Riverworld and Other Stories

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  Riverworld

  And Other Stories

  Philip José Farmer

  STORIES THAT WILL NOT APPEAR IN THIS VOLUME

  Every now and then a word, a phrase, a picture or image will flash into my mind. I’ll write them down with the hope that some day I can use them. Of such as “The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol” and “The Leaser of Two Evils.” Both had just been titles that I’d thought of …

  I still am waiting for something to result from the title, A Flock of Ducts. And nothing has yet come from The Erodynamics Engineer or Dwellers in the Pup Tense. Or Rule 42. This last, you’ll remember, is to be found in Alice in Wonderland. Rule 42 states that all persons more than a mile high must leave the courtroom. And then there’s the germ of a story titled Two Blue Einsteins. Though I’ve striven with that a dozen times in the past fifteen years, I’ve been able to do nothing with it.

  But we’ll see.

  —Philip José Farmer

  Contents

  Riverworld

  J. C. on the Dude Ranch

  The Volcano

  The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol

  The Problem of the Sore Bridge—Among Others

  Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)

  The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod.

  The Voice of the Sonar in My Vermiform Appendix

  Monolog

  The Leaser of Two Evils

  The Phantom of the Sewers

  Up The Bright River

  Crossing the Dark River

  The Source of the River

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Riverworld

  Foreword

  The first of the Riverworld series was actually written in 1952. This was a 150,000-word novel originally tilled Owe for the Flesh. It was written in one month so I could enter it in an international fantasy-science-fiction-award contest. It won but because of circumstances I won’t go into here, it was never published and I got only a fraction of the money due me. It was then not conceived as a series; the manuscript was a complete book in which the mystery of the Riverplanet was solved. After the distressing events connected with the contest were finished, I had ownership of the book. There wasn’t at that time a market for very long s-f novels by someone who’d only sold a few magazine stories. I put the ms. in the proverbial trunk and forgot about it for some years.

  In 1964 I took it out, dusted it off, and changed the title to Owe for a River. It went out to a couple of publishers, one of whom rejected it on the grounds it was just “an adventure” story. This wasn’t at all true. Also, curiously, the publisher making this comment had published my The Green Odyssey, which was far more an “adventure” novel than Owe for a River.

  Fred Pohl was at that time editor of Galaxy magazine and its sister s-f magazines. I sent the ms. to him, and he returned it to me with some very perceptive comments. It was, he said, too big a concept to confine even within such a long novel. He proposed that I write a series of novelettes for him. These could later he put into book form, if I wished. By then I’d done enough thinking about the Riverworld concept to know that he was right. A planet on which most of humanity living from 1,000,000 B.C. to the early twenty-first century had been resurrected along a ten-million- or perhaps twenty-million-mile-long river was too big a world to put into one volume. And it had too many characters I’d like to write about.

  So I wrote Day of the Great Shout, a novelette which appeared in Pohl’s Worlds of Tomorrow in the January 1965 issue. Thirteen years had elapsed since the original story. In that, the action had started twenty years after the day on which thirty-five billion people from many different times and places on Earth had been raised from the dead in some mysterious but scientific manner. “Day” began even before the general resurrection with the hero, Sir Richard Francis Burton, accidentally (or was it accidentally?) awakening in the pre-resurrection chamber, though only briefly.

  Day was later somewhat expanded and presented as Chapters 1–18 of the novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, 1971.

  Its sequel, The Suicide Express, appearing in the same magazine in March 1966, was expanded to make chapters 19–30 of To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

  I wrote the novelette Riverworld shortly after The Suicide Express, but it appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow in January of the same year. I wasn’t satisfied with it then, and I expanded it slightly for appearance in a collection of some of my shorter works in Down in the Black Gang. Still, I hadn’t done what I should have done. The story seemed to me more an outline than a full-fleshed tale.

  So, this time, Riverworld has been expanded from 12,000 to 33,750 words. I think I’ll he satisfied with this version.

  When the fourth volume of the Riverworld series. The Magic Labyrinth, comes out, the mysteries set forth in the first three will be solved, and the series will have a definite conclusion. But, as I said in the foreword to the third. The Dark Design, I do plan on writing a fifth and even sixth book dealing with matters which I didn’t have space for in the first four volumes. These are what I call the “mainstream” books of the series. The fifth and sixth will be in the “sidestream” or “tributary” tales.

  Tom Mix will be in these, but the story at hand, Riverworld, won’t be included. All of the tales in the fifth will be previously unpublished, brand new.

  1.

  Tom Mix had fled on Earth from furious wives, maddened bulls, and desperate creditors. He’d fled on foot, on horse, and in cars. But this was the first time, on his native planet or on the Riverworld, that he had fled in a boat.

  It sailed down-River and downwind swiftly, rounding a bend with the pursuer about fifty yards behind. Both craft, the large chaser and the small chased, were bamboo catamarans. They were well-built vessels, though there wasn’t a metal nail in them: double-hulled, fore-and-aft rigged and flourishing spinnakers. The sails were made of bamboo fiber.

  The sun had two hours to go before setting. People were grouped by the great mushroom-shaped stones lining the banks. It would be some time before the grailstones would roar and spout blue electricity, energy which would be converted in the cylinders on top of the stones into matter. That is, into the evening meal and also, liquor, tobacco, marijuana, and dreamgum. But they had nothing else to do at this time except to lounge around, talk, and hope something exciting might happen.

  They would, soon be gratified.

  The bend which Mix’s boat had rounded revealed that the mile-wide River behind him had suddenly become a three-mile wide lake ahead. There were hundreds of boats there, all filled with fishers who’d set their cylinders on the stones and then put out to augment their regular diet with fish. So many were the craft that Mix suddenly found that there was even less room to maneuver than in the narrower stretch of water behind him.

  Tom Mix was at the tiller. Ahead of him on the deck were two other refugees, Bithniah and Yeshua. Both were Hebrew, tied together by blood and religion though separated by twelve hundred years and sixty generations. That made much difference. In some ways Bithniah was less a stranger to Mix than she was to Yeshua; in some ways, Yeshua was closer to Mix than to the woman.

  All three, at the moment, shared bruises and contusions given by the same man, Kramer. He wasn’t in the boat following
their wake, but his men were. If they captured the three, they’d return them to “The Hammer,” as Kramer had been called on Earth and was here. If they couldn’t take the refugees alive, they’d kill them.

  Mix glanced behind him. Every bit of sail on the two-masted catamaran was up. It was slowly gaining on the smaller craft. Mix’s boat should have been able to keep its lead, its crew was far lighter, but, during the escape, three spears had gone through the sail. The holes were small, but their effect had accumulated during the chase. In about fifteen minutes the prow of the chaser could be touching the stern of his craft. However, Kramer’s men wouldn’t try to board from the bow of their boat. They’d come up alongside, throw bone grappling hooks, draw the vessels together, and then swarm over the side.

  Ten warriors against three, one a woman, one a man who would run away but who refused on principle to fight, and one a man who’d been in many duels and mass combats but wouldn’t last long against such numbers.

  People in a fishing boat shouted angrily at him as he took the catamaran too near them. Mix grinned and swept from his head his ten-gallon white hat, made of woven straw fibers painted with a rare pigment. He saluted them with the hat and then donned it. He wore a long white cloak made of towels fastened together with magnetic tabs, a white towel fastened around his waist, and high-heeled cowboy boots of white River-serpent leather. The latter were, in this situation, both an affectation and a handicap. But now that fighting was close, he needed bare feet to get a better grip on the slippery deck.

  He called to Yeshua to take over the tiller. His face rigid, unresponsive to Mix’s grin, Yeshua hastened to him. He was five feet ten inches tall, exactly Mix’s height, but considered tall among the people of his time and place on Earth. His hair was black but with an undercoating which shone reddish in the sun. It was cut just below the nape of the neck. His body was thin but wiry, covered only by a black loincloth; his chest was matted with curly black hair. The face was long and thin, ascetic, that of a beardless scholarly-looking Jewish youth. His eyes were large and dark brown with flecks of green, inherited, he’d said, from Gentile ancestors. The people of his native land, Galilee, were much mixed since it had been both a trade route and a road for invaders for several thousand years.

  Yeshua could have been Mix’s twin, a double who’d not been eating or sleeping as well as his counterpart. There were slight differences between them. Yeshua’s nose was a trifle longer, his lips a little thinner, and Mix had no greenish flecks in his eyes nor red underpigment in his hair. The resemblance was still so great that it took people some time to distinguish between them—as long as they didn’t speak.

  It was this that had caused Mix to nickname Yeshua as “Handsome.”

  Now Mix grinned again. He said, “Okay, Handsome. You handle her while I get rid of these.”

  He sat down and took off his boots, then rose and crossed the deck to drop them and his cloak into a bag hanging from a shroud. When he took over the tiller, he grinned a third time.

  “Don’t look so grim. We’re going to have some fun.”

  Yeshua spoke in a deep baritone in a heavily accented English.

  “Why don’t we go ashore? We’re far past Kramer’s territory now. We can claim sanctuary.”

  “Claiming’s one thing,” Mix drawled in a baritone almost as deep. “Getting’s another.”

  “You mean that these people’ll be too scared of Kramer to let us take refuge with them?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I’d just as soon not have to find out. Anyway, if we beach, so will they, and they’ll skewer as before the locals can interfere.”

  “We could run for the hills.”

  “No. We’ll give them a hard time before we take a chance on that. Get back there, help Bithniah with the ropes.”

  Yeshua and the woman handled the sail while Mix began zigzagging the boat. Glances over his shoulder showed that the pursuer was following his wake. It could have continued on a straight line in the middle of the River, and so gotten ahead of Mix’s craft. But its captain was afraid that one of the zigs or zags would turn out to be a straight line the end of which would terminate at the bank.

  Mix gave an order to slacken the sail a little. Bithniah protested.

  “They’ll catch us sooner!”

  Mix said, “They think they will. Do as I say. The crew never argues with the master, and I’m the captain.”

  He smiled and told her what he hoped to do. She shrugged, indicating that if they were going to be boarded, it might as well be sooner as later. It also hinted that she’d known all along that he was a little mad and this was now doubly confirmed.

  Yeshua, however, said, “I won’t spill blood.”

  “I know I can’t count on you in a fight,” Mix said. “But if you help handle the boat, you’re indirectly contributing to bloodshed. Put that in your philosophical pipe and smoke it.”

  Surprisingly, Yeshua grinned. Or perhaps his reaction wasn’t so unexpected. He delighted in Mix’s Americanisms, and he also liked to discuss subtleties in ethics. But he was going to be too busy to engage in an argument just now.

  Mix looked back again. The fox—the chaser was the fox and he was the rabbit—was now almost on his tail. There was a gap of twenty feet between them, and two men at the bows of the double hull were poised, ready to hurl their spears. However, the rapid rise and fall of the decks beneath them would make an accurate cast very difficult.

  Mix shouted to his crew—some crew!—and swung the tiller hard over. The prow had been pointed at an angle to the righthand bank of the River. Now it turned away suddenly, the boat leaning, the boom of the sail swinging swiftly. Mix ducked as it sang past his head. Bithniah and Yeshua clung to ropes to keep from being shot off the deck. The righthand hull lifted up, clearing the water for a few seconds.

  For a moment, Mix thought the boat was going to capsize. Then it righted, and Bithniah and Yeshua were paying out the ropes. Behind him he heard shouting, but he didn’t look back. Ahead was more shouting as the crews of two small one-masted fishing boats voiced their anger and fear.

  Mix’s vessel ran between the two boats in a lane only thirty feet wide. That closed quickly as the two converged. Their steersmen were trying to turn them away, but they had been headed inward on a collision path. Normally, they would have straightened this out, but now the stranger was between them, and its prow was angling toward the boat on the port.

  Mix could see the twisted faces of the men and women on this vessel. They were anguished lest his prow crash into their starboard side near their bow. Slowly, it seemed too slowly, the prow of that boat turned. Then its boom began swinging as it was caught in the dead zone.

  A woman’s voice rose above the others, shrilling an almost unintelligible English at him. A man threw a spear at him, a useless and foolish action but one which would vent some of his anger. The weapon soared within a foot of Mix’s head and splashed into the water on the starboard.

  Mix glanced back. The pursuer had fallen into the trap. Now, if only he could keep from being caught in his own.

  His vessel slid by the boat to port, and the end of its boom almost struck the shrouds of the mast tied to the starboard edge of the deck. And then his boat was by.

  Behind him, the shouting and screaming increased. The crash of wood striking wood made him smile. He looked swiftly back. The big catamaran had smashed bows first into the side of the fishing boat on his right. It had turned the much smaller single-hulled bamboo vessel around at right angles to its former course. The crew of both boats had been knocked to the deck, including the steersmen. Three of Kramer’s men had gone over the side and were struggling in the water. Count them out. That left seven to deal with.

  2.

  The rabbit became a fox; the attacked, the attacker. His craft turned as swiftly as Mix dared take it and began beating against the wind toward the two that had collided. This took some time, but Kramer’s vessel was in no shape to countermaneuver. Both it and the fishing boat had st
ove-in hulls and were settling down slowly. Water was pouring in through the hulls. The captain of the catamaran was gesturing, his mouth open, his voice drowned by all those on his boat and the others, plus the yelling from the many other crafts. His men must have heard him, though, or interpreted his furious signs. They picked themselves up, got their weapons, and started toward the vessel they’d run into. Mix didn’t understand why they were going to board it. That would be deserting a sinking ship for another, jumping from the boiling kettle into the fire. Perhaps it was just a reflex, a mindless reaction. They were angry, and they meant to take it out on the nearest available persons.

  If so, they were frustrated. The two men and two women on the fisher leaped overboard and began swimming. Another boat sailed toward them to pick them up. Its sail slid down as it neared the swimmers, and men leaned over its side to extend helping hands. Two of Kramer’s men, having gotten on the smaller vessel, ran to the other side and heaved spears at the people in the water.

  “They must be out of their mind,” Mix muttered. “They’ll have this whole area at their throats.”

  That was agreeable to him. He could leave the pursuers to the mercy of the locals. But he didn’t intend to. He had a debt to pay. Unlike most debts, this would be a pleasure to discharge.

  He told Yeshua to take over the tiller, and he got a war boomerang from the weapons box on the deck. It was two feet long, fashioned by sharp flint from a piece of heavy white oak. One of its ends turned at an angle of 30 degrees. A formidable weapon in the hand of a skilled thrower, it could break a man’s arm even if hurled from five hundred feet away.

  The weapons box contained three chert-headed axes, four more boomerangs, several oak spear shafts with flint tips, and two leather slings and two bags of sling-stones. Mix braced himself by the box, waited until his boat had drawn up alongside the enemy’s on the portside, and he threw the boomerang. The up-and-down movement of the deck made calculation difficult. But the boomerang flew toward its target, the sun flashing off its whirling pale surface, and it struck a man in the neck. Despite the noise of voices, Mix faintly heard the crack as the neck broke. The man fell sidewise on the deck; the boomerang slid against the railing.