The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Cyrano said, “You must comprehend that Olivia did not con­sciously acknowledge all this during her Terrestrial existence. At least, she claimed not to have done so, though I suspect that she had such thoughts, was ashamed of them, and so put them away in the deep, dark files of her soul. But it was here, in this Valley, when she became addicted to chewing the soi-disant, the so-called dream-gum, that she perceived her true feelings.

“And so, though she still loved Clemens, in a manner of speak­ing, she hated him even more.”

“Did she quit using the gum?”

“Yes. It upset her too much. Though she now and then had some ecstatic or fantastic visions, she had too many horrible experi­ences.”

“She should have stuck with it,” Jill said. “But under proper guidance. However …”

“Yes?”

Jill compressed her lips, than said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t be too bloody critical. I had a guru, a beautiful woman, the best and wisest woman I ever knew, but she couldn’t keep me from running head­long into . . . well, no need to go into it here … it was too . . . dis­maying? No, horrifying. I chickened out. So I shan’t be criticizing anyone else, shouldn’t anyway. I have been considering taking it up again, but I don’t trust the Second Chancers’ use of it, even though they claim to have excellent, quite safe, techniques. I couldn’t put full confidence in people who have their religious beliefs.”

” I was a free thinker, a libertin, as we styled ourselves,” Cyrano said. “But now . . . I do not know. Perhaps there is after all a God. Otherwise, how does one account for this world?”

“There are a score of theories,” Jill said.” And no doubt you’ve heard them all.”

” Many, at any rate,” Cyrano said. ” I was hoping to hear a new one from you.”

15

At that moment, several people invaded the conversation.

Jill broke off from the clump and drifted around, looking for another clump, a temporary colony, to attach herself to. In The Riverworld, as on Earth, all cocktail or after-dinner parties were alike. You spoke briefly, trying to make yourself heard above all the chatter and music, and then changed partners or groups until you had made a complete circuit. If you were intrigued or even interested in someone, you could make arrangements to see him or her some other time, when you could have a chance for an uninterrupted and quiet conversation.

In the old days, long ago, when she was young in mind, she had often met men or women at such gatherings who enthralled her. But then she had been full of booze or pot or both and so wide open. It was easy to fall in love with a mind or body-or both at the same time. Sobering up usually meant wising up. A disappointment. Not always. Just most of the time.

Here was a gathering all of whom had the bodies of twenty-five-year-olds. Chronologically, she was sixty-one. Some here might actually be one hundred and thirty-two or even more. The youngest could not be under thirty-six.

The index of wisdom should be high, if it was true that age brought wisdom. She had not found that to be true about most people on Earth. Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum. Experience did not by any means give-wisdom, that understanding of the basic mechanics of humanity. Most oldsters she had known had been as governed by conditioned reflexes as when they had been nineteen.

So it was expected that people would not have benefited much from their experiences here. However, the hammer blows of death and resurrection had broken open the seals of the minds of many.

For one thing, absolutely no one had expected this type of afterlife, if you could call this an afterlife. No religion had described such a place, such events. Though, to tell the truth, those religions which did promise paradises and hells were remarkably lacking in descriptive detail. Perhaps not so remarkably, since very few persons had actually claimed to have seen the postmortem world.