The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Jill hesitated for several seconds. She did not mind being alone- most of the time. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she did not get desperate, panicked, if she were thrown on her own resources. But she had been her only company for too long. The voyage up The River had taken four hundred and twenty days, and during most of that time she had been utterly alone by day. At night, she had eaten and talked with strangers. She had passed an estimated 501,020,000 people and had not seen one face she had known on Earth or Riverworld. Not one.

But then she had seldom gotten close enough to the banks during the day to have recognized facial features. Her socializing at night was limited to a few people. What was mental agony, or would have been if she permitted herself such an emotion, was that she might have passed by some people, she had loved on Earth, or, at least, liked. There were some she wanted very much to see again.

Perhaps the one she most longed to talk to was Marie. What had Marie felt when she learned that her senseless jealousy had been responsible for the death of her lover, Jill Gulbirra? Would she have been grief-stricken, perhaps have taken her own life because of guilt? After all, Marie was suicide-prone. Or, rather, to be exact, prone to taking just enough pills to endanger her but not enough so that she could not get medical assistance in time to save her. Marie had come close to death at least three times that Jill knew about. But not very close.

No, Marie would have been plunged into gloom and self-re­proach for about three days. Then she would have swallowed about twenty phenobarbitols and called her closest friend, probably an­other lover, Jill thought, her breast hurting-the bitch!-and the lover would have called the hospital, and then there would be the stomach pump and the antidotes and the long, anxious waiting in the lobby and then the attendance by the bed while Marie rambled on half-mindlessly, still fogged by the drug but not so fogged that she would not be deliberately working on her lover’s emotions. It would not just be sympathy that she would be evoking. The sadistic little bitch would also make a few wounding remarks to her lover, getting across some criticisms which she would claim later that she did not remember making.

Then Marie would be taken to her apartment by her lover, and tenderly taken care of for a while, and then . . . Jill could not bear fantasizing that then.

At these times she had to laugh, though grimly, at herself. It was thirty-one years after she had stormed out of the house and driven off, tires screaming, rubber burning, and raced recklessly through three stoplights and then . . . then the blinding lights and the blaring horn of the huge lorry and the savage wrenching at the wheel to rum the Mercedes-Benz, the frozen sickness inside her, the looming of the juggernaut, and …

And she had awakened with countless others, naked, her thirty-year-old body restored to a twenty-five-year-old state-minus cer­tain blemishes and imperfections-on the banks of the Rivervalley. Nightmare in paradise. Or what could have been paradise if so many human beings did not insist on making a hell of it.

Thirty-one years ago. Time had not mended all hurts, not, at least, this one. By now she should have gotten over the mingled fury and grief. It should have receded beyond the horizon of things that mattered now. She should have no slightest emotion about Marie now. But she did.

She was suddenly aware that the Japanese was looking at her. He evidently expected her to reply to something he had just said. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes, I get lost in the past.” “I am sorry, too,” he said. “Sometimes … if one is using dreamgum as a means to rid oneself of painful or crippling memories or undesirable psychic states, one instead . . . gets lost.” “No,” she said, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. “It’s just that I have been alone so long, I have fallen into the habit of reverie. Why, when I was sailing the canoe up The River, I would do so automatically. Sometimes, I would realize that I had put ten kilometers behind me and not even been aware, consciously any­way, of what had happened during that time.