Why had Hakim hinted that he was not really the figment his followers worshiped? Something didn’t wash. What was going on here? After a time Plum got up and went back outside, into the “garden”—this giant-chiclet-walled cricket meadow—to see if his fellow historical consultants had any idea.
They were fonts of information. The ex-haberdasher from Smyrna pointed off right, to the wall opposite this row of huts. “Beyond that’s the women’s side,” he explained. “Hakim spends much more time with them. We’re the second team. He uses us to check their facts. When Maria tells him that Kemal Ataturk did thus and so, he noses around to make sure of it.”
“Maria?”
“We’re not supposed to know their names,” said Nabuch ad-Nasr, who was an expert on Middle East politics two thousand years before Hakim became Imam-Caliph. Plum thought it odd that a fellow of Old Testament times should bounce around in the vigor of youth, as giddy a lad as the Afghan resistance fighter—notwithstanding his love of makeup and elaborately pretty eyes, this last was an expert on nine guerrilla organizations fighting the Soviet invaders.
None of the aforementioned chaps came by Arabic honestly: they were Turkish, Amorite, and Pathan. But it was a condition of living here that they could make themselves understood, and so they had huts, while Jim the Apache was obliged to camp in odd corners until he
grew fluent. Plum repeated the name in translation, as if “Maria” sounded different in English. Before he could laugh at himself for this stupidity, Jim answered in broken Arabic: “She’s best. Queen of harem. She talk much Lenin.”
“Hitler too,” said the haberdasher.
“Hakim is jealous. He thinks he should rank in history with those two,” said a junior prince of Iraq, assassinated in some coup in the 1950s. Plum was surprised at the princeling’s open hostility, and at the general freedom of speech within these walls, but most of this cabal had gotten here the same way he had, by taking the “cheap trip.” They were half ready and half willing to die again.
There were worse punishments than death. One heard of slaver kingdoms: blind, mutilated starvelings kept in confinement for the booty in their tiffin “grails.” If Hakim wanted a reputation for villainy, he could have done the like. He hadn’t. It gave one pause. It made one wonder if there was a goodish bloke inside Hakim, trying fitfully to make himself known.
Plum Wodehouse slept on the problem that night without coming to an answer. The daily rains came just before dawn. Breakfast was a bun and hot noodle soup, the guard absconding with the usual tax. There’d be no tobacco for Plum’s nonexistent pipe, and afterward no typewriter to lay hands on, no audience for the latest adventure at Standings Castle. What was left? How could life be worth living?
That afternoon, good bloke Hakim and his entourage visited the male side of his garden, filing from hut to hut for chats with the locals. Reaching Plum at last, the Occult Master of Druze-dom played the generous host.
“What is wrong?” he asked, after Plum made a botch
150
Phillip C. Jennings
I
BLANDINGS ON RIVERWORLD
151
of gratitude for his lodgings. “Would you like to wander around this land of winter piety? I myself feel circumscribed, and so we organize hikes and tours and picnics. You mustn’t think you’re a prisoner.”
Really? “No, it’s not that. I just—I’m addicted to writing,” Plum answered. “For sixty-plus years that’s all I did. Writing, and a spot of walking, or wrestling now that I’m in my vigor again. Dogs. I liked dogs. But nothing quite does it for me like putting words on a blank Page-He averted his face, appalled at the surge of his emotions. He spoke on, brokenly. “I’ve never seen paper on Riverworld.”
Hakim took Plum’s hand, as a minister might pluck the limp hand of a mourning widow, and gave it a ministerial pat. “I can bring you paper! We make it out of bamboo. I knew there was something. People are sent to me for a purpose. Yesterday I didn’t know what you were for, but now it becomes clear.”