.

Five miles downstream, the
Rex
beached, and, ten minutes later, the first of the men who’d run all the way along the bank, following the boat, came aboard.

Dr. Doyle set John’s bones and administered Irish coffee for shock.

When John was fit enough to curse and rave, he did so. But he was glad to be alive, and the engine could be repaired with the precious aluminum wire in the storage room. That would take a month, though, and meanwhile the Clemens boat was slowly gaining on them.

Since twelve guards had been killed, there was a cabin for Loghu to move into. The king had to replace the dead men, but he seemed to be in no hurry to do so. After days of examining candidates and then putting some through mental and physical tests, he chose only two.

“There’s no hurry,” he said. “I want only the best. These locals are a scroungy lot.”

One result of the raid was that John became fond of Burton, whom he gave the most credit for saving his life. He couldn’t promote him over the heads of Burton’s fellow marines, but he could make him a bodyguard. And he promised Burton to give him a commission whenever it was possible to do so. Burton and Alice moved into the cabin next to John’s quarters.

Burton was displeased in one way because he liked to dance attendance to no man. However, it did give him an opportunity to be with Strubewell a lot and to study him. He listened carefully to the man’s speech for traces of a foreign accent. If Strubewell was an agent, he had mastered American Midwestern.

Alice kept an intent eye and ear on Podebrad while playing bridge and during other social activities. Loghu liked one of the suspected agents, a huge man named Arthur Pal who claimed to have been a Hungarian electrical engineer, so she moved in with him after his mate left him. Burton’s suspicions were increased when Loghu noted that Pal spent much time with Podebrad. Her efforts to trip him up on his story were fruitless, but Burton said that if enough time elapsed she was bound to do so. If the agents had a common story, they would have memorized it. However, they were (presumably) human and so would make mistakes. One contradiction would be enough.

Alice still had not been able to bring herself to force the split with Burton. She kept hoping that he would change his attitude toward her enough to justify staying with him. That their duties kept them apart most of the day helped ease matters. He seemed so glad to see her at the end of the day that she felt better, and she talked herself into believing that they would get back to their original passionate state. They were like an old married couple in many ways. They still had a certain fluctuating affection but were increasingly irritated by character traits they could have once easily overlooked.

In one sense, they were old though their youthful bodies had been restored. She had lived on Earth to be eighty-two and he to sixty-nine. (“Considering my sexual preferences, a significant age at which to die,” Burton had once drawled.) A long life tended to ossify more than the arteries; it also ossified habits and attitudes. It made it much more difficult to adjust, to change one’s self for the better. The impact of the resurrection and the Riverworld had shattered many people’s beliefs and helped set them up for change. It had decalcified many, though in some the fragmentation was only slight, in others much more, and many had been unable to adjust at all.

Alice had suffered a metamorphosis in many respects, though her basic character remained. It was down there in the abysm of the soul, the deeps which make the spaces between the stars seem a mere step over a puddle. It was the same with Burton.

So Alice stayed with him, hoping what she knew was hopeless.

At times, she dreamed of finding Reginald again. But she also knew that that was even more hopeless. She would never go back to him whether he had remained the same or changed. It was doubtful that he had changed. He was a good man, but, like all the good, he had faults, some grave, and he was too stubborn to change.

The thing was that no caterpillar could ever effect a metamorphosis in another. The other, if it is to become a butterfly, must do it itself. The difference between man and caterpillar was that the insect was preprogrammed and the human had to reprogram himself.

Thus the days passed for Alice, though there was much more to them than thinking such thoughts.

And then one day, when the
Rex
connected its batacitor and grail lines to a stone on the right bank, the stone failed to discharge.