The Fabulous Riverboat

by Philip José Farmer

  A captain reported that Kleomenes, the leader of Kleomenujo, had been found dead near the River-edge, where a piece of rock shrapnel had entered his skull. So ended the half-brother of the great Spartan, Leonidas, who defended the pass of Thermopylae. Or so he ended in this area, at least.

  Sam appointed some men to leave by boat immediately for the two countries. They were to inform them that Parolando did not intend to take vengeance if the new leaders would guarantee friendship to Parolando. John complained that he should have been consulted, and there was a short but savage argument. Sam finally agreed that John was right in principle, but there was no time to discuss certain matters. John informed him that, under the law, Sam had to take the time. Any decision had to be agreed upon by both of them.

  Sam hated to agree, but John was right. They couldn't be giving contradictory orders.

  They went together to inspect the factories. These were not badly damaged. The invaders had not, of course, wanted to wreck them since they had intended to use them. The amphibian, the Firedragon I, was untouched. Sam shuddered when he thought of what might have happened if it had been completed and had fallen into the hands of the enemy. With it, they could have crushed the Parolandoj in the center and dug in to fight on the perimeter until reinforcements came. He would set up a large special guard around the vehicle.

  He fell asleep after lunch in a Councilman's hut. It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when he was shaken awake. Joe was standing over him, breathing bourbon fumes from his tremendous proboscis. "The delegathyon from Thoul Thity jutht landed."

  "Firebrass!" Sam said, standing up from the chair. "I forgot all about him! What a time for him to show up!"

  He walked down to The River, where a catamaran was beached near the grailstone. John was already there, greeting the delegation, which consisted of six blacks, two Arabs, and two Asiatic Indians. Firebrass was a short, bronze-skinned, curly-haired man with big brown eyes flecked with green. His huge forehead and shoulders and thickly muscled arms contrasted with his skinny legs, making him look all top. He spoke in Esperanto at first but later used English. It was a very strange English, full of terms and slang that Sam did not understand. But there was a warmth and openness about Firebrass that made Sam feel good just to have him around.

  "We better go back to Esperanto," Sam said, smiling and pouring three more slugs of scotch into Firebrass' cup. "Is that spaceman's lingo or SoulCity dialect?"

  "Marsman's," Firebrass said. "SoulCity English is pretty wild, but the official language, of course, is Esperanto, though Hacking was considering Arabic. But he isn't too happy about his Arabs anymore," he added in a lower voice, looking at Abd ar-Rahman and AM Fazghuli, the Arab members of his delegation.

  "As you can see," Sam said, "we are in no condition to have a long, leisurely conference. Not now. We have to clean up, get information about what's going on outside Parolando and set up our defenses. But you are welcome, of course, and we'll get around to business within a few days."

  "I don't mind," Firebrass said. "I'd like to look around, if you don't mind."

  "I don't, but my co-Consul has to give his consent, too."

  John, smiling as if it hurt his teeth to be exposed to the air – and it probably did this time – said that Firebrass was welcome. But he would have to be accompanied by a guard of honor every time he left the quarters that would be assigned to him. Firebrass thanked him, but another delegate, Abdullah X, protested loudly and occasionally obscenely. Firebrass said nothing for a minute and then told Abdullah to be polite, since they were guests. Sam was grateful, though he wondered if the speech and Fire-brass' command had not been prearranged.

  It had not been easy to sit there and listen, though the vitriolics had been hurled at the white race in general and no one in particular. It troubled him, but Sam had to agree with Abdullah. He was right about conditions as they had been. But old Earth was dead; they were living in a new world.

  Sam personally conducted the delegates to three huts, side by side, owned by men and women who had been killed last night. Then he moved into a hut near the delegation.

  Drums boomed by the grailstone. After a minute, drums from across. The River thundered back an answer. The new chief of the Ulmaks wanted peace. The old chief, Shrubgrain, had been put to death, and his head would be delivered within the hour by canoe if peace could be arranged. Shrubgrain had failed his people by leading them to defeat.

  Sam gave orders to transmit a request for a conference with the new chief, Threelburm.

  Drums from Chernsky's Land said that Iyeyasu, who ruled a twelve-mile stretch of land between New Brittany and Kleomenujo, had invaded New Brittany. The news meant that the New Bretons would not be bothering Parolando, but it also worried Sam. Iyeyasu was a very ambitious man. Once he had consolidated his state with New Brittany he might decide he was strong enough to take Parolando.

  More drums. Publius Crassus sent his congratulations and warmest regards, and he would be visiting tomorrow to see what he could do to aid Parolando.

  And also to see how hard we've been hit and if we'd be easy pickings, Sam thought. So far, Publius had been cooperative, but a man who had served under Julius Caesar could have his own brand of Caesarism.

  Göring, his head wrapped in a bloody towel, staggered by, supported by two of his followers. Sam hoped he would take the hint and leave Parolando, but he didn't have much faith in the German's perceptiveness. He went to sleep that night while torches burned everywhere over the land and guards peered into the shadows and the mists. His sleep was troubled, despite his intense fatigue. He tossed and rolled and once he awoke, his heart beating, his skin cold, certain that there was a third person in the hut. He fully expected to see the shadowy figure of the Mysterious Stranger crouched by his bed. But nobody was there except the monstrous form of Joe stretched out on the huge bamboo bed near him.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  The next morning he arose unrefreshed in a refreshed world. The three-o'clock rain had washed away the blood and the stink of gunpowder. The bodies were gone, and the sky was clear and blue. Business as usual was resumed but without about four hundred and fifty men and women. Half of these were in the rendering factory; the rest, in the hospital. Those who wanted to be put out of their misery were given their wish. Time had been when an ax was the only euthanasiast but now, thanks to Parolando's technology, the work was done with a potassium cyanide pill.

  Some decided to stick it out. In time their limbs or eyes would grow back in. Those who could not take the pain boarded The Suicide Express, and the bodies they left behind went to the rendering factory.

  Sam's secretary had been killed. Sam asked Gwenafra if she would like to take Millie's place. Gwenafra seemed very pleased. The new position gave her a high status, and she had made no secret of the fact that she liked to be near Sam. Lothar von Richthofen, however, did not seem pleased.

  "Why shouldn't she be my secretary, regardless of her relationship to you?" Sam said.

  "There is no reason," Lothar said, "except that I might have a very good chance with her if she isn't around you much." "Let the best man win."

  "My sentiments, too, but I don't like your wasting her time or leading her on. You know that you won't take another hut-mate as long as Livy is here."

  "Livy has nothing to say about what I do," Sam said. "And don't forget that." Lothar smiled slightly and said, "Sure, Sam."

  Gwenafra tagged along with him, taking notes, sending messages, receiving them, arranging schedules and appointments. Though he was very busy, he found moments when he could talk and joke with her and he felt a warmth every time he looked at her. Gwenafra seemed to adore him.

  Two days passed. The twenty-four-hour shift on the amphibian was showing results. The machine would be completed in another two days. The SoulCity delegation strolled around with two of King John's men watching them. Joe Miller, who had gone back to his bed after the battle, said he was well again. Now Sam had both Gwenafr
a and the Titanthrop with him, and his world seemed much more comfortable, though it was a long way from being Utopia. Word came via the drum telegraph that Odysseus had loaded his ships with flints and would be back in a month. He had gone as commander of a ten-boat fleet to barter with the chieftainess of Selinujo. On Earth she had been Countess Huntingdon, Selina Hastings, born 1707, died 1791. She was now a member of the Church of the Second Chance and traded her flint with Parolando only because Parolando permitted Göring's missionaries to preach at will in its territory. In return for the flint, she had been promised a small metal steamboat in which she proposed to go up and down The River and preach. Sam thought she was fooling herself. The first place she put into she was liable to have her throat cut for the sake of the boat. But that was her business.

  The Councilmen met with the SoulCity delegation at a round table in the largest room in John's palace. Sam would have liked to put it off, since John was in a mood even uglier than usual. One of his women had tried to kill him, or so he claimed. He had been stabbed in the side before he broke her jaw and knocked her head against the corner of a table. The woman had died an hour later still unconscious, and John's word that she had attacked him first had to be accepted. Sam would have liked to have collected some neutral eyewitness account, but that was impossible.

  John was in pain from the stab wound, half drunk with bourbon as an anesthetic, and smarting because the woman had dared to defy him. He slumped in a large, high-backed, ornately carved oak chair covered with red hornfish leather. One hand was around a clay vessel full of whiskey, a cigarette dangled from his lips, and he glowered at everybody. Firebrass was talking.

  "Hacking once believed in total segregation of whites and nonwhites. He believed, fiercely believed, that whites could never accept, not soul-accept, non-white peoples – that is, the blacks, Mongolians, Polynesians, and Amerindians. The only way nonwhites could live with dignity, feel beautiful, be a people with its own personality and pride, was to follow the way of segregation. Equal but separate.

  "Then his leader, Malcolm X, quit the Black Muslims. Malcolm X saw that he was wrong. Not all whites were devils, racist fiends, any more than all blacks had flat noses. Hacking fled the states to live in Algeria and there he found that it was the attitude that made racism, not the color of the skin."

  Hardly an original or surprising discovery, Sam thought. But he had told himself that he would not interrupt.

  "And then the young whites of the Untied States, many of them, anyway, rejected their parents' prejudices, and they supported the blacks in their struggles. They got out on the streets and demonstrated, rioted, laid down their lives for the blacks. They genuinely seemed to like blacks, not because they thought they ought to, but because blacks were human beings and human beings can be liked or even loved.

  "Hacking, however, wasn't ever really at ease with an American white, try though he did to think of them as human beings. He was ruined, just as most whites, most older whites, were ruined. But he tried to like those whites who were on his side and he respected those young whites that told their parents, their white racist society, to go to hell.

  "Then he died, as everybody did, black or white. He found himself among ancient Chinese, and he wasn't very happy with them because they regarded all peoples except the Chinese as inferior."

  Sam remembered the Chinese of Nevada and California in the early '60's, the hard-working, thrifty, quiet, meek, cheery little brown men and women. They had taken abuse that most people would not give a mule, been spat upon, cursed, tortured, stoned, robbed, raped, suffered about every indignity and crime that a people could suffer. They had had no rights whatsoever, no protector or protection. And they had never murmured, never revolted, they just endured. What thoughts had those mask-like faces hidden? Had they, too, believed in the superiority of any Chinese to any white devil? If so, why had they not struck back, not once? They would have been massacred if they had, but they would have stood up like men for a few moments.

  But the Chinese believed in time; time was the Chinese ally. If time did not raise a father to fortune, time would raise his son. Or his grandson.

  Firebrass said, "So Hacking left in a dugout, floated downRiver, and after many thousands of miles settled down among some blacks of seventeenth-century A.D. Africa. Ancestors of the Zulus before they migrated to southern Africa. After a while he left them. Their customs were too repulsive, and they were too bloody-minded for him.

  "Then he lived in an area where the people were a mixture of Dark Age Huns and dark whites of the New Stone Age. They accepted him well enough, but he missed his own people, the American blacks. So he took off again and was captured by ancient Moabites and enslaved, escaped, was captured by ancient Hebrews and put into grail slavery, escaped again, found a little community of blacks who'd been pre-Civil War slaves and was happy for a while. But their Uncle Tom attitudes and their superstitions got on his nerves and he took off, sailed downRiver, and lived with several other peoples. Then, one day, some big blond whites, Germans of some kind, raided the people he was with and he fought and was killed.

  "He was resurrected here. Hacking became convinced that the only happy states on The River were going to be made up of people with similar colors, similar tastes, and of the same terrestrial period. Anything else just won't work. People here aren't going to change. Back on Earth he could believe in progress, because the young were flexible-minded. The old ones would die off, and then the children of the young whites would be even more free of racial prejudice. But here that just isn't going to take place. Every man's set in his ways. So, unless Hacking just happened to find a community of late-twentieth-century whites, he would find no whites without racial hatreds or prejudices. Of course, the ancient whites didn't have any against blacks, but they're too strange for a civilized man."

  Sam asked, "What's all this leading up to, Sinjoro Firebrass?"

  "We want a homogeneous nation. We can't get all late-twentieth-century blacks, but we can get as black a nation as possible. Now, we know that you have approximately three thousand blacks in Parolando. We would like to exchange our Dravidians, Arabs, any non-blacks, for your blacks. Hacking is making similar proposals to your neighbors, but he doesn't have any lever with them."

  King John sat up and said, loudly. "You mean he doesn't have anything they want?"

  Firebrass looked coolly at John and said, "That's about it. But we'll have a lever some day."

  "Do you mean when you have enough steel weapons?" Sam said. Firebrass shrugged.

  John crashed his empty cup down on the table. "Well, we don't want your Arabs or your Dravidians or any of your SoulCity dregs!" he shouted. "But I'll tell you what we will do! For every ton of bauxite or cryolite or ounce of platinum, we will give you one of our black citizens! You can keep your Saracen infidels or send them packing downRiver or drown them for all we care."

  "Wait a minute," Sam said. "We can't give our citizens away. If they want to volunteer, fine. But we don't just give anybody away. This is a democracy." Firebrass' expression had darkened at John's outburst.

  I wasn't suggesting that you give anybody away," he said. "We're not slave dealers, you know. What we want is a one-per-one voluntary exchange. The Wahhabi Arabs, whom ar-Rahman and Fazghuli represent, feel they're unwelcome at SoulCity and they would like to go where they could congregate in their own community, form a sort of Kasbah, you might say."

  Sam thought this sounded fishy. Why couldn't they do that just as well in SoulCity? Or why didn't they just get up and leave? One of the beauties of this world was that ties or property or dependence on income did not exist. A man could carry everything he owned on his back – and building another house was easy in a world where new bamboo grew at a rate of two inches a day.

  It was possible that Hacking wanted to get his people into Parolando so that they could spy or revolt when Hacking invaded.

  Sam said, "We'll put your proposition about the exchange to each individual. That's all we can d
o. Now, does Sinjoro Hacking plan to keep on supplying us with the minerals and with wood?"

  "As long as you keep on sending us raw ore and steel weapons," Firebrass said. "But Hacking is thinking of upping the price."

  John's fist smashed into the tabletop again. "We will not be robbed!" he shouted. "We are paying too much now! Don't push us, Sinjoro Firebrass, or you may find yourselves with nothing! Nothing at all – not even your lives!"

  "Take it easy, Your Majesty," Sam said quietly. To Firebrass he said, "John isn't feeling well. Please forgive him. However, he does have a point. We can be pushed only so far."

  Abdullah X, a very big and very black man, jumped up and pointed a big finger at Sam. In English, he said, "You honkies had better quit badmouthing us. We won't take any crap from you, Mister Whitey! None! Especially from a man that wrote a book like you did about Nigger Jim! We don't like white racists and we only deal with them because there's nothing else we can do just now."

  "Take it easy, Abdullah," Firebrass said. He was smiling and Sam wondered if Abdullah's speech was the second part of a well-prepared program. Probably, Firebrass was similarly wondering if John's explosions had been rehearsed. Actors didn't have to be politicians, but politicians had to be actors.

  Sam groaned and said, "Did you read Huckleberry Finn, Sinjoro X?" Abdullah, sneering, said, "I don't read trash."

  "Then you don't know what you're talking about, do you?" Abdullah's face darkened. Firebrass grinned.

  "I don't have to read that racist crap, man!" Abdullah shouted. "Hacking told me all about it and what he says is good enough for me!"

  "You read it and then come back and we'll discuss it," Sam said.

  "You crazy?" Abdullah said. "You know there aren't any books on this world."

  "Then you lost out, didn't you?" Sam said. He was trembling a little; he wasn't used to being talked to like this by a black man. "Anyway," Sam said, "this isn't a literary tea-and-discussion group. Let's stick to the issue."