To Your Scattered Bodies Go

"Why don’t you try your luck with a Gentile?" Frigate had said.

Lev had shrugged his narrow shoulders. "I have. But sooner or later you get into a big fight, and they lose their temper and call you a goddam kike. The same thing also happens with my Jewish women, but from them I can take it."

"Listen, friend," the American said. "There are billions of Gentiles along this river who’ve never heard of a Jew. They can’t be prejudiced. Try one of them."

"I’ll stick to the evil I know."

"You mean you’re stuck to it," Frigate said.

Burton sometimes wondered why Ruach stayed with the boat. He had never made any more references to The Yew, The Gypsy, and El Islam, though he often questioned Burton about other aspects of his past. He was friendly enough but had a certain indefinable reserve. Though small, he was a good man in a fight and he had been invaluable in teaching Burton judo, karate, and jukado. His sadness, which hung about him like a thin mist even when he was laughing, or making love, according to Tanya, came from mental scars. These resulted from his terrible experiences in concentration camps in Germany and Russia, or so he claimed. Tanya had said that Lev was born sad; he inherited all the genes of sorrow from the time when his ancestors sat down by the willows of Babylon.

Monat was another case of sadness, though he could come out of it fully at times. The Tau Cetan kept looking for one of his own kind, for one of the thirty males and females who had bees tom apart by the lynch mob. He did not give himself much chance. Thirty in an estimated thirty-five to thirty-six billion strung out along a river that could be ten million miles long made it improbable that he would ever see even one. But there was hope.

Alice Hargreaves was sitting forward of the fo’c’sle, only the top of her head in his view, and looking at the people on the banks whenever the boat got close enough for her to make out individual faces. She was searching for her husband, Reginald, and also for her three sons and for her mother and father and her sisters and brothers. For any dear familiar face. The implications were that she would leave the boat as soon as this happened. Burton had not commented on this. But he felt a pain in his chest when he thought of it. He wished that she would leave and yet he did not wish it. To get her out of sight would eventually be to get her out of his mind. It was inevitable. But he did not want the inevitable. He felt for her as he had for his Persian love, and to lose her, too, would be to suffer the same long-lived torture.

Yet he had never said a word about how he felt to her. He talked to her, jested with her, showed her a concern that he found galling because she did not return it, and, in the end, got her to relax when with him. That is, she would relax if there were others around. When they were alone, she tightened up.

She had never used the dreamgum since that first night. He had used it for a third time and then hoarded his share and traded it for other items. The last time he had chewed it, with the hope of an unusually ecstatic lovemaking with Wilfreda, he had been plunged back into the horrible sickness of the "little irons," the sickness that had almost killed him during his expedition to Lake Tanganyika. Speke had been in the nightmare, and he had killed Speke. Speke had died in a hunting "accident" which everybody had thought was a suicide even if they had not said so. Speke, tormented by remorse because he had betrayed Burton, had shot himself. But in the nightmare, he had strangled Speke when Speke bent over to ask him how he was. Then, just as the vision faded, he had kissed Speke’s dead lips.

14

Well, he had known that he had loved Speke at the same time that he hated him, justifiably hated him. But the knowledge of his love had been very fleeting and infrequent and it had not affected him. During the dreamgum nightmare, he had felt so horrified at the realization that love lay far beneath his hate that he had screamed. He awakened to find Wilfreda shaking him, demanding to know what had happened. Wilfreda had smoked opium or drunk it in her beer when on Earth, but here, after one session with dreamgum, she had been afraid to chew any more. Her horror came from seeing again the death of a younger sister from tuberculosis and, at the same time, reliving her first experience as a whore.

"It’s a strange psychedelic," Ruach had told Burton. He had explained what the word meant. The discussion about that had gone on for a long time. "It seems to bring up traumatic incidents in a mixture of reality and symbolism. Not always. Sometimes it’s an aphrodisiac. Sometimes, as they said, it takes you on a beautiful trip. But I would guess that dreamgum has been provided us for therapeutic, if not cathartic, reasons. It’s up to us to find out just how to use it."

"Why don’t you chew it more often?" Frigate had said.

"For the same reason that some people refused to go into psychotherapy or quit before they were through; I’m afraid."

"Yeah, me, too," Frigate said. "But some day, when we stop off some place for a long time, I’m going to chew a suck every night, so help me. Even if it scares hell out of me. Of course, that’s easy to say now." Peter Jairus Frigate had been born only twenty-eight years after Burton had died; yet the world between them was wide. They saw so many things so differently; they would have argued violently if Frigate was able to argue violently. Not on matters of discipline in the group or in ru

Yet, in many ways, Frigate was much like Burton, and it may have been this that had caused him to be so fascinated by Burton on Earth. Frigate had picked up in 1938 a soft-cover book by Fairfax Downey titled Burton: Arabian Nights" Adventurer. The front page illustration was of Burton at the age of fifty, The savage fate; the high brow and prominent supraorbital ridges, the heavy black brows, the straight but harsh nose, the great scar on his cheek, the thick "sensual" lips, the heavy downdrooping moustache, the heavy forked beard, the essential broodingness and aggressiveness of the face, had caused him to buy the book.

"I’d never heard of you before, Dick," Frigate said. "But I read the book at once and was fascinated. There was something about you, aside from the obvious daring-do of your life, your swordsmanship, mastery of many languages, disguises as a native doctor, native merchantman, as a pilgrim to Mecca, the first European to get out of the sacred city of Harar alive, discoverer of Lake Tanganyika and near-discoverer of the source of the Nile, co-founder of the Royal Anthropological Society, inventor of the term ESP, translator of the Arabian Nights, student of the sexual practices of the East, and so forth…

"Aside from all this, fascinating enough in itself, you had a special affinity for me. I went to the public library — Peoria was a small city but had many books on you and about you, donated by some admirer of yours who’d passed on — and I read these. Then I started to collect first editions by you and about you. I became a fiction writer eventually, but I pla

This was the first time Frigate had mentioned his tomb. Burton, startled, said, "Where?" Then, "Oh, of course! Mortlake! I’d forgotten! Was the tomb really in the form of an Arab tent, as Isabel and I had pla

"Sure. But the cemetery was swallowed up in a slum, the tomb was defaced by vandals, there were weeds up to your focus and talk of moving the bodies to a more remote section of England, though by then it was hard to find a really remote section."