Riverworld Short Stories

by Philip José Farmer

  Davis spoke more hotly than he had intended. “Nonsense! In our first life, faith and faith alone had the answers, faith in the divine work as recorded in the Bible. As on Earth, so here.”

  “But there is no Holy Scripture here.”

  “In our minds!” Davis said loudly. “It’s recorded here!” And he tapped a fingerpoint against his temple.

  “As you know, no afterlife depicted in any religion faintly resembles this one. However, we do not argue. We state the truth and move on, leaving the truth behind us yet also taking it with us. But truth is arrived at when one ceases thinking. That’s hard to do, we admit. Yet, if we can think about abandoning thought, we will be able to quit thinking. Thus, with that barrier to mental osmosis removed, the molecules of truth penetrate the diaphragm.”

  “Lunacy! Sheer lunacy! And blasphemy!”

  Faustroll went through the doorway. Over his shoulder, he said, “We go, yet that is an illusion. The memory of this event remains in your mind. Thus, we are still here; we have not left.”

  Andrew Davis sighed. He sure had a lot to put up with. Why didn’t he just take French leave and continue his quest up-River? Why didn’t he? He had compelling reasons not to. One, if he were caught sneaking our of Ivar’s domain, he’d be a slave and probably flogged. Two, if he did get out of the kingdom’s boundaries, he still would not be safe from recapture for several days. The kingdoms for a fifty-mile stretch up the River had an agreement to return slaves to the states from which they had run away. Three, he could take the guaranteed foolproof way of escape. But, to do that, he’d have to kill himself. Then he’d be resurrected far away, but the thought of killing himself was hard to contemplate.

  Bur, though his mind knew that he’d live again, his body didn’t. His cells fiercely resisted the idea of suicide; they insisted on survival. Furthermore, he loathed the idea of suicide, though it was not rationally based. As a Christian, he would sin if he killed himself. Was it still a sin on the Riverworld? He doubted that very much. But his lifelong conditioning against it made him act as if it were.

  Also, if he did do away with himself, he had a fifty-fifty chance of being translated downstream instead of upstream. If that happened he’d have to travel past territory he’d already covered. And he could be captured and enslaved again by any of hundreds of states before he even got to Ivar’s country.

  If he awoke far up the River, he might have the goal of his quest behind him. Not until he had come to the end of the River would he know that he had skipped it. Then he would have to retrace his route.

  What if the story of the woman who gave birth in the Valley was false? No, he would not consider that. He had not only faith but logic behind his belief. This world was a final test for those who believed in Jesus as their savior. Pass this test, and the next stage would be the true paradise. Or the true Hell.

  The Church of the Second Chance had some false doctrines, and it was another trap set by Satan. But the Devil was subtle enough to have planted some true doctrines among the false ones. The Second Chancers did not err in claiming that this world did offer all souls another opportunity to wash off their spiritual filth. What that church overlooked or deliberately ignored was that it also gave Satan a second chance to grab those who had eluded his clutches on Earth.

  He looked through the wide, arched, and glassless window. Prom his height, he could see the hills and the plain and the River and the plain, hills, and mountains on the opposite bank. Arpad (died A.D. 907) ruled that twelve-mile-long area. He was the chief of the seven Mongolian tribes, called Magyar, who had left the Don River circa A.D. 889 in what would be Russia and migrated westward to the Pannonian Plains. This was the area that would become Hungary. Arpad had been resurrected among a population that was partly ancient Akkadian, partly Old Stone Age southeast Asiatics, and ten percent of miscellaneous peoples. Though he was a Magyar, a tiny minority in this area, he had became king. That testified to his force of personality and to his ruthless methods.

  Arpad was Ivar’s ally and also a partner in the dam project. His slaves worked harder and longer and were treated much more harshly than Ivar’s. The Norsemen was less severe and more generous with his slaves. He did not want to push them to the point of revolt or of suicide. Arpad’s slaves had rebelled twice, and the number of suicides among them was far higher than among Ivar’s.

  Nor did Ivar trust Arpad. That was to be expected. Ivar trusted no one and had good reason not to rely on the Magyar. His spies had told him that Arpad had boasted, when drunk, which was often, that he would kill Ivar when the dam was finished.

  If the Dane planned to jump the gun and slay Arpad first, he had not said so. Though he drank deeply at times, he reined in his tongue. At least, he did so concerning matters of state.

  Davis was convinced that one of the two kings was nor going to wait for the dam to be completed. Sometime, probably during the next two years, one was going to attack the other. Davis, on the principle that the lesser of two evils was to be preferred, hoped that Ivar would win. Ideally, each would knock the other off. Whichever happened, Davis was going to try to flee the area during the confusion of the battle.

  4

  He must have been looking through the window longer than he had thought. Faustroll had left the tower and was walking downhill, the fishing pole on his shoulder. And, some paces behind him, was the inevitable spy, a woman named Groa. She, too, carried a fishing pole, and, as Davis watched, she called to the Frenchman. He stopped, and they began talking. A moment later, they were side by side and headed for the River.

  Groa was a redheaded beauty, daughter of a ninth-century Norwegian Viking, Thorsteinn the Red, son of Olaf the White and that extraordinary woman, Aud the Deep-Minded. Thorsteinn had been killed in a battle after conquering the northern part of Scotland. It was this event that caused Aud to migrate to Iceland and become ancestress of most Icelanders of the twentieth century.

  No doubt, Thorsteinn was somewhere on the River and battling some foe while trying to get power over the foe or else battling to keep a toe from getting power over him. Power had been the main fuel of humankind on Earth. As on Earth, so here. So far. Until the Savior—Savioress?—grew up and worked God’s will on His creations.

  Groa must have been ordered by Ivar to attach herself to Faustroll. She was to find out if his story was true. Though the king had seemed to accept Faustroll at face value, he would wonder if the fellow had been sent by Arpad to assassinate him. Groa would test him, probe him, and go so far as to lie with him if it was necessary. Perhaps, even if it was not necessary. She was a lusty woman. Then she’d report to Ivar later.

  Davis sighed. What a life the afterlife was! Why couldn’t everybody live in peace and trust? If they could not all love each other, they could at least be tolerant.

  They could not do this for the same reason they had not done so on Earth. It was the nature of Homo Sapiens. Of most of men and women, anyway. But…their situation was so different here. It was set up so that none need work hard for food and housing and other necessities. If people could all be pacifists and honest and compassionate, they would need no government by others. The Frenchman was right, though Davis hated admitting it even to himself. Given a new type of people, anarchy could be workable here.

  Obviously, Whoever had placed humanity here had designed the Rivervalley so that humans, not having to spend so much time working, had time to advance themselves spiritually. But only those who understood this would advance themselves, change themselves for the better, and go on to whatever stage the Whoevers had built for them.

  The Whoevers, however, had to be God. For Davis, there was no doubt or mystery about the identity of the creator of this place. The big mystery was why He had prepared a halfway house for the once-dead instead of the heavenly mansion the Bible had described.

  He admitted to himself that the Bible had been very vague about the specifics of the abode of the saved, the saints. It had been much more concrete about the abode of the damned
.

  He could only accept that God, in His infinite wisdom, knew what he was doing.

  Why, as so many complained, had not God given them some reassurance? A sign? A beacon toward which they could go as a moth could fly to the flame? Though that was not the best of comparisons, now he considered it. Anyway, where was the sign, the beacon, the writing in the sky?

  Davis knew. It was the birth of a baby to a virgin. In a world where men and women were sterile, one woman had been the exception. She had been impregnated with the Holy Spirit, and she had conceived. God had performed a miracle. The infant, so the story went, was female. At first, hearing this, Davis had been shocked. But, thinking about it calmly and logically, trying to overcome his preconceptions, he had concluded that he should not be upset, not kick against the pricks. On Earth, the Savior had been a male. Here, the Savior was a female. Why not?

  God was fair-minded, and who was he to question the Divine Being?

  “Davis!” a harsh voice said behind him. He jumped and whirled, his heart beating hard. Standing in the doorway was Sharkko the Shyster, the ever-egregious slave of whom he had dreamed last night.

  “Hustle your ass, Davis! The Great Whore of Babylon wants you for a treatment! Right now!”

  “I’ll tell the queen what you said about her,” Davis said. He did not intend to do so, but he wanted to see the loathsome fellow turn pale. Which he did.

  “Ah, she won’t believe you,” the slave said. “She hates your guts. She’d take my word against yours any time. Anyway, I doubt she’d be insulted. She’d think it was a compliment.”

  “If it wasn’t against my nature, I’d boot you in the rear,” Davis said.

  The slave, his color now restored, snorted. He turned and limped down the hall. Davis left the room. He watched the man as he walked behind him. Though the man had been resurrected in his twenty-five-year-old body, his vision restored to 20/20, he was now a human wreck. His right leg had been broken in several places and reset wrong. His nose had not been reset after the bridge had been shattered. He could not breathe properly because of his nose and some ribs that had also lacked proper resetting. One eye had been knocked out and was not yet fully regrown. His face twisted and leered with a tic.

  All of this had resulted from a beating by slaves whose overseer he had been. Unable any longer to endure his bullyings, kicks, and other unjust treatment, they had worked on him late one night and thus worked our their hatred of him. His hut had been too dark for him to identify his attackers, though he, and everybody else, knew his men were the malefactors. If you could fairly call them malefactors. Most people thought the deed was justified self-defense.

  Ivar thought so, too, after hearing testimony. He decided that Sharkko had broken the rules laid down by the king. These were mainly for the sake of efficiency, not of humanitarianism. But they had been disregarded, and Sharkko’s back was bloody from forty lashes with a fish-hide whip. Each of the overseer’s slaves had administered a stroke. Ivar, witnessing this, had been highly amused.

  Sharkko had then been degraded to a quarry slave. But his injuries had kept him from doing well at the hard work, and he had been made a tower slave after six months. Ivar used him for, among other things, a human bench when he wished to sit down where a chair was unavailable.

  The Shyster had been so named by a Terrestrial client who was now a citizen of Ivar’s kingdom. From what the client said, he had been cheated by Sharkko and had been unable to find justice in the court. The ex-client was among those who had beaten Sharkko.

  The Shyster had been indiscreet enough to tell some cronies that he meant to revenge himself on all who had wronged him. Though Davis did not think that he had earned Sharkko’s hatred, he was among those named for some terrible retribution. The Shyster had not been so full of braggadocio that he had said anything about revenging himself on Ivar. He knew what would happen to him if the king heard about such a threat.

  Sharkko, hunched over, dragging one foot and mumbling to himself, continued on down the hall. Sharkko was a veritable Caliban, Davis thought, as he followed the monster down the hall to a steep and spiraling staircase.

  He felt unusually uneasy. It seemed to him that events were coming to a head, a big, green, and pus-filled boil on the face of this kingdom. The coming conflict between Arpad and Ivar, the arrival of the grotesque and disquieting Faustroll, the increasing tension between himself and the queen, and Sharkko’s hatred added up to a situation that could pop open—like a boil—at any time. He could feel it. Though he could not logically predict that the eruption would occur soon, he sensed it.

  Or, perhaps, this was caused by his internal conflicts. He himself was ready to break open and out, much as he wanted to wait until the right moment for flight.

  The virgin mother and the baby were waiting for him up the River. They did not know it, of course. But he was to play a strong part in the events that would bring on the revelation of the second Savior to this world. Though it might be egotistic to think so, he was sure of it.

  Me entered the large room where Queen Ann waited for him. She was on the osteopathic table that he had built. But, spread out naked there, she looked as if she were waiting for a lover. Her two attendants giggled when they saw him. They were blacks who had been slaves of an early-twentieth-century Arabian family on Earth. They had been free for only one year after their resurrection. Now they were slaves again.

  They should be sympathizing with his plight. Instead, they were amused.

  5

  Massage my inner thigh muscles,” Ann said. “They’re very tight.”

  She kept talking softly while laughing loudly between sentences. Her remarkably bright and leaf-green eyes never left his face. Though he kept it expressionless, he longed to snarl at her, spit in her face, and then vomit on her. The Jezebel! The Scarlet Women! The Great Whore of Babylon!

  “When you’re on your back, rotating your pelvis, your legs up in the air for a long time, you put a strain on those muscles,” she said. “It’s almost an equal strain when I’m on top. Sometimes I have to rest between up-and-downs and hip gyrations. But then I squeeze down on him with my sphincter muscle and so don’t really get a rest. It is the sphincter, isn’t it, Doctor?”

  He knew the human body so well he did not have to see what he was doing. His head turned away from her, his eyes half closed, he kneaded her flesh. How soft her skin was! What a muscle tone! Sometimes, when he was in that drowsy twilight state between dreaming and awakening, he knew his fingers were working on flesh. Not hers, of course. The reflex was caused by a digital memory, as it were, of the thousands of bodies he had treated while on Earth.

  “Don’t get too close to the king’s personal property,” she said. “You touch it, and he might cut your hands off.”

  If he did that, Davis thought, scores of the males in the kingdom would be without hands.

  “You’re not much of a man,” she said. “A real man’s tallywhacker would be lifting that towel right off his waist, rip the Velcro apart.”

  The slave girls giggled though they did not understand English. But they had heard similar phrases in Esperanto for a long time. They knew that she was saying something taunting and demeaning.

  Davis envisioned closing his hands around the queen’s throat. It wouldn’t take long.

  Then he prayed. Oh, Lord! Save me from such sinful thoughts!

  “Perhaps,” he said, “I should massage your knees, too? They seem to be rather stiff.”

  She frowned and stared hard at him. The she smiled and laughed.

  “Oh! You’re suggesting…? Yes, do. I have spent a certain amount of rime on my knees. But they’re on pillows, so it’s not so bad. However…”

  Instead of flying into a rage, as he had expected, she was amused. She also looked somewhat triumphant, as if goading him into saying something insulting to her, even an innuendo, was a victory. However, she probably did not regard his comments as an insult. The bitch was more likely to think he had compliment
ed her.

  What did he care what she thought? To be honest with himself, he cared a lot. Unless she was stopped by Ivar, she could make his life unbearable, torture him, do anything with or to him. Davis had not heard any stories about her being cruel, except for her sexual teasing, which could not be ranked with torture or killing. Rut he had no guarantee that she might not become so. Especially in her dealings with him.

  Ann Pullen was a fellow American, though a nauseating example as far as he was concerned. She had been born about 1632 in Maryland. Her family had been Quakers, but when it converted to Episcopalianism, she had gone to hell. Those were her own words. She had been married four times to tobacco plantation owners in Virginia and Maryland. She had survived them all.

  No wonder, Davis thought. She’d wear any man out, if nor from her incessant sexual demands and infidelity, then from her TNT temper and willfulness.

  Mostly, she had lived in Westmoreland County, Virginia, which was between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. In her day, the area had many thick forests and large swamps but no roads. Travel was mainly by river or creek. Nor did the plantations resemble those of a later era. There were no beautiful many-pillared mansions and broad well-kept lawns. The owners’ houses were modest, the stables were likely to be made of logs, and chickens and hogs roamed the yards. Pig stealing was common even among the plantation owners. Cash was scarce, the chief currency was tobacco. The people were unusually hot-tempered and litigious, though no one knew why.

  By her own testimony, Ann had once been sentenced to ten lashes on her bare shoulders because of her libelous and scandalous speeches against a Mister Presley. She also had once attacked her sister-in-law with bare hands.

  It had been recorded in the Order Book of the county in A.D. 1677 that Ann Pullen had encouraged her daughter Jane to become “the most remarkable and notorious whore in the province of Virginie.” But Davis had to admit that, in the strict sense of the word, she was not a whore. She fornicated because she liked to do so and never took money.