This al-Hakim bi'Amr Allah had one thing going for him-he knew how to keep a chap off balance. "What? Where?"

"In your several lives," Hakim said. "Hitler? Lenin?"

Plum shook his head. "Queen Bilkis. That was my first resurrection. She and Madame Blavatsky set up an aunt-aucracy of women who lived long lives on Earth, and learned not to take backchat from me. La Blavatsky- she got this religion going when I was a schoolboy. Er-ah."

"Yes?"

"I do a splendid job of organising things on paper; it's only in real life that I'm a broken reed. Do you want to know all the Hollywood types I met on Earth? Movie stars," he went on. "Clark Gable. Fred Astaire. Broadway chappies, too."

"Queen Bilkis is a mythical figure," Hakim said.

"There was a good muchness to her, for a myth," Plum answered. "She had the advantage on me of a stone or two, and made dashed sure I learned Arabic. Who else? Bilkis's neighbors across the river tugged their forelocks at Prince Fernando Montesinos, who claimed to be somebody. You couldn't prove it by me. I mean, I couldn't tell you if Rowena was Horsa's daughter, or Hengist's."

"Rowena?" Hakim had the gift of patience.

"Gossip drifted up-River that she'd married H. Rider Haggard, but Allah knows how many kingdoms away from me that was; somewhere the far side of Emperor Alexius. I got killed for Bilkis, don't you know. I walked into a spear because my new eyes were too good."

Since he had Hakim's attention, Plum took wind. "The real me used to be blind as a bat. I'd take my gla.s.ses off before going to sleep. I needed to get blurry, or it didn't146.go. All that time with Bilkis and her sanhedron of aunts, I had insomnia like n.o.body's business. I was groggy on my toes when Prince Fernando launched his armada. 'Invasion!' the locals hued and cried. 'Invasion? What? Where?' I yawned, fumbling for my bludgeon-"

Hakim's black eyes beaded steadily on despite this diversion. "But perhaps you know about Lenin," he interrupted. "And the Bolshevik movement? Had they achieved true communism by your time on Earth?"

Surely this wrench in topics meant something profound, Plum thought to himself. "Lenin died-spare me the math-but fifty years before me. Russia kept going and picking up satellites. They bought my books, don't you know. Bought 'em like billy-o. I had the deuce of a time doing anything with their rubles, but my characters were all idiot English capitalists, and they liked that."

"You wrote books."

"Fiction. Music hall stuff. Funny."

The man Hakim filed this away. "Fifty years. And Lenin's cause was prospering?" An eagle had the same way of plucking here, plucking there, and pausing between times to contemplate its dead fish. Hakim had an eagle's craggy face, and all the time in the world.

"The Reds? In a glum sort of way, rising on the stepping-stones of dead mult.i.tudes to higher things. Politics wasn't my game. When it's summer, one doesn't dwell on the torments of winter, and I'm a summer person."

Hakim nodded at the metaphor. He spoke in ponderous sympathy. "All these people in black robes: winter people. Religion does that. They migrate up-River and down, dozens a week, because they've heard mat their Hakim is back from occultation. I have to conquer new grailstones147.to feed them all, and so my neighbors hate me. Perhaps they're right. Messiahs are evil, no?"

Plum shrugged. In his hours here, he'd gotten the impression that Mr. al-Hakim bi'Amr Allah was a G.o.d in the flesh to the Druze who dominated this bit of river-bank. He was a latter-day Mohammed. Tact required that he show some reluctance to d.a.m.n the man to his face.

He cogitated-what should he say? As he ransacked his wits, Hakim went inscrutable. "Your cabin. The last one in the corner. We'll walk there."

They did. It had a bed, a small table, a door, and a window. During his internment in World War Two, Plum had endured worse than this. Much worse. Given the dearth of structure around Riverworld, this bamboo box was a suite at the Ritz.

The G.o.dlike and possibly evil Hakim made a gesture-this is yours-and left. Plum stepped inside, put his tiffin-grail on the table, and tested his frame-and-mattress. Ropes took the place of bedsprings, but it was comfortable.

Privacy!

Plum's face fell. This was as good as it got, but Riverworld was still h.e.l.l. No paper, no ink, no printing presses. How could he function? The one thing he did well was no longer an option. Except for that, he was a fool. His role as "historical consultant" was pure folly. No one forced to be there had paid less attention to the twentieth century.

Then there was Hakim. When Plum talked, the vagaries of his mind took play. Hakim was equally inconsistent, but here was the terrifying difference: He had depths behind him. In switching topics, he followed a cunning mental algorithm that left his victim plundered.

Literarily speaking, Plum had always found it a bad148.idea to get into the psychology of his villains. It ruined them. Now that he was in the story instead of writing it, his feelings were different. Plum regretted that he could guess nothing of his master's inner compulsions. He was Hakim's poor mule, goaded by carrot and stick, but why?

Why had Hakim hinted that he was not really the figment his followers worshiped? Something didn't wash. What was going on here? After a time Plum got up and went back outside, into the "garden"-this giant-chiclet-walled cricket meadow-to see if his fellow historical consultants had any idea.

They were fonts of information. The ex-haberdasher from Smyrna pointed off right, to the wall opposite this row of huts. "Beyond that's the women's side," he explained. "Hakim spends much more time with them. We're the second team. He uses us to check their facts. When Maria tells him that Kemal Ataturk did thus and so, he noses around to make sure of it."

"Maria?"

"We're not supposed to know their names," said Nabuch ad-Nasr, who was an expert on Middle East politics two thousand years before Hakim became Imam-Caliph. Plum thought it odd that a fellow of Old Testament times should bounce around in the vigour of youth, as giddy a lad as the Afghan resistance fighter-notwithstanding his love of makeup and elaborately pretty eyes, this last was an expert on nine guerrilla organisations fighting the Soviet invaders.

None of the aforementioned chaps came by Arabic honestly: they were Turkish, Amorite, and Pathan. But it was a condition of living here that they could make themselves understood, and so they had huts, while Jim the Apache was obliged to camp in odd corners until he149.grew fluent. Plum repeated the name in translation, as if "Maria" sounded different in English. Before he could laugh at himself for this stupidity, Jim answered in broken Arabic: "She's best. Queen of harem. She talk much Lenin."

"Hitler too," said the haberdasher.

"Hakim is jealous. He thinks he should rank in history with those two," said a junior prince of Iraq, a.s.sa.s.sinated in some coup in the 1950s. Plum was surprised at the princeling's open hostility, and at the general freedom of speech within these walls, but most of this cabal had gotten here the same way he had, by taking the "cheap trip." They were half ready and half willing to die again.

There were worse punishments than death. One heard of slaver kingdoms: blind, mutilated starvelings kept in confinement for the booty in their tiffin "grails." If Hakim wanted a reputation for villainy, he could have done the like. He hadn't. It gave one pause. It made one wonder if there was a goodish bloke inside Hakim, trying fitfully to make himself known.

Plum Wodehouse slept on the problem that night without coming to an answer. The daily rains came just before dawn. Breakfast was a bun and hot noodle soup, the guard absconding with the usual tax. There'd be no tobacco for Plum's nonexistent pipe, and afterward no typewriter to lay hands on, no audience for the latest adventure at Standings Castle. What was left? How could life be worth living?

That afternoon, good bloke Hakim and his entourage visited the male side of his garden, filing from hut to hut for chats with the locals. Reaching Plum at last, the Occult Master of Druze-dom played the generous host.

"What is wrong?" he asked, after Plum made a botch150.of grat.i.tude for his lodgings. "Would you like to wander around this land of winter piety? I myself feel circ.u.mscribed, and so we organise hikes and tours and picnics. You mustn't think you're a prisoner."

Really? "No, it's not that. I just-I'm addicted to writing," Plum answered. "For sixty-plus years that's all I did. Writing, and a spot of walking, or wrestling now that I'm in my vigour again. Dogs. I liked dogs. But nothing quite does it for me like putting words on a blank Page-He averted his face, appalled at the surge of his emotions. He spoke on, brokenly. "I've never seen paper on Riverworld."

Hakim took Plum's hand, as a minister might pluck the limp hand of a mourning widow, and gave it a ministerial pat. "I can bring you paper! We make it out of bamboo. I knew there was something. People are sent to me for a purpose. Yesterday I didn't know what you were for, but now it becomes clear."

"Allah wouldn't send you P.O. Wodehouse to write funny stories," Plum answered. Even as his spirits launched upward on the giddy wings of hope, he recoiled against the grandeur of Hakim's concepts.

"You must have faith! The universe is broken," Hakim answered. "Logic demands that all the casual chains should cycle beginning to end, in a round of time, and each link of that round chain-, when you come to it, is the same link as eighty billion years before. The same Hakim meeting the same P.G. Wodehouse, but thanks to Allah, the doom of that eternal cycle cycle of Big Bang and collapse is not for us. The universe of Physics has cracked, and His grace leaks in through His instruments. I know nothing except what I experience-I am a vessel151.of that grace. I trust in it. I use it. When I was younger, I used it very badly, although grace has a way of making bad things good.

"I was not sure yesterday. You seemed very bad: a mocker. A man of un-Druze-like character hi a world that makes a joke of Druze beliefs. But now you can prove yourself. Come. We must whisper."

Bending away from his guards into Plum's hut, Hakim touched his finger to his lips. "This is a secret you will be unable to betray: my followers would kill you at the suggestion of the truth. Nine hundred years before your time, they say I left Cairo and fled my honours and t.i.tles. I wrote letters from hiding the next three decades. These letters instructed them in their religion. Lies, lies! But naturally I'd be interested in reading them myself! To know what I said! On Resurrection Day we all woke on Riverworld, naked and bookless, and I have no good way to quote myself."

Hakim went to the window to make sure no one was listening. After a moment he came back. "Hence my interest in paper and ink. All I need do-all I can do, is cause to have published as much of those texts as my elders here can remember. We are all enthusiastic about this project, for various reasons, mine being survival.

"Survival? But-"

"I know I'd resurrect if all they did was kill me. Consider that they could do worse. Consider also: I have not died once since the morning in Cairo when I 'went into occultation.' I'm not as used to the idea as you are. But I'm not merely a coward who plays a bully hi self-defence: the fealty of these people gives me wonderful opportunities. What I told you is true. Unless I'm152.insane to say so, I am one of Allah's vessels of grace. I was born to it, and I have felt the power in me."

Plum cleared his throat. Why me? he thought to himself. If this cove unbosoms himself to every customer he meets within forty-eight hours... One possibility had to be that he really was insane.

Fortunately, Hakim kept up his end of the conversation without Wodehouse's active help. "In your life on Earth, al-Hakim bi'Amr Allah meant nothing to you. You never heard of me before yesterday."

"Er, ah... I guess-"

"Few people have, outside the Jebel Druze. Yet until my sister had me a.s.sa.s.sinated I was the Lenin of my age. I ruled from Cairo, and Cairo was as great a city as Byzantium had ever been. Greater than Damascus, much greater than Rome!

"Being a vessel of G.o.d, I hated religion. I was impartial-I hated them all. I destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I suppressed all pilgrimages, emphatically including the sacred Hadj to Mecca and Medina. But I ruled through my Shi'ite followers, and they were biased. Christians and Jews suffered much worse than Moslems.

"What use was it to drive people of the Bible into apostasy, if all they did was convert to Islam? My solution was to create a new religion without priests and real estate and vested interests, so fanaticism could work for me, and Allah sent me proselytes to do the work. If we'd had more than four years... if we'd had eight, or twenty..."

Hakim shrugged. "Before I came along, Moslems, Christians and Jews lived peacefully in my realms. I set the precedent of oppression, and did not survive to see it153.work properly-it was always unjust oppression, never just. For years afterward, rulers continued to hara.s.s Christians with biased zeal. A lifetime later, the Franks responded with the First Crusade."

Hakim paused at this dramatic juncture. Plum took up the slack. Apparently the man wanted blame-or credit. Yesterday he'd almost begged to be called evil. "So you caused all that."

"All that harm. Useless bloodshed in the name of religion, because I wanted to break those inst.i.tutions, not use them. Should I not be famous over the centuries for my mistakes? Perhaps Lenin was greater than me. He succeeded where I failed."

Plum shook his head. "The verdict isn't in. Not as of my former life span. Anyhow, Lenin's religion of communism-I can't see it's better than the others. People die for it the same way."

Hakim smiled. "I like the way your mind works. But Maria and I have antic.i.p.ated your reservations. Secrets within secrets! This is one I cannot give away. An extraordinary woman!"

He went to the window again and spoke in a more public voice: "For you, my women do not exist. You will never be useful in the same measure as my favourite among them. There is no scoundrel in you. No energy I can grasp and use. I must simply give you paper and ink, and trust in the results."

On this note he swept off, except this one-room shack lacked the dimensions. A good sweep needs three paces- two if there's a door one shuts dramatically. By Hakim's third pace he was well outdoors and talking about someone's prospective execution.

A tyrant's agenda was a busy one. Plum reconstructed154.the last ten minutes, and decided the man had done it again. Overwhelmed him. What he was proudest of in his work wasn't his lyrical English, his mastery of the storyteller's rules. No, he prized those Rube Goldberg plots, full of hairsbreadth timing and improbable coincidences. It cost him half his efforts putting them together- the harder half. The easier half was slathering on the verbiage.

Hakim? Hakim was a plot on the hoof. You could hardly help having a story with a dervish like him whirling around. Wodehouse didn't like it. Reality was reality and fiction was fiction, and never the twain should meet. He'd always been fond of the characters in his stories, but did those characters like their author? The issue came up with a vengeance, because Hakim had an author's power over him.

Plum fulminated. What one had here in spades were: plush digs, servants, impostors. Familiar elements to any of his readers. What about the love angle? The dreaded aunt? Well, there'd be enough of that on the other side of the wall, in the women's garden.

Yes, he could work something out. It might be therapeutic. If Hakim made good on his promised paper, Plum might manage a story: Blandings-on-Riverworld. Something to restore his sense of balance. Something to put Hakim in his place.

Careful. 'Twere best to be subtle indeed, given all this bally fanaticism. The cast must play in disguise. It made a pretty problem, and Wodehouse devoted the rest of the afternoon and evening to working it out.

By morning he was adding details, and wishing he could remember them all. Hakim-and-crew came by again on their daily const.i.tutional. "People who die155.simultaneously-do they resurrect in the same place? Have you heard rumours? Lovers' compacts and the like?"

Plum blinked. "I-I don't know."

"We'll experiment. Nabuch and the Afghan can be lovers somewhere else, with my blessings." He shifted his voice, as newscasters did when they sat in front of a mike. "Unnatural vices are not tolerated here."

"Ah." Plum focused on the sight of two historical consultants being led to the big tree. Thrust up against the bark. Tied. If this happened often, no wonder there were empty huts for new arrivals like himself.

Hakim reached behind him and handed over a parcel. "Paper, pens, and ink. Don't watch if it distresses you."

Plum collected the treasured objects and ducked into his cabin. He heard spear thunks. They were not very simultaneous, after all.

For an hour afterward, Wodehouse found it impossible to write. The story was to have circled around an American rubber-toy magnate who funded a cult combining health and religiosity, a son of Seventh-Day Adventism. The chap had a happy-go-lucky twin with a thirst for alcohol....

Both twins were Hakim, the good Hakim and the bad one. But Plum's juices froze at any thought of that awful man, mat vortex of contradictions. He only thawed out by parking that story on a mental shelf and starting something new.

In what language? Arabic. And if so, make it a short story. Plum wasn't up to being clever for over five thousand words in his adopted language.

Using what script? Plum was illiterate in Arabic. He threw down his pen and stood. Talk about adversity! Phonetic Roman, then. If all the whilom inhabitants of156.Planet Earth decorated the landscape somewhere on Riverworld, there must be dozens, even hundreds, who would enjoy a good Arabic screed penned by guess and by gosh. He returned to his table and started to scribble.

Plum took days to get up to speed. Even under better circ.u.mstances a five-thousand-word story needs a week to write. Hakim the Patient failed to understand. On his sixth visit, he tapped Wodehouse's finished pages. "I make nothing of your foolish ciphers. If this bears sense at all, read me this to prove it."

"I-I'm fairly horrible," Plum responded. "I've been told on good authority I should never read out loud."

"Try."

With a grimace Plum plucked up page one and began to orate. He faltered and droned, skipping lines, backtracking and scratching his head.

"Hah!" Hakim barked after two minutes of torment. "Give it to me! I know what needs to be done."

He left with Plum's half-finished work. Wodehouse sank in defeat. He had failed-and why not? How did he ever think otherwise? Would Hitler laugh at witticisms in pidgin German, penned in Hebrew? Gents like Lenin weren't famous for their senses of humor, were they? Hakim was no different. Hakim, who could keep him from reaching any audience at all!

In Plum's frame of mind the sight of his worktable was hateful. He got up and plunged into the garden, walking fast loops around the periphery, averting his face from the central tree. What had Hakim done with his wretched ma.n.u.script? Used it for toilet paper? Thrown it into the river?157.Every fifth time he changed directions. Clockwise-counterclockwise-clockwise again. From the women's side of the wall, he heard laughter. The word "guffaw" sprang to mind, hard as it was to imagine girlish lungs guffawing. Life was sweet over there. The sun shone.

Perhaps if he spread-eagled himself across the tree, some guard would obligingly chuck a spear in his direction. "Hakim's a fake!" he'd shout to encourage the blighter. "He never wrote your scriptures! It's all lies!"

That would do it. Plum left the path he was burning in the gra.s.s, the better to make a target of himself.

As he reached the tree Hakim appeared at the labyrinth entry, his face creased with smiles. "Excellent! Wonderful!"

He handed over Plum's pages and left again, a man with a penchant for sudden departures. So it is with your general run of critic, Wodehouse thought to himself. You want them to omit no details of your excellent wonderfulness; this line, this joke, this felicity of expression, and instead they zoom off.

The world had just turned a hundred eighty degrees, so to speak. Plum did too. He went back into the hut....

Girlish laughter. Girlish laughter at his story? Then they knew about him over there. Someone knew. What would she look like?

Perhaps a bit hearty. The sort of woman who brayed. Ah, no. a.s.suredly there was a brayer, but why not another woman too? Who knew the density of population over there? Dozens of ears may have heard. Lips were lisping: "Wodehouse. Could it be the same? That Wodehouse?"

Plum was a lonely man, kept company by the creatures of his imagination. Take that dashed wall away, and he'd still be lonely. It was better this way. He could pretend158.there were people who thought about him. People he could excite.

No, no pretence. He could excite them. He could reach them. He sat at his table, fired with new ambition. A story? A book! In English, at least the first draft. No more weird mishmashes!

Once Plum immersed himself in his grand enterprise, time whizzed by, with occasional interruptions to tie on the old nosebag. He almost resented these breaks, made worse by the officiousness of the tiffin man, who never failed to collect his tobacco, his marijuana, his liquor, andIor his dreamgum. No altered mental states allowed in Druze-dom!

Hakim visited daily, and then absented himself on a tour of his domains. Plum scribbled on. Now and again he'd walk for exercise, having the sort of strappingly large body that insisted on its own health.

Chapter one took shape. It would remain chapter one. The chapters one of other authors became chapters twelve or chapters seventeen before their books were through, or got distributed in parcels through the work, or ditched entirely. Such was not the way of P.O. Wodehouse.

He launched chapter two. Hakim came back from his royal progress. He collected Plum's first closely written pages and felt the sting of the Wodehouse wrath. "Hey! What do you think you're doing?"

"You said this much was done. Maria wants to see it."

Plum insisted on promises. Hakim scowled, and left.

A guard returned the pages some hours later. Plus a pipe. Plus a pouch of tobacco. He turned and left. Plum danced a caper around his hut, puffed a bowlful, and got back to work.159.He laboured until the gilded evening dimmed and took his light away, and then took another walk, nodding cheerfully at Jim the Apache, the Smyrnese haberdasher, and a new arrival, a French Algerian with a smouldering resentment of everything Arabic. The Iraqi prince bowed grandly as Plum swung by, not a nice bow, but an accusation. Plum could not account for it. Jealousy? Word of the gift pipe had gotten around.

No butler shimmered into view at nine-thirty with whiskey-and-soda. Plum went to bed.

He was awakened by a "Shhh!" Someone was in the hut with him. "Please!" she whispered. "Don't make a sound."

Plum fumbled, then remembered he didn't need gla.s.ses anymore. He spoke to a scented silhouette. "How did you get here? Who are you?"

"I knew it was you. I had to see." She spoke English in the accents of the warm south, somewhere between Alps and Ganges. "I loved your story. The pipe was my idea."