Riverworld01- To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) Hugo Award Read online

He was close enough to the rod to seize it with one hand. The sudden checking of his fall brought his hip up against the rod with a painful impact. The skin of his hand burned as he slid down the rod, and then his other hand clutched the rod, and he had stopped. In front of him, on the other side of the rod, the bodies had started to fall. They descended with the velocity of a falling body on Earth, and each maintained its stretched-out position and the original distance between the body above and below. They even continued to revolve.

  It was then that the puffs of air on his naked sweating back made him twist around on the rod. Behind him, in the vertical row of bodies that he had just occupied, the sleepers were also falling. One after the other, as if methodically dropped through trapdoor spinning slowly, they hurtled by him. Their heads missed him by a few inches. He was fortunate not to have been knocked off the rod and sent plunging into the abyss along with them.

  In stately procession, they fell. Body after body shooting down on both sides of the rod, while the other rows of millions upon millions slept on.

  For a while, he stared. Then he began counting bodies; he had always been a devoted enumerator. But when he had counted 3,001, he quit. After that he gazed at the cataract of flesh. How far up, how immeasurably far up, were they stacked? And how far down could they fall? Unwittingly, he had precipitated them when his touch had disrupted the force emanating from the rod.

  He could not climb up the rod, but he could climb down it. He began to let himself down, and then he looked upward and he forgot about the bodies hurtling by him. Somewhere overhead, a humming was overriding the whooshing sound of the falling bodies.

  A narrow craft, of some bright green substance and shad like a canoe, was sinking between the column of the fallers and the neighboring column of suspended. The aerial canoe had no visible means of support, he thought, and it was a measure of his terror that he did not even think about his pun. No visible means of support. Like a magical vessel out of The Thousand and One Nights.

  A face appeared over the edge of the vessel. The craft stopped, and the humming noise ceased. Another face was by the first. Both had long, dark, and straight hair. Presently, the faces withdrew, the humming was renewed, and the canoe again descended toward him. When it was about five feet above him it halted. There was a single small symbol on the green bow: a white spiral that exploded to the right. One of the canoe's occupants spoke in a language with many vowels and a distinct and frequently recurring glottal stop. It sounded like Polynesian. Abruptly, the invisible cocoon around him reasserted itself. The falling bodies began to slow in their rate of descent and then stopped. The man on the rod felt the retaining force close in on him and lift him up. Though he clung desperately to the rod, his legs were moved up and then away and his body followed it. Soon he was looking downward. His hands were torn loose; he felt as if his grip on life, on sanity, on the world, had also been torn away. He began to drift upward and to revolve. He went by the aerial canoe and rose above it. The two men in the canoe were naked, dark-skinned as Yemenite Arabs, and handsome. Their features were Nordic, resembling these of some Icelanders he had known.

  One of them lifted a hand which held a pencil-sized metal object. The man sighted along it as if he were going to shoot something from it.

  The man fisting in the air shouted with rage and hate and frustration and flailed his arms to swim toward the machine.

  `I'll kill!' he screamed. `Kill! Kill!' Oblivion came again.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  God was standing over him as he lay on the grass by the waters and the weeping willows. He lay wide-eyed and as weak as a baby just born. God was poking him in the ribs with the end of an iron cane. God was a tall man of middle age. He had a long black forked beard, and He was wearing the Sunday best of an English gentleman of the 53rd year of Queen Victoria's reign.

  `You're late,' God said. `Long past due for the payment of your debt, you know.' 'What debt?' Richard Francis Burton said. He passed his fingertips over his ribs to make sure that all were still there.

  'You owe me for the flesh,' replied God, poking him again with the cane. `Not to mention the spirit. You owe for the flesh and the spirit, which are one and the same thing.' Burton struggled to get up onto his feet. Nobody, not every God, was going to punch Richard Burton in the ribs and get army without a battle.

  God, ignoring the futile efforts, pulled a large gold watch from His vest pocket, unsnapped its heavy enscrolled gold lid, looked at the hands, and said, `Long past due.' God held out His other hand, its palm turned up.

  `Pay up, sir. Otherwise, I'll be forced to foreclose.'

  `Foreclose on what? Darkness fell. God began to dissolve into the darkness. It was then that Burton saw that God resembled himself. He had the carne black straight hair, the same Arabic face with the dark stabbing eyes, high cheekbones, heavy lips, and the thrust-out, reply cleft chin. The same long deep scars, witnesses of the Somali javelin which pierced his jaws in that fight at Berbers, were on His cheeks. His hands and feet were small, contrasting with His broad shoulders and massive chest, and he had the long thick moustachios and the long forked beard that had caused the Bedouin to name Burton `the Father of Moustachios.' `You look like the Devil,' Burton said, but God had become just another shadow in the darkness.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  Burton was still sleeping, but he was so close to the surface of consciousness that he was aware that he had been dreaming. Light was replacing the night.

  Then his eyes did open. And he did not know where he was. A blue sky was above. A gentle breeze flowed over his naked body His hairless head and his back and legs and the palms of his hands wets against grass. He turned his head to the right – end saw a plain covered with very short, very green, very thick grass. The plain sloped gently upward for a mile. Beyond the plain was a range of hills that started out mildly, then became steeper and higher and very irregular in shape as they climbed toward the mountains. The hills seemed to run for about two and a half miles. All were covered with trees, some of which blazed with starlets, azures, bright greens, flaming yellows, and deep pinks. The mountains beyond the hills rose suddenly, perperpendicularly, and unbelievably high. They were black and bluish-green, looking like a glassy igneous rock with huge splotches of lichen covering at least a quarter of the surface.

  Between him and the hills were many human bodies. The closest one, only a few feet away, was that of the white woman who had been below him in that vertical row.

  He wanted to rise up, but he was sluggish and numb. All he could do for the moment, and that required a strong effort, was to turn his head to the left. There were more naked bodies there on a plain that sloped down to a river perhaps 10 yards away. The river was about a mile wide, and on its other side was another plain, probably about a mile broad and sloping upward to foothills covered with more of the trees and then the towering precipitous black and bluish-green mountains. That was the east, he thought frozenly. The sun had just risen over the top of the mountain there.

  Almost by the river's edge was a strange structure. It was gray red-flecked granite and was shaped like a mushroom. Its broad base could not be more than five feet high, and the mushroom top had a diameter of about fifty feet.

  He managed to rise far enough to support himself on one elbow.

  There were more mushroom-shaped granites along both sides, of the river.

  Everywhere on the plain were unclothed bald-headed human beings, spaced about six feet apart. Most were still on their backs and gazing into the sky. Others were beginning to stir, to look around, or even sitting up.

  He sat up also and felt his head and face with both hands. They were smooth.

  His body was not that wrinkled, ridged, bumpy, withered body of the sixty- nine- year- old which had lain on his deathbed. It was the smooth-skinned and powerfully muscled body he had when he was twenty-five years old. The same body he had when he was floating between those rods in that dream. Dream? It had seemed too
vivid to be a dream. It was not a dream.

  Around his wrist was a thin band of transparent material. It was connected to a six-inch-long strap of the same material. The other end was clenched about a metallic arc, the handle of a grayish metal cylinder with a closed cover.

  Idly, not concentrating because his mind was too sluggish, he lifted the cylinder. It weighed less than a pound, so it could not be of iron even if it was hollow. Its diameter was a foot and a half and it was over two and a half feet tall.

  Everyone had a similar object strapped to his wrist.

  Unsteadily, his heart beginning to pick up speed as his senses became unnumbed, he got to his feet.

  Others were rising, too. Many had faces which were slack or congealed with an icy wonder. Some looked fearful. Their eyes were wide and rolling; their chests rose and fell swiftly; their breaths hissed out. Some were shaking as if an icy wind had swept over them, though the air was pleasantly warm.

  The strange thing, the really alien and frightening thing, was the almost complete silence. Nobody said a word; there was only the hissing of breaths of those near him, a tiny slap as a man smacked himself on his leg; a low whistling from a woman.

  Their mouths hung open, as if they were about to say something.

  They began moving about, looking into each other's faces, sometimes reaching out to lightly touch another. They shuffled their bare feet, turned this way, turned back the other way, gazed at the hills, the trees covered with the huge vividly colored blooms, the lichenous and soaring mountains, the sparkling and green river, the mushroom-shaped stones, the straps and the gray metallic containers.

  Some felt their naked skulls and their faces.

  Everybody was encased in a mindless motion and in silence.

  Suddenly, a woman began moaning. She sank to her knees, threw her head and her shoulders back, and she howled. At the same time, far down the riverbank, somebody else howled.

  It was as if these two cries were signals. Or as if the two were double keys to the human voice and had unlocked it.

  The men and women and children began screaming or sobbing or tearing at their faces with their nails or beating themselves on their breasts or falling on their knees and lifting their hands in prayer or throwing themselves down and trying to bury their faces in the grass as if, ostrich-like, to avoid being seen, or rolling back and forth, barking like dogs or howling like wolves.

  The terror and the hysteria gripped Burton. He wanted to go to his knees and pray for salvation from judgment. He wanted mercy. He did not want to see the blinding face of God appear over the mountains, a face brighter than the sun. He was not as brave and as guiltless as he had thought. Judgment would be so terrifying, so utterly final, that he could not bear to think about it.

  Once, he had had a fantasy about standing before God after he had died. He had been little and naked and in the middle of a vast plain, like this, but he had been all alone. Then God, great as a mountain, had strode toward him And he, Burton, had stood his ground and defied God.

  There was no God here, but he fled anyway. He ran across the plain, pushing men and women out of the way, running around some, leaping over others as they rolled on the ground. As he ran, he howled, `No! No! No!' His arms windmilled to fend off unseen terrors. The cylinder strapped to his wrist whirled around and around.

  When he was panting so that he could no longer howl, and his legs and arms were hung with weights, and his lungs burned, and his heart boomed, he threw himself down under the first of the trees.

  After a while, he sat up and faced toward the plain. The mob noise had changed from screams and howls to a gigantic chattering. The majority were talking to each other, though it did not seem that anybody was listening. Burton could not hear any of the individual words. Some men and women were and kissing as if they had been acquainted is their previous lives, and now were holding each other to reassure each other of their identities and of their reality.

  There were a number of children in the great crowd. Not one was under five years of age, however. Like their elders, their heads were hairless. Half of them were weeping, rooted to one spot. Others, also crying out, were running back and forth, looking into the faces above them, obviously seeking their parents.

  He was beginning to breathe more easily. He stood up and turned around. The tree under which he was standing was a red pine (sometimes wrongly called a Norway pine) about two hundred feet tall. Beside it was a tree of a type he had never sees. He doubted that it had existed on Earth. (He was sure that he was not on Earth, though he could not have given any specific reasons at that moment.) It had a thick, gnarled blackish trunk and many thick branches bearing triangular six-feet-long leaves, green with scarlet facings. It was about three hundred feet high. There were also trees that looked like white and black oaks, firs, Western yew, and Lodgepole pine.

  Here and there were clumps of tall bamboo-like plants, and everywhere that there were no trees or bamboo was a grass about three feet high. There were no animals in sight. No insects and no birds. He looked around for a stick or a club. He did not have the slightest idea what was on the agenda for humanity, but if it was left unsupervised or uncontrolled it would soon be reverting to its normal state. Once the shock was over, the people would be looking out for themselves, and that meant that some would be bullying others.

  He found nothing useful as a weapon. Then it occurred to him that the metal cylinder could be used as a weapon. He banged it against a tree. Though it had little weight, it was extremely hard.

  He raised the lid, which was hinged inside at one end. The hollow interior had six snap-down rings of metal, three on each side and spaced so that each could hold a deep cup or dish or, rectangular container of gray metal. All the containers were empty. He closed the lid. Doubtless he would find out in time the function of the cylinder was.

  Whatever else had happened, resurrection had not resulted in bodies of fragile misty ectoplasm. He was all bone and blood and flesh.

  Though he still felt somewhat detached from reality, as if he had been disengaged from the gears of the world, he was emerging from his shock.

  He was thirsty. He would have to go down and drink from the river and hope that it would not be poisoned. At this thought, he grinned wryly, and stroked his upper lip. His finger felt disappointed. That was a curious reaction, he thought, and then he remembered that his thick moustache was gone. Oh, yes, he had hoped that the river water would not be poisoned. What a strange thought! Why should the dead be brought back to life only to be killed again? But he stood for a long while under the tree. He hated to go back through that madly talking, hysterically sobbing crowd to reach the river. Here, away from the mob, he was free from much of the terror and the panic and the shock that covered them like a sea. If he ventured back, he would be caught up in their emotions again.

  Presently, he saw a figure detach itself from the naked throng and walk toward him. He saw that it was not human.

  It was then that Burton was sure that this Resurrection Day was not the one which any religion had stated would occur. Burton had not believed in the God portrayed by the Christians, Moslems, Hindus, or any faith. In fact, he was not sure that he believed in any Creator whatsoever. He had believed in Richard Francis Burton and a few friends. He was sure that when he died, the world would cease to exist.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  Waking up after death, in this valley by this river, he had been powerless to defend himself against the doubts that existed is every man exposed to as early religious conditioning and to as adult society which preached its convictions at every chance.

  Now, seeing the alien approach, he was sure that there was some other explanation for this event than a supernatural one. There was a physical, a scientific, reason for his being here; he did not have to resort to Judeo- Christian- Moslem myths for cause.

  The creature, it, he – it undoubtedly was a male – was a biped about six feet eight inches tall. The pink-skinned body was ver
y thin; there were three fingers and a thumb on each hand and four very long and thin toes on each foot. There were two dark red spots below the male nipples on the chest. The face was semi-human. Thick black eyebrows swept down to the cheekbones and flared out to cover them with a brownish down. The sides of his nostrils were fringed with a thin membrane about a sixteenth of an inch long. The thick pad of cartilage on the end of his nose was deeply cleft. The lips were thin, leathery, and black. The ears were lobe-less and the convolutions within were non-human. His scrotum looked as if it contained many small testes.

  He had seen this creature floating in the ranks a few rows away is that nightmare place.

  The creature stopped a few feet away, smiled, and revealed quite human teeth. He said, `I hope you speak English. However, I can speak with same fluency in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, or Hindustani.' Burton felt a slight shock, as if a dog or an ape had spoken to him.

  `You speak Midwestern American English,' he replied. `Quite well, too. Although too precisely.' 'I thank you; the creature said. `I followed you because you seemed the only person with enough sense to get away from that chaos. Perhaps you have some explanation for this . . . what do you call it? . . . resurrection?' `No more than you,' Burton said. `In fact, I don't have any explanation for your existence, before or after resurrection.' The thick eyebrows of the alien twitched, a gesture which Burton was to find indicated surprise or puzzlement.

  `No? That is strange. I would have sworn that not one of the six billion of Earth's inhabitants had not heard of or seen me on TV.'

  `TV?'

  The creature's brows twitched again. `You don't know what TV. . .' His voice trailed, then he smiled again. `Of course, how stupid of me! You must have died before I came to Earth!

  'When was that?' The alien's eyebrows rose (equivalent to a human frown as Burton would find), and he said slowly, `Let's see. I believe it was, in your chronology, A.D. 2002. When did you die?'