GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"I do not know about that," he said.

Aphra shrugged. "Well, if it doesn't work out, we can live together as before. Surely, Marcelin, you are not afraid of this venture?"

"I? Afraid? Never! Very well, Peter, I will take up residence in the fifth house and Aphra in the sixth. After all, we will be next-door neighbors."

"With a thick wall between you. Walls make good neighbors."

"But poor lovers," Burton said.

"You are too cynical, my friend," de Marbot said.

"Libra and Scorpio, the seventh and eighth houses, will have to be empty for the time being," Frigate said. "The ninth is Sagittarius, the archer, ruled by Jupiter, the dominant mode being expansion. Sagittarius philosophizes. Which is appropriate, since you, Nur, are Sagittarius. You are, according to the ancient science, jovial, prophetic and logical."

"And more," Nur said.

"You have the negative qualities of bluntness, fanaticism and intolerance."

"Had. I conquered those in my .late youth."

"We must skip Capricorn. Aquarius, my sign," Frigate said, "is the eleventh house. Aquarius the Waterbearer is ruled by Saturn, which symbolizes lessons, and by Uranus, which stands for opportunities. Aquarius humanizes. Aquarius is diplomatic, altruistic and inventive. Unfortunately, on the negative side, he is selfish, eccentric and impulsive."

"Do you plead guilty?" Burton said.

"More or less. Now, Dick, we come to you, Pisces, since you were born March 19, 1821. Pisces the Fish. Harmonizes, haw! haw! Ruled by Neptune or idealism and Jupiter or expansion. No argument there. Positive qualities: intuitive, sympathetic, artistic."

"You've told me, more than once, that I was a self-made martyr," Burton said.

"And so," Nur said, "carrying our baggage of good and bad qualities, we go to our new homes. If we could only leave the suitcases containing the bad at the door."

16

Moving into the "pie-in-the-sky" chambers demanded much preparation. The tenants had to tour their little worlds and decide whether they should keep the present decor or "environment" or make their own. Except for Nur, who was intrigued by the chamber of dark mirrors, each finally had his or her place stripped. While the hordes of androids and robots were doing this, the tenants decided on what kind of private world they wanted. After that, they had to instruct the Computer down to the minutest details about their specifications.

Nur changed his mind. He would remain in his suite though he would visit the mirror-world now and then to meditate.

Burton surprised everybody by his unaccountable reluctance to change homes. He had always been a wanderer who grew restless if he stayed in one place more than a week. Yet he now refused to move until he had made his world exactly as he wished. Halfway through the building of his first world, he stopped the work and had it stripped again. After a long time, he started on a second design but abandoned that after two weeks.

"Perhaps he's so unwilling to go there," Nur said, "because it will be his last home. Where else can he go after he moves into that?"

The afternoon that the six were to move, all eight held a big going-away party in the central area. It was not entirely a joyous occasion because de Marbot and Behn quarreled just before they were to take occupancy. The Frenchman was burned up at Aphra's refusal to live with him in his world, and, after drinking more wine than he was accustomed to, he accused her of not loving him.

"1 am entitled to my own world, the world I made," she said loftily.

"A woman's place is by the man she loves. She should go where he goes."

"We've been through this too many times," she said. "I'm weary of it."

"You should be under my roof. It is my right. How can I trust you?"

"I don't have to be in your sight every minute. If you can't trust me, if you think I'll hop into another man's bed the moment I go around the corner ... Is it just me or don't you trust any woman? You were often absent for many months from your wife when you were a soldier. Did you trust her? You must have, you didn't—"

"My wife was above suspicion!" de Marbot shouted.

"Hail, Caesar!" Aphra said scornfully. "The real Caesar's wife, my precious little piece of shit, put horns on him. So, if your wife was as good as Caesar's wife ..."

Aphra walked away from him while he yelled at her, and she went through the doorway to the sixth house.

Weeping, she let the door close behind her. She felt as if she were also closing off her lover forever, though she had had enough experience to know that her emotions, not her reason, were speaking. How many men had she parted from and never expected to see again? It seemed like a hundred, but, actually, it must be only twenty. And she could not remember the names of some. She would, though, when the dogging screen of her past showed up again. Here, at least, she could get away from it.

She went up the steps, the door opening for her at the top, and she stepped into her world. There was another flying chair there; she got into it and soared to an altitude of a hundred feet and headed inward. Below her was South American low-altitude tropical jungle, with winding narrow rivers gleaming in the light of the false moon. The cries of night birds rang and clanged below her; a bat shot by near her and dipped toward the dark tops of the trees a few feet below her. The moon was full because she had arranged for one every night, and its light was twice as powerful as that of Earth's. And the stars, also those of equatorial South America, were three times as bright as the real ones. In this luminous night, she saw a shape slip across a glade. A jaguar. And she heard the bellowings of alligators.

The wind cooled her and fluttered her robe as she headed toward the big lake in the middle of the jungle. Its waters sparkled around the floating palace in its center. She had reconstructed this from her memory of an apparition she had seen while voyaging from Antwerp to London. It had appeared suddenly ahead of the ship as if placed there by magic and had startled and frightened everybody aboard. This magical building was square, four stories high, made of marble of various colors, and surrounded by rows of fluted and twisting pillars with climbing vines and flowers and streamers waving in the breeze. Each pillar was carved with hundreds of little Cupids who seemed to be climbing them with the aid of their fluttering wings.

The palace had been seen by everybody aboard the ship. Where had it come from? If it was a mirage, what building did it reflect? There was nowhere in England or the Continent such a rococo fantastic palace.

That unexplainable vision had haunted her the rest of her life on Earth and still did on the Riverworld. She had asked the Computer to explain it to her, but its searches had turned up only the reference to it in the biography of her by John Gildon. This posthumous work had both intrigued and disgusted her because of its inaccuracies and lies. She had then asked for all available literature concerning her and had read Montague Summers', Bernbaum's and Sackville-West's accounts. These authors had been mainly occupied in trying to sift the truth from the romance and speculations and had usually failed. They could not be blamed. The official records and documents about her were scarce, and getting the historical facts about her from her novels, plays and poems was hopeless.

Aphra knew, or had been told, that she was the daughter of a barber, James Johnson of Canterbury. Her mother had died a few days after Aphra's birth, and she and her sister and brother had been adopted by relatives, John and Amy Amis. Neither she nor the Amises, of course, had any prescience that the little girl would some day be the first Englishwoman to support herself wholly by writing. Nor that one of her poems would be included in anthologies for centuries afterward and one novel would survive as a minor classic.