The largest of all, vaster than the blue whale of Earth, was a carnivorous fish called the Riverdragon. It shared with a much smaller water dweller the ability to roam the bottom or skim the surface without harm from change in pressure.
The other creature had many names, but in English it was generally called “croaker.” It was the size of a German police dog, as slow as a sloth, and as undiscriminating in appetite as a hog. The chief sanitation engineer of The River, it ate anything that did not resist it. The greater part of its diet, however, was the human turd.
A lungfish, it also foraged ashore at night. Many a human had been frightened on seeing its huge goggle eyes in the fog or when stumbling over its slimy body as it crawled around seeking garbage and crap. Almost as scary as its appearance was its loud croak, evoking images of monsters and ghosts.
On this day of year 25 A.R.D., one of these vilely stinking scavengers was near a bank. Here the current was weaker than in the middle. Even so, its fin-legs were going at near top speed to keep it from being moved backward. Presently, its nose detected a dead fish floating toward it. It moved out a little and waited for the carcass to drift into its mouth.
Along came the fish and another object immediately behind it. Both went into the croaker’s mouth, the fish sliding down the gullet easily, the large object sticking for a moment before a convulsive swallow drew it in.
For five years, the watertight bamboo jar containing Frigate’s letter to Rohrig had been carried downstream. Considering the vast numbers of fishers and voyagers, it should have been picked up and opened long before. However, it was ignored by all creatures except for the fish whose primary object had been the delectable rotting chub.
Five days before the container came to journey’s end, it had drifted past the area in which its intended recipient lived. But Rohrig was in a hut, surrounded by the stone and wood sculptures he fashioned for trade in booze and cigarettes, snoring off the effects of a big party.
Perhaps it was just coincidence, perhaps some psychic principle was responsible, a vibratory link between the addresser and the addressee. Whatever the cause, Rohrig was dreaming of Frigate that early morning. He was back in 1950 when he had been a graduate student supported by the G.I. Bill and a working wife.
It was a warm, late-May day (Mayday! Mayday!). He was sitting in a small room, facing three PhDs. This was the day of reckoning. After five years of labor and stress in the halls of learning he would gain or lose the prize, a Master of Arts in English literature. If he passed his oral defense of his thesis, he would go out into the world as a teacher of high-school English. If he failed, he would have to study for six months and then try for a second and final chance.
Now the three inquisitors, though smiling, were shooting questions at him as if they were arrows and he was the target—which was the case. Rohrig was not nervous since his thesis was on medieval Welsh poetry, a subject he’d chosen because he believed that the professors knew very little about it.
He was right. But Ella Rutherford, a charming lady of forty-six, though prematurely white haired, had it in for him. Some time ago they’d been lovers, meeting twice a week in her apartment. Then one afternoon they had gotten into a furious drunken argument about the merits of Byron as a poet. Rohrig wasn’t crazy about his verse, but he admired Byron’s lifestyle, which he considered to be true poetry. Anyway, he liked to take the opposite side of an argument.
As a result, he had stormed out of the apartment after saying some very cruel things to her. He had also shouted at her that he never wanted to see her in private again.
Rutherford believed that he had seduced her just to get a high grade in her course, that he was using the argument as an excuse to quit making love to a middle-aged woman. She was wrong. He was compulsively attracted to older women. However, he was finding her demands too great a strain. He could no longer satisfy her, his wife, two female sophomores, two of his friends’ wives, a female bartender who gave him free drinks, and the superintendent of the apartment building in which he lived.
Five, he could handle; eight, no. He was being drained of time, energy, and semen, and he was falling asleep in class. Thus, he had craftily started violent arguments with his professor, one of the sophomores (it was rumored that she had the clap), and the wife of a friend (she was too emotionally demanding, anyway).
Now, Rutherford, her watery blue eyes narrowed, said, “You’ve done very well in your defense, Mister Rohrig. So far.”
She paused. He felt suddenly chilled. His anus tightened. Sweat poured down his face and from his armpits. He had visions of her sitting up late nights thinking of some way to get him, some horrible, peculiarly humiliating way.
Doctors Durham and Pur quit drumming their fingers. This was getting interesting. Their colleague was burning bright, like the eyes of a tiger about to spring on a tethered lamb. Lightning was going to strike, and the unfortunate candidate was without a grounding rod, unless it was up his ass.
Rohrig gripped the arms of his chair. Sweat popped out on his forehead like mice scared from a Swiss cheese; sweat, acid sweat, nibbled at the armpits of his shirt. What in hell was coming?
Rutherford said, “You seem to know your subject thoroughly. You’ve given a remarkable demonstration of knowledge of a rather obscure field of poetry. I’m sure we’re all proud of you. We haven’t wasted our time with you in the classroom.”
The sly bitch was telling him that she had wasted her time outside of the classroom with him. But this was only a sideswipe, a remark meant to injure but not to kill. She was setting him up for the big fall. It was seldom, if ever, that the examining professors congratulated the candidate during the torture. Afterward, perhaps, when the board had voted that he be passed.
“Now… tell me,” Rutherford drawled.
She paused.
Another turn of the crank of the rack.
“Tell me, Mister Rohrig. Just where is Wales?”
Something in him lost its hold and slid bumping down to the bottom of his stomach. He clapped his hand on his forehead, and he groaned.
“Mother of mercy! Trapped! Holy shit!”
Doctor Pur, dean of women, turned pale. This was the first time in her life she had ever heard that vile word.
Doctor Durham, who wept when reciting poetry to his students, looked as if he was about to swoon.
Doctor Rutherford, having hurled her thunderbolt, smiled without pity or compassion upon the remains of her victim.
Rohrig rallied. He refused to go down without his flags flying, the band playing Nearer My God to Thee. He smiled as if the gold in the pot at rainbow’s end had not suddenly been transmuted into turds.
“I don’t know how you did it, but you got me! Okay, I never said I was perfect. What happens now?”
Verdict: failed. Sentence: six months of probation with another and final inquisition at its end.
Later, when he and Rutherford were alone in the hall, she said, “I suggest you study geography, too, Rohrig. I’ll give you a clue. Wales is near England. But I doubt my advice will help you. You couldn’t find your ass if it was handed to you on a silver platter.”
His friend, Pete Frigate, was waiting at the end of the hall for him. Pete was one of the group of older students dubbed “The Bearded Ones” by a sophomore girl who liked to hang around them. They were all veterans whose college education had been interrupted by the war. They and their wives or mistresses led a life which was then called “Bohemian.” They were the unknown forerunners of the beatniks and the hippies.
As Rohrig drew near, Frigate looked questioningly at him. Though Rohrig was near tears, he put on a big smile and then began laughing uproariously.
“You won’t believe this, Pete!”
Frigate did find it difficult to believe that anyone past the sixth grade of grammar school did not know where Wales was. When he was finally convinced, he too laughed.
Rohrig shouted, “How in hell could that white-haired fox have found out my weak spot?”
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Frigate said, “I don’t know, but she’s magnificent. Listen, Bob. Don’t feel so bad. I know a distinguished surgeon who doesn’t remember if the sun goes around the earth or the earth goes around the sun. He says it’s not necessary to know that when you’re digging into people’s bodies.
“But an English major… he ought at least to know… ooh, haw, haw!”
In one of those non sequiturs the Dream Scripter so often writes, Rohrig found himself elsewhere. Now he was in fog and chasing a butterfly. It was beautiful, and what made it so valuable was that it was the only one of its kind and only Rohrig knew that it existed. It was striped with azure and gold, its antennae were scarlet, its eyes were green emeralds. The king of the dwarfs had fashioned it in his cave in the Black Mountains, and the Wizard of Oz had dunked it in the waters of life.
Fluttering only an inch beyond his outstretched hand, it led him through the mists.
“Hold still, you son of a bitch! Hold still!”
He plunged after it for what seemed like miles. Dimly, out of the corner of his eye, he could see shapes in the clouds, things standing as motionless and quietly as if they were carved from bone. Twice he distinguished a figure; one wore a crown, the other had a horse’s head.
Suddenly, he was confronted by one of the objects. He stopped since it seemed impossible for some reason to go around it. The butterfly hung for a moment above the top of the thing, then settled down upon it. Its green eyes glowed, and its front legs shook the antennae mockingly.
Moving forward slowly, Rohrig saw that it was Frigate who was blocking his path.
“Don’t you dare touch it!” Rohrig whispered fiercely. “It’s mine!”
Frigate’s face was as expressionless as a knight’s visor. It always looked deadpan when Rohrig was in one of his many furies and chewing out everybody in sight. That had made Rohrig even more angry, and now it rocketed him to the point of utter madness.
“Out of the way, Frigate! Step aside or get knocked down!”
The butterfly, startled by the outburst, flew off into the fog.
“I can’t,” Frigate said.
“Why not?” Rohrig thundered as he hopped up and down in frustration.
Frigate pointed downward. He was standing on a large red square. Adjoining it were other squares, some red, some black.
“I got misplaced. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. It’s against the rules to put me on a red square. But then, who cares about rules? Besides the pieces, I mean.”
“Can I help you?” Rohrig said.
“How could you do that? You can’t help yourself.”
Frigate pointed over Rohrig’s shoulder.
“It’s going to catch you now. While you’ve been chasing the butterfly, it’s been chasing you.”
Rohrig suddenly felt utterly terrified. There was something after him, something which would do something horrible to him.
Desperately, he tried to move forward, to go over or around Frigate. But the red square held him as it held Frigate.
“Trapped!”
He could still see the butterfly, a dot, a dust mote, gone. Forever.
The fog had thickened. Frigate was only a blur.
“I make my own rules!” Rohrig shouted.
A whisper came from the mists before him. “Quiet! It’ll hear you!”
He awoke briefly. His hutmate stirred.
“What’s wrong, Bob?”
“I’m drowning in a surf of uncease.”
“What?”
“Surcease.”
He sank back into the primal ocean down to where drowned gods leaned in the ooze at crazy angles, staring with fish-cold eyes under barnacled crowns.
Neither he nor Frigate knew that he could have answered one of the questions in the letter. Rohrig had awakened on Resurrection Day in the far north. His neighbors were prehistoric Scandinavians, Patagonian Indians, Ice Age Mongolians, and late-twentieth-century Siberians. Rohrig was quick at learning new languages and was soon fluent in a dozen, though he never mastered the pronunciation and he murdered the syntax. As he always did, he made himself at home, and he was soon friends with many. For a while, he even set himself up as a sort of shaman. Shamans, however, must take themselves seriously if they would succeed, and Rohrig was only serious about his sculpturing. Also, he began to tire of the cold. He was a sun worshipper; his happiest days had been in Mexico where he was the first mate on a small coastal ship transporting frozen shrimp from Yucatan to Brownsville, Texas. He had been briefly involved in gun-smuggling there but had quit it before spending a few days in a Mexican jail. He had also quit Mexico. The authorities could not prove his guilt, but they suggested that he leave the country.
He was just about to take a dugout downRiver for a warm climate when along came Agatha Croomes. Agatha was a black woman, born 1713, died 1783, a freed slave, a backwoods Baptist preacher, a holy roller, four times married, mother of ten children, and a pipe smoker. She had been resurrected a hundred thousand grailstones away, but here she was. A vision had come to her, a vision in which God told her to come to His dwelling at the North Pole, where He would hand her the keys to kingdom come, to glory and salvation forever, to understanding of time and eternity, space and infinity, creation and destruction, death and life. She would also be the one to cast the devil into the pit, lock him up, and throw the key away.
Rohrig thought she was crazy, but she intrigued him. Also, he wasn’t so sure that the solution to the mystery of this world did not lie at the beginning of The River.
He knew that no one had ventured into the fog-laden land farther north. If he accompanied her party of eleven, he would be among the first to reach the North Pole. If he had anything to do with it, he would be the very first person to get there. When their goal was in sight he was going to sprint ahead and plant on the site of the North Pole a stone statuette of himself, his name incised at the base.
From then on, anybody who got there would know that he’d been beat out for first place by Robert F. Rohrig. Agatha wouldn’t take him, however, unless he believed in the Lord and the Holy Book. He hated to lie, but he told himself that he wasn’t really deceiving her. Deep down, he did believe in a god, though he wasn’t sure whether its name was Jehovah or Rohrig. As for the Bible, it was a book, and all books told the truth in the sense that their authors believed they were writing a kind of truth.
Before the expedition reached the end of the grailstones, five had turned back. When they got to the enormous cave out of which The River fell, four decided that they would starve to death if they kept on going. Rohrig went on with Agatha Croomes and Winglat, a member of an Amerind tribe that had crossed from Siberia to Alaska sometime in the Old Stone Age. Rohrig would have liked to turn back, but he wasn’t going to admit that a crazy black woman and a paleolithic savage had more courage than he.
Besides, Agatha’s preachings had almost convinced him that she had had a true vision. Maybe Almighty God and sweet Jesus were waiting for him. It wouldn’t do to hold up the schedule.
After they had crawled along the ledge in the cave and Winglat had slipped and fallen into The River, Rohrig told himself that he was as crazy as Agatha. But he went on.
When they came to the place where the ledge sloped downward into the fog, the fog that covered a sea the sounds of which faintly reached them, they were very weak from hunger. There was no turning back now. If they did not find food within the day, they would die. Agatha, however, said that all they could eat was close at hand. She knew it was so because she had had a vision while they slept on the ledge within the cave. She had seen a place where meat and vegetables were in abundance.
Rohrig watched her crawl away from him. After a while, he followed. But he left his grail behind because he was too weak to drag it. If he survived, he could always come back for it. The statuette was in the grail, and for a few seconds he considered removing it and taking it with him. To hell with it, he thought, and he went down the path.
He never made it
. Weakness overcame him; his legs and arms just would not obey his will.
Thirst killed him before starvation did its job. It was ironic that The River had rushed by him, and he could not drink because he had no rope with which to lower his grail and collect the precious fluid. A sea was booming against the rocks at the base of the cliffs, and he could not descend in it.
“Coleridge would appreciate this,” he thought. “I wish I did.”
He muttered, “Now I’ll never get the answers to my questions. Maybe it’s just as well. I probably wouldn’t have liked them anyway.”
Now Rohrig was sleeping uneasily in a hut by The River in the equatorial zone. And Frigate, standing watch on the deck of a cutter, was chuckling. He was recalling Rohrig’s ordeal while defending his thesis.
Perhaps it was telepathy that evoked the incident in their minds at the same time. It’s preferable to use Occam’s razor, that never dull but seldom used blade. Call it coincidence.
The croaker placed itself directly in the path of the floating dead fish. The body went into the wide mouth of the amphibian. Frigate’s letter and its container, only a centimeter behind the carcass, were also engulfed, and both slid into the gullet and became lodged in the croaker’s belly.
Its stomach could easily handle garbage, excrement, and rotting flesh. But the cellulose fibers of the bamboo case were too tough for it to convert into absorbable form. After feeling sharp pain for a long time the croaker died trying to pass the container.
The letter often kills the spirit. Sometimes, the envelope does it.
Almost everybody was cheering. People were crowding around Jill and hugging and kissing her, and for once she did not mind. Most of the display of affection was due to booziness, she knew, but she still felt a warm glow within herself. If they had not been pleased, their very drunkenness could have resulted in open hostility. Perhaps she was not as disliked as she had thought. Here was David Schwartz, whom she had once overheard calling her “Old Frozen Face,” patting her on the back and congratulating her.