The Classic Philip Jose Farmer 1952-1964 Page 11

  I looked back from time to time, but I saw no sign of the Ass. There was no guarantee he wasn’t on our trail, however. He could have been lost in the great mass of people we’d encountered. These carried baskets and bottles and torches and were, as I found out from conversation with a man, latecomers going to view the departure of the bone-boat from the foot of Main Street.

  “Rumor says that Mahrud—may his name be bull—will raise the dead at the foot of the hill the Fountain of the Bottle spurts from. Whether that’s so or not, we’ll all have fun. Barbecue, Brew, and bundling make the world go round.”

  I couldn’t argue with that statement. They certainly were the principal amusements of the natives.

  During our progress down Adams Street, I learned much about the valley’s setup. My informant was very talkative, as were all his fellow Brew-drinkers. He told me that the theocracy began on the lowest plane with his kind, Joe Doe. Then there were the prayer-men. These received the petitions of the populace, sorted them out, and passed on those that needed attention to prophets like the Forecaster Sheed, who screened them. Then these in turn were relayed to demigods like Polivinosel, Albert Allegory, and a dozen others I had not heard of before then. They reported directly to Mahrud or Peggy.

  Mahrud handled godhood like big business. He had delegated various departments to his vice-presidents such as the Ass, who handled fertility, and Sheed, who was probably the happiest forecaster who’d ever lived. Once a professor of physics at Traybell and the city’s meteorologist, Sheed was now the only weatherman whose prophecies were one hundred percent correct. There was a good reason for that. He made the weather. All this was very interesting, but my mind wasn’t as intent on the information as it should have been. For one thing, I kept looking back to see if Polivinosel was following us. For another, I worried about Alice’s attitude toward me. Now that I had hair, would she stop loving me? Was it a—now I was doing it—fixation that attracted her to me, or was it a genuine affection?

  The next moment, I did leap. It was not from joy, however. Somebody behind me had given a loud braying laugh. There was no mistaking the Ass’s hee-haw. I whirled and saw, blazing golden in both the light of the moon and the torches, the figure of Polivinosel galloping toward us. There were people in the way, but they ran to get out of his path, yelling as they did so. His hoofs rang on the pavement even above their cries. Then he was on us and bellowing, “What now, little man? What now?”

  Just as he reached us, I fell flat on my face. He was going so fast, he couldn’t stop. His hoofs didn’t help him keep his balance either, nor did Alice when she shoved him. Over he went, carrying with him bottles and baskets of fruit and corn and little cages of chickens. Women shrieked, baskets flew, glass broke, chickens squawked and shot out of sprung doors—Polivinosel was buried in the whole mess.

  Alice and I burst through the crowd, turned a corner and raced down to Washington Street, which ran parallel to Adams. There was a much smaller parade of pilgrims here, but it was better than nothing. We ducked among these while, a block away, the giant throat of the Ass called again and again, “Little man, what now? What now, little man?”

  I could have sworn he was galloping toward us. Then his voice, mighty as it was, became smaller, and the fast cloppety-clop died away.

  Panting, Alice and I walked down Washington. We saw that the three bridges across the Illinois had been destroyed. A native told us that Mahrud had wrecked them with lightning one stormy night.

  “Not that he needed to worry about crossing to the other side,” he said, swiftly making the sign of the bull. “All of what used to be East Onaback is now sacred to the owner of the Bottle.”

  His attitude verified what I had noticed already. These people, though uninhibited by the Brew in other respects, retained enough awe to give the higher gods plenty of privacy. Whatever the priests relayed to them was enough to keep them happy.

  When we came to the foot of Main Street, which ran right into the Illinois, we looked for a place to rest. Both of us were bone-weary. It was almost dawn. We had to have some sleep, if we wanted to be at all efficient for our coming work.

  First, though, we had to watch the Fountain. This was a thin arc of the Brew which rose from the Bottle, set on the top of the bluffs across the river from Onaback, and ended in the middle of the waters. The descending moon played a rainbow of wavering and bright colors along it. How that trick was done, I didn’t know, but it was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen.

  I studied it and concluded that some force was being exerted linearly to keep the winds from scattering it into fine spray. And I saw how easy it would be to locate the Bottle. Follow the fountain to its source, a mile and a half away. Then destroy it, so the power of the Bull would be gone. After that, sit back and watch the Marines glide in and begin the conquest of Onaback.

  It was as simple as that. We looked around some more and found a place on the riverside park to lie down. Alice, snuggled in my arms, said, “Dan, I’m awfully thirsty. Are you?”

  “No,” she said, kissing my chest, “I’m not. I’m sticking with you. After all, I want to see if your hair turns out curly or straight. And don’t tell me!”

  “I won’t. But you’re going to get awfully thirsty before this assignment is over.”

  Secretly, I was pleased. If she wanted to be with me, then my returning hair wasn’t putting a roadblock in the course of true love. Maybe it was the real thing, not just something laid by a trauma and hatched by a complex. Maybe…

  There I was in the tavern in the little town ofCroncruachshin. I’d just fulfilled my mother’s deathbed wish that I visit her mother, who was living when I stepped aboard the plane for Ireland and died the day I set foot on the green sod.

  After the funeral, I’d stopped in Bill O’basean’s for a bite, and Bill, who was wearing horns like a Texas steer’s, picked the bottle off the shelf where he kept his other curios, and bellowed, “Danny Temper, look at the bull on the side o‘ that piece of glass! Know what that means? ’Tis the bottle that Goibniu, the smith o‘ the gods, fashioned. ’Twill run forever with magical brew for him that knows the words, for him that has a god hidden within himself

  “What happened to the owner?” I said, and he answered, “Sure and bejasus, all the Old Ones—Erse and Greek and Dutch and Rooshian and Chinee and Indian—found they was crowdin each other, so they had a trooce and left Airth and went elsewhere. Only Pan stayed here for a few centuries, and he flew away on the

  wings o’light when the New Ones came. He didn’t die as the big mouths claim.

  “And then, in the eighteenth century, the New Ones, who’d become Old Ones now, thought that, begorry, they’d better be leavin,‘ too, now that they was crowdin each other and makin a mess o’things. But the Bottle o’ Goibniu has been lyin‘ around here collectin dust and stories and here ye are, my bhoy, for ten American dollars, and what do ye intend doin with it?”

  So I said, “I’ll wrap it up and send it on to my old professor as a joke. It’ll tickle him when I tell him it’s for sure the genuine everflowing bottle o‘ Goibniu.”

  And Bill O’basean winked and said, “And him a teetotaller. What’ll his wife, the old hag and wicked witch, say to that?”

  And I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the old prof thought this really was Goibniu’s bottle?”

  And Bill, who had now become the Rational Man, looked severely at me and said to the squirrel crouched on his shoulder, “O Nuciferous One, what this simpleton don’t know nohow! Hasn’t he intellect enough, begorry, to see that the bottle was destined from its making for Boswell Durham? ‘Bos,’ which is Latin for the bovine species, and ‘well,’ a combination of the Anglo-Saxon ‘wiella,’ meaning fountain or well-spring ‘wiellan’ or ‘wellen? meaning to pour forth, and the Anglo-Saxon adverb ’well meaning worthily or abundantly, and the adjective, meaning healthy. Boswell—the foun-taining, abundantly healthy bovine. And of course, Durham. Everybody knows that that is sign and symbol for
a bull.” “And he was born under Taurus too,” I said.

  But I wouldn’t do it, and I awoke moaning, with the sun in my eyes and Alice shaking me and saying, “Dan, Dan, what’s the matter?”

  I told her about my dream and how it was mixed up with things that had actually happened. I told her how I had bought this bottle from O’basean and sent it to the Professor as a hoax. But she didn’t pay much attention because, like me, she had one thing uppermost in the cells of both body and mind. Thirst. Thirst was a living lizard that, with a hot rough skin, forced its swelling body down our throats and pulsed there, sucking moisture from us with every breath.

  She licked her dry, cracked lips and then, glancing wistfully toward the river, where bathers shouted and plunged with joy, asked, “I don’t suppose it’d hurt me if I sat in it, do you?”

  “Be careful,” I said, my words rattling like pebbles in a dried gourd. I ached to join her, but I couldn’t even get near the water. I was having trouble enough combatting the panic that came with the odor of the Brew blowing from the river on the morning breeze.

  While she waded out until the water was hip-deep and cupped it in her hands and poured it over her breasts, I examined my surroundings in the daylight. To my left was a warehouse and a wharf. Tied alongside the latter was an old coal barge that had been painted bright green. A number of men and women, ignoring the festivities, were busy carrying bags and long mummy-shaped bundles from the warehouse to the boat. These were the bones that had been dug up recently. If my information was correct, they’d be ferried across to the other side after the ceremonies.

  That was fine. I intended to go over with them. As soon as Alice came back out of the water, I’d unfold my plans to her and if she thought she could go through with it, we’d…

  A big grinning head emerged from the water just behind Alice. It belonged to one of those jokers on every beach who grabs you from behind and pulls you under. I opened my mouth to yell a warning, but it was too late. I don’t suppose I’d have been heard above the crowd’s noise, anyway.

  After sputtering and blowing the water out, she stood there with the most ecstatic expression, then bent over and began drinking great mouthfuls. That was enough for me. I was dying within, because she was now on the enemy’s side, and I’d wanted so badly to do something for her that I hurt. But I had to get going before she saw me and yelled, “Come on in, Dan, the beer’s fine!”

  I trotted through the crowd, moaning to myself at losing her, until I came to the far end of the warehouse, where she couldn’t possibly see me enter. There, under the cool cavernous roof, I paused until I saw a lunch-basket sitting by a pile of rags. I scooped it up, untied one of the bags, put the basket inside, and hoisted the bag over my shoulder. I stepped, unchallenged, into the line of workers going out to the barge. As if I belonged there, I briskly carried my burden over the gangplank.

  But instead of depositing it where everybody else was, I walked around the mountain of bags. Out of view on the riverside, I took the basket out and dumped the bones inside the bag over the railing into the river. I took one peek around my hiding place. Alice was nowhere to be seen.

  Satisfied she would not be able to find me, and glad that I’d not disclosed my plans to her last night, I took the basket and crawled backward into the bag. Once there, I succumbed to the three things that had been fighting within me—grief, hunger, and thirst. Tears ran as 1 thought of Alice. At the same time, I greedily devoured, in rapid succession, an orange, a leg and breast of chicken, a half-loaf of fresh bread, and two great plums.

  I crouched within the thick leather bag like—I couldn’t help thinking—an embryo within its sac. I was sweating so much that I felt as if I were floating in amniotic fluid. The outside noises came through dimly; every once in a while I’d hear a big shout.

  When the workers quit the barge, I stuck my head out long enough to grab some air and look at the sun. It seemed to be about eleven o’clock, although the sun, like the moon, was so distorted that I couldn’t be sure. Our scientists had said the peculiar warmth of the valley and the elongation of the sun and moon were due to some “wave-focusing force field” hanging just below the stratosphere. This had no more meaning than calling it a sorcerer’s spell, but it had satisfied the general public and the military.

  About noon, the ceremonies began. I ate the last two plums in the basket, but I didn’t dare open the bottle at its bottom. Though it felt like a wine-container, I didn’t want to chance the possibility that the Brew might be mixed in it.

  From time to time, I heard, intermingled with band music, snatches of chants. Then, suddenly, the band quit playing and there was a mighty shout of, “Mahrud is Bull—Bull is all—and Sheed is the prophet!”

  The band began playing the Semiramis overture. When it was almost through, the barge trembled with an unmistakable motion. I had not heard any tug, nor did I think there was one. After all I’d seen, the idea of a boat moving by itself was just another miracle.

  The overture ended in a crash of chords. Somebody yelled, “Three cheers for Albert Allegory!” and the crowd responded.

  The noises died I could hear, faintly, the slapping of the waves against the side of the barge. For a few minutes, that was all. Then heavy footsteps sounded close by. I ducked back within the bag and lay still. The steps came very near and stopped.

  The rumbling unhuman voice of The Allegory said, “Looks as if somebody forgot to tie up this bag.”

  Another voice said, “Oh, Al, leave it. What’s the difference?”

  I would have blessed the unknown voice except for one thing—it sounded so much like Alices.

  I’d thought that was a shock, but a big green four-fingered hand appeared in the opening of the bag’s mouth and seized the cords, intending to draw them close and tie them up. At the same time, the tag, which was strung on the cord, became fixed in my vision long enough for me to read the name.

  Mrs. Daniel Temper.

  I had thrown my mothers bones into the river!

  For some reason, this affected me more than the fact that I was now tied into a close and suffocating sack, with no knife to cut my way out. The voice of The Allegory, strange in its saurian mouth-structure, boomed out. “Well, Peggy, was your sister quite happy when you left her?”

  Temper,“ said the voice, which I now realized was Peggy Rourke’s.

  “After we’d kissed, as sisters should who haven’t seen each other for three years, I explained everything that had happened to me. She

  , started to tell me of her adventures, but I told her I knew most of

  ,! them. She just couldn’t believe that we’d been keeping tabs on her

  ‘ ’and her lover ever since they crossed the border.“

  “Too bad we lost track of him after Polivinosel chased them down Adams Street,” said Allegory. “And if we’d been one minute earlier, we’d have caught him, too. Oh, well, we know he’ll try to destroy the Bottle—or steal it. He’ll be caught there.”

  “If he does get to the Bottle,” said Peggy, “he’ll be the first man to do so. That F.B.I, agent only got as far as the foot of the hill, remember.”

  “If anybody can do it,” chuckled Allegory, “Dan H. Temper can. Or so says Mahrud, who should know him well enough.” i “Won’t Temper be surprised when he finds out that his every move since he entered Mahrudland has been not only a reality, but a symbol of reality? And that we’ve been leading him by the nose through the allegorical maze?”

  Allegory laughed with all the force of a bull-alligator’s roar.

  “I wonder if Mahrud isn’t asking too much of him by demanding that he read into his adventures a meaning outside of themselves? For instance, could he see that he entered this valley as a baby enters the world, bald and toothless? Or that he met and conquered the ass that is in all of us? But that, in order to do so, he had to lose his outer strength and visible burden—the water-tank? And then operate upon his own strength with no source of external strength to fall back on?
Or that, in the Scrambled Men, he met the living punishment of human self-importance in religion?”

  Peggy said, “He’ll die when he finds out that the real Pol-ivinosel was down South and that you were masquerading as him.”

  “Well,” rumbled Allegory, “I hope Temper can see that Mah-rud kept Polivinosel in his asinine form as an object lesson to everybody that, if Polivinosel could become a god, then anybody could. If he can’t, he’s not very smart.”

  I was thinking that I had, strangely enough, thought that very thing about the Ass. And then the cork in the bottle in the basket decided to pop, and the contents—Brew—gushed out over my side.

  I froze, afraid that the two would hear it. But they went on talking as if they hadn’t noticed. It was no wonder—the Allegory’s voice thundered on.

  “He met Love, Youth, and Beauty—which are nowhere to be found in abundance except in this valley—in the form of Alice Lewis. And she, like all three of those qualities, was not won easily, nor without a change in the wooer. She rejected him, lured him, teased him, almost drove him crazy. She wanted him, yet she didn’t. And he had to conquer some of his faults—such as shame of his baldness and toothlessness—before he could win her, only to find out his imagined faults were, in her eyes, virtues.”

  “I don’t know. I wish I’d first taken the form of the Sphinx and asked him her questions, so he’d have had a clue to what was expected of him. He’d have known, of course, that the answer to the Sphinx is that man himself is the answer to all the old questions. Then he might have seen what I was driving at when I asked him where Man—Modern Man—was going.”

  “And when he finds the answer to that, then he too will be a god.”

  “If!” said Allegory. “If! Mahrud says that Dan Temper is quite a few cuts above the average man of this valley. He is the reformer, the idealist who won’t be happy unless he’s tilting his lance against some windmill. In his case, he’ll not only have to defeat the windmills within himself—his neuroses and traumas—he’ll have to reach deep within himself and pull up the drowned god in the abyss of himself by the hair. If he doesn’t, he’ll die.”