The situation reminded me of Jim Hawkins' experience in the apple barrel in Treasure Island, when he overheard Long John Silver plotting with his pirate cronies to take over the Hispaniola after the treasure was found. Only, in this case, Farrington and Rider weren't planning anything evil against anybody at all. They seemed to be more plotted against.
Farrington said, "What I'd like to know is why he needs us? Here's a man with more power than a dozen gods, and if he's going against his buddies, what help can he get from mere mortals like us? And if he wants us in the tower, why doesn't he just ferry us to it?"
There was another interruption, followed by the clink of grail cups against each other. Then Rider spoke loudly ". . . must have damn good reasons. Anyway, we'll find out in time. And what else do we have to do?"
Farrington bellowed laughter, then said, "That's right! What else? Might as well use our time for some end, good or bad. But I still feel like we're being exploited, and I'm fed up with that. I was exploited by the rich and the middle class when I was young, and then when I became famous and rich, I was exploited by editors and publishers and then by my relatives and friends. I ain't going to let anybody exploit me here on this world, use me like I was a dumb beast fit for nothing but shoveling coal or canning fish!"
"You did some self-exploiting, too," Rider said. "Didn't we all? I made plenty of money and so did you. And what happened? We spent more'n we made on big houses and fast cars and bad investments and booze and whores and putting on a big front. We could've played it smart and tight and saved our money and taken it easy and lived to ripe old ages in ease and plenty. But . . ."
Farrington exploded into laughter again. "But we didn't, did we? That wasn't our nature, Tex, and it ain't now. Live it up, burn the candle at both ends, spin off fire and beauty like a St. Catherine's wheel instead of trudging along like a steer turning a mill wheel! So the deballed beast gets turned out to pasture instead of going to the glue factory? So what? What does he have to think about while he's munching grass? A long, grey life and a short, grey future?"
More clinking. Then Farrington started to tell Rider about a train trip he'd taken from San Francisco to Chicago. He had introduced himself to a beautiful woman who was accompanied by her child and a maid. It wasn't more than an hour after meeting her that he and the woman went to his compartment, where they coupled like crazed minks for three days and nights.
I decided that then was a good time to leave. I got up and strolled to the foremast where Abigail Rice and Nur were talking. Mustafa apparently never suspected me of eavesdropping.
Since then, I've been wondering. Who was the he referred to? It's obvious that he must be one of Those who have made this world for us and then raised us from the dead. Could it really be? The idea seemed so tremendous, so difficult to grasp. Yet – Somebody has to have done this, Somebodies, I should say. And they are truly gods, in many senses, anyway.
If Rider is telling the truth, there is a tower in the north polar sea. And by implication it's a base for Whomever made this world, our secret masters. Yes, I know this sounds paranoid. Or like a science fiction tale, most of which were paranoid, anyway. But, except for the very few who got rich, science fiction writers were convinced that their secret (or not so secret) masters were the publishers. Even the rich ones questioned their royalty statements. Maybe the tower is inhabited by the cabal of super-publishers. (Just kidding, Bob. I think.)
Maybe Rider is lying. Or his informant, Paheri, was lying. I don't believe so. It's obvious that Rider and Farrington have been approached by one of these Whomevers. They weren't just making up this story to fool an eavesdropper.
Or were they?
How paranoid can you get?
No, they were discussing something that had really happened. If they were careless, left the hatch open, didn't talk subduedly, it was only natural. After all those years, who wouldn't get careless? As far as that goes, why shouldn't they tell everybody?
Somebody might be looking for them. Who? Why?
My mind yaws, pitches, and rolls. So many speculations, so many possibilities. And I think, wow! What a story! Too bad I hadn't thought of something like this when I was writing science fiction. But the concept of a planet consisting of a many-millions-kilometer-long river along which all of humanity that ever lived had been resurrected (a good part of it, anyway) would have been too big to put in one book. It would have taken at least twelve books to do it anywhere near justice. No, I'm glad I didn't think of it.
In light of those developments, what do I do now? Should I mail this letter or tear it up? It won't fall into your hands, of course, not a chance of that. Into whose, then?
Probably it'll be picked up by someone who can't even read English.
Why am I afraid it might fall into the wrong hands? I really don't know. But there is a dark, secret struggle going on under the seemingly simple life of this Valley. I intend to find out just what it is. I'll have to proceed cautiously though. A small voice tells me that I might be better off if I don't know anything about this.
Anyway, to whom am I really writing these missives? To myself, probably, though I hope hopelessly that just possibly impossibly one might drift into the hands of someone I knew and loved or at least was fond of.
And yet, this very moment, as I stare across the water at the many people on the bank, I might be looking directly at the person to whom I've written one of these letters. But the ship is in the middle of The River just now, and I'm too far away to recognize anyone recognizable.
Great God, the faces I've seen in twenty years! Millions, far more than I ever saw on Earth. Some of the faces came into being three hundred thousand years ago or more. Undoubtedly, the faces of many of my ancestors, some of them Neanderthals. A certain number of Homo neanderthalis was absorbed by miscegenation into Homo sapiens, you know. And considering the flux and reflux of large groups through prehistory and history, migrations, invasions, slavery, individual travel, some, maybe many, of the Mongolian, Amerindian, Australoid, and Negro faces I've seen belong to my ancestors.
Consider this. Each generation of your ancestors, going back in time, doubles its number. You were born in 1925. You had two parents, born in 1900. (Yes, I know you were born in 1923 and your mother was forty when she bore you. But this is an ideal case, an average.)
Your parents' parents were born in 1875. That makes four. Double your ancestors every twenty-five years. By 1800, you have thirty-two ancestors. Most of them didn't even know each other, but they were "destined" to be your great- great- great- grandparents.
In 1700 A.D., you have five hundred twelve ancestors. In 1600 A.D. 8192 ancestors. In 1500 A.D., 131,072 ancestors. In 1400, 2,097,152. In 1300, 33,554,432. By 1200 A.D., you have 536,870,912 ancestors.
So do I. So does everybody. If the world population was, say, two billion in 1925 (I don't remember what it was), then multiply that by the number of your ancestors in 1200 A.D. You get over one quadrillion. Impossible? Right.
I just happen to remember that in 1600 the estimated world population was five hundred million. In 1 A.D., it was an estimated 138,000,000. So, the conclusion is obvious. There was a hell of a lot of incest, close and remote, going on in the past. Not to mention the present. Probably from the dawn of humankind. So, you and I are related. And, in fact, it may be possible that we're all related, many times over. How many Chinese and black Africans born in 1925 were distant cousins of you and me? Plenty, I'd say.
So, the faces I see on both banks as I sail along are my cousins'. Hello, Hang Chow. Yiya, Bulabula. What's happening, Hiawatha? Hail, Og, Son of Fire! But even if they knew this, they wouldn't feel any more friendly toward me. Or vice versa. The most intense quarreling and the most vicious bloodletting take place in families. Civil wars are the worst wars. But then, since we're all cousins, all wars are civil. Mighty uncivil, at the same time. The paradox of human relations. I'll shoot your ass off, brother.
Mark Twain was right. Did you ever read his Extract from Ca
ptain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven ? Old Stormfield was shocked when he got past the Pearly Gates because there were so many dark people. Like all of us pale Caucasians, he had envisioned Heaven as being full of white faces with here and there a few yellow, brown, and black ones. But it wasn't that way. He'd forgotten that the dark-skinned peoples had always outnumbered the whites. In fact, for every white face he saw there were two dark ones. And that's the way it is here. My hat is off to you, Mr. Twain. You told it like it was gonna be.
So, here we are in the Rivervalley, knowing not why and whence. Just like on Earth.
Of course, there are plenty of people who say they know. There are the two dominant churches, the Chancers and the Nichirenites, and a thousand sects of reformed Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and God knows what all. The former Taoists and Confucianists say they don't give a damn; this is a better life, on the whole, than the last one. The totemists are in a bit of a bind, since there are no animals here. But that doesn't mean the totem spirits aren't here. Many's the savage I've run into who sees his totem in dreams or visions. The majority of them, though, have been converted to one of the "higher" religions.
There's also Nur el-Musafir. He's a Sufi. He was just as shocked as anybody to wake up here. He wasn't outraged, however, and he reordered his thinking tout de suite. He says that whatever beings have made this world have done so with only our eventual good in mind. Otherwise, why go to all this great expense and trouble? (In this, he sounds like a barker for a circus. But he's sincere. Which doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about.)
We shouldn't concern ourselves with the Who or the How, he says. Just with the Why. In this respect, he sounds like a Chancer. But I see I'm about to run out of my quota of paper. So, adiaŭ, adios, selah, amen, salaam, shalom, and so long. (The English so long is from selang, the Moslem Malayan's pronunciation of the Arabic salaam.)
Amicably and didactically yours in the bowels of Whomever,
Peter Jairus Frigate
P.S. I still don't know if I'll mail this in toto, censor it, or use it for toilet paper.
Chapter 41
* * *
On the average, the river was 2.4135 kilometers or a mile and a half wide. Sometimes it narrowed into channels always lined by high hills; sometimes it widened into a lake. Whatever its breadth, its depth was everywhere about 305 meters or a trifle over 1000 feet.
Nowhere along The River was there water erosion of the banks. The grass on the plains merged into an aquatic grass at the water level, and the latter flourished on the sides and bottom of the channel. The roots of this fused with the roots of the surface grass to form an interconnected mass. The grass was not separate blades; it was one vast vegetable entity.
The water plants were eaten by a multitude of fish life from surface to bottom. Many species cruised about in the upper stratum, where the sunlight penetrated. Others, paler creatures but no less voracious, swarmed in the middle layer. In the darkness of the bottom many weird forms scuttled, crawled, wriggled, jetted, swam.
Some ate the leprous-white rooted things that looked like flowers or were in turn enfolded and digested by them. Others, large and small, slid steadily along, mouths gaping, collecting the microscopic life that also lived in the fluid strata.
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 Ph.D.s. 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 coining?
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 him 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.