Riverworld Short Stories

  As Ivar had once said, a man could not fart without the Inca hearing about it.

  “I go up-River tonight,” Ivar said. “You may come along with me, though you are not a great warrior. Yet, you have some cunning, you have been useful in frays, and you do have a strong reason to leave this place. I tell you this because I can trust you not to betray me if you decide to stay behind. That is praise, since few may be trusted.”

  “Thank you,” Davis said. His tone hinted at sarcasm, but he knew that the Viking was, according to his lights, being complimentary. “I will go with you, as you knew I would. What are your plans? And why tonight? What makes it different from all the others?”

  “Nothing is different. My patience is gone. I’m weary of waiting for events to open the way. I’ll make my own event.”

  “Besides,” Davis said, “the Inca is too interested in Ann. If you wait much longer, he will make her one of his concubines. I assume chat she’s going with us.”

  “Correct.”

  “And Faustroll?”

  “The crazed one may stay here or go with us as he wishes. You will ask him if he cares to accompany us. Warn him to stay sober. If he is drunk, he will be left behind, most probably as a corpse.”

  Davis and Ivar talked in low tones as Ivar revealed his plans. Then the Viking climbed down from the crow’s nest. Davis stayed awhile so that the sentinel would not think that they had been conspiring and were eager to begin their wicked work against the Inca.

  At noon, Davis was by a grailstone on the edge of the River. After the top of the stone erupted in lightning and thunder, he waited until an overseer handed him his big cylindrical grail. He went off to cat from its offerings, walking slowly and looking for Faustroll in the crowd. He did not have much time for this. His appointment with the Inca was within the hour, and that bloody-minded pagan accepted no excuses for lateness from his subjects.

  After several minutes, Davis saw the Frenchman, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground. He was eating and at the same time talking to some friends. Faustroll’s appearance was no longer so grotesque. He had washed out of his black hair the glue and mud forming a nest in the center of which was a wooden cuckoo egg. His hair now hung dawn past his shoulders. He no longer had a painted mustache and he had also removed the painted mathematical formula from his forehead. He spoke only occasionally in the even-stressed words once distinguishing all of his speech. The change in him had encouraged Davis to believe that Faustroll was beginning to recover his sanity.

  But his fishing pole was always at hand, and he still called himself “we.” He insisted that using “I” made an artificial distinction between subject and object, that everybody was part of one body called humanity and that this body was only a small part of the even vaster universe.

  “We” included the “Great Ubu,” that is, God, and also anything that did not exist but could be named, and also the past, present, and future. This triad he considered to be indivisible.

  Faustroll had irked, angered, and repulsed Davis. But, for some reason, Davis also felt a sort of fondness for him and was, despite himself, fascinated by Faustroll. Perhaps that was because the Frenchman was also looking for the Ultimate Reality, the Truth. However, their concepts of these differed greatly.

  Davis waited until Faustroll happened to look at him. He signaled with a hand raised level with his forehead, his fingers waggling. Faustroll nodded slightly to acknowledge the signal, but he continued his animated talk in Esperanto. After a few minutes, he rose, stretched, and said that he was going fishing. Fortunately, no one offered to go with him. The two met by the very edge of the River.

  “What do we have in mind?” the Frenchman said, speaking in English.

  “Ivar is going to leave tonight. I’m going with him, and so is Ann Pullen. You’re invited. But you must not get drunk.”

  “What? Surely, we are jesting!”

  “We are not amused,” Davis said.

  “We are sometimes intoxicated, but we are never drunk.”

  “Come off it,” Davis said. “No clowning around tonight. Ivar said he’d kill you if you’re drunk, and that’s no empty threat. And you know what’ll happen to us if we get caught. Are you coming with us or not?”

  “We never leave a place. On the other hand we are never in one place. That would be too mundane and scarcely to be tolerated. Yes, we will accompany us, though the answer to the Great Question, the uncompleted side of the formula, may be here in this minute metropolis of uncertainty and instability, not, as we hope, far up the River.”

  “Here’s what Ivar proposes,” Davis said.

  Faustroll listened without interrupting, something he rarely did, then nodded. “We believe that that is as good a plan as any and perhaps better than most. Which is not to say that it has any merit at all.”

  “Very well. We’ll meet at midnight at the Rock of Many Faces.”

  Davis paused, then said, “I do not know why Ivar insists on bringing Ann Pullen along. She’s a troublemaker and a slut.”

  “Ah! We hate her so much, we must love her!”

  “Nonsense!” Davis said. “She’s contemptible, wicked, vicious, the lowest of the low. She makes the Great Whore of Babylon look like a saint.”

  Faustroll laughed. “We believe that she is a soul who had and has the strength of intellect and character to free herself of the bonds, limits, and restrictions imposed upon women by men since time began or, perhaps, shortly before that. She snaps her fingers under the puissant but pinched proboscis of the god you worship and the puny pinched penises of the men who worship him. She…”

  “You will burn in hell as surely as a struck match burns,” Davis said, his blue eyes slitted, his hands clenched.

  “Many matches do not light because they are deficient in the wherewithal of combustion. But we agree with the dying words of the immortal Rabelais: ‘Curtain! The farce is finished! I am setting out to seek a vast perhaps.’ If we die the death of forever, so be it. There are not enough fires in Hell to burn all of us away.”

  Davis opened his arms wide and held out his hands, indicating hopelessness. “I pray that the good Lord will make you see the errors of your ways before it is too late for you.”

  “We thank you for the kind thought, if it is kind.”

  “You’re impenetrable,” Davis said.

  “No. Expenetrating.”

  Faustroll walked off, leaving Davis to figure out what he meant.

  But Davis hurried away to be on time for his daily appointment. Just as he had been the royal masseur for Ivar the Boneless, when Ivar was king of an area far to the south of this state, so Davis was now premier masseur for Pachacuti. His job angered and frustrated him because he had been on Earth an M.D., a very good one, and then an osteopath. He had traveled to many places in the U.S.A., lecturing and founding many osteopathic colleges. When he was getting old, he had founded and headed a college in Los Angeles based on his eclectic discipline, neuropathy. That used the best theories and techniques of drugless therapy: osteopathy, chiropractic, Hahnemanism, and others. When he had died in 1919 at the age of eighty-four, his college was still flourishing. He was sure that it would grow and would found new branches throughout the world. But late-twentieth-centurians he had met had said that they had never heard of him or of the college.

  Seven years ago, Ivar had been forced to flee from his kingdom because of treachery by an ally, Thorfinn the Skull-Splitter. Davis, Faustroll, and Ann Pullen had gone with Ivar. They did not know what to expect from Thorfinn, but they assumed that they would not like it.

  After many fights, enslavements, and escapes while going up the River, they had been captured by the Incans. And here they were, enduring what they must and plotting to get freedom someday.

  Ivar was as patient as a fox watching a toothsome hen, but his patience had been eroded away. Just why the Viking had not taken off by himself, Davis did not know. He would be burdened by them—from his viewpoint, anyway. But an unanalyzable magnetism k
ept the four together. At the same time that they were attracted to each other, they also were repulsed. They revolved about each other in intricate orbits that would have given an astronomer a headache to figure out.

  About ten minutes by the sand clock before his scheduled appearance, Davis was in the building housing the Inca’s court. This was a four-walled and roofed structure sitting on the intersection of many beams a hundred feet above the ground. The skeletal city creaked, groaned, and swayed around, above, and below them. It was noisy outside the building and only a trifle less so inside. Though the Inca sat on a bamboo throne on a dais while he listened to his petitioners, the people around him talked loudly to each other. Davis had threaded his way through them and now stood a few feet from the dais. Presently, the Inca would rise, a fishskin drum would boom three times, and he would retire to a small room with the woman he had chosen to honor with his royal lust. Afterward, Davis would massage the royal body.

  Pachacuti was a short and dark man with a hawk nose, high cheekbones, and thick lips. Around the hips of his short squat body a long green towel served as a kilt, and a red towel, edged in blue, was draped over his shoulders as a cape. His headpiece was a turban-towel secured by a circlet of oak from which sprouted long varicolored fake feathers made of carved wood.

  If Pachacuti had been naked, Davis often thought, he would not have looked like a monarch. Very few unclothed kings would be. In fact, even now, he was no more distinguished in appearance than any of his subjects. But his manner and bearing were certainly imperial.

  Who was the woman who would share the royal couch today? Davis had thought that he did not care. And then he saw his bête noir, Ann Pullen, preceded by two spearmen and followed by two more. The crowd gave way for her. When she reached the dais, she stopped and turned around and smiled with lovely white teeth set in bright rouged lips.

  Though Davis loathed her, he admitted to himself that she was beautiful. Those long wavy yellow tresses, the strikingly delicate and fine-boned face, the perfectly formed and outthrust breasts she was so proud of, the narrow waist and hips, and the long slim legs made her look like a goddess. Venus as she would be if Praxiteles had happened to dream of Ann Pullen. But she was such a bitch, he thought. However, Helen of Troy probably had been a bitch too.

  The guards marched her toward the door of the room in which the Inca waited for her. A moment alter she had entered the room, the guards admitted the little big-eyed priest who observed the virility of the Incan during his matings. When the king was done, and God only knew when that would be, the royal witness would step outside and announce the number of times the Inca had mounted his woman.

  The crowd would rejoice and would congratulate their fellows. The kingdom would continue to flourish; all was well with its citizens’ world.

  Beware, though, if the Inca failed once.

  Davis had never cursed. At least, not on Earth. But he did now.

  “Go-o-o-od damn her!”

  She had given herself to the Inca and now would become one of his wives, perhaps the favorite. But why? Had she quarreled with Ivar since he had been on the sentinel tower? Or had the Inca tempted her with such offers that she could no longer refuse him? Or had she, the Scarlet Woman, an abomination in the nostrils of the Lord, just decided that she would like to lie with the Inca before she left the kingdom tonight? The man was said to be extraordinarily virile.

  Whatever the reason, Ivar would not ignore her infidelity. Though he had done so now and then in the past, that was because Ann had been discreet and he had been lying at the same time with another woman. For Ann to copulate with the Inca in public view, as it were, was to insult Ivar. Though he was usually self-controlled, he would react as surely as gunpowder touched with a flaming match.

  “What’s gotten into that woman?” Davis mumbled. “Aside from a horde of men?”

  Ann Pullen was a late-seventeenth-century American who had lived—and she had lived to the fullest—in Maryland and Westmoreland County, Virginia. Born in a Quaker family, she had converted to the Episcopalian Church along with most of her tobacco planter family. She had married four times, a man by the name of Pullen being her final husband. Just when she took her first lover and when she took the last one even she did not know. But they had been coming and going for at least forty years during her turbulent life an Earth.

  As she had declared—this had been in a public record—she saw no reason why a woman should not enjoy the same liberty and privileges as a man. Though that was a dangerous sentiment in her time, she had escaped arrests for harlotry and adultery. Twice, though, she had come close to being whipped by the court flogger because she was charged with attacking women who had insulted her.

  Perhaps the isolation of the Maryland and Virginia counties in which she resided had enabled her to avoid the severe punishment she would have gotten in the more civilized Tidewater area. Or perhaps it was the fiery and pugnacious nature and the wild ways and free spirit of the Westmorelandians of her time. In any event, she had been a terrible sinner on Earth, Davis thought, and on the Riverworld she had gotten worse. His Church of Christ beliefs made him scorn and despise her. At the same time, he was grieved because she would surely burn in Hell. Sometimes, though he was ashamed of himself afterward, he gloried in the visions of her writhing and screaming in the torments of Inferno.

  So, now, the Jezebel had suddenly decided to couple with Pachacuti. There was not much more she could do to make trouble than this. Except tor telling the Inca that Ivar, Davis, and Faustroll were planning to leave the kingdom. Not even she would be so low.

  Or would she?

  He wished to slip away from the court, but he did not dare to anger the Inca. He was forced to listen to the cries and moans of ecstasy from the emperor and Ann Pullen. The courtiers and soldiers had quit talking to hear them, which made it worse for Davis. Especially since they were not at all disgusted. Instead, they were grinning and chuckling and nudging each other. Several men and women were feeling each other, and one couple was brazenly copulating on the floor. Savages! Beasts! Where was the lightning stroke to burn them with a foretaste of Hell? Where the vengeance of the Lord?

  After several hours, the priest came out of the room. Smiling, he shouted that the Inca still had the virility demanded by the gods and his people. The state would prosper; good times would continue. Everybody except Davis and the man and the woman on the floor cheered.

  Presently, slave women carried in bowls and pitchers of water and towels to bathe and to dry off the Inca and Ann. When they came out, the chief priest: went in to perform a cleansing ritual. After he was done, a servant told Davis that the Emperor was ready for him. Gritting his teeth, but trying to smile at the same time, Davis entered the chamber of iniquity. Despite the bathing, the two still reeked of sweaty and overly fluidic sex.

  Ann, naked, was lolling on a couch. She stretched out when she saw Davis and then flipped a breast at him. One of her chief pleasures was to flaunt her body before him. She knew how disgusted that made him.

  The Emperor, also naked, was lying on the massage table. Davis went to work on him. When he was done, he was told to massage Ann. The Emperor, after getting off the table, was clothed by his dressers in some splendid ceremonial costume, splendid by Riverworld standards, anyway. Then he left the chamber and was greeted with loud cheers by the crowd.

  Ann got onto the table and turned over on her front.

  She spoke in the Virginia dialect of her time. “Give me a very good rubdown, Andy. The Emperor bent me this way and that. I taught him many positions he did not know on Earth, and he used them all. If you were not such a holy man, I’d instruct you on them.”

  Two female attendants remained in the room. But they did not understand English. Davis, trying to keep his voice from trembling with anger, said, “What do you think Ivar is going to do about this?”

  “What can he do?” she said flippantly. Nevertheless, her muscles stiffened slightly. Then. “What business is it of yours???
?

  “Sin is everybody’s business.”

  “Just what I’d expect a smellsmock fleak preacher to say.”

  “Smellsmock? Fleak?” Davis said.

  “A licentious idiot.”

  Davis was kneading her shoulder muscles. He would find it very easy to move his hands up, close there around her neck, and snap it. Though he was not a big man, he had very powerful hands. For a moment, he almost realized the fantasy Hashing through his mind. But a true Christian did not murder, no matter how strong the provocation. On the other hand, he would not be really killing her. She would appear somewhere else tomorrow and bedevil others. Far from here, though.

  “Licentious,” she said. “You hate me so much because, deep down, you would like to tup me. The Old Adam in you wants to ravish me. But you shove that down into the shadows of your sinfulness, into the Old Horny crouching clown there. I say that because I know men. Down there, they are all brothers. All, all, I say!”

  “Whore! Slut! You lie! You would like to have carnal knowledge of every man in the world, and…”

  She turned over abruptly. She was smiling, bur her eyes were narrow. “Carnal knowledge? You mealy-mouth! Can’t you use good old English? You wouldn’t say tit if you had one in your mouth!”

  Though he was not done massaging, he walked out of the room. The snickering and giggling of the servants followed him through the bamboo walls. They had not understood a word, but the tones of his and Ann’s voices and her gestures were easily read.

  Having recovered somewhat, he came back into the room. Ann was sitting up on the table and swinging her long shapely legs. She seemed pleased with herself. He stood in the door and said, “You know what Ivar intends for us to do tonight?”

  She nodded, then said, “He’s told me.”

  “So you had to have one last fling?”

  “I’ve done the double-backed beast with kings bur never with an emperor. Now, if I could only find a god to take me as Zeus took Leda. Or the great god Odhinnr whom Ivar claims he’s descended from. A god who has the stamina to keep going forever and no storms of conscience afterward and is always kind to me. Then my life would be complete.”