R.W. VI - Riverworld and Other Stories
Page 26
'Doubled in ugliness,' the girl's lips shaped.
Red gave her the finger. The girl, her head turned to look behind her, was startled at first, but she laughed and turned to the boy and said something. Red thought for a minute that the boy might back up the car and come storming out, but after slowing down, the car speeded up. The two had thrown their heads back as if they were laughing.
Red shrugged. He'd seen this reaction many times before. People were always shocked when they uncovered the conspiracy of his genes to overthrow the human face. Then they laughed.
He started down the ladder below the manhole. Bleek said, 'How's your poem coming?'
Red wondered why he was asking him that, but he answered, 'I've given up on The Queen of Darkness, No, that's wrong. She's given up on me. Anyway, she was never serious. All she ever did was flirt with me. She isn't going to kiss me, like she does real poets.'
'You're a little strange,' Bleek said. 'But then I got a lot of strange ones among my boys. Sewer work seems to attract them, but of course this is California. So you ain't going to write poetry any more?'
'I've had it,' Red said. 'All I've wanted for the past two years is to write four perfect lines. To hell with epics, especially epics about sewers. All I wanted was four lines that would make me remembered forever, and I'd have settled for two. Two lines to blaze in the eyes of the world so it wouldn't see the face of the man behind them. That wasn't much to ask, but it was too much. She's kissed me off for good. She doesn't come in my dreams any more. It's just the rats that come now.'
Bleek looked distressed. However, he often looked that way.
The planes of his face naturally formed themselves into a roadmap of grief.
'You saying this is the end of the line for you?'
'As a poet, yes. And since I'm half poet, though a bad one, only half a man is going to survive.'
Bleek didn't seem to know what to say.
Red said, 'See you,' and he climbed on down the ladder. He and Ringo picked up their tools and lunchbuckets and walked toward their work. Somewhere ahead of them something had clogged up the stream, and they had to find it and remove it.
They passed through areas where permanent lights blazed overhead and then through dark places where the only light was their headlamps. Like a chess board, Red thought, where the only players were pawns.
Their lamps beamed on a big pile of something indeterminable. The mass was like a dam, at least a foot higher than the water backing up behind it.
Ringo, a few feet ahead of Red, stopped on the walkway and looked down at the pile. Red started to say something, and then Ringo screamed.
The mass had come alive. It was heaving up from the channel, and two pseudopods had encircled Ringo's feet and waist.
Red was paralysed. The tunnel had become a cannon barrel down which unreality was shooting.
Ringo fought the tentacles, tearing off big pieces of soft brown stuff. Bones wired together at the joints fell out of the stuff that struck the concrete walkway, but other pseudopods grew out of the mass and seized Ringo around the throat and between his legs. They extended, slid around and around Ringo while Red stared. His beam lit up Ringo's open mouth, the white teeth, the whites of the eyes. It also reflected on the single bulging eye on top of a bump on the side near Ringo.
Suddenly, Ringo's jaw dropped, and his eyes started to glaze like the monster's eye. Either he had fainted or he had had a heart attack. Whichever it was, he had fallen onto the mass, a little distance from the eye, and he was sinking face down into it.
Red wanted to run away, but he couldn't leave Ringo to be drawn into that sickening mass. Suddenly, as if a switch had been slammed shut inside him, he leaped forward. At the edge of the walkway he leaned down and grabbed Ringo's left ankle. A tentacle, soft, slimy, stinking, came up over the edge of the concrete and coiled around his own leg. He screamed but he did not let loose of the ankle. Ringo was being pulled out slowly, and Red knew that if he could hang on to him, he could probably get him away. He had to free him soon because Ringo, if he wasn't dead, was going to suffocate in a short time.
Before he could drop the ankle and get away, he was up to his waist in the mass. It had oozed up onto the walkway, enfolded him, and was sucking him into it.
The glass eye was in front of his face; it was on the end of a pod, swaying back and forth before him.
Red, still screaming, took off his helmet and batted at the eye. It struck it, tore it loose, and then he was in darkness. The helmet had been snatched away and was sinking into the vast body. For a second the light glowed redly inside and then was gone.
Red forgot about Ringo. He thrashed and struck out and suddenly he was free. Sobbing, he crawled away until he came against the wall. He didn't know which way was upstream, but he hoped he was going in the right direction. The thing couldn't make much headway against the waters. It had pulled part of its body away from the channel to get up on the walkway, and the waters had come rushing down the opened way. They made a strong current just now, one against which the thing surely could not swim very swiftly.
Also, with its eye gone, it was as blind as he. Could it hear? Smell?
Maybe I've flipped, Red thought. That thing can't exist. I must be in a delirium, imagining it. Maybe I'm really in a straitjacket someplace. I hope they can give me something, a miracle drug, shock treatment, to get me out of here. What if I were locked in this nightmare forever?
He heard a shout behind him, a human voice. He quit crawling and turned around. The beam of a headlamp shone about fifty yards from him. He couldn't see the figure under it, but it must be about six feet two or three inches high. Anybody he knew?
The beam danced around, lit on him once, then went back to point up and down the stream. The water level had gone down though it was still higher than it should be. The thing had gone with the current, Ringo inside it.
The beam left the channel and played on the walkway as the man walked toward him. Red sat down with his back against the wall, unable to hear the approaching footsteps because of his loud breathing and his heart booming in his eardrums. The man stopped just before him, the beam on his helmet glaring into Red's eyes so he couldn't see the face beneath.
'Listen,' Red said. Something struck the top of his head, and when he awoke the light was out. He had a sharp pain in his head, but he had no time to think about that. His clothes had been removed, and he was on his back, and his hands were under him and taped together at the wrists. His ankles were also taped.
Red groaned and said, 'What are you doing? Who is it?'
There was a sound as of a suddenly sucked-in breath.
'For God's sake,' Red said. 'Let me loose. Don't you know what happened? Ringo was killed. It's true, so help me God, he was swallowed by a thing you wouldn't believe. It's waiting out there. A man alone won't get by him. Together we might make it.'
He jumped as a hand touched his ankle above the tapes. He trembled as the hand began moving up his leg. He jumped again when something cold and hard touched the other leg for a moment.
'Who are you?' he yelled. 'Who are you?'
He heard only a heavy breathing. The hand and the knife had stopped, but now they were sliding upward along his flesh.
'Who are you?'
The hand and the knife stopped. A voice, thick as honey, said, 'I'm not worried about the thing. It's my buddy.'
'Bleek?'
'Up there I'm Bleek. In more ways than one.
'Down here, I'm the phantom of the sewer, lover.'
Red knew it was no use to scream. But he did.
About the Author
* * *
Philip José Farmer was born in 1918. A part-time student at Bradley University, he gained a BA in English in 1950. Two years later he shocked the SF world with the publication of his novella The Lovers in Startling Stories. This won him a Hugo Award in 1953; his second Hugo came in 1968 for the story Riders of the Purple Wage written for Harlan Ellison's famous Dangerous Visions serie
s; and his third came in 1972 for the first part of the acclaimed Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Leslie Fiedler, eminent critic and Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has said that Farmer 'has an imagination capable of being kindled by the irredeemable mystery of the universe and of the soul, and in turn able to kindle the imaginations of others – readers who for a couple of generations have been turning to science fiction to keep wonder and ecstasy alive'. Philip José Farmer lives and works in Peoria, Illinois.