THE MAGIC LABYRINTH by Philip Jose Farmer

“I still feel like a pimp,” Burton said.

“Why should you? You don’t own me.”

They returned to John and told him that they wished to take the oath.

John ordered drinks for the occasion. After these, he had his executive officer, a huge late-twentieth-century Yank named Augustus Strubewell, make arrangements for the swearing-in that evening.

Two days later, the Rex up-anchored and set out up-River. Alice was attached as a nurse to the staff of one of the boat’s physicians, a Doctor Doyle. Loghu was to be trained as a pilot, after which she would be officially a pilot second-class, extra. The duties would require only that she substitute if one of the second-class pilots was unavailable. She would have plenty of spare time unless John kept her busy in his suite, which he did for some time to come. The woman she dispossessed seemed to be angry about it, but was only pretending. She’d been getting as tired of John as he of her.

Kazz and Burton were ranked as privates in the marines. Kazz was an axeman; Burton, a pistoleer and rapiersman. Besst was put among the women archers.

One of the first things that Burton did was find out who on the boat claimed to have lived past A.D. 1983. There were four. One was Strubewell. He’d been with John when he hijacked the boat.

8

WHEN THE REVEREND MR. DODGSON, BETTER KNOWN AS LEWIS Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland, he prefaced it with a poem. It begins with “All in the golden afternoon” and compresses that famous journey by boat up the Isis during which Dodgson was teased by the real Alice into writing down the tale he’d composed to please the “cruel Three.”

On that day of July 4,1852, golden in memory only because it actually was cool and wet, Dodgson, who would be the Dodo in Alice and the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, was accompanied by Reverend Duckworth, who naturally became the Duck. Lorina, aged thirteen, was the Lory, and Alice, age ten, Dodgson’s favorite, was of course Alice. Edith, the youngest sister, aged eight, would be the Eaglet.

The three little girls were the daughters of Bishop Liddell, whose surname rhymed with fiddle, as evidenced by a poem-“ about the bishop sung by the rowdy Oxford students. Dodgson’s verse refers to the girls in Latin ordinals according to the ages. Prima, Secunda, and Tertia.

It seemed to Alice now, as she stood in the middle of Richard’s and her cabin, that she had in truth played the part of Secunda during her Earthly life. Certainly on this world she was Secunda. Richard Burton regarded few men as his equal and no women, not even his wife and perhaps especially his wife, as equals.

She hadn’t minded. She was dreamy, gentle and introverted. As Dodgson had written of her:

Still she haunts me, phantomwise.

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

That would become true in more senses than Dodgson could have dreamed of. Now she was under a sky in which even at the blaze of noon she could see near the tops of the mountains the faint phantom glow of a few giant stars. And in the moonless night sky was the blaze of great gas sheets and enormous stars which shed the light of a full moon.

Under the light of day and night, she had been content, even eager, to have Richard make the decisions. These had often involved violence, and, contrary to her nature, she had fought like an Amazon. Though she did not have the physique of a Penthesilea, she did have the courage.

Life on the Riverworld had often been harsh, cruel, and bloody. After dying on Earth, she’d awakened naked and with all body hair shaven, in the body she’d had when she was twenty-five, though she’d died when eighty-two. Around her was not the room of the house in which she’d died, her sister Rhoda’s in Westerham, Kent. Instead towering unbroken mountain ranges enclosed the plains and the foothills and the river in the middle of the valley. As far as she could see, people stood on the banks, all naked, hairless, young and in shock, screaming, weeping, laughing hysterically, or in horror-struck silence.