R.W. II - The Fabulous Riverboat Read online

  The man wore a towel-like cloth, secured by magnetic tabs under the material, as a kilt. His leather sandals were made of the hide of the whale-sized Riverdragon fish, Around his thickly muscled neck he wore a string of brilliantly colored hornfish vertebrae. In his huge powerful hand he gripped the wooden shaft of a large war ax of iron. His pale-blue eyes were fixed on Samuel Clemens and that broad hawk-nosed face was grim.

  Sam Clemens screamed to the pilot, "Faster! Faster! Full speed ahead!"

  The great paddle-wheels began to dip into the water more swiftly – chunk, chunk. Even through the fiberglass-insulated deck the vibrations made the deck quiver. Suddenly the blond man, Erik Bloodaxe, tenth-century Viking King, was in the pilothouse.

  He shouted at Sam Clemens in Old Norse. "Traitor! Droppings of Ratatosk! I told you I would wait along the banks of The River! You betrayed me so you could get the iron from the fallen star and build your great Riverboat!"

  Sam fled the pilot house and down the ladders from deck to deck and down into the dark bowels of the hold, but Erik Bloodaxe was always two steps behind.

  Past the colossal rotating electric motors Sam Clemens ran, and then he was in the chemistry room, where the engineers were making potassium nitrate from human excrement and mixing it with sulfur and charcoal to make gunpowder. Sam grabbed hold of a lighter and a resin torch, pressed the slide, and a white-hot glowing wire slid out of the case. "Stop, or I'll blow up the whole boat!", Sam screamed.

  Erik had stopped, but he was swinging the big ax around and around over his head. He grinned and said, "Go ahead! You haven't got the guts! You love the Riverboat more than you love anything, even your faithless but precious Livy! You wouldn't blow her up! So I'm going to split you down the middle with my ax and then take the Riverboat for myself!"

  "No! No!" Sam screamed. "You wouldn't dare! You can't! You can't! This is my dream, my love, my passion, my life, my world! You can't!"

  The Norseman stepped closer to him; the ax whistled over his head. "I can't? Just stand there and see!"

  Over his shoulder Sam saw a shadow. It moved forward and became a tall, faceless figure. It was X, the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical who had sent the meteorite crashing into the River-valley so that Sam could have the iron and nickel to build his Riverboat on this mineral-poor planet. And so he could sail up The River to the North Polar Sea where the Misty Tower, the Big Grail, call it what you would, was hidden in the cold fog. And there Sam, with the eleven men chosen by X for his as-yet-unrevealed plan, would storm the Tower, and find – find what? Whatever was there. "Stranger!" Sam called. "Save me! Save me!"

  The laughter was like a wind from the polar sea, turning his guts to crystal. "Save yourself, Sam!"

  "No! No! You promised!" Sam yelled. And then his eyes were open and the last of his groans died away. Or had he dreamed that he was groaning?

  He sat up. His bed was made of bamboo. The mattress was a bamboo fiber cloth stuffed with giant leaves of the irontree. The blanket was made up of five towels secured together by magnetic tabs. The bed was against the wall of a room twenty feet square. It held a desk and a round table and about a dozen chairs, all of bamboo or pine, and a fired-clay chamber pot. There were also a bamboo bucket half full of water, a tall broad case with many pigeonholes for rolls of paper, a rack with bamboo and pine spears with flint and iron tips, yew bows and arrows, a war ax of nickel-iron and four long steel knives. On the wall were a number of pegs from which white towels hung. On one hat-stand was a naval cap, an officer's, made of leather covered with a thin white cloth.

  On the table was his grail, a gray metallic cylinder with a metal handle.

  On the desk were glass bottles containing a soot-black ink, a number of bone pens, and one nickel-iron pen. The papers on the desk were of bamboo, though there were a few sheets of vellum from the inner lining of the stomach of the hornfish.

  Glass windows (or ports, as he called them) looked out all around the room. As far as Sam Clemens knew, this was the only house with glass windows in the entire River-valley. Certainly, it was the only one for 10,000 miles either way from this area.

  The sole light came from the sky. Though it was not yet dawn, the light was a trifle brighter than that cast by the full moon on Earth. Giant stars of many colors, some so big they looked like chipped-off pieces of the moon, jam-packed the heavens. Bright sheets and streamers hung between the stars, behind them, and even, seemingly, in front of some of the brightest. These were cosmic gas clouds, glories that never ceased to thrill the more sensitive of humanity along The River.

  Sam Clemens, smacking his lips at the sour taste of the liquor he had drunk that evening and the even sourer taste of the dream, stumbled across the floor. He opened his eyes completely when he reached the desk, picked up a lighter, and applied the extended hot wire to a fish-oil lamp in a stone bracket.

  He opened a port and looked out toward The River. A year ago he would have seen only a flat plain about a mile and a half wide and covered with short, tough, bright-green grass. Now it was a hideous mass of piled-up earth, deep pits and many buildings of bamboo and pine containing brick furnaces. These were his steel mills (so called), his glass factory, his smelters, his cement mills, his forges, his blacksmith shops, his armories, his laboratories, and his nitric and sulfuric-acid factories. A half a mile away was a high wall of pine logs enclosing the first metal boat he would build.

  Torches flared to his left. Even at night the men were digging out the siderite chunks, hauling up pieces of the nickel-iron.

  Behind him had been a forest of thousand-foot-high irontrees, red pine, lodgepole pine, black oak, white oak, yew trees and thick stands of bamboo. These had stood on the foothills; the hills were mostly still there but the trees, except for the irontrees, were all gone, along with the bamboo. Only the huge irontrees had withstood the steel axes of Clemens' people. The tall grasses had been cut down and their fibers chemically treated to make ropes and paper, but their roots were so tough and so tangled that there had not been enough reason to chop them out. The labor and the materials used in chopping through the roots of the short grass of the plains to get to the metal there had been very expensive. Not in terms of money, because that did not exist, but in terms of sweat, worn-out stone and dulled steel.

  Where this area had been beautiful with its many trees and bright grass and the colored blooms of the vines that covered the trees, it was now like a battlefield. It had been necessary to create ugliness to build a beautiful boat.

  Sam shivered at the wet and chilly wind which always came late at night from upRiver. He shivered also at the thought of the desolation. He loved beauty and nature's order and he loved the park-like arrangement of the valley, whatever else he thought about this world. Now he had made it hideous because he had a dream. And he would have to extend that hideousness, because his mills and factories needed more wood for fuel, for paper, for charcoal. All that his state possessed was used up and he had about used up all that Cernskujo to the immediate north and Publiujo to the immediate south would trade him. If he wanted more he would have to war on his closest neighbors or make arrangements for trading with the more distant states or those just across The River. Or else conquer them and take their wood away from them. He did not want to do that; he abhorred war in principle and could barely stand it in practice.

  But if he was to have his Riverboat he had to have wood as fuel for his factories.

  He also had to have bauxite and cryolite and platinum if he was to have aluminum generators and motors.

  The nearest source of all three was in Soul City, that nation twenty-six miles downRiver dominated by Elwood Hacking, who hated whites.

  So far, Sam had been able to trade iron weapons for bauxite, cryolite, cinnabar and platinum. Sam's own state, Parolando, needed the weapons badly. Adding one burden to the other, Hacking insisted that Parolando use its own -men to mine and transport the ore.

  Sam sighed deeply. Why in hell hadn't the Mysterious Stranger di
rected the meteorite to fall right by the bauxite deposits? Then, when Sam and Bloodaxe's Vikings had sailed into this area immediately after the meteorite had struck, they could have claimed the land that was now Soul City for their own. When Hacking arrived, he would have been forced to join Clemens or to leave.

  Still, even with the Stranger's powers, it could not be easy to deflect a hundred-thousand-ton iron-nickel siderite from its course and make it fall only twenty-six miles from the bauxite and other minerals. Actually the Stranger had supposed that he had hit the target on the bull's eye. He had told Sam, before he disappeared on some unknown mission, that the minerals were upRiver, all within a seven-mile range. But he had been mistaken. And that had made Sam both glad and angry. He was angry because the minerals were not all within his reach, but he was also happy that the Ethicals could make a mistake.

  That fact did not help the humans imprisoned forever between sheer mountains 20,000 feet high in a valley about 9.9 miles wide on the average. They would be imprisoned for thousands of years, if not forever, unless Samuel Langhorne Clemens could build his Riverboat.

  Sam went to the unpainted pine cabinet, opened a door and pulled out an opaque glass bottle. It held about twenty ounces of bourbon donated by people who did not drink. He downed about three ounces, winced, snorted, slapped his chest and put the bottle back. Hah! Nothing better to start off the day with, especially when you woke up from a nightmare that should have been rejected by the Great Censor of Dreams. If, that is, the Great Censor had any love and regard for one of his favorite dream-makers, Sam Clemens. Maybe the Great Censor did not love him after all. It seemed that very few did love Sam anymore. He had to do things he did not want to do in order to get the boat built.

  And then there was Livy, his wife on Earth for thirty-four years.

  He swore, caressed a nonexistent moustache, reached back into the cabinet, and pulled the bottle out again. Another snort. Tears came, but whether engendered by the bourbon or the-thought of Livy, he did not know. Probably, in this world of complex forces and mysterious operations – and operators – the tears were caused by both. Plus other things which his hindbrain did not care to let him peep into at this moment. His hindbrain would wait until his forebrain was bent over, tying its intellectual shoestrings, and would then boot the posterior of said forebrain.

  He strode across the bamboo mats and looked through the port window. Down there, about two hundred yards away, under the branches of the irontree, was a round, conical-roofed, two-room hut. Inside the bedroom would be Olivia Langdon Clemens, his wife – his ex-wife – and the long, lanky, tremendously beaked, weak-chinned Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac, swordsman, libertine, and man-of-letters.

  "Livy, how could you?" Sam said. "How could you break my heart, the heart of Your Youth?"

  A year had passed since she had shown up with Cyrano de Bergerac. He had been shocked, more shocked than he had ever been in his seventy-four years on Earth and his twenty-one years on the Riverworld. But he had recovered from it. Or he would have recovered if he had not gotten another shock, though a lesser one. Nothing could exceed the impact of the first. After all, he could not expect Livy to go without a man for twenty-one years. Not when she was young and beautiful again and still passionate and had no reasonable hope of ever seeing him again. He had lived with a half dozen women himself, and he could not expect chastity or faithfulness from her. But he had expected that she would drop her mate as a monkey drops a heated penny when she found him again. Not so. She loved de Bergerac.

  He had seen her almost every day since the night she had first come out of the mists of The River. They spoke politely enough and sometimes they were able to crack their reserve and laugh and joke just as they had on Earth. Sometimes, briefly but undeniably, their eyes told each other that the old love was vibrating between them. Then, when he felt that he had broken out with longing, just like the hives, so he told himself later, laughing while he felt like crying, he had stepped toward her, despite himself, and she had stepped back to Cyrano's side if he happened to be there or looked around for him if he wasn't.

  Every night she was with that dirty, uncouth, big-nosed, weak-chinned, Adam's-appled, but colorful, strong-minded, witty, vigorous, talented, scary Frenchman. The virile frog, Sam muttered. He could imagine him leaping, croaking with lust, toward the white, blackly outlined, curving figure of Livy, leaping, croaking . . .

  He shuddered. This was no good. Even when he brought women up here secretly – though he did not have to hide anything – he could not quite forget her. Even when he chewed dreamgum he could not forget her. If anything, she sailed into the drug-tossed sea of his mind more strongly, blown by the winds of desire. The good ship Livy, white sails bellying out, the trim clean-cut curving hull . . .

  And he heard her laughter, that lovely laughter. That was the hardest thing to endure.

  He walked away and looked out through the fore ports. He stood by the oak pedestal and the big-spoked Riverboat's wheel he had carved. This room was his "pilothouse" and the two rooms behind made up the "texas." The whole building was on the side of the hill nearest to the plain. It was on thirty-foot stilts and could be entered through a staircase or ladder (to use a nautical term) on the starboard side or through a port directly from the hill behind the rear chamber of the texas. On top of the pilothouse was a large bell, the only metal bell in the world, as far as he knew. As soon as the water-clock in the corner struck six, he would clang the big bell. And the dark valley would slowly come to life.

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  Mists still overhung The River and the edge of the banks, but he could see the huge squat mushroom shape of the grailstone a mile and a half down the slope of the plain just by the water's edge. A moment later, he saw a boat, toy-size, emerge from the mists. Two figures jumped out and pulled the dugout onto the shore, then ran off to the right. The light from the skies was bright enough for Sam to see them, though he sometimes lost them when buildings intervened. After going around the two-story pottery factory, they cut straight into the hills. He lost them then, but it seemed that they were heading for John Plantagenet's log "palace."

  So much for the sentinel system of Parolando. Every quarter mile on The River's front was guarded by a hut on thirty-foot stilts with four men on duty. If they saw anything suspicious, they were to beat on their drums, blow their bone horns and light their torches.

  Two men slipping out of the fog to carry news to King John, ex-King John, of England?

  Fifteen minutes later Sam saw a shadow running between shadows. The rope attached to the small bell just inside the entrance rang. He looked through the starboard port. A white face looked up at him. Sam's own spy, William Grevel, famous wool merchant, citizen of London, died in 1401 in the Year of Our Lord. There were no sheep or, in fact, any mammals other than man along The River. But the ex-merchant had shown great aptitude for espionage, and he loved to stay up all night and skulk around.

  Sam beckoned to him; Grevel ran up the "ladder" and entered after Sam had unbarred the thick oak door.

  Sam said, in Esperanto, "Saluton, leutenanto Grevel. Kio estas?"

  (Translation: "Hello, Lieutenant Grevel. What's the matter?") Grevel said, "Bonan matenon, Estro. Ciu grasa ripono, Rego Johano, estas jus akceptita duo spionoj."

  (Translation: "Good morning, Boss. That fat rascal, King John, has just received two spies.")

  Neither Sam nor Grevel could understand each other's English, but they got along very well in Esperanto, except now and then.

  Sam grinned. Bill Grevel had let himself down from the limb of an irontree, passing directly over a sentry, and down a rope onto the edge of the roof of the two-story building. He had passed through the bedroom, where three women slept, and then crawled to the top of the staircase. John and his spies, a twentieth-century Italian and a sixth-century Hungarian, were at a table below Grevel. The two had reported the results of their trip upRiver. John was furious and justly so, from his viewpoint. S
am, hearing Grevel's report, also became furious.

  "He tried to assassinate Arthur of New Brittany? What is that man trying to do, ruin all of us?"

  He paced back and forth, stopped, lit a big cigar and began pacing again. Once he stopped to invite Grevel to a bite of cheese and a glass of wine.

  It was one of the ironies of Chance or, perhaps, of the Ethicals, for who knew what things they arranged, that King John of England and the nephew he had murdered most foully should have been located within thirty-two miles of each other. Arthur, Prince of Brittany of dead Earth, had organized the peoples among whom he found himself into a state he called New Brittany. There were very few old Bretons in the ten-mile-long territory he ruled, but that did not matter. New Brittany it was.

  It had taken eight months before Arthur had discovered that his uncle was his neighbor. He had traveled incognito to Parolando to verify with his own eyes the identity of the uncle who had slit his throat and dropped his weighted body into the Seine. Arthur wanted to capture John and keep him alive for as long as possible under exquisite torture. Killing John would only bar him, possibly forever, from getting his revenge. John, murdered, would awake the next day someplace thousands of miles away on The River.

  But Arthur had sent emissaries demanding that John be given up to him. These demands had been rejected, of course, though only Sam's sense of honor and his fear of John kept him from agreeing to Arthur's demands.

  Now John had sent four men to assassinate Arthur. Two had been killed; the others had escaped with minor wounds. This would mean invasion. Arthur not only had wanted revenge on John, he would like to get possession of the meteorite iron.

  Between Parolando and New Brittany, a fourteen-mile stretch of the right bank of The River was known as Chernsky's Land, or in Esperanto, Cernskujo. Chernsky, a sixteenth-century Ukrainian cavalry colonel, had refused an alliance with Arthur. But the nation immediately to New Brittany's north was governed by Iyeyasu. He was a powerful and ambitious person, the man who had established the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600 with its capital at Yedo, later called Tokyo. Sam's spies said that the Japanese and the Breton had met six times in a war conference.