Riverworld Short Stories

  “Goddamn!” Mix said. “She was one of the most beautiful women inside and out I ever knew!”

  They went on up and then down a corridor leading to the open deck. London spoke softly to Mix. “Do you think we’ll make it?”

  Mix shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Whatever happens, I’ve had a good time most of the time on this world. And on Earth, too. The bad times was mostly my fault.”

  “Yes,” London said, “but if we die now, it’s for keeps.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. Anyway, what if it is? Haven’t we lived far longer than we thought we would when we was on Earth?”

  “It’s not good enough,” London said.

  “Things never are for you.”

  “Still, I don’t like dying for that son of a bitch John. We’ve paid for our ticket. There’s really nothing more we can do for the boat or for John. We’ve done our best for the asshole.”

  “He wasn’t such a bad guy,” Mix said. “I’ve had worse bosses. And he was a hell of a good pokerplayer.”

  “What an epitaph!”

  “Lots of men have had worse.”

  “It’s not disloyalty, you understand,” London said, “or fear. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Sure. But we owe John for the ride.”

  “Yeah, but the Rex is sunk. I say, let’s get ashore while the getting’s good.”

  “It’s not just John. There’s the others.”

  “If they have any sense, they’ll get off, too. They’ve been exploited by John just as we have.”

  “If you felt so strongly you were being exploited, why didn’t you leave long ago?”

  “Because of that Ethical. Because I’d like to find out just who’s running this world and why they’re doing it. Because I like you and lots of other people on the boat. But the Ethical and King John were exploiting us. I could put up with it as long as I thought it was worth it. It isn’t any more.”

  “Hell,” Mix said, “you can’t be sure the Ethical was using us just for his own purposes. And John’son exploitation, as you call it, was mighty easy to take. We lived like kings for many years. Anyway, you’re always hollering about being exploited. Even when you ain’t. Jesus, man! Everybody’s using everybody else for something or other! And when you get rid of one exploiter, you get another.”

  “Well, which is it?” London said fiercely. “Stay here when there’s no good reason to get our ass chopped off? We’ve fulfilled our obligations, more than fulfilled them, I say. Or do we get off now and continue going on up The River? Or do we say to hell with the Misty Tower and the Ethical and settle down here? Life is good here.”

  Mix stopped, and the men bunched up behind him. He frowned, then said, “I been needling you, Jack, but a lot of what you say makes good sense. The only trouble is that my heart overrules my reason. I say we shouldn’t quit until we’ve been licked.”

  “Dammit, we are licked! There’s no shame in admitting that! I’m no quitter, you know that! But we were outnumbered, and we fought a hell of a good fight! I’d say keep going, too, if our cause was worth it. But it ain’t!”

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” Mix said. “But…no, I ain’t going to quit! You can do what you want to, and I won’t think the worse of you if you desert. But me, I’m staying here until the last dog dies.”

  He started to walk on. London hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, what the hell!” He went after Mix, and the others followed him.

  At that moment a door, which had been opened an inch, swung fully out. Three people, two men with double-barrelled shotguns and a woman with a carbine loaded with wooden bullets, stepped out. All were wounded, though not so much that they couldn’t walk and, they hoped, swim. They had intended to leave the boat at the first opportunity, since they believed that the presence of the Rexites meant that they had taken over the boat. It would have been easy to wait until the enemy were gone and then sneak to the railing and jump into The River. But they were grieved because so many of their lovers and friends had been killed, and they wanted to strike one more blow.

  One man was a 20th-century Ecuadorian poet. The other was an 18th-century Irish barber with no little ability as a warrior and with only his trade to offer. Except that he was a superb raconteur, and King John had laughed so much at his stories while ashore that he’d offered him a berth. The woman was a sister of Tatianus, the famous (in his time) 2nd-century A.D. Christian apologist who then became a heretic. Her parents were Syrians living in Mesopotamia. She had been picked by John because of her dark beauty and especially large flashing eyes. She’d been John’s cabinmate for two years (almost a record). In the six years on the boat, she’d revealed a surprising aptitude at electronics and so had become second-in-command of the engine room personnel.

  The three, at a whispered signal from the Ecuadorian poet, raised their guns together and fired.

  Tom Mix’s ten-gallon hat was blown off along with part of his head. A wooden bullet shattered itself against Jack London’s spine. The others also either died or were wounded so badly they had no chance to survive.

  Before the smoke had cleared, Lt. Gaius Flaminius and the two men left in his group came up behind the three and cut them down with cutlasses.

  A moment later the rockets in the storage room on the boiler deck blew up. Flaminius and his men were unhurt but decided to abandon boat.

  CROSSING THE DARK RIVER

  1

  What? You prescribed lemon juice to cure cholera?”

  “What? You had a sure cure for infants who held their breaths until their faces turned blue? And for young females in a hysterical seizure? You stuck your little finger up their anuses? Presto! Changeo! They’re rid forever of infantile behavior and the tantrums of the body?”

  “What? You’re searching for the woman who’s supposed to have given birth to a baby somewhere along the River? A baby? In this world where all are sterile and no woman has ever gotten pregnant? You believe that’s true? How about buying the Brooklyn Bridge?

  “No? Then how about a splinter from the True Cross? Ho! Ho! Ho! And you believe that this baby reproduced by parthenogenesis is Jesus Christ born again to save us Valleydwellers? And you’ve been traveling up-River to find the infant? Who do you think you are? One of the Three Wise Men? Ho! Ho! Ho!”

  And so Doctor Andrew Paxton Davis had not stayed long any place until he had been detained by Ivar the Boneless. He had wandered up the Valley, seldom pausing, just as, on Earth, he had been the peripatetic’s peripatetic. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, he had traveled to many cities in the United States. There he had lectured on and practiced his new art of healing and sometimes established colleges of osteopathy. Denver, Colorado; Quincy, Missouri; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Ohio; LaFayette and Indianapolis, Indiana; Dallas and Corsicana, Texas; Baker City, Oregon; Los Angeles, California, and many other places.

  Then he had originated Neuropathy, an eclectic discipline of healing. It combined all the best features of osteopathy, chiropracty, magnetism, homeopathy, and other systems of drugless medicine. He had preached that God-inspired gospel throughout the country. And he had written four thick books that were used by osteopaths and ophthalmologists and read by many laymen throughout the United States.

  “From going to and fro in the earth and from walking up and down in it.”

  That was Satan’s answer to God when He said, “Whence comest thou?” That could be said also of Andrew P. Davis. But Davis loathed Satan, and his model was Job, who “was perfect and upright and one that feared God and eschewed evil.”

  Since Davis had awakened on the Riverworld, he had suffered the torments of Job. Yet he had not faltered in his faith any more than had Job. God must have made this world, but the Great Tempter was here too. To realize that, you just had to look around at the inhabitants.

  Riverworlders dreamed most often about lost Earth. The one exception to this was the nightmare about their mass resurrection, the Day of the Great Shout when all
the dead had screamed at one time. What a cry that must have been!

  Doctor Andrew Paxton Davis had often awakened moaning, sometimes screaming, from that nightmare. But he had another dream that distressed him even more.

  For instance, on this early and still-dark morning of the fifth anniversary of The Day, he had painfully oozed into wakefulness from a Riverworld-inspired nightmare. Not terror but shame and humiliation had written the script for that sleep-drama.

  He had gotten his M.D. from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1867. Bur, after many years as a physician in the rural areas of Illinois and Indiana, he had become unhappy with the practice. Always a seeker after truth, he had become convinced that the new science and art of healing devised by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still was a breakthrough. Davis had been in the first class (1893) to complete the courses of the newly established American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri.

  But, ever questioning, ever seeking, he had decided that osteopathy alone was not enough. Hence, his own discipline and his founding of the College of Neuropathy in Los Angeles. When he died at the age of eighty-four of stomach cancer—he also had nightmares about that long agony—he was still the head of a flourishing practice.

  However, medical science had improved considerably from his birth in 1835 to his death in 1919. And, from then on, it had accelerated at an incredible velocity. His late-twentieth-century informants made it sound like one of those scientific romances by H.G. Wells.

  In the first two years on the Riverworld, he had proudly; at first, anyway, told the doctors he met of his knowledge and accomplishments. He had also confided his belief that the Savior had been born again. So many had laughed at him that he became very reserved about telling any M.D. that he had practiced the healing art. He was almost as reticent about revealing his Quest to laymen. But how could he find the Holy Mother and the Holy Infant unless he told people that he was searching for them?

  He had awakened this morning and lain in a sweat not caused by the temperature. After a while, he vaguely remembered a dream preceding the one about the mockery and jeers.

  He was outside the tower on top of the hill and just starting to walk down the hill when he heard the king calling him. He turned and looked up through the twilight that enveloped most of his dreams. Ivar the Boneless was staring down at him from the top of the tower. As usual, the king was half smiling. Beside him, Ann Pullen, the queen not only of Ivar’s land but of all the bitches in the world, was leaning through a space in the top wall. Her bare breasts were hanging over the top of the stone. Then she lifted one and Hipped it at him.

  Suddenly, Sharkko the Shyster appeared beside the two. Sharkko, the man who would have been utterly miserable if he could understand how detestable he was. But Sharkko was unable to imagine that anyone could not like him. He had been given solid proof, kicks, slaps, curses, and savage beatings, that he was not loved by all. Yet his mind slid these off and kept his self-image undented and unbreakable.

  These three were the most important beings in Davis’s life in Ivar’s land. He would have liked to have put them in a rocket and fired them off toward the stars. That way, he would keep them from being resurrected somewhere along the River and thus avoid meeting them again. Except in his nightmares, of course.

  Later, a few hours after dawn, Davis was walking up the hill to the tower after fishing in the River. He had caught nothing and so was not in a good mood. That was when he met the lunatic gotten up like a clown.

  “Doctor Faustroll, we presume?”

  The man, who spoke in a strangely even tone, held out an invisible calling card.

  Davis glanced down at the rips of the man’s thumb and first finger as if they really were holding a card.

  “Printed in the letters of fire,” the man said. “But you must have a heart on fire to see them. However, imaginary oblongs are best seen in an imaginary unlighted triangle. The darker the place, the brighter the print. As you may have noticed, it’s late morning, and the sunlight is quite bright. At least, they seem to be so.”

  The fellow, like all other insane on Earth, must have been resurrected with all traces erased of any mental illness he had suffered there. But he was crazy again.

  His forehead was painted with some kind of mathematical formula. The area around his eyes was painted yellow, and his nose was painted black. A green mustache was painted on his upper lip. His mouth was lipsticked bright-red. On his chest, a large question mark was tattooed in blue. A dried fish was suspended on a cord reaching to his belly. His long, thick, and very black hair was shaped into a sort of bird’s nest and held in place by dry gray mud.

  And, when the man bent his neck forward, he exposed the upper part of an egg in the nest. Davis could easily see it because the man was shorter than he. It did not roll with the movement of the head. Thus, it must be fixed with fish glue to the top of his head. The wooden and painted pseudo-egg, Davis assumed, was supposed to represent that laid by a cuckoo. Appropriate enough. The stranger was certainly cuckoo.

  A large green towel, the clown’s only garment, was draped around his hips. The gray cylinder of his grail was near his bare feet. Most people carried a fish-skin bag that held their worldly possessions. This fellow lacked that, and he was not even armed. But he did carry a bamboo fishing pole.

  The man said, “While on Earth, we were King Ubu. Here, we are Doctor Faustroll. It’s a promotion that we richly deserve. Who knows? We may yet work our way to the top and become God or at least occupy His empty throne. At the moment, we are a pataphysician, D.Pa., at your service. That is not a conventional degree in one sense, but in all senses it is a high degree, including Fahrenheit and Kelvin.”

  He started to put his imaginary card in an imaginary pocket of an imaginary coat.

  Davis said, “I’ll take it,” and he held out his hand. Humoring the pataphysician, whatever that was, might prevent him from becoming violent.

  He moved his hand close to his bare chest to suggest that he was pulling out a card from an inner pocket of his coat. He held it out.

  “Andrew Paxton Davis, M.D., Oph.D., N.D., D.O., D.C.”

  “Where’s the rest of the alphabet?” the man said, still keeping his voice even-toned. But he pretended to take the card, read it, and then put it inside his coat.

  “I made soup of it,” Davis said. His blue eyes seemed to twinkle.

  Doctor Faustroll’s dark-brown eyes seemed to reflect the twinkle, and he smiled. He said, “Now, if you’ll be kind enough to conduct us to the ruler of this place, whatever his or her or its names, we will present ourself or perhaps more than one of our selves and will apply for a position or positions.”

  Davis was startled. He said, “What? You don’t know where you are? The guards did not stop you? How did you get by them?”

  Doctor Faustroll indicated an invisible object by his right foot. “We carried ourself through the border in our suitcase. The guards did not see the case. It was midnight and cloudy. Also, they were drowsy.”

  “It must be a very large case to hold you. All of you?”

  “It’s very small, but there’s enough room for us and our conscience,” Doctor Faustroll said. “We take the conscience out of the case only when we intend to use it, which isn’t often. Or when it needs airing.”

  He picked up his grail with one hand and his fishing pole in the other.

  Davis hitched up the towel Velcroed to his waist and then grasped the handle of his own grail. His good humor had vanished. He was getting impatient with the fellow, and he did not want to be late for his appointment with the king.

  Looking serious, he said, “If I were you, I’d get out of this place as quickly and quietly as possible. If you don’t, you’ll be working with those wretched people down there.”

  He pointed at the riverbank. Faustroll turned around to stare at the swarm of sweating, straining, and shouting men and women. Tiny figures at this distance, they were striving to pull or to push a roughly cube-shaped and bungalow-sized block
of granite on log rollers into the River. Its forward edge was on two wooden runners, heavily lubricated with fish fat, that dipped into the water.

  “They’re building a pyramid beneath the surface of the River?” Faustroll said.

  “Must you keep up this nonsense?” Davis said. “And why don’t you ask me why I’m giving you this advice to scoot out of here as fast as your feet can carry you? If, that is, you’re able to do so, which I doubt very much.”

  “There is no such thing as nonsense,” Faustroll said. “In fact, what you call nonsense makes greater sense than what you call sense. Or, perhaps, there is no concrete abstraction that we term sense. But, if there is no sense, then there is also no nonsense. We have spoken. Selah.”

  2

  Davis sighed, and he said, “If you don’t mind risking slavery and perhaps torture, come along with me. Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

  They had been standing at the edge of the grass-carpeted plain. Now they trudged up the slope of the foothills, Davis, a red-haired man of medium height and build but with abnormally large hands, led the way. The madman was slower because he was observing the whole milieu. Though the mountains towering straight up to 20,000 feet, the mile-wide foothills, and the mile-wide plains on either side of the mile-wide River were typical of most of the Rivervalley, the human activity was not. Many men and women were cutting away large blocks of stone in the vertical face of the mountains and were sliding the blocks down the foothills. The grass in the path of the very heavy weights was crushed, and the earth had sunk in. But the grass was so tough that it had not died our.

  Near the lower edge of the foothill were extra oak log rollers for moving the blocks across the plain. Halfway along the plain, several crews were pulling on ropes tied around the blocks while gangs shoved against the rear of the blocks. When these got to the River’s edge, they were placed on runners and slid into the water.