The long journeys of all were ended, for the time being, anyway. They were locked up in the physical recordings and the wathans that floated whirling in the central well.
22
His investigation of the Ripper affair was completed; the mystery, solved. Now he could take residence in his private world, but, for some unfathomable reason, he was still reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, he could not put off moving long. It irked him to be unconsciously opposing himself; he would not put up with it.
Before going, though, he considered what he had been living through, vicariously, these past two weeks. He was shaken and appalled, especially by the world as seen through the eyes of the whores. He had witnessed many savage and grisly deeds and much injustice and oppression, but none matched the grisliness and inhumanity of the deed that was the East End of London in the 1880s. In this relatively small area were jampacked eight hundred thousand people, hungry most of the time, eating swill and glad to have it, drunk if they could afford it and often when they could not, dwelling in small, dirty rooms with sweating peeling walls alive with vermin, cruel to each other, ignorant, superstitious, and, worst condition of all, hopeless.
Burton knew that the lives of the East Enders had been wretched, but not until he had lived in it, even if in a secondhand manner, was he made sick and guilty by the mere existence of that hellhole. Guilty because he now understood that he and all others who had ignored it were responsible.
From one viewpoint, perverted but nevertheless valid, the Ripper had done a deed of mercy when he had put those hungry, gaunt, diseased and hopeless whores out of their deep misery.
Also, unwittingly, he had forced the England outside of the East End to look at the inferno they had turned their eyes away from. The result had been a great cry for change, and many buildings had been torn down to make way for better housing. But in time the poverty and pain had resumed its former level—it had never subsided much—and the East End was forgotten by those who did not have to live there.
Frigate, when told by Burton of the results of his investigation, was intrigued. He said, “What you should do is track down those absentee landlords who made money from the horribly poor and deliver them to oblivion.”
“That’s Marxism,” Burton said.
“I despised the practice of communism, but it had some great ideals,” Frigate said. “I also despised the practice of capitalism, many aspects of it anyway.”
“But it had its ideals,” Burton said.
He had looked at Frigate and then laughed. “Has any social-political-economic system ever gotten anywhere near its ideals? Haven’t they all been corrupted?”
“Of course. So … the corrupters should be punished.”
Nur el-Musafir had pointed out what they knew but had ignored.
“It does not matter what they … we … did on Earth. What matters is what we’re doing now. If the corrupter and the corrupted have changed for the better, then they should be rewarded as much as those who have always been virtuous. Now, let me define virtue and the virtuous …” He smiled.
“No, I think not. You are tired of the sage of the tower, as you sometimes call me. My truths make you uneasy even though you agree with me.”
Frigate said, “About this business of wondering whom to resurrect to be our companions. Take Cleopatra, for instance. You and I would like to see her in the flesh and hear her story, find out the truth of what went on then. But she liked to stick sharp pins in her slave-girls’ breasts, and she could enjoy their screams and writhings. Shakespeare ignored that when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra. So did George Bernard Shaw in his Caesar and Cleopatra. From a literary viewpoint, they were right. Could you believe in or care about the genius and greatness of Cleopatra and Caesar or sorrow over their tragedy if you saw their barbaric sadism and callous murderousness? We, however, live in the real world, not that of fiction. So, would you want Cleopatra or Caesar or Antony as your neighbor?”