She was shocked and confused. She had been killed in those horrible days when the east bank of grailstones had failed to provide food for the east bank’s inhabitants. She, with hordes of others, had crossed The River in boats to fight for the food supplied to the west bank dwellers. She had not known then that resurrection of the dead had ceased, and so she had expected to awake somewhere along The River.
Instead, here she was in a strange place, one obviously not in The Valley. And who was this fellow countryman grinning like a demon at her?
“Truly, she thought I was a devil at first,” Li Po was to say. “She was half-mistaken.” He added, “She did not even recognize me until I spoke. Then everything flooded in on her, and she wept for a long time.”
It had taken most of the night for him to explain to her just what had happened to him and to her. Then he had allowed her to sleep, though he lusted to get her into bed with him.
“I am not one to force myself upon a Woman. She must be willing.”
Everyone came to his suite to meet the newcomer. She was indeed beautiful and delicate, about five feet tall, slim-boned and slim-fleshed but well rounded and long-legged. Her eyes were huge and dark brown, and she was dressed in the same kind of clothes she had worn on Earth. She was not as shy as Li Po had portrayed her. The Riverworld had changed her in that respect. Her voice was, however, low and husky as she spoke to them in Esperanto. She was fluent in a dozen or more languages, but English was not one of them.
Burton was enraged, but, for once, he controlled himself. Star Spoon was a deed done. Reproaching the Chinese for breaking the agreement not to resurrect anybody as yet would upset the woman and only cause Li Po to argue with him or, worse, challenge him to a duel. Burton had lost whatever authority he had. Now that the situation was changed, the danger over, he could no longer be captain of this group of strong individualists. They would pretty much do what they wished.
Burton managed to smile, but his voice betrayed him. He growled, “How many more are you planning to raise?”
“Not many. I am no maniac.”
Burton snorted.
“The Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove, my immortal companions. You’d like them. Women for them and perhaps a few more for me. My honorable parents, my sisters and brothers and an aunt whom I greatly loved. My children. Of course, I have to find them first.” , Frigate groaned and said, “An invasion. The Yellow Peril all over again.”
“What?” Li Po said.
“Nothing. I’m sure that we’ll all be happy and pleased.”
“I look forward to meeting those you will bring back,” Li Po said.
Frigate grinned and clapped Li Po on the shoulder. He was very fond of the poet, though, like the others, he was sometimes irritated by him.
14
Peter Jairus Frigate was born in 1918 in North Terre Haute, Indiana, near the banks of the Wabash River. Though he called himself a rationalist, he believed, or claimed to believe, that each Earthly area had its unique psychic properties. Thus, Vigo County soil had absorbed the peculiar qualities of the Indians who had lived there and of the pioneers who had driven them away and settled there. His own psyche, soaked with the effluvia of Amerindianness and Hoosierness, would never get rid of these no matter how much they evaporated in other climes and times.
“In a sense, I contain redskins and frontiersmen.”
His voice reminded people of that of the Montana movie actor, Gary Cooper, but now and then the Hoosier twang appeared in it. He sometimes pronounced “wash” as “warsh,” and a “bucket” was sometimes a “pail.”
“Illinois” more often than not was “Ellinois.”
In his childhood, he had been subjected to Christian Science, that mélange of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy transmuted into Western religion by the woolly-minded and neurotic Mary Baker Eddy. His parents had originally been Methodist Episcopalian and Baptist, but a “miracle” had occurred when his father’s aunt was sent home from a hospital to die of incurable cancer. A friend had talked her into reading The Key to the Scriptures and, while she was doing this, the aunt’s cancer had remissed. Most of the Frigate family in Terre Haute had become devout disciples of Eddy and of Jesus Christ as Scientist.