The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

The western precipices were blue-black stone on which were enormous splotches of bluish-green lichen. Here and there, narrow cataracts fell dull-silvery down the mountain sides.

All of this was familiar to Jill Gulbirra. But each morning awoke in her the same sense of awe and wonder. Who had formed this many-million-kilometers-long Rivervalley? And why? And how and why had she, along with an estimated thirty-four to thirty-seven billion people, been resurrected on this planet? Everybody who had ever lived from about 2,000,000 b.c. to 2008 a.d. seemed to have been raised from the dead. The exceptions were children who’d died at or under the age of five and the mentally retarded. And also, possibly, the hopelessly insane, though there was doubt about the definition of hopelessly.

Who were the people who had done this? Why?

There were rumors and tales, strange, disturbing, and madden­ing, of people who had appeared among the lazari. Briefly. Mysteri­ously. They were named, among other things, the Ethicals.

“Are you listening?” Firebrass said. She became aware that they were staring at her. “I can give you back, almost verbatim, what you’ve said so far,” she answered.

This wasn’t true. But she was sensitized-keeping one ear open, as it were, like an antenna receiving on a single frequency-for what she considered important.

Now the people were coming out of the huts, stretching, cough­ing, lighting up cigarettes, heading for the bamboo-walled latrines, or walking toward The River, grails in hand. The hardy wore only a towel; most were clad from head to foot. Bedouins of the Riverval­ley. Phantoms in a mirage.

Firebrass said, “Okay. You ready to be sworn in? Or do you have mental reservations?”

“I never have those,” she said. “What about you? In regard to me, I mean?”

“It wouldn’t matter, anyway.” He grinned again. “This oath is only a preliminary one. You’ll be on probation for three months, then the people vote on you. But I can veto the vote. Then you take the final oath, if you pass. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She didn’t like it, but what could she do? She certainly wasn’t going to walk out. Besides, though they didn’t know it, they’d be on probation with her.

The air became warmer. The eastern sky continued to brighten, quenching all but a few giant stars. Bugles blew. The nearest was on top of a six-story bamboo tower, in the middle of the plain, and the bugler was a tall, skinny black wearing a scarlet towel around his waist.

“Real brass,” Firebrass said. “There are some deposits of cop­per and zinc a little ways upstream. We could have taken them away from the people who owned it, but we traded instead. Sam wouldn’t let us use force unless it was necessary.

“South of here, where Soul City used to be, were big deposits of cryolite and bauxite. The Soul Citizens wouldn’t keep their side of the bargain-we were trading steel weapons for the ores-so, we went down and took it. In fact,” he waved his hand, “Parolando now extends for 64 kilometers on both sides of The River.”

The men removed all cloths except for those around the waist. Jill kept on a green-and-white-striped kilt and a thin, nearly transparent cloth around her breasts. They had looked like desert Arabs; now they were Polynesians.

The dwellers of the plains and the bases of the foothills were gathering by the Riverside. A number shucked all their cloths and jumped into the water, whooping at the cold and splashing each other.

Jill hesitated for a minute. She had sweat all day and all night paddling her canoe. She needed a bath, and sooner or later she’d have to disrobe entirely. She dropped her towels and ran to the bank and dived flatly out. After swimming back; she borrowed a bar of soap from a woman and lathered the upper part of her body. She came out of the water shivering and rubbed herself vigor­ously.

The men stared frankly, seeing a very tall woman, slim, long lagged, small breasted, wide hipped, deeply tanned. She had short, straight, russet hair and large russet eyes. Her face, as she well knew, was nothing to write home about. It was passable except for large buck teeth and a nose a little too long and too hawkish. The teeth were an inheritance from her blackfeller grandmother. There was nothing she could do about them. Nor was there anything she wanted to do about them.