Riverworld Short Stories

  His soul and body drove him always up the River. Someday, so he boasted, he would get to the sea at the North Pole and would storm the great tower that many said was there. And he would squeeze the throats of the tower dwellers until they told him who they were, why they had made this planet and its River, and how they had resurrected all of Earth’s dead and brought them here and why they had done it.

  His vow to do this made him sound simpleminded. In many ways, he was. But he was not just a cruel, bloodthirsty, and loot-hungry savage. He was very shrewd, very curious, and very observant, especially about those who professed to believe in the gods. Having been a priest and a sorcerer of the Norse religion, he was skeptical of all faiths. Near the end of his life, while he was the king of Dublin, he had converted to Christianity. He was playing it safe just in case that religion might be the true one. It would not cost him anything.

  He died in A.D. 873. After his resurrection in his youthful body on the Riverbank, he abandoned the Cross and became an agnostic, though he kept calling on Odin and Thor when he was in a tight spot. Lifelong habits die hard. Sometimes you have to die more than once before the habits die. That might be one of the messages of the Riverworld.

  Ivar’s character had changed somewhat. Now, instead of physical and temporal power, he wanted the power of knowledge of the truth. A step forward, yes. But not far enough. How was he going to use his knowledge? I suspected that he would be mightily tempted to wield the knowledge torn from the masters of this world—if he ever got it—for his benefit only. He wanted the truth, not The Truth.

  Then there was Andrew Davis, the American physician, osteopath, and neuropath. He had died in A.D. 1919. But awakening on the River, though it had confused him, had not made him abandon his fundamentalist Church of Christ religion. Like so many believers, he had rationalized that the Riverworld was a testing ground that God had provided for those who professed to be Christians. That it was not mentioned in the Bible was only another proof of God’s mysterious ways.

  When he heard rumors that a woman had conceived and borne a male child, he became convinced that God’s son was born again. And he had set out up-River to find the woman and the child. A few years ago, he had met a man who had known Jesus on Earth. This man told Davis that he had encountered Jesus again on the Riverbank. And he had witnessed the execution of Jesus by fanatical Christians.

  Did Davis then admit that Jesus was just another madman who had believed that he was the Messiah? No! Davis said that his informant had lied. He was a tool of the Devil.

  I believe that it was possible that, somewhere on this world, a woman did have a false pregnancy. And that the story of this somehow became twisted during the many years and the many millions of miles it traveled. Result: the tale goes that a woman has given birth in a world where all men and women are sterile. And, of course, the child must be the Savior.

  Thus, Davis went with Ivar on his boat, leaving me behind. Davis did not care much about getting to the supposed tower in the supposed North Polar Sea. He hoped—longed—to find the son of the virgin somewhere north of here and to cast himself in adoration at the feet of the son. Who by now should be approximately thirty years old if he exists. And he does not, of course.

  After Ivar and his crew sailed off, seven years passed. During this time, I met many dozens of groups of men and women who were going up-River to storm the tower. They were questioners and seekers after the truth, for which I honor them. One of them was a man who claimed to be an Arab. But some of his followers talked, and I found out that he was really an Englishman who had lived in the nineteenth century. My contemporary, more or less. His name was Burton, well known in his time, a remarkable man, a writer of many books, a speaker of many tongues, a great swordsman, a fabled explorer of many lands in Africa and elsewhere. His followers said that he had accidentally awakened in a pre-resurrection chamber made by those mysterious people who had made this planet. They had put him back to sleep, but he had had encounters with these beings since then, and they were out to find him. For what purposes, I do not know. I suspect that this story is one of many tales of wonder floating through the Riverworld.

  If any man could get to the tower through the many seemingly insurmountable obstacles and seize the owners of the tower by the throat, this man could. At least, that was the impression I got. But he went on up the River, and that was the last I heard of him. Other questers followed him.

  All this time, I was the disciple of Rabi’a, the Arab woman who had lived A.D. 717 to 801. She was born in Basra, a city on the Shatt-al-Arab, a river born of the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This was in the area of ancient Mesopotamia where the Sumerian civilization came into being and was followed by the Akkadian, the Babylonian, the Assyrian, and many others that rose and fell and were covered with the dust. Rabi’a’s native city, Basra, was not distant from Baghdad, which some people tell me was the capital of a Muslim nation called Iraq in the middle twentieth century.

  Rabi’a was a Sufi and well-known throughout the Muslim world in her time and later. The Sufis were Muslim mystics whose unconventional approach to religion often brought about persecution from the orthodox. That did not surprise me. Everywhere on Earth, the orthodox have hated the unorthodox, and there has been no change here. The not-so-strange thing is that, after the Sufis’ deaths, they often became saints to the orthodox. They were no longer a danger.

  Rabi’a told me that, for a long time, there have been Jewish and Christian Sufis, though not many, and these are accepted as equals by the Muslim Sufis. Anyone who believes in God may become a Sufi. Atheists need not apply. But there are other qualifications for becoming a Sufi and they are very hard. Also, unlike the orthodox, the Muslim Sufis genuinely believe in the equality of women with men, a belief unacceptable to the orthodox.

  My many friends in late-nineteenth-century, early-twentieth-century Paris (Apollinaire, Rousseau, Satie, and many others, they were legion and legend, great poets, writers, and painters, leapers from the orthodox into the future, where are they now?) would be nauseated or would laugh scornfully if they knew that I aspire to be a Sufi. I sometimes laugh at myself. Who is better qualified to do so?

  Rabi’a says that she has traveled The Path upward until she knows the utmost ecstasy, seeing the glory of God. I might be able to do so. No guarantee. She is my teacher, but only I, through my own efforts, can achieve what she has achieved. Others have done it, though they are very few. And then she adds that my strivings may be for nothing. God chooses those who will know The Way, The Path, The Truth. If I have not been chosen, tant pis, je suis dans un de ces merdiers, quel con, le bon Dieu! Why am I, Alfred Jarry, once calling himself Doctor Faustroll, mocker and satirizer of the hypocrites, the Philistines, the orthodox and the self-blinded, the exploiter and persecutor of others, the dead of soul, the steadfast and stick-in-the-mud people of faith…why am I now seeking God and willing to work as I have never worked before, to become a slave of God, not to mention a slave of Rabi’a? Why am I doing this?

  There are many explanations, mostly psychological. But psychology never explains anything satisfactorily.

  I had heard about Rabi’a for some time, and so I went to hear her directly. I was the student and portrayer of the absurd, and I did not wish to miss out on the particular absurdity she represented… I thought. I hung around the fringe of the crowd of her disciples and the eager to learn and the idly curious. What she said seemed no different from what others of many different faiths had preached. Talk of The Way and The Path is cheap, and only the names of. those who founded the sects and of their disciples differ.

  But this woman seemed to radiate something I had never detected in the others. And her words seemed to make sense even if they were, according to logic, absurd. And then she gave me a sidelong glance. It was as if lightning fastened us, as if positive and negative ions had joined. I saw something undefinable but magnetic in those black deerlike eyes.

  To shorten the tale, I listened, and then
I talked to her, and then I became convinced that what she was talking about was the essence of absurdity. But I recalled that it was Tertuallian who had written about his Christian faith. “I believe because it is absurd.” That saying doesn’t stand up to logical analysis: But then, it wasn’t meant to do so. It appeals to the spirit, not the mind. There’s a layer of meaning to it that is as hard to grasp as wine fumes. The nose smells them; the hand cannot hold them.

  There is also a method of discipline which the Sufi master requires his initiates to obey. This is designed to lead the initiates upward physically, mentally, and spiritually. Part of it is taking nothing tor granted just because it is traditional and conventional. The Sufi never accepts “everybody knows,” “They say that…” Neither had I done that, but the Sufi evaluation method was different from mine. Mine had been to expose to ridicule. Theirs was to instill in the initiate an automatic method of looking at all sides of anything and, also, to teach the non-Sufi if that were possible. I had never believed that my satiric poetry, novels, plays, and paintings would illuminate a single person among the Philistines. I appealed only to minds that already agreed with me.

  Thus, my schooling progressed under Rabi’a, though not very swiftly. I was her physical servant, bound to fetch and carry for her, attentive to her every waking moment. Fortunately, she liked to fish, so we spent many hours at my beloved pastime. I was also her spiritual servant, listening to her lectures and observations, thinking on them, answering her many questions designed to test my comprehension of her teachings, to see if I was making any progress. I was in bondage until I quit or I, too, attained the highest mastership and burned ecstatically with the flame of The One.

  On the other hand, what else important did I have to do?

  When Rabi’a heard me make that remark, she reproached me. “Levity has its place, but it too often indicates a giddy mind and a lack of seriousness,” she said. “That is, a serious lack in the character. Or fear of the thing laughed at. Meditate about that.”

  She paused, then said, “I think you believe that you can attain a glimpse of The One through my eyes. I am only our teacher. You alone can find The Way.”

  It was not long after that that she decided to climb to the top of the monolith. There, if the top was inhabitable, she would stay for a long time. She would take along three of her disciples if they wished to accompany her.

  “And how long, vessel of the inner light, will we remain there?” I said.

  “We will let our hair grow until it reaches our calves,” she said. “Then we will cut it off next to the scalp. When, after many cuttings, we have saved enough hair with which to make a rope long enough to descend from the top to the ground level, then we will leave the monolith.”

  That seemed a long time, but four of her disciples said that they would follow her. I was one. Havornik, a sixteenth-century Bohemian, wavered. He admitted that, like those who refused to go with her, he was afraid of the climb. But he finally said that he would try to overcome his lack of courage. He regretted that decision on the way up because he could use only his fingers and toes to cling to juts or ledges or holes in the rock, and many of these were small. But he made it to the top. He lay on the ground, quivering for an hour before he got the strength to stand up.

  Havornik was the only one who was afraid. Bur he conquered his fear. Thus, he was the bravest of us all.

  I wish that he had been as brave in his climbing out of his Self as he had been in climbing the mountain.

  Or do I? After all, he might have saved me from my Self.

  Three days after we got to the top, I found The Artifact. I was on my way to the little lake to fish when I saw something sticking out of the dirt at the base of a large bush. I don’t know why I discerned it, since it was smeared with mud and protruded slightly from the ground. But I was curious, and I went to it. Bending down close to it, I saw the top of something bulb-shaped. I touched it; it was hard as metal. After digging in the soft earth around it, I pulled out something man-made. Made by sentiments, anyway. It was a cylinder about a foot long and three inches in diameter. On each end was an onion-sized bulb.

  Very excited, I cleaned it in the creek water. It was black metal and bare of pushbuttons, slides, rheostats, and any operational devices. I didn’t, of course, have the slightest idea who had made it or what it did or why it had been left or lost on this near-inaccessible peak. That day, I forgot about the fishing.

  After an hour of touching it all over and turning it over and over and squeezing it, hoping to find a way to activate it or to open a section that would reveal controls, I took it to Rabi’a and the others. She heard my story, then said, “It may have been left here by accident by the makers of this world. If so, the makers are not gods, as many suppose. They are human beings like us, though they may differ in bodily form. Or it may be that the device was left here for some purpose in their plan. It does not matter who made it or what its function is. It has nothing to do with me or you. It can only be a deterrent, an obstacle, a stumbling block in The Path.”

  I was flabbergasted at this appalling lack of scientific curiosity—or any other kind. But, on reflection, I admitted that, from her viewpoint, she was right. Unfortunately, I have always been very interested in mathematics, physics, and technology. Not to brag (though why not?), but I am well-versed in these branches of science. In fact, I once designed a timetraveling machine that almost convinced many people that it was workable. Almost, I say. No one, including myself, ever built one to test its validity. That was because time travel seemed impossible according to the science of my day. Sometimes, I wonder if I should have built the machine. Perhaps time travel is impossible most of the time. But there may be moments when it is highly possible. I am a pataphysician, and pataphysics is, among other things, the science of the exceptional.

  Rabi’a did not order me to get rid of The Artifact and forget about it. As her disciple, I was bound to obey her no matter how reluctant I was to do so. But she knew me well enough to realize that I would have to experiment with it until I gave up the search to determine its function. And perhaps she hoped to teach me a valuable lesson because of my willingness to veer from The Path for a while.

  The third day after I had found the mysterious device, I was sitting on a branch of the great oak and staring at the device. Then I heard a voice. It was a woman’s speaking a language I didn’t know and had never heard before. And it came from one of the globes at the end of the cylinder. It startled me so much that I froze for a few seconds. Then I held the end near to my ear. The gibberish stopped after thirty seconds. But a man spoke then from the bulb at the other end.

  When he stopped, a green ray bright enough to be seen in the daylight shot out. But it faded after four feet from the source, the bulb. It gave birth at the termination to a picture. A moving picture in which three-dimensional actors moved and spoke audibly. There were three strikingly handsome people in it, a Mongolian man, a Caucasian woman, and a Negro woman, each in a flimsy ancient-Greece-like robe. They were seated at a table the legs of which were curved and beautifully carved into the semblance of animals unknown to Earthly zoology. They were talking animatedly to each other and, now and then, into devices exactly like the one I held in my hand.

  Then the images faded into sunlight. I tried to bring them back by duplicating the series of finger pressures on the cylinder just before they had appeared. Nothing happened. Not until at night three days later was I able to activate the device. This time the images were no brighter, the device apparently automatically adjusting itself to the exterior illumination. The scene projected was of some place along the River and seemed to be during the day. There were the usual men and women in their towels, fishing and talking. They spoke in Esperanto. Across the River were round bamboo huts with thatched roofs and many people. Nothing of any great interest. Except that one of the men nearby looked remarkedly like a man in the projection of the first scene, the meeting at the table.

  From this I deduced th
at the makers of this world—I had no doubt that they were the makers—walked among the River-dwellers disguised as such. Whatever machine was recording this scene must be set in a boulder or perhaps in one of the indestructible and unmeltable irontrees everywhere on this world.

  At the moment the scene was projected, Rabi’a and Havornik were present. She was interested, but she said, “This has nothing to do with us.” Havornik, the Bohemian, however, was excited, and he was greatly disappointed when the scene faded out. I let him try his hand at reactivating the device after I had failed to do so. He also failed.

  “There’s some way to operate this,” I said. “I’ll find out what it is if I have to wear it out pressing on it.”

  Rabi’a frowned, then she smiled and said, “As long as playing with it does not interfere with your walking on The Path. It does no harm to have fun if you remain basically serious.”

  “All fun is basically serious,” I said.

  She thought for a moment, then smiled again and nodded.

  But I became obsessed with operating The Artifact. When my mind should have been on Rabi’a’s words, I thought of the device. Whenever I could, I retreated to the great tree or sat on the rim of the peak. Here, I experienced moments when I seemed to be on the brink of what I had written on Earth about God. That was the formula I had arrived at. Zero equals infinity. That was the formula for God, and, sometimes, it seemed that my soul—if I had one—was bereft of flesh and bone. It was close to realizing directly the truth behind that equation. I almost ripped off the mask of Reality.

  When I told Rabi’a that, she said, “God is a mathematical equation. But God is also everything else, though The Spirit is apart from Himself.”