The Dark Design

He had then gone on to the tale of Sinbad the Sailor, though it was necessary to adapt this to the experiences of the Ganopo. They had never seen a sea, so the sea became a river, and the roc which carried off Sinbad became a giant golden eagle.

The Ganopo, in their turn, told stories from their creation myths and the ribald adventures of a folk hero, the trickster Old Man Coyote.

Burton questioned them about the adaptation of their religion to the reality of this world.

"O Burton," their chief said, "this is not quite the world after death which we had envisioned. It is no land where maize grows higher than a man's head in one day and deer and jackrabbit give us a good hunt but never escape our spears. Nor have we been reunited with our women and children, our parents and grandparents. Nor do the great ones, the spirits of the mountains and the river, of the rocks and the bush, walk among us and talk to us.

"We do not complain. In fact, we are far happier than in the world we left. We have more food, better food, than we had there, and we do not have to work to get it, though we had to fight to keep it in the early days here. We have far more than enough water, we can fish to our heart's content, and we do not know the fevers that killed or crippled us nor do we know the aches and pains of old age and its enfeeblements."

5

Here the chief frowned, and with his next words a shadow fell upon them and the smiles faded.

"Tell me, you strangers, have you heard anything about the return of death? Of death forever, I mean? We live upon this little island and so do not get many visitors. But from the few we do meet and from those we talk to when we visit the banks, we have heard some strange and troubling stories.

"They say that for some time now no one who has died has been raised again. A person is killed, and he or she does not wake up the next day, his wounds healed, his grail beside him, upon a bank far from the scene of his death. Tell me, is this true or is it just one of those tales that people like to make up to worry others?"

"I do not know,'' Burton said. "It is true that we have traveled for thousands of kilometers ... I mean, we have passed by an uncountable number of grailstones on our voyage. And for the past year, we have noticed this thing of which you speak."

He paused for a moment, thinking. From the very second day after the great resurrection, the lesser resurrections, or translations, as they were generally called, had occurred. People were killed or killed themselves or had fatal accidents, but, at dawn the next day, they found themselves alive. However, they were never raised at the scene of their deaths. Always, they found themselves far away, often in a different climatic zone.

Many attributed this to a supernatural agency. Many more, among whom was Burton, did not think that there was any agency except an advanced science which accounted for this. There was no need to call in the supernatural. "No ghosts need apply,"-to quote the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Physical explanations sufficed.

Burton knew from his own experience, apparently a unique one, that a dead person's body could be duplicated. He had seen that in the vast space where he had awakened briefly. Bodies were some­how made from some kind of recording, their wounds healed, diseased flesh regenerated, limbs restored, the ravages of old age repaired, youth restored.

Somewhere under the crust of this planet was an immense thermionic energy-matter converter. Probably, it was fueled by heat from the nickel-iron core. Its machinery operated through the com­plex of grailstones, the roots of which reached deep under the earth, forming a circuit so complex that it staggered the mind to think of it.

Was the recording of the dead person's cells made by something in the stones themselves? Or was it made as Frigate had suggested, by unseen orbital satellites which kept an eye upon every living being, much as God was supposed to note even the fall of a sparrow?

Nobody knew, or, if they did, they were keeping the secret to themselves.

Energy-matter conversion through the grailstone system also accounted for the free meals every citizen of The Riverworld found in his grail three times a day. The base of each of the metal cylinders must conceal a tiny converter and an electronic menu. The energy was transmitted through the grailstone complex into the grails. And there electricity became complex matter: beef, bread, lettuce, etcet­era, and even luxuries, tobacco, marijuana, booze, scissors, combs, cigarette lighters, lipstick, dreamgum.

The towel-like cloths were also provided via the stone system, but not through the grails. They appeared in a neat pile next to the resurrected body and the grail.

There had to be some sort of mechanism inside the underground roots of the stone complex. This somehow could project through many meters of earth the vastly complicated configuration of molecules of human bodies, grails, and cloths at precisely a cen­timeter above ground level.

Literally, people and things formed from the air.

Burton had sometimes wondered what would happen if the translatee should happen to be formed in an area occupied by another object. Frigate said that there would be a terrible explosion. This had never happened, at least not to Burton's knowledge. Thus, the mechanism "knew" how to avoid this intermingling of molecules.

There was, however, as Frigate had pointed out, the volume of atmosphere which the newly formed body had to displace. How were the molecules of air kept from a fatal mingling with the molecules of the body?

No one knew. But the mechanism must somehow remove the air, make vacuums into which the body, grail, and cloths appeared. It would have to be a perfect vacuum, too, something which the science of the late 10th century had not succeeded in making.

And it did it silently, without the explosion of a mass of suddenly displaced air.

The question of how bodies were recorded still did not have a satisfactory answer. Many years ago, a captured agent of the Ethicals, a man calling himself Spruce, had said that a sort of chrono-scope, an instrument which could look back in time, recorded the cells of human beings. Of every person who had ever lived from about two million B.C. to 2008 a.d.

Burton did not believe this. It did not seem possible that anything could go backward in time, bodily or visually. Frigate had ex­pressed his disbelief, too, saying that Spruce probably had used "chronoscope" in a figurative sense. Or perhaps he had lied.

Whatever the whole truth, the resurrection and the grail food could be explained in purely physical terms.

"What is it, Burton?" the chief said politely. "You have been seized by a spirit?"

Burton smiled and said, "No, I was just thinking. We too have talked to many who said that no one has been translated for a year in their areas. Of course, this may just mean that the places through which we voyaged may not have had any translatees. It is possible that there have been translatees elsewhere. After all, The River may be ..."

He paused. How could he put across the concept of a River which was possibly 10,000,000 or more kilometers long to people who did not understand any number above twenty?

"It may be so long that a man who sailed from one end of The River to the other would take as many years to do it as the combined lifetimes of your grandfather, father, and yourself on Earth.

"Thus, even though there may be as many deaths as there are blades of grass between two grailstones, that still would not be much compared to the numbers who live along The River. Even though we have voyaged very far, we still have not gone far compared to the length of The River. So, there may be many areas where the dead have risen.