THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

8

WHEN THE REVEREND MR. DODGSON, BETTER KNOWN AS LEWIS Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland, he prefaced it with a poem. It begins with "All in the golden afternoon" and compresses that famous journey by boat up the Isis during which Dodgson was teased by the real Alice into writing down the tale he'd composed to please the "cruel Three."

On that day of July 4,1852, golden in memory only because it actually was cool and wet, Dodgson, who would be the Dodo in Alice and the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, was accompanied by Reverend Duckworth, who naturally became the Duck. Lorina, aged thirteen, was the Lory, and Alice, age ten, Dodgson's favorite, was of course Alice. Edith, the youngest sister, aged eight, would be the Eaglet.

The three little girls were the daughters of Bishop Liddell, whose surname rhymed with fiddle, as evidenced by a poem-" about the bishop sung by the rowdy Oxford students. Dodgson's verse refers to the girls in Latin ordinals according to the ages. Prima, Secunda, and Tertia.

It seemed to Alice now, as she stood in the middle of Richard's and her cabin, that she had in truth played the part of Secunda during her Earthly life. Certainly on this world she was Secunda. Richard Burton regarded few men as his equal and no women, not even his wife and perhaps especially his wife, as equals.

She hadn't minded. She was dreamy, gentle and introverted. As Dodgson had written of her:

Still she haunts me, phantomwise.

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

That would become true in more senses than Dodgson could have dreamed of. Now she was under a sky in which even at the blaze of noon she could see near the tops of the mountains the faint phantom glow of a few giant stars. And in the moonless night sky was the blaze of great gas sheets and enormous stars which shed the light of a full moon.

Under the light of day and night, she had been content, even eager, to have Richard make the decisions. These had often involved violence, and, contrary to her nature, she had fought like an Amazon. Though she did not have the physique of a Penthesilea, she did have the courage.

Life on the Riverworld had often been harsh, cruel, and bloody. After dying on Earth, she'd awakened naked and with all body hair shaven, in the body she'd had when she was twenty-five, though she'd died when eighty-two. Around her was not the room of the house in which she'd died, her sister Rhoda's in Westerham, Kent. Instead towering unbroken mountain ranges enclosed the plains and the foothills and the river in the middle of the valley. As far as she could see, people stood on the banks, all naked, hairless, young and in shock, screaming, weeping, laughing hysterically, or in horror-struck silence.

She knew no one and had by impulse attached herself to Burton. However, one of the items in her grail was a chiclelike stick containing some sort of psychedelic substance. She'd chewed it, and then she and Burton had copulated furiously all night and also done things she then regarded as perverted and some things which she still did.

She'd loathed herself in the morning and felt like killing herself. Burton she'd hated as she'd never hated anyone. But she continued to stay with him since anyone she switched to might be worse. Also she had to admit that he too was under the gum's influence, and he did not press her to renew, as she then thought of it, their carnal acquaintance. Burton would have used an Anglo-Saxonism, as he called it, to describe their coupling.

In time she'd fallen in love with him—had, in fact, been in love that night—and they began living together. Living together was not exactly accurate since a good half of her time she spent by herself in their hut. Burton was the most restless man she'd ever known. After a week in one place he must be up and moving: From time to time they'd had quarrels, he doing most of the quarreling, though by now she could hold her own. Eventually he disappeared for years and returned with a story that turned out to be the essence of cock-and-bull.

She was very hurt when she finally found out that he'd kept his most important secret from her for years. He'd been visited one night by a robed and masked being who said that he was an Ethical, one of the Council which governed those responsible for the resurrections of thirty-five billion or so Terrestrials.

The story went that these Ethicals had raised humanity to life to perform certain experiments. They meant to let humankind die, never to be resurrected again. One of the Council, this Ethical, this "man," was secretly opposing this.

Burton was skeptical. But when the other Ethicals tried to seize him, Burton had run. He was forced to kill himself several times, utilizing the principle of resurrection, to get far away from his pursuers. After a while he decided that he might as well keep going. After 777 suicides, he awoke in the Council room of the twelve. These had told him what he knew already from X, that is, that there was a renegade among them. So far, they hadn't been able to detect who he or she was. But they would.

Now that they had caught him, they would keep him under permanent surveillance. The memory of his visits from the Ethicals, in fact, everything since he'd first known X, would be wiped out of his mind.

Burton, however, on waking on the banks of The River, had found his memory unimpaired. Somehow, X has succeeded in averting the erasure and in fooling his colleagues.

Burton reasoned also that X must have arranged it so that the Ethicals couldn't find him whenever they wished to. Burton had gone up-River then, looking for the others whom X had recruited. Just when and how they could help him, X wouldn't say, though he promised to reveal the time and the methods at a later time.

Something had gone wrong. X hadn't appeared for years, and the resurrections had suddenly stopped.

Then Burton had found out that the Peter Jairus Frigate and the Tau Cetan, who'd been with Burton from the begi

Burton could no longer hide his secret from his companions. Alice was shocked by the story, stu

Since that time, she'd been slowly burning. The repressed anger had now and then broken out, and the flames had scorched Burton. He, always willing to burn back, had quarreled with her. And though they'd always reconciled afterward, Alice knew that the day of parting had to come soon.

She should have made the break before signing on the Rex. But she also wanted to know the answers to the mysteries of the Riverworld. If she stayed behind, she would always regret not having gone on. So she had boarded with Richard, and here she was in their cabin wondering what to do next.

Also, she had to confess that there was more to her being here than the desire to reveal mysteries. For the first time in her life on this world, she had hot and cold ru

It was indeed a strange situation for a bishop's daughter born May 4, 1852, next to Westminster Abbey. Her father was not only the dean of Christ Church College but famous as the co-editor of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon. Her mother was a beautiful and cultured woman who looked as if she were Spanish. Alice Pleasance Liddell came to Oxford when she was four and almost immediately made friends with the shy, stammering mathematician-clergyman with the offbeat sense of humor. Both lived in Tom Quad so that their meetings were frequent.