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

  Frigate said, `I was in a hospital in Western Samoa, dying of cancer, wondering if I would be buried next to Robert Louis Stevenson. Not much chance, I was thinking. Still, I had translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into Samoan . . . Then, the news came. People all over the world were falling dead. The pattern of fatality was obvious. The Tau Cetan satellite was radiating something that dropped human beings in their tracks. The last I heard was that the U.S., England, Russia, China, France, and Israel were all sending up rockets to intercept it, blow it up. And the scanner was on a path which would take it over Samoa within a few hours. The excitement must have been too much for me in my weakened condition. I became unconscious. That is all I remember!

  'The interceptors failed,' Ruach said. `The scanner blew them up before they even got close.'

  Burton thought he had a lot to learn about post-1890, but now was not the time to talk about it. `I suggest we go up into the hills,' he said. `We should learn what type of vegetation grows there and if it can be useful. Also, if there is any flint we can work into weapons. This Old Stone Age fellow must be familiar with stone working. He can show us how.' They walked across the mile-broad plain and into the hills. On the way, several others joined their group. One was a little girl, about seven years old, with dark blue eyes and a beautiful face. She looked pathetically at Burton, who asked her in twelve languages if any of her parents or relatives were nearby. She replied in a language none of them knew. The linguists among them tried every tongue at their disposal, most of the European speeches and many of the African or Asiatic: Hebrew, Hindustani, Arabic, a Berber dialect, Romany, Turkish, Persian, Latin, Greek, Pushtu.

  Frigate, who knew a little Welsh and Gaelic, spoke to her. Her eyes widened, and then she frowned. The words seemed to have a certain familiarity or similarity to her speech, but they were not close enough to be intelligible.

  `For all we know,' Frigate said, `she could be an ancient Gaul She keeps using the word Gwenafra. Could that be her name?' `We'll teach her English,' Burton said. `And we'll call her Gwenafra.' He picked up the child in his arms and started to walk with her. She burst into tears, but she made no effort to free herself. The weeping was a release from what must have been almost unbearable tension and a joy at finding a guardian.

  Burton bent his neck to place his face against her body. He did not want the others to see the tears in his eyes.

  Where the plain met the hills, as if a line had been drawn, the short grass ceased and the thick, coarse Esparto-like grass, waist-high, began. Here, too, the towering pines, red pines and Lodgepole pines, the oaks, the yew, the gnarled giants with scarlet and green leaves, and the bamboo grew thickly. The bamboo consisted of many varieties, from slender stalks only a few feet high to plants over fifty feet high. Many of the trees were overgrown with the vines bearing huge green, red, yellow, and blue flowers.

  `Bamboo is the material for spear-shafts,' Burton said, `pipes for conducting water, containers, the basic stuff for building houses, furniture, boats, charcoal even for making gunpowder. And the young stalks of some may be good for eating. But we need stone for tools to cut down and shape the wood' They climbed over hills whose height increased as they neared the mountain. After they had walked about two miles as the crow flies, eight miles as the caterpillar crawls, they were stopped by the mountain. This rose in a sheer cliff-face of some blue-black igneous rock on which grew huge patches of a blue-green lichen. There was no way of determining how high it was, but Burton did not think that he was wrong in estimating it as at least 20,000 feet high. As far as they could see up and down the valley, it presented a solid front.

  `Have you noticed the complete absence of animal life?' Frigate said.

  `Not even an insect.' Burton exclaimed. He strode to a pile of broken rock and picked up a fist-sized chunk of greenish stone. `Chert,' he said. `If there's enough, we can make knives, spearheads, adzes, and axes. And with them build houses, boats, and many other things.'

  `Tools and weapons must be bound to wooden shafts,' Frigate said. `What do we use as binding material? 'Perhaps human skin,' Burton said.

  The others looked shocked. Burton gave a strange chirruping laugh, incongruous in so masculine-looking a man. He said, `If we're forced to kill in self-defense or lucky enough to stumble over a corpse some assassin has been kind enough to prepare for us, we'd be fools not to use what we need. However, if any of you feel self-sacrificing enough to offer your own epidermises for the good of the group, step forward! We'll remember you in our wills.' ` Surely, you're joking,' Alice Hargreaves said. `I can't say I particularly care for such talk.'

  Frigate said, `Hang around him, and you'll hear lots worse,' but he did not explain what he meant.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  Burton examined the rock along the base of the mountain. The blue-black densely grained stone of the mountain itself was some kind of basalt. But there were pieces of chert scattered on the surface of the earth or sticking out of the surface at the base. These looked as if they might have fallen down from a projection above, so it was possible that the mountain was not a solid mass of basalt. Using a piece of chert, which had a thin edge, he scraped away a patch of the lichenous growth. The stone beneath it seemed to be a greenish dolomite. Apparently the pieces of chert had come from the dolomite, though there was no evidence of decay or fracture of the vein.

  The lichen could be Parmelia saxitilis, which also grew on old bones, including skulls, and hence, according to The Doctrine of Signatures, was a cure for epilepsy and a healing salve for wounds.

  Hearing stone banging away on stone, he returned to the group. All were standing around the subhuman and the American, who were squatting back to back and working on the chert. Both had knocked out rough handaxes. While the others watched, they produced six more. Then each took a large chert nodule and broke it into two with a hammerstone. Using one piece of the nodule, they began to knock long thin flakes from the outside rim of the nodule. They rotated the nodule and banged away until each had about a dozen blades.

  They continued to work, one a type of man who had lived a hundred thousand years or more before Christ, the other the refined end of human evolution, a product of the highest civilization (technologically speaking) of Earth, and, indeed, one of the last men on Earth – if he was to be believed.

  Suddenly, Frigate howled, jumped up, and hopped around holding his left thumb. One of his strokes had missed its target. Kazz grinned, exposing huge teeth like tombstones. He got up, too, and walked into the grass with his curious rolling gait. He returned a few minutes later with six bamboo sticks with sharpened ends and several with straight ends. He sat down and worked on one stick until he had split the end and inserted the triangular chipped-down point of an axe head into the split end. This he bound with some long grasses.

  Within half an hour, the group was armed with hand-axes, spears with bamboo hafts, daggers, and spears with wooden points and with stone tips.

  By then Frigate's hand had quit hurting so much and the bleeding had stopped. Burton asked him how he happened to be so proficient in stone working.

  `I was an amateur anthropologist,' he said. `A lot of people – a lot relatively speaking – learned how to make tools and weapons from stone as a hobby. Some of us got pretty good at it, though I don't think any modern ever got as skillful and as swift as a Neolithic specialist. Those guys did it all their lives, you know.

  'Also, I just happen to know a lot about working bamboo, too, so I can be of some value to you.' They began walking back to the river. They paused a moment on top of a tall hill. The sun was almost directly overhead. They could see for many miles along the river and also across the river. Although they were too far away to make out any figures on the other side of the mile-wide stream, they could see the mushroom-shaped structures there. The terrain on the other side was the same as that on theirs. A mile-wide plain, perhaps two and a half miles of foothills covered with trees. Beyond, the straight-up face of an insurmountable b
lack and bluish-green mountain.

  North sad south, the valley ran straight for about ten miles. Then it curved, and the river was lost to sight.

  `Sunrise must come late and sunset early,' Burton said. `Well, we must make the most of the bright hours: At that moment, everybody jumped and many cried out. A blue flame arose from the top of each stone structure, soared up at least twenty feet, then disappeared. A few seconds later, a sound of distant thunder passed them. The boom struck the mountain behind them and echoed.

  Burton scooped up the little girl in his arms and began to trot down the hill. Though they maintained a good pace, they were forced to walk from time to time to regain their breaths. Nevertheless, Burton felt wonderful. It had been so many years sum he could use his muscles so profligately that he did not want to stop enjoying the sensation. He could scarcely believe that, only a short time ago, his right foot had been swollen with gout, and 32°F ice. His heart had beaten wildly if he climbed a few steps.

  They came to the plain and continued trotting, for they could see that there was much excitement around one of the structures. Burton swore at those in his way and pushed them aside. He got black looks but no one tried to push back. Abruptly, he was in the space cleared around the use. And he saw what had attracted them. He also smelled it.

  Frigate, behind him, said, `Oh, my God′ and tried to retch on his empty stomach.

  Burton had seen too much in his lifetime to be easily affected by grisly sights. Moreover, he could take himself to one remove from reality when things became too grim or too painful. Sometimes, he made the move, the sidestepping of things as they were, with an effort of will. Usually, it occurred automatically. In this case the displacement was done automatically.

  The corpse lay on its side and half under the edge of the mushroom top. Its skin was completely burned off, and the naked muscles were charred. The nose and ears, fingers, toes, and the genitals had been burned away or were only shapeless stubs.

  Near it, on her knees, was a woman mumbling a prayer in Italian. She had huge black eyes, which would have been beautiful, if they had not been reddened and puffy with tears. She had a magnificent figure, which would have caught all his attention under different circumstances.

  `What happened?' he said.

  The woman stopped praying and looked at him. She got to her feet and whispered, `Father Giuseppe was leaning against the rock; be said he was hungry. He said he didn't see much sense in being brought back to life only to starve to death. I said that we wouldn't die, how could we? We'd been raised from the dead, and we'd be provided for. He said maybe we were in hell. We'd go hungry and naked forever. I told him, not to blaspheme, of all people he should be the last to blaspheme. But he said that this was not what he'd been telling everybody for forty years would happen and then . . . and then. . . .'

  Burton waited a few seconds, and then said, `And then?'

  `Father Giuseppe said that at least there wasn't any hellfire but that that would be better than starving for eternity. And then the flames reached out and wrapped him inside them and there was a noise like a bomb exploding, and he was dead, burned to death It was horrible, horrible.'

  Burton moved north of the corpse to get the wind behind him, but even here the stench was sickening. It was not the odor as much as the idea of death that upset him. The first day of the Resurrection was only half over and a man was dead. Did this mean that the resurrected were just as vulnerable to death as to Earth life? If so, what sense was there to it? Frigate had quit trying to heave on an empty stomach. Pie and shaking, he got to his feet and approached Burton. He kept his back turned to the dead man.

  `Hadn't we better get rid of that?' he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  'I suppose so,' Burton said coolly. `It's too bad his skin is ruined, though.' He grinned at the American. Frigate looked even more shocked.

  `Here,' Burton said. `Grab hold of his feet, I'll take the other end We'll toss him into the river.' `The river?' Frigate said.

  `Yaws. Unless you want to carry him into the hills and chop out a hole for him there.'

  `I can't,' Frigate said, and walked away. Burton looked disgustedly after him and then signaled to the subhuman. Kazz grunted and shuffled forward to the body with that peculiar walking- on- the- side- of- his- feet gait. He stooped over and, before Burton could get hold of the blackened stumps of the feet, Kazz had lifted the body above his head, walked a few steps to the edge of the river, and tossed the corpse into the water. It sank immediately and was moved by the current along the shore. Kazz decided that this was not good enough. He waded out after it up to his waist and stooped down, submerging himself gar a minute. Evidently he was shoving the body out into the deeper part.

  Alice Hargreaves had watched with horror. Now she said `But that's the water we'll be drinking!'

  `The river looks big enough to purify itself,' Burton said. `At any rate, we have more things to worry about than proper sanitation procedures.' Burton turned when Monat touched his shoulder and said, `look at that.'

  The water was boiling about where the body should be. Abruptly a silvery-white-finned back broke the surface.

  `It looks as if your worry about the water being contaminated is in vain,' Burton said to Alice Hargreaves. `The river has scavengers. I wonder . . . I wonder if it's safe to swim?'

  At least, the subhuman had gotten out without being attacked. He was standing before Burton, brushing the water off his hairless body, and grinning with those huge teeth. He was frighteningly ugly. But he had the knowledge of a primitive man, knowledge which had already been handy in a world of primitive conditions. And he would be a damned good man to have at your back in a fight. Short though he was, he was immensely powerful. Those heavy bones afforded a broad base for heavy muscles. It was evident that he had, for some reason, become attached to Burton. Burton liked to think the savage, with a savage's instincts, `knew' that Burton was the man to follow if he would survive. Moreover, a subhuman or pre-human, being closer to the animals, would also be more psychic. So he would detect Burton's own well-developed psychic powers and would feel an affinity to Burton, even though he was Homo sapiens.

  Then Burton reminded himself that his reputation for psychism had been built up by himself and that he was half charlatan. He had talked about his powers so much, and had listened to his wife so much, that he had come to believe in them himself. But there were moments when he remembered that his `powers' were at least half-fake.

  Nevertheless, he was a capable hypnotist, and he did believe that his eyes radiated a peculiar extra-sensory power, when he wished them to do so. It may have been this that attracted the half-man.

  ′The rock discharged a tremendous energy,' Lev Roach said. `It must have been electrical. But why? I can't believe that the discharge was purposeless.'

  Burton looked across the mushroom-shape of the rock. The gray cylinder in the center depression seemed to be undamaged by the discharge. He touched the stone. It was no warmer than might have been expected from its exposure to the sun.

  Lev Roach said, `Don't touch it! There might be another..' and he stopped when he saw his warning was too late.

  'Another discharge?' Burton said. `I don't think so. Not for some time yet anyway. That cylinder was left here so we could learn something from it.

  He put his hands on the top of the mushroom structure and jumped forward. He came up and onto the top with an ease that gladdened him. It had been so many years since he had felt so young and so powerful. Or so hungry.

  A few in the crowd cried out to him to get down off the rock before the blue flames came again. Others looked as if they hoped that another discharge would occur. The majority were content to let him take the risks.

  Nothing happened, although he had not been too sure he would not be incinerated. The stone felt only pleasantly warm on his bare feet.

  He walked over the depressions to the cylinder and put his fingers under the rim of the cover. It rose easily. His heart beating with
excitement, he looked inside it. He had expected the miracle, and there it was. The racks within held six containers, each of which was full.

  He signaled to his group to come up. Kazz vaulted up easily. Frigate, who had recovered from his sickness, got onto the top with an athlete's ease. If the fellow did not have such a queasy stomach, he might be an asset, Burton thought. Frigate turned and pulled up Alice, who came over the edge at the ends of his heads.

  Why they crowded around him, their heads bent over the interior of the cylinder, Burton said, `It's a veritable grain Look! Steak, a thick juicy steak! Bread and butter! Jam! Salad! And what's that? A package of cigarettes? Yaas! And a cigar! And a cup of bourbon, very good stuff by its odor! Something . . . what is it?'

  `Looks like sticks of gum,' Frigate said. 'Unwrapped. And that must be a . . . what? A lighter for the smokes?'