GODS OF RIVERWORLD

Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.

(Man is the only animal who thinks of the should-be rather than the what-is, Nur had said. Which is why man is the only animal who consciously changes the environment to suit himself. And usually spoils it because of his stupidity and excess. There are exceptions to this rule, of course.)

(A fine statement, Alice had said. But Dick Burton has always been self-destructive. When, if ever, will he stop destroying himself?)

For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume. Vie

(Has it occurred to you, Nur had said, that you are nearing the end of that book you call Richard Francis Burton? It's been published in two volumes, Earth-Burton and Riverworld-Burton. This tower may be The End.)

(It's always been an excellent philosophy to live as if you're going to die in the next hour, Frigate had said. Everybody agrees on that, but the only people who live it are those who know they're going to die soon. And not even then.)

(That's why I like to go to bed whenever possible, Aphra had said. Marcelin, are you in the mood?)

(Even the most ardent soldier needs to go to a rest camp now and then, de Marbot said. At the moment, I am an old, weary and saddle-sore veteran.)

11

Burton also felt like a weary, saddle-sore veteran. He had been riding himself—and others—too hard for top long. Now that he had crossed the last of hundreds of obstacles that had had to be dealt with at once, he needed rest and recreation. The problems to be solved, those presented by the Computer, could be tackled later.

Yet, he thought, as he looked into a mirror, I do not look as if I had lived for sixty-nine years on Earth and sixty-seven years here. My face is not that of a 136-year-old man. It is the face I had when I was a youth of twenty-five. Minus the long Satan-black drooping moustache, a hairy crescent moon. The Ethicals had arranged that the resurrected males lack facial hair, an arrangement that Burton had always resented. It was true that men did not have to shave, but what about the feelings—the rights—of those who desired moustaches and beards?

Now that I am in the tower, he thought, why not change those despotic arrangements? Surely there must be a way to start the hair growing again on my face.

On Earth, he had been afflicted—perhaps afflicted was too strong a word—marked with a slight strabismus. He had a "wandering eye." In more senses than one. This small fault had been corrected by the Computer when he had been raised from the dead in the Rivervalley.

So, loss of beard weighed against correction of focus. But now, why could he not have both?

He made a note to look into that question.

"Brow of a god, jaw of a devil" some impressionable biographer had written of him. An accurate description, however. And one that described the two personae within him, the one who lusted for success and the one who lusted for defeat.

If, that is, the books written about him were correct in their judgments.

Some of them were on the table now. He had requested a few of the titles suggested, by Frigate, and the Computer had printed and bound them for him and deposited their reproductions in a converter. The best, so Frigate said, was The Devil Drives, written by an American woman, Fawn M. Brodie, first published in 1967.

"I gave up my intention to write a biography of you when that came out," Frigate had said. "But its excellence and wide inclusiveness did not keep others from writing biographies of you after hers. They lacked good judgment. However, you may not like The Devil Drives. Brodie couldn't keep from analyzing you in Freudian terms. On the other hand, perhaps you can tell me if she was right or not. But then, you'd be the last person to know, wouldn't you?"

Burton had not read the text yet, but he had looked at the reproductions of photographs. There was one of him at the age of fifty-one, painted by the famous artist Sir Frederick Leighton, and displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He did look fierce, Elizabethan, buccaneerish. Leighton had posed him at such an angle as to catch the high forehead, the swelling supraorbital ridges, the thick eyebrows, the driven hungry expression of his eyes, the thrusting chin, the high cheekbones. The scar left from a Somali spear was prominent; Leighton had insisted on showing that, and Burton had not objected. A scar, if honorably gotten, was a form of medal, and he, who should have been covered with real medals, had been slighted.

"Partly your own fault," Frigate had said. "I can understand and sympathize with that. I, too, was, am, self-defeating."

"My family motto was 'Honour, not Honours.' "

Opposite the Leighton portrait was a photograph of his wife, Isabel, made in 1869, when she was thirty-eight. She looked buxom, regal, and handsome. Like a kindly but domineering mother, he thought. A few pages back was a portrait of her done by the French artist Louis Desanges in 1861, when she had married Burton. She looked young, loving and optimistic. Beneath her was the Desanges painting of Burton done at the same time. She was thirty; he, forty. His moustache dropped almost to his shoulder-bones, and he certainly looked dark and fierce.

And how thick his lips were. Which had suggested to certain biographers, and others, an overly sensual nature. How thin and prim and pursed were Isabel's lips. A flaw in an otherwise perfectly beautiful face. Thin lips. Thick lips. Love, tenderness and cheerfulness versus fierceness, ambitiousness and pessimism.

Isabel, blonde; he, dark.

He turned the pages to a photograph of him at sixty-nine in 1890 and another of himself and Isabel in the same year, same place, Trieste. It had been taken by Doctor Baker, his personal physician, under a tree in the backyard. Burton sat on a chair, not visible in the photograph, one hand on the knob of his iron cane, the other draped over his right wrist. The fingers looked skeletal: Death's own hand. He wore a tall gray plug hat, a stiff white collar, and a gray morning coat. The eyes in the gaunt face looked like those of a dying prisoner. Which, in a sense, he was. Little of the fierceness evident in the earlier pictures was there.

By his side, looking down at him, one white hand held up, a finger extended as if she were chiding him, was Lady Isabel. Fat, fat, fat. While he shriveled, she expanded. Yet, according to Frigate, though she knew that he was dying, she bore in herself the seeds of death, a cancer. She had not said a word to him about it; she had not wanted to upset him.

In her black dress and hood, she looked like a nun, a nurse nun. Kindly but firm. No nonsense.

He contrasted the youthful face in the mirror with that in the photograph. Those old old eyes. Sunken, despairing, lost. Those of a prisoner who had no hope of bail or pardon. Moons in eclipse.

He remembered how at Trieste in September, the last month of his life, he had purchased caged birds in the market, taken them home, and set them free. And how, one day, he had stopped before a monkey in a cage. "What crime did you commit in some other world, Jocko, that you are now caged and tormented and going through your purgatory?" And, shaking his head, walking away, he had muttered, "I wonder what he did? I wonder what he did?"

This world, the Riverworld, was a purgatory, if what the Ethicals said was true. Purgatory was the hardest of the three afterworlds, heaven, purgatory and hell. In heaven you were free and ecstatic and knew that the future would always be good. In hell, though you suffered, you knew for once and all what your future would be. You did not have to strive for freedom; you knew that you would never attain it. But in purgatory you knew that you were going either to hell or to heaven, and it was up to you where you went. With the joys and freedom of heaven as a carrot, you strove like hell in purgatory. You knew the theory of how to get a ticket to heaven. But the practice ... ah, the practice ... that eluded you. You snatched it away from yourself.