The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in our lousy genes. Or in failure of one’s conquest of one’s self. The fault, dear Brutus, is in our fear of knowing our self. The next, almost inevitable, scene in this drama of recollection was the seduction of Wilhelmina. How easy to think of this fantasy as potentially real, since it was possible that he would meet her. After some mutual questioning, they would discover that they were grandmother and grandson. Then the long talk with her telling what had happened to her daughter and her husband (Peter’s father) and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great­grandchildren. Would she be horrified when she found that a great-granddaughter had married a Jew? Undoubtedly. Anyone of rural stock born in 1880 was bound to be deeply prejudiced. Or what if he told her that his sister had married a Japanese? Or that a brother and a first cousin had married Catholics? Or that a great-granddaughter had converted to Catholicism? Or that a great-grandson had become a Buddhist?

On the other hand, The Riverworld might have changed her attitudes, as it had done to so many. However, many more were as psychologically fossilized as when they had lived on Earth.

To get on to the fantasy.

After a few drinks and long talk, bed?

Rationally, one could not object to incest here. There would be no children.

But when did people ever think rationally in such situations?

No, the thing to do would be to say nothing about their relation­ship until after they’d been to bed.

The construction crumbled then. To reveal that would make her grievously ashamed. It would be cruel. And no matter how much he wanted revenge, he could not do that to her. To anyone. Besides, it would be revenge for some act that he only thought might have been committed. Even if it had occurred, it might have been something only a child would have thought terrible. Or something misinter­preted in his infant mind. Or something that she, being aproduct of her times, would have thought only natural.

It was exciting to think about laying your grandmother. But, in reality, it just wouldn’t happen. He was sexually drawn only to intelligent women, and his grandmother had been an ignorant peas­ant. Vulgar, too, though not in an obscene or irreligious way. He remembered when she was eating with the family on a Thanksgiv­ing holiday. She’d sneezed, the snot had landed on her blouse, and she had wiped it off with her hand and deposited it on her skirt. His father had laughed, his mother had looked stricken, and he had lost his appetite.

There went the whole fantasy, dissolved in disgust.

Still, she might have changed.

To hell with it, he told himself, and he turned on his side and went to sleep.

29

Drums beat, and wooden trumpets blew. Peter Frigate woke up in the midst of another dream. It was three months after Pearl Harbor, and he was an air cadet at Randolph Field being chewed out by his flight instructor.

The lieutenant, a tall young man with a thin moustache and big feet, was almost as hysterical as Grandma Kaiser.

‘ “The next time you turn left when I tell you to turm right, Frigate, I’m bringing us in right now, cutting the goddamn flight, and I’m refusing to go up with you! You can get an instructor who doesn’t give a shit if his dumb student kills him or not! Jesus Christ, Frigate, we coulda been killed! Didn’t you see that plane on your left! Are you suicidal! That’s all right with me, but don’t take me and two others with you! And do it on your own time, off the field, and not with government property! What the hell is the matter with you, Frigate! Do you hate me!”

“I coudn’t hear you, sir,” Peter said. Though he was sweating in the heavy flight clothes in the warm room, he was shivering and he felt a painful urge to urinate. “I just can’t seem to hear through those tubes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the tubes! I could hear you all right! And there’s nothing wrong with your ears! You had a medical checkup only two weeks ago, didn’t you? All you pissy-assed cadets are examined when you transfer here! Aren’t you?”