R.W. II - The Fabulous Riverboat Page 6

  Moreover, he was a grown man and just would not be as happy as a boy on a raft. No, if he went journeying on The River, he needed protection, comfort and – undeniable – desire, authority. Also, there was his other great ambition to be pilot of a Riverboat. He had attained that for a while on Earth. Now, he would be a captain of a Riverboat, the largest, fastest, most powerful Riverboat that had ever existed, on the longest River in the world, a River that made the Missouri-Mississippi and all its tributaries, and the Nile, the Amazon, the Congo, the Ob, the Yellow River, all strung together, look like a little Ozark creek. His boat would be six decks high above the waterline, would have two tremendous side-wheels, luxurious cabins for the many passengers and crew, all of whom would be men and women famous in their time. And he, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain, would be the captain. And the boat would never stop until it reached the headwaters of The River, where the expedition would be launched against the monsters who had created this place and roused all of mankind again to its pain and disappointments and frustrations and sorrows.

  The voyage might take a hundred years, maybe two or three centuries, but that was all right. This world did not have much, but it had more than enough time.

  Sam warmed himself in the glow of his images, the mighty Riverboat, himself as captain in the wheelhouse, his first mate perhaps Mr Christopher Columbus or Mr Francis Drake, his Captain of Marines – no, not Captain, Major, since there would be only one aboard with the title of Captain – Sam Clemens, himself – his Major would perhaps be Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Ulysses S. Grant.

  A pinprick of a thought pierced the glorious balloon sailing along in the wind of his dream. Those two ancient bastards, Alexander and Caesar, would never submit long to a subordinate position. They would plot from the very beginning to seize the captainship of the paddle-wheeler. And would that great man, U. S. Grant, take orders from him, Sam Clemens, a mere humorist, a man of letters in a world where letters did not exist?

  The luminescent hydrogen of his images whistled out. He sagged. He thought of Livy again, so near but snatched away by the very thing that had made his other dream possible. She had been shown to him briefly, as if by a cruel god, and then taken away again. And was that other dream possible? He could not even find the vast store of iron that must be somewhere around here.

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  "You look tired and pale, Sam," Lothar said. Sam stood up and said, "I'm going to bed."

  "What, and disappoint that seventeenth-century Venetian beauty who's been making eyes at you all evening?" Lothar said.

  "You take care of her," Sam said. He walked away. There had been some moments during the past few hours when he had been tempted to take her off to his hut, especially when the whiskey from the grail had first warmed him. Now he felt listless. Moreover, he knew that his guilt would return if he did take Angela Sangeotti to bed. He had suffered recurrent pangs during the twenty years here with the ten women who had been his mates. And now, strangely enough, he would feel guilt not only because of Livy but because of Temah, his Indonesian companion for the last five years.

  "Ridiculous!" he had said to himself many times. "There is no rational reason why I should feel guilty about Livy. We've been separated for so long that we would be strangers. Too much has happened to both of us since Resurrection Day."

  His logic made no difference. He suffered. And why not? Rationality had nothing to do with true logic; man was an irrational animal, acting strictly in accordance with his natal temperament and the stimuli to which he was peculiarly sensitive.

  So why do I torture myself with things that cannot be my fault because I cannot help my responses?

  Because it is my nature to torture myself for things that are not my fault. I am doubly damned. The first atom to move on primeval Earth and to knock against another atom started the chain of events that have led, inevitably, mechanically, to my being here and walking through the dark on a strange planet through a crowd of aged youths from everywhere and every time to a bamboo hut where loneliness and guilt and self-recriminations, all rationally unnecessary but nevertheless unavoidable, await me.

  I could kill myself, but suicide is useless here. You wake up twenty-four hours later, in a different place but still the same man who jumped into The River. Knowing that another jump won't solve a thing and probably will make you even more unhappy.

  "Stone-hearted relentless bastards!" he said and shook his fist. Then he laughed sorrowfully and said, "But They can't help their hard hearts and cruelty any more than I can help what I am. We're all in it together."

  This thought did not, however, make him wish any the less to get his revenge. He would bite the hand that had given him eternal life.

  His bamboo hut was in the foothills under a large irontree. Although only a shack, it represented genuine luxury in this area, where stone tools to build houses were a rarity. The translatees had had to settle for makeshift housing, bamboo plants bent and tied together with grass ropes at the top and sides and covered with huge elephant-ear leaves from the irontrees. Of the five hundred varieties of bamboo in the valley, some could be split and made into knives, which, however, easily lost their edge.

  Sam entered his hut, lay down on the cot, and covered himself with several big towels. The faint sound of distant revelry disturbed him. After tossing for a while, he gave in to the temptation to chew a piece of dreamgum. There was no predicting what its effect might be: ecstasy, bright many-colored shifting shapes, a feeling that all was right with the world, a desire to make love, or abysmal gloom with monsters springing out of the darkness at him, recriminating ghosts from dead Earth, burning in the flames of hell while faceless devils laughed at his screams.

  He chewed and swallowed his saliva and knew at once that he had made a mistake. It was too late then. He continued to chew while he saw before him that time when he was a boy and had drowned, or at least was close to it, and would have drowned if he had not been dragged from the waters. That was the first time I died, he thought, and then, no, I died when I was born. That's strange, my mother never told me about that

  He could see his mother lying on the bed, hair tangled, skin pale, eyelids half-opened, jaw dropped. The doctor was working on the baby – himself, Sam – while he smoked a cigar. He was saying out of the corner of his mouth to Sam's father, "Hardly seems worth saving."

  His father said, "You had a choice between saving that and saving Jane?"

  The doctor had a shock of bright red hair, a thick drooping red moustache, and pale blue eyes. His face was strange and brutal. He said, "I bury my mistakes. You worry too much. I'll salvage this bit of flesh, though it's really not worth doing, and save her, too."

  The doctor wrapped him up and put him on the bed, and then the doctor sat down and began writing in a little black book. Sam's father said, "Must you write at a time like this?"

  The doctor said, "I must write, though I'd get more writing done if I didn't talk so much. This is a log I keep on all the souls I bring into the world. I intend some day to write a big case history of the infants, find out if any ever amounted to anything. If I can bring one genius, one, into this vale of heavy tears, I will think my life worthwhile. Otherwise, I've been wasting my time bringing thousands of idiots, hypocrites, dogs in the mangers, etc. into this sad place."

  Little Sam wailed, and the doctor said, "Sounds as if he's a lost soul before he's dead, don't he? As if he's bearing the blame for all the sins of the world on his tiny shoulders."

  His father said, "You're a strange man. Evil, I think. Certainly not God-fearing."

  "I pay tribute to the Prince of Darkness, yes," the doctor said.

  The room was filled with the odor of blood, the doctor's boozy breath and cigar and sweat.

  "What're you going to call him? Samuel? That's my name, too! It means 'name of God.' That's a joke. Two Samuels, heh? Sickly little devil, I don't think he'll live. If he does, he'll wish he hadn't"

  His father
roared, "Get out of my house, you devil's spawn! What kind of a man are you? Get out! I'll call in another doctor! I won't even let it be known that you attended my wife or had anything to do with this or was even in this house. I'll rid this house of your evil odor."

  The doctor, swaying, threw his dirty instruments into the bag and snapped it shut.

  "Very well. But you have delayed my passage through this miserable village of asses. I'm on my way to bigger and better things, my provincial friend. It was only out of the kindness of my heart that I took pity upon you because the quacks that serve this mud-hole were out of town. I left the comforts of the tavern to come here and save an infant who would be better off dead, infinitely better. Which reminds me, though I don't know why, that you must pay my fee."

  "I should throw you out of the house and pay you with nothing but curses!" Sam's father said. "But a man has to pay his debts no matter what the circumstances. Here's your thirty pieces of silver."

  "Looks more like paper to me," the doctor said. "Well you can call in your dispenser of pills, folly and death, but just remember that it was Doctor Ecks that dragged your wife and baby from the jaws of death. Ecks, the unknown quantity, the eternal passer-through, the mysterious stranger, the devil dedicated to keeping other poor devils alive, also dedicated to the demon whiskey, since I can't abide rum."

  "Out! Out!" Sam's father shouted. "Out before I kill you!"

  "There's no gratitude in this world," Doctor Ecks mumbled. "Out of nothing I come, through a world populated by asses I pass, and into nothing I go. Ecks equals nothing."

  Sweating, eyes open and rigid as those of a stone Apollo, Sam watched the drama. The scene and the actors were enclosed in a ball of pale yellow light through which veins of red shot like lightning and then faded out. The doctor turned his face once before he walked through the door of the house in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He took the cigar from his mouth and grinned mockingly, revealing long yellow teeth with two abnormally white, abnormally long canines.

  As if the scene were a film being shut off, it blinked out. Through the door which had been in Sam's birthplace and now was the door of the bamboo hut, another figure entered. It was momentarily silhouetted by the bright starlight, then slid into the shadows. Sam closed his eyes and steeled himself for another frightening experience. He groaned and wished he had not taken the dreamgum. Yet he knew that under the terror was a thread of delight. He hated and enjoyed this. The birth-drama was a fantasy, created by him to explain why he was the kind of man he was. But what was this shadowy figure moving silently and intently as death? From what deep cavern in his mind came this creature?

  A baritone voice spoke. "Sam Clemens! Do not be alarmed! I am not here to harm you! I come to help you!"

  "And what do you want in repayment for your help?" Sam said.

  The man chuckled and said, "You're the kind of human being I like. I chose well." "You mean I chose you to choose me," Sam replied.

  There was a pause of several seconds, and then the man said, "I see. You think I'm another fantasy inspired by the gum. I'm not. Touch me."

  "What for?" Sam said. "As a gum-inspired fantasy, you should know that you can be felt as well as seen and heard. State your business."

  "Entirely? That would take too long. And I don't dare take much time with you. There are others in this area who might notice. That would be too bad for me, since they are very suspicious. They know there is a traitor among them, but they don't have the slightest idea who it could be." "Others? They?" Sam answered. "They – we Ethicals – are doing field work in this area now," the figure said. "This is a unique situation, the first time that a completely unhomogenized assortment of humans has been thrown together. It presents a rare chance for study, and we are recording everything. I'm here as chief administrator, since I'm one of The Twelve."

  "I'll have to figure you out after I wake up," Sam replied.

  "You are awake, and I exist. I have objective reality. And, I repeat, I don't have much time."

  Sam started to sit up but was pushed back by a hand which somehow communicated a sense of great power, muscular and mental. Sam shivered upon feeling it. "You're one of Them," he whispered. "One of Them!"

  He gave up his idea of seizing the man and calling for help.

  "Of them, but not with them," the man said. "I'm with you human beings, and I intend to see that my people do not complete their filthy project. I have a plan, but a plan that will take much time, much patience, a slow and careful, devious development. I have contacted three humans now; you are the fourth. They are aware of parts of the plan but not all of it. If any one of them should be revealed and interrogated, he could tell the Ethicals only a little. The plan must unfold slowly and everything must appear accidental. "Just as the meteorite must appear accidental."

  Sam did start to sit up then but caught himself before the hand touched him. "It was no accident?"

  "No. I have known for some time of your dream of building a Riverboat and going to the end of The River. It would be impossible without iron. So I deflected the meteorite to bring its orbit within this planet's grip and cause it to crash near you. Not too near you, of course, otherwise you would have died and have been translated far from this area. There are safeguards to prevent such spatial matter from falling on the valley, but I managed to trip them out just long enough for the meteor to get through. Unfortunately, the guardians almost got to the repulsion system in time. When the system went back into action, its effect caused the meteorite to go off the course I'd planned. As a result, we – I mean you – almost got killed. It was just luck that you weren't. But then I've found out that what you call luck is on my side." "Then the falling star. . . ?" "Is a deliberately felled star, yes."

  Sam thought, if he knows so much about me, he must be one of the crew of the Dreyrugr. Unless he's able to make himself invisible. That isn't impossible. That egg-shaped ship I saw in the air was invisible; I only saw it because it was for some reason made visible very briefly. Maybe the lightning interfered with the apparatus that makes the ship invisible.

  Then, what am I thinking? This is just another dreamgum fantasy.

  The man said, "One of their agents is nearby! Listen carefully! The meteorite wasn't removed because we didn't have time. At least, that was my decision. It's buried under the plains and foothills ten miles from here. Go ten grailstones downRiver.

  "You'll be on the perimeter of the original crater, where several large masses and many small pieces are buried. Start digging. The rest is up to you. I'll help you when I can, but I can't do anything obvious."

  Sam's heart was beating so hard his own voice sounded muted. "Why do you want me to build a boat?"

  "You'll find out in time. For the present, be happy that you've been given what you need. Listen! There's a huge deposit of bauxite only five miles farther up, under the surface of the mountains, near the base. And near it is a small lode of platinum and two miles up from it, cinnabar." "Bauxite? Platinum?" "You fool!"

  There was the sound of hard breathing. Sam could almost hear the man's internal struggle to control his disgust and fury. Then, calmly, "You'll need bauxite for aluminum and platinum for a catalyst for the many things you'll have in your boat. I haven't got time to explain. There are several engineers in this area who'll tell you what to do with the minerals. I must go. He's getting closer! Just do what I say. And, oh, yes, there's flint thirty miles upRiver!"

  "But . . ." Sam said. The man was silhouetted briefly and was gone. Sam rose unsteadily and went to the door. Fires were still blazing on the banks, and small figures were capering in front of them. The stranger was gone. Sam went around to the back of the hut but there was no one there. He looked up at the sky, pale with great gas sheets and bright knots of white, blue, red and yellow stars. He had hopes he might catch a glimpse of a vehicle winking from visibility to invisibility. But there was nothing.

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  On returning to the hut, he was
startled by a huge figure standing dark and immobile before his door. His heart hammering, he said, "Joe?"

  "Yeah," answered the bass drum voice. Joe advanced to him and said, "There'th been thomone not human here. I can thmell him. He got a funny thtink, different than you humanth got. You know, it remindth me . . ."

  He was silent for a while. Sam waited, knowing that the ponderous stone wheels were grinding out the flour of thought. Then Joe said, "Vell, I'll be damned!" "What is it, Joe?"

  "It'th been tho long ago, it happened on Earth, you know, thometime before I got killed there. No, it couldn't be. Jethuth Chritht, if vhat you thay ith true about how long ago I lived, it mutht've been maybe a hundred thouthand yearth ago!" "Come on, Joe, don't leave me hanging up in the air."

  "Vell, you ain't going to believe thith. But you got to remember that my nothe hath a memory, too."

  "It ought to, it's bigger than your brain," Sam said. "Out with it, or are you trying to kill me with frustrated curiosity?"

  "All right, Tham. I vath on the track of a vifthangkruilth tribethman, they lived about ten mileth from uth on the other thide of a big hill that looked like . . ." "Never mind the details, Joe," Sam snapped.

  "Vell, it vath late in the day and I knew I vath getting clothe to my enemy becauthe hith printth were tho frethh. And then I heard a noithe that made me think maybe the guy I vath following had backtracked on me and I vath going to get hith club thyoved all the vay up instead of vithevertha. Tho I dropped to the ground and crawled tvardth the noithe. And gueth vhat I thaw? Great Thcott, vhy didn't I ever tell you thith before? Vat a dummy I am!"

  "I'll go along with that. So. . . ?"

  "Vell, the guy I vath trailing had gotten vind of me, though I don't know how, thinthe I'm ath thilent ath a veathel thneaking up on a bird, big ath I am. Anyvay, he had backtracked and might've come up behind me, maybe. But he vath lying on the ground, out cold ath a cavedigger'th ath. And there vere two humanth thtanding by him. Now, I'm ath brave ath the nektht guy and maybe braver, but thith vath the firtht time I ever thaw humanth, and it vath poththible I vath thcared. Cauthyiouth, anyvay.