THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

The fellow had a very good memory, but his interest in Mark Twain had helped him to record the heading in his mind.

"She was fifty-five years old and was found dead late Sunday in a motel room at 20-something-or-other North Highland Avenue. Her room was strewn with bottles of pills and liquor. There wasn't any note and an autopsy was ordered to find out the exact cause of her death. I never saw the report.

"She'd died across the street from her luxurious three-bedroom penthouse in the Highland Towers. Her friends said she often checked in there for the weekend when she was tired of being alone. The paper said she'd been alone most of her life. She'd used the name of Clemens after she divorced an artist by the name of Rutgers. She had been married to him briefly in, ah, 1935, I think. The paper said she was the daughter of Clara Grabrilowitsch, your only daughter. It meant that she was your only surviving daughter. Clara married a Jacques Samoussoud after her first husband died. In 1935,1 think. She was a devout Christian Scientist, you know."

"No, I didn't know!" Sam said.

His informant, knowing that Sam loathed Christian Science, that he had once written a defamatory book about Mary Baker Eddy, had gri

"Do you suppose she was getting back at you?"

"Spare me your psychological analyses," Sam had said. "Clara worshiped me. All my children did."

"Anyway, Clara died in 1962, not long after she'd authorized publication of your unpublished Letters to the Earth."

"That was printed?" Sam said. "What was the reaction?"

"It sold well. But it was pretty mild stuff, you know. No one was outraged or thought it was blasphemous. Oh, yes, your 1601, uncensored, was also printed. When I was young, it could be obtained only through private presses. But by the late 1960's, it was sold to the general public."

Sam had shaken his head. "You mean children could buy it?"

"No, but a lot of them read it."

"How things must 'ye changed!"

"Anything, well, almost anything, went. Let's see. The article said that your granddaughter was an amateur artist, singer and actress. She was also a shutterbug—a person who liked to take photographs—she took dozens of pictures every week of friends, bartenders, and waiters. Even strangers on the street.

"She was writing an autobiography, A Life Alone, which title tells you a lot about her. Poor thing. Her friends said the book was ‘generally confused' but parts of it showed some of your genius."

"I always said that Livy and I were too highstrung to have children."

"Well, she wasn't suffering from lack of money. She inherited some trust funds from her mother, about $800,000, I believe. Money from the sale of your books. When she died, she was worth one and a half million dollars. Yet, she was unhappy and lonely.

"Oh, yes. Her body was taken to Elmira, New York.. .for burial in a family plot near the famed grandfather whose name she bore."

"I can't be blamed for her character," Sam had said. "Clara and Ossip can take credit for that."

The informant shrugged and said, "You and your wife formed the characters of your children, Clara included."

"Yes, but my character was formed by my parents. And theirs by theirs," Sam had said. "Do we go back to Adam and Eve to fix the responsibility? No, because God formed their temperaments when he created them. There is but one being who bears the ultimate responsibility."

"I'm a free-wilier myself," the man had said.

"Listen," Sam had said. "When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian sea, the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing in my kilt at this instant, talking to you. That's from my What Is Man? slightly paraphrased. What do you think of that?"

"It's bullshit."

"You say that because you have been determined to do so. you could not have said anything else."

"You're a sorry case, Mr. Clemens, if you don't mind my saying so."

"I do. But you can't help saying that. Listen, what was your profession?"

The man looked surprised. "What's that got to do with it? I was a realtor. I was also on the school board for many years."

"Let me quote myself again," Sam had said. "In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."

Sam chuckled now at the memory of the man's expression.

He sat up. Gwen slept on. He turned on the nightlight and saw that she was smiling slightly. She looked i

He punched the P button. The doors slid shut, but not before he saw a guard starting to phone to the pilothouse that La Bosso (The Boss) was coming up. The cage rose from the D or hangar deck, where the officers' quarters were, through the two narrow round rooms below the pilothouse, and then to the top chamber. There was a brief wait while the third-watch exec checked out the cage with closed-circuit TV. Then the doors slid open, and Sam entered the pilothouse or control room.

"It's all right boys," he said. "Just me, enjoying insomnia."

There were three others there. The night pilot, smoking a big cigar, eyeing the dials lackadaisically. He was Akande Erin, a massive Dahomeyan who had spent thirty years operating a jungle riverboat. The most outrageous liar Sam had ever known, and he had met the world's best. Third-mate Calvin Cregar, a Scot who had put in forty years on an Australian coastal steamer. Ensign Diego Santiago of the marines, a seventeenth-century Venezuelan.

"Just came to look around," Sam said. "Carry on."

The sky was unclouded, blazing as if that great arsonist, God, had set it afire. The Valley was broad here, and the light fell softly, showing dimly the buildings and boats on both banks. Beyond them was a darker darkness. A few sentinel fires made eyes in the night. Otherwise, the world seemed asleep. The hills rose dark with trees, the giant irontrees, a thousand feet high, spiring up from the others. Beyond, the mountains loomed blackly. Faint starlight sparked on the waves.

Sam went through the door to stand on the port walk that ringed the exterior of the pilothouse. The wind was cool but not yet cold. It ran fingers through his bushy hair. Standing on the deck, he felt like a living part, an organ, of the vessel. It was spanking along, paddlewheels churning, its flags flapping, brave as a tiger, huge and sleek as a sperm whale, beautiful" as a woman, heading always against the current, its goal the Axis Mundi, the Navel of the World, the dark tower. He felt roots grow from his feet, tendrils that spread through the hull, extended from the hull, dropped through the black waters, touched by the monsters of the deep, plunged into the muck three miles below, grew laterally up through the earth, spread out, shooting with the speed of thought, growing vines which erupted from the earth, stabbed into the flesh of every living human being on this world, spiraled upward through the roofs of the huts, rocketed toward the skies, veined space with the shoots which wrapped themselves around every planet on which lived animal life and sentients, enveloped and penetrated these, an then shot exploring tentacles toward the blackness where no matter was, where only God existed.