The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Fifty were in the line between the Rex and Virolando.

Of the total of sixty, he could identify only ten. These were upper echelon, heads of their sections.

The chances were that he would encounter none of the sixty.

But. . . what if he failed to get aboard either boat?

He felt sick.

Somehow, he would do it. He must do it.

To be realistic, he had to admit that he could fail.

At one time he had believed that he could do anything humanly possible and some things which no other humans could do. But his faith in himself had been somewhat shaken.

Perhaps this was because he had lived among the Riverpeople too long.

There were so many journeying up-River, driven by one great desire. By now most of them would have heard Joe Miller’s story, though it was at hundredth-hand. They’d be expecting to find the towel rope up which they could climb the precipice. They’d also expect the tunnel which would permit them to detour an almost unscalable mountain. They would expect the path along the face of the mountain.

These were no more.

Neither was the tunnel at the end of the path, at the base of the mountain. It had melted into lava.

He looked again at the unencircled star. Close. Far too close by. As the situation now was, it represented the greatest danger.

Who knew how the situation would change?

Now the loud voice of Tai-Peng entered the hut. He was outside, having tumbled his woman, and he was shouting something unintel­ligible at the world. What a noise the man made in this world! What a blur of action!

If I cannot shake the gods on high, I will at least make an uproar in Acheron.

Now Tai-Peng was closer, and his speech could be heard clear­ly.

“I eat like a tiger! I crap like an elephant! I can drink three hundred cups of wine at a sitting! I have married three wives, made love to a thousand women! I outplay anyone on the lute and the flute! I write immortal poems by the thousands, but I throw them into the stream as soon as they’re finished and watch the water, the wind, and the spirits carry them off to destruction!

“Water and flowers! Water and flowers! These I love the most! “Change and impermanence! These wound, pain, torture me!

“Yet it is change and ephemerality that make for beauty! Without dy ng and death can there be beauty? Can there be perfection? “Beauty is beautiful because it is doomed to perish! “Or is it?

“I, Tai-Peng, once thought of myself as flowing water, as a blooming flower! As a dragon!

“Rowers and dragons! Dragons are flowers of the flesh! They live in beauty while generations of flowers bloom and die! Bloom and become dust! Yet even dragons die; they bloom and become dust! A white man, pale as a ghost, blue-eyed as a demon, once told me that dragons lived for eons! Eons, I say! For ages that make the mind turn upside down to think of them! Yet. . . they all perished millions of years ago, long before Nukua created men and women from yellow mud!

“In all their pride and beauty, they died!

“Water! Flowers! Dragons!”

Tai-Peng’s voice became less loud as he went down the hill. But the man in the hut heard one especially clarion passage.

“What evil person brought us back to life and now wishes us to die forever again?.”

The man in the hut said, “Hah!”

Though Tai-Peng’s poems spoke much of the shortness of life of men and women and of flowers, they never mentioned death. Nor had he ever before referred to death in his conversation. Yet now he was speaking boldly of it, raging at it.

Until now he had seemed to be as happy as a man could be. He’d lived for six years in this little state and apparently had no desire to leave it.

Was he ready now?

A man like Tai-Peng would be a good companion for the voyage up-River. He was aggressive, quick wined, and a great swordsman. If he could be subtly urged to resume the course he had forsaken… What was likely to happen in the decades to come? All he could predict-for now he too was one of the webs in the dark design, no longer a weaver-all he could predict was that some would get to Virolando and some would not.