Farmer, Philip Jose Riverworld 1 To Your Scattered Bodies Go

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together by Whoever is responsible for all this!'
'The ox and the ass plow together,' Burton said, leaving it to the
German to decide which he was. Then the two were busy introducing
themselves, or attempting to do so, to the people among whom they had
arrived. These, as he later found out, were Sumerians of the Old or
Classical period; that is, they had lived in Mesopotamia between 2500 and
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2300 B.C. The men shaved their heads (no easy custom with flint razors),
and the women were bare to the waist. They had a tendency to short squat
bodies, pop-eyes, and (to Burton) ugly faces.
But if the index of beauty was not high among them, the pre
Columbian Samoans who made up 30 percent of the population were more
than attractive. And, of course, there was the ubiquitous 10 percent of
people from anywhere-everyplace, twentieth-centurians being the most
numerous. This was understandable, since the total number of these
constituted a fourth of humanity. Burton had no scientific statistical data, of
course, but his travels had convinced him that the twentieth-centurians had
been deliberately scattered along The River in a proportion to the other
peoples even greater than was to be expected. This was another facet of
the Riverworld setup, which he did not understand. What did the Ethicals
intend to gain by this dissemination? There were too many questions. He
needed time to think, and he could not get it if he spent himself with one
trip after another on The Suicide Express. This area, unlike most of the
others he would visit, offered some peace and quiet for analysis. So he
would stay here for a while.
And then there was Hermann Goring. Burton wanted to observe his
strange form of pilgrim's progress. One of the many things that he had not
been able to ask the Mysterious Stranger (Burton tended to think in
capitals) was about the dreamgum Where did it fit into the picture? Another
part of the Great Experiment?
Unfortunately, Goring did not last long.
The first night, he began screaming. He burst out of his hut and ran
toward The River, stopping now and then to strike out at the air or to
grapple with invisible beings and to roll back and forth on the grass. Burton
followed him as far as The River. Here Goring prepared to launch himself
out into the water, probably to drown himself. But he froze for a moment,
began shuddering, and then toppled over, stiff as a statue. His eyes were
open, but they saw nothing outside him. All vision was turned inward. What
horrors he was witnessing could not be determined, since he was unable to
speak.
His lips writhed soundlessly, and did not stop during the ten days
that he lived. Burton's efforts to feed him were useless. His jaws were
locked. He shrank before Burton's eyes, the flesh evaporating, the skin
falling in and the bones beneath resolving into the skeleton. One morning,
he went into convulsions, then sat up and screamed. A moment later he
was dead.
Curious, Burton did an autopsy on him with the flint knives and
obsidian saws available. Goring's distended bladder had burst and poured
urine into his body.
Burton proceeded to pull Goring's teeth out before burying him.
Teeth were trade items, since they could be strung on a fishgut or a tendon
to make much-desired necklaces. Goring's scalp also came off. The
Sumerians had picked up the custom of taking scalps from their enemies,
the seventeenth-century Shawnee across The River. They had added the
civilized embellishment of sewing scalps together to make capes, skirts,
and even curtains. A scalp was not worth as much as teeth in the trade
mart, but it was worth something.
It was while digging a grave by a large boulder at the foot of the
mountains that Burton had an illuminating flash of memory. He had
stopped working to take a drink of water when he happened to look at
Goring. The completely stripped head and the features, peaceful as if
sleeping, opened a trapdoor in his mind.
When he had awakened in that colossal chamber and found himself
floating in a row of bodies, he had seen this face. It had belonged to a body
in the row next to his. Goring, like all the other sleepers, had had his head
shaved. Burton had only noted him in passing during the short time before
the Warders had detected him. Later, after the mass Resurrection, when
he had met Goring, he had not seen the similarity between the sleeper and
this man who had a full head of blondish hair.
But he knew now that this man had occupied a space close to his.
Was it possible that their two resurrectors, so physically close to
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each other, had become locked in phase? If so, whenever his death and.
Goring's took place at the same approximate time, then the two would be
raised again by the same grailstone. Goring's jest that they were twin souls
might not be so far off the mark.
Burton resumed digging, swearing at the same time because he
had so many questions and so few answers. If he had another chancy to
get his hands on an Ethical, he would drag the answers out of him, no
matter what methods he had to use.
The next three months, Burton was busy adjusting himself to the
strange society in this area. He found himself fascinated by the new
language that was being formed out of the clash between Sumerian and
Samoan. Since the former were the most numerous, their tongue
dominated. But here, as elsewhere, the major language suffered a Pyrrhic
victory. Result of the fusion was a pidgin, a speech with greatly reduced
flexion and simplified syntax. Grammatical gender went overboard; words
were syncopated; tense and aspect, of verbs were cut to a simple present,
which was used also for the future. Adverbs of time indicated the past. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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