THE MAGIC LABYRINTH by Philip Jose Farmer

“Just came to look around,” Sam said. “Carry on.”

The sky was unclouded, blazing as if that great arsonist, God, had set it afire. The Valley was broad here, and the light fell softly, showing dimly the buildings and boats on both banks. Beyond them was a darker darkness. A few sentinel fires made eyes in the night. Otherwise, the world seemed asleep. The hills rose dark with trees, the giant irontrees, a thousand feet high, spiring up from the others. Beyond, the mountains loomed blackly. Faint starlight sparked on the waves.

Sam went through the door to stand on the port walk that ringed the exterior of the pilothouse. The wind was cool but not yet cold. It ran fingers through his bushy hair. Standing on the deck, he felt like a living part, an organ, of the vessel. It was spanking along, paddlewheels churning, its flags flapping, brave as a tiger, huge and sleek as a sperm whale, beautiful” as a woman, heading always against the current, its goal the Axis Mundi, the Navel of the World, the dark tower. He felt roots grow from his feet, tendrils that spread through the hull, extended from the hull, dropped through the black waters, touched by the monsters of the deep, plunged into the muck three miles below, grew laterally up through the earth, spread out, shooting with the speed of thought, growing vines which erupted from the earth, stabbed into the flesh of every living human being on this world, spiraled upward through the roofs of the huts, rocketed toward the skies, veined space with the shoots which wrapped themselves around every planet on which lived animal life and sentients, enveloped and penetrated these, an then shot exploring tentacles toward the blackness where no matter was, where only God existed.

In that moment, Sam Clemens was, if not one with the universe, at least integral with it. And for a moment he believed in God.

And at the moment Samuel Celmens and Mark Twain inhabited the same flesh, merged, became one.

Then the thrilling vision exploded, contracted, dwindled, shot back into him.

He laughed. For several seconds he had known an ecstasy that surpassed even sexual, intercourse, up to that moment the supreme feeling in his, and humanity’s lot, disappointing as it often was.

Now he was within himself again, and the universe was outside.

He returned to the control room. Erin, the black pilot, looking up at him, said, “You have been visited by the spirits.”

“Do I look that peculiar?” Sam said. “Yes, I have.”

“What did they say?”

“That I am nothing and everything. I once heard the village idiot say the same thing.”

SECTION 5

Burton’s Soliloquy

15

LATE AT NIGHT, WHILE THE EXCEPTIONALLY THICK AND HIGH fog shrouded even the pilothouse, Burton prowled.

Unable to sleep, he roamed here and there with no place to go in mind—except that of getting away from himself.

“Damn me! Always trying to outrun my own self! If I had the wits of a cow, I’d stay and wrestle with him. But he can outrun, outwrestle me, the Jacob to my angel. Yet.. .1 am Jacob also. I have a broken cog, not a broken thigh, I am an automaton Jacob, a mechanical angel, a robot devil. The ladder to heaven still leans against its window, but I can’t find it again.

“Destiny is happenchance. No, not that. I make my own. Not I, though. That thing which drives me, the devil that rides me. It waits grinning in the dark corner, and when I’ve reached my hand out to grab the prize, it leaps out and snatches it away from me.

“My ungovernable temper. The thing that cheats me and laughs and gibbers and runs away to hide and to emerge another day.

“Ay, Richard Francis Burton, Ruffian Dick, Nigger Dick, as they used to call me in India. They! The mediocrities, the robots running on the tracks of Victoria’s railrpad… they had no interest in the native except to lay the women and eat good food and drink good drink and make a fortune if they could. They couldn’t even speak the native language after thirty years in the greatest gem in the queen’s crown. A gem, hah! A stinking pesthole! Cholera and its sisters! The black plague and its brothers! Hindus and Moslems laughing behind pukka Sahib’s back! The English couldn’t even fuck well. The women laughed at them and went to their black lovers for satisfaction after Sahib had gone home.