“Did she get a look at the person?”
“No. I wasn’t there for any of it. But if I had been—” His messianic dark eyes looked away. “She has a hard time concentrating sometimes. And that can get dangerous when somebody is stalking you.”
There’s only one way you consistently lose your concentration on Riverworld.
“You mean you introduced her to dreamgum.”
“No!” He was almost shouting. “She did it all on her own. I didn’t even know she was doing it until it was too late.”
Dreamgum comes to everybody in the grail. Most of
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us decline it, not wanting to spend our lives in a phantasmagoria. Waking up on Riverworld is fantastic enough for most folks.
But I was getting sanctimonious again, a trait of mine Lillian hadn’t much liked. But then, there had been many traits of Lillian’s I hadn’t much liked either, especially when, near the end of my life on earth, I deduced the real nature of our relationship.
“Who would want to hurt her?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Or why?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“It couldn’t be her imagination?”
“The arrow’s in our cabin. I assumed you wanted to talk with her. I figured you could see the arrow then.”
“I just can’t help you, Edgar.”
“Won’t, you mean.”
“If you like.”
The tears were there, and they were so sudden that I didn’t see how they could be fake, even given his theatrical nature.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “It’s bad enough when a woman uses tears on me. But a man—”
“Do you have any idea how much I love her, Dashiell? Any idea at all?”
Now, in addition to the tears, his whole body had started shaking. I looked at him and hated him. He was so goddamned weak. But then I realized how weak I was, just in a different way was all, and so I gave up my pulpit and said, “It’s been a long time since I was a Pinkerton, Edgar. A long, long time.”
“She really needs help, Dashiell. Otherwise, somebody will take her from me forever.”
A nut-case poet and a dreamgum nymphette. Aren’t they just the kind of clients all private ops dream of?
After swimming for twenty minutes or so, I climbed back to the bank and returned to my hut and got ready for the day.
By now, I was starting to like the idea of having a case. Riverworld is many things, but exciting is not one of them, at least not in my own particular little patch of it. Two cultures and historical eras are represented here, the first being a group of suburban businessmen and their families from the Baltimore area circa 1907, the second being a group of San Franciscans from the late 1950s. I was among the latter group when I died and was reborn on Riverworld, whatever and wherever Riverworld really is.
When I got back to the shore, I found the good Baltimore burghers engaged in carrying material for huts into the surrounding forest. Even here, even in this purgatory in which we found ourselves, the good industrious burghers wanted a suburb to themselves. They believed, and quite rightly, that half the people you found canoeing down the River were riffraff. How could I disagree when one of our last visitors had been Wyatt Earp, who very seriously proposed that we take the six prettiest women in camp and set up a whorehouse, which he of course would be happy to oversee for a goodly share of the action?
The rain didn’t bother the good burghers. They had
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been seized with an idea and nothing was going to stop them. They performed their task with the ceaseless and uncomplaining attitude of worker ants.
The San Franciscans were neither so robust nor so industrious. They sat beneath little canopies of leaves and fed on dreamgum and watched the River flow and waved to various folks floating by. One fellow told me that he’d once seen an entire UFO filled with little green Martians waving at him. Such are the rewards of dreamgum.
I waved to the burghers and I waved to the River watchers. I walked up the muddy, sloping hill to the small hut that sat on a bluff and overlooked-a deep ravine. This was where Poe lived.