The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer Read Free Book Online Page B

her.
    Kazz and Burton were ranked as privates in the marines. Kazz was an axman; 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, aged 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.
    She knew no one and had by impulse attached herself to Burton. However, one of the items in her grail was a chiclelike stick containing some sort of psychedelic substance. She’d chewed it, and then she and Burton had copulated furiously all night and also done things she then regarded as perverted and some things which she still did.
    She’d loathed herself in the morning and felt like killing herself. Burton she’d hated as she’d never hated anyone. But she continued to stay with him since anyone she switched to might be worse. Also she had to admit that he too was under the gum’s influence, and he did not press her to renew, as she then thought of it, their carnal acquaintance. Burton would have used an Anglo-Saxonism, as he called it, to describe their coupling.
    In time she’d fallen in love with him—had, in fact, been in love that