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

by Philip José Farmer

  `Sacrifice?' Burton said.

  `Many bloody thanks, Burton-naq. Sacrifice! Cut throat . . . put on boat . . . rub it on wood . . . then water god not mad at us. . .'

  'We don't do that,' Burton said.

  Kazz argued but finally agreed to get on the boat. His face was long, and he looked very nervous. Burton, to ease him, told him that this was not Earth. It was a different world, as he could see at a quick glance around him and especially at the stars. The gods did not live in this valley. Kazz listened and smiled, but he still looked as if he expected to see the hideous green-bearded face and bulging fishy eyes of Kabburqanaqruebemss rising from the depths.

  The plain was crowded around the boat that morning. Everybody was there for many miles around, since anything out of the usual was entertainment. They shouted and laughed or joked. Though some of the comments were derisive, all were in good humor. Before the boat was rolled off the bank into The Rivet, Burton stood up on its `bridge,' a slightly raised platform, and held up his hand for silence. The crowd's chatter died away, and he spoke in Italian.

  `Fellow lazari, friends, dwellers in the valley of the Promised Land! We leave you in a few minutes. . .'

  `If the boat doesn't capsize!' Frigate muttered.

  `. . . to go up The River, against the wind and the current. We take the difficult route because the difficult always yields the greatest reward, if you believe what the moralists on Earth told us, and you know now how much to believe them!' Laughter. With scowls here and there from die-hard religionists.

  `On Earth, as some of you may know, I once led an expedition into deepest and darkest Africa to find the headwaters of the Nile. I did not find them, though I came close, and I was cheated out of the rewards by a man who owed everything to me, a Mister John Hanning Speke. If I should encounter him on my journey upriver, I will know how to deal with him. . .'

  `Good God!' Frigate said. `Would you have him kill himself again with remorse and shame?'

  `. . . but the point is that this River may be one far, far greater than any Nile, which as you may or may not know, was the longest river on Earth, despite the erroneous claims of Americans for their Amazon and Missouri-Mississippi completes. Some of you have asked why we should set out for a goal that lies we know not how far away or that might not even exist. I will tell you that we are setting sail because the Unknown exists end we would make it the Known. That's all! And here, contrary to our sad and frustrating experience on Earth, money is not required to outfit us or to keep us going. King Cash is dead, and good riddance to him! Nor do we have to fill out hundreds of petitions and forms and beg audiences of influential people and minor bureaucrats to get permission to pass up The River. There are no national borders. .

  `. . . as yet' Frigate said.

  `.. . nor passports required nor officials to bribe. We just build a boat without having to obtain a license, and we sail off without a by-your-leave from any muck-a-muck, high, middle, or low.

  We are free for the first time in man's history. Free! And so we bid you adieu, for I will not say goodbye. .'

  `. . . you never would,' Frigate muttered.

  `. . . because we may be back a thousand years or so from now! So I say adieu, the crew says adieu, we thank you for your help in building the boat and for your help in launching us. I hereby hand over my position as Her British Majesty's Consul at Trieste to whomever wishes to accept it and declare myself to be a free citizen of the world of The River! I will pay tribute to none, owe fealty to none; to myself only will I be true!'

  'Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause.'

  `He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws,' Frigate chanted.

  Burton glanced at the American but did not stop his speech. Frigate was quoting lines from Burton's poem, The Kasidah of Haji Abdu AlYazdi. It was not the first time that he had quoted from Burton's prose or poetry. And though Burton sometimes found the American to be irritating, he could not become too angry at a man who had admired him enough to memorize his words.

  A few minutes later, when the boat was pushed into the River by some men and women, and the crowd was cheering, Frigate quoted him again. He looked at the thousands of handsome youths by the waters, their skins bronzed by the sun, their kilts and bras and turbans wind-moved and colorful, and he said,

  'Ah! gay the day with shine of sun, and bright the breeze, and blithe the throng `Met an the Riverbank to play, when I was young, when I was young.'

  The boat slid out, and its prow was turned by the wind and the current downstream, but Burton shouted orders, and the sails were pulled up, and he turned the great handle of the paddle so that the nose swung around and then they were beating to windward. The Hadji rose and fell in the waves, the water hissing as it was cut by the twin prows. The sun was bright and warm, the breeze cooled them off, they felt happy but also a little anxious as the familiar banks and faces faded away. They had no maps nor travelers' tales to guide them; the world would be created with every mile forward.

  That evening, as they made their first beaching, an incident occurred that puzzled Burton. Kazz had just stepped ashore among a group of curious people, when he became very excited. He began to jabber in his native tongue and tried to seize a man standing near. The man fled and was quickly lost in the crowd.

  When asked by Burton what he was doing, Kazz said, `He not got . . . uh . . . whacha call it? . . . it . . .' and he pointed at his forehead. Then he traced several unfamiliar symbols in the air. Burton meant to pursue the matter, but Alice, suddenly wailing, ran up to a man. Evidently, she had thought he was a son who had been killed in World War 1. There was some confusion. Alice admitted that she had made a mistake. By then, other business came up. Kazz did not mention the matter again, and Burton forgot about it. But he was to remember.

  Exactly 415 days later, they had passed 24,900 grailrocks on the right bank of The River. Tacking, running against wind and current, averaging sixty miles a day, stopping during by day to charge their grails and at night to sleep, sometimes stopping all day so they could stretch their legs and talk to others besides the crew, they had journeyed 24,900 miles. On Earth, that distance would have been about once around the equator. If the Mississippi-Missouri, Nile, Congo, Amazon, Yangtze, Volga, Amur, Hwang, Lena, and Zambezi had been put end to end to make one great river, it still would not have been as long as that stretch of The River they had passed. Yet the River went on and on, making great bends, winding back and forth. Everywhere were the plains along the stream, the tree-covered hills behind, and, towering, impassable, unbroken, the mountain range.

  Occasionally, the plains narrowed, and the hills advanced to The River-edge. Sometimes, The River widened and became a lake, three miles, five miles, six miles across. Now and then, the line of the mountains curved in toward each other, and the boat shot through canyons where the narrow passage forced the current to boil through and the sky was a blue thread far, far above and the black walls pressed in on them. And always, there was humankind. Day and night, men, women, and children thronged the banks of The River and in the hills were more.

  By then, the sailors recognized a pattern. Humanity had been resurrected along The River in a rough chronological and national sequence. The boat had passed by the area that held Slovenes, Italians, and Austrians who had died in the last decade of the nineteenth century, had passed by Hungarians, Norwegians, Finns, Greeks, Albanians, and Irish. Occasionally, they put in at areas which held peoples from other times and places. One was a twenty-mile stretch containing Australian aborigines who had never seen a European while on Earth. Another hundred-mile length was populated by Tocharians (Loghu's people). These had lived around the time of Christ in what later became Chinese Turkestan. They represented the easternmost extension of Indo-European speakers in ancient times; their culture had flourished for a while, then died before the encroachment of the desert and invasions of barbarians.

  Through admittedly hasty and uncertai
n surveys, Burton had determined that each area was, in general, comprised of about 60 per cent of a particular nationality and century, 30 percent of some other people, usually from a different time, and 10 per cent from any time and place.

  All men had awakened from death circumcised. All women had been resurrected as virgins. For most women, Burton commented, this state had not lasted beyond the first night on this planet.

  So far, they had neither seen nor heard of a pregnant woman. Whoever had placed them here must have sterilized them, and with good reason. If mankind could reproduce, the Rivervalley would be jammed solid with bodies within a century.

  At first, there had seemed to be no animal life but man. Now it was known that several species of worms emerged from the soil at night. And The River contained at least a hundred species of fish, ranging from creatures six inches long to the sperm-whale sized fish, the `Riverdragon,' which lived on the bottom of The River a thousand feet down. Frigate said that the animals were there for a good purpose. The fish scavenged to keep The River waters clean. Some types of worm ate waste matter and corpses. Other types served the normal function of earthworms.

  Gwenafra was a little taller. All the children were growing up. Within twelve years, there would not be an infant or adolescent within the valley, if conditions everywhere conformed to what the voyagers had so far seen.

  Burton, thinking of this, said to Alice, `This Reverend Dodgson friend of yours, the fellow who loved only little girls. He'll be in a frustrating situation then, won't he?'

  `Dodgson was no pervert,' Frigate said. `But what about those whose only sexual objects are children? What will they do when there are no more children? And what will those who got their kicks by mistreating or torturing animals do? You know, I've regretted the absence of animals. I love cats and dogs, bears, elephants, most animals. Not monkeys, they're too much like humans. But I'm glad they're not here. They can't be abused now. All the poor helpless animals who were in pain or going hungry or thirsty because of some thoughtless or vicious human being. Not now.'

  He patted Gwenafra's blonde hair, which was almost six inches long.

  `I felt much the same about the helpless and abused little ones, too.'

  `What kind of a world is it that doesn't have children,' Alice said. `For that matter, what kind without animals? If they can't be mistreated or abused any more, they can't be petted and loved.'

  `One thing balances out another in this world,' Burton said. `You can't have love without hate, kindness without malice, peace without war. In any event, we don't have a choice in the matter. The invisible Lords of this world have decreed that we do not have animals and that women no longer bear children. So be it.'

  The morning of the 416th day of their journey was like every morning. The sun had risen above the top of the range on their left. The wind from Up River was an estimated fifteen miles per hour, as always. The warmth rose steadily with the sun and would reach the estimated 85 degrees Fahrenheit at approximately 2 in the afternoon. The catamaran The Hadji, tacked back and forth. Burton stood on the `bridge' with both hands on the long thick pine tiller on his right, while the wind and the sun beat on his darkly tanned skin. He wore a scarlet and black checked kilt reaching almost to his knees and a necklace made of the convoluted shiny-black vertebrae of the hornfish. This was a six-foot long fish with a six-inch long horn that projected unicorn-like from its forehead. The hornfish lived about a hundred feet below the surface and was brought in on a line with difficulty. But its vertebrae made beautiful necklaces, its skin, properly tanned, made sandals and armor and shields or could be worked into tough pliable ropes and belts. Its flesh was delicious. But the horn was the most valuable item. It tipped spears or arrows or went into a wood handle to make a stiletto.

  On a stand near him, encased in the transparent bladder of a fish, was a bow. It was made of the curved bones protruding from the sides of the mouth of the whale-sized dragonfish. When the ends of each had been cut so that one fitted into the other, a double recurved bow was the result. Fitted with a string from the gut of the dragonfish, this made a bow that only a very powerful man could fully draw. Burton had run across one forty days ago and offered its owner forty cigarettes, ten cigars, and thirty ounces of whiskey for it. The offer was turned down. So Burton and Kazz came back late that night and stole the bow. Or, rather, made a trade, since Burton felt compelled to leave his yew bow in exchange.

  Since then, he had rationalized that he had every right to steal the bow. The owner had boasted that he had murdered a man to get the bow. So taking it from him was taking it from a thief and a killer. Nevertheless, Burton suffered from thrusts of conscience when he thought about it, which was not often.

  Burton took The Hadji back and forth across the narrowing channel. For about five miles, The River had widened out to a three and a half mile broad lake, and now it was forming into a narrow channel less than half a mile across. The channel curved and disappeared between the walls of a canyon.

  There the boat would creep along because it would be bucking an accelerated current and the space allowed for tacking was so limited. But he had been through similar straits many times and so was not apprehensive about this. Still, every time it happened, he could not help thinking of the boat as being reborn. It passed from a lake, a womb, through a tight opening and out into another lake. It was a bursting of waters in many ways, and there was always the chance of a fabulous adventure, of a revelation, on the other side.

  The catamaran turned away from a grailstone, only twenty yards off. There were many people on the right-side plain, which was only half a mile across here. They shouted at tie boat or waved or shook their fists or shouted obscenities, unheard but understood by Burton because of so many experiences. But they did not seem hostile; it was just that strangers were always greeted by the locals in a varied manner. The locals here were a short, dark-skinned, dark-haired, thin-bodied people. They spoke a language that Roach said was probably proto Hamite-Semitic. They had lived on Earth somewhere in North Africa or Mesopotamia when those countries had been much more fertile. They wore the towels as kilts but the women went bare-breasted and used the `bras' as neckscarfs or turbans. They occupied the right bank for sixty grailstones, that is, sixty miles. The people before them had been strung out for eighty grailstones and had, been tenth-century A.D. Ceylonese with a minority of pre-Colombian Mayans.

  `The mixing bowl of Time,' Frigate called the distribution of humanity. `The greatest anthropological and social experiment ever.' His statements were not too far-fetched. It did look as if the various peoples had been mixed up so that they might learn something from each other. In some cases, the alien groups had managed to create various social lubricants and lived in relative amity. In other cases, there was a slaughter of one side by the other, or a mutual near-extermination, or slavery, of the defeated.

  For some time, after the resurrection, anarchy had been the usual rule. People had `milled around' and formed little groups for defense in very small areas. Then the natural leaders and power seekers had come to the front, and the natural followers had lined up behind the leaders of their choice – or the leaders' choice, in many cases.

  One of the several political systems that had resulted was that of `grail slavery.' A dominant group in an area held the weaker prisoners. They gave the slave enough to eat because the grail of a dead slave became useless. But they took the cigarettes, the cigars, the marihuana, the dreamgum, the liquor, and the tastier food.

  At least thirty times, The Hadji had started to put into a grailstone and had come close to being seized by grail slavers. But Burton and the others were on the alert for signs of slave states. Neighboring states often warned them. Twenty times, boats had put out to intercept them instead of trying to lure them ashore, and the Hadji had narrowly escaped being run down or boarded. Five times, Burton had been forced to turn back and sail downstream. His catamaran had always outrun the pursuers, who were reluctant to chase him outside their borders. Then t
he Hadji had sneaked back at night and sailed past the slavers.

  A number of times, The Hadji had been unable to put into shore because the slave states occupied both banks for very long stretches. Then the crew went on half-rations, or, if they were lucky, caught enough fish to fill their bellies.

  The proto- Hamite- Semites of this area had been friendly enough after they were assured that the crew of The Hadji had no evil intentions. An eighteenth-century Muscovite had warned them that there were slave states on the other side of the channel. He did not know too much about them because of the precipitous mountains. A few boats had sailed through the channel and almost none had returned. Those that did brought news of evil men on the other side.

  So the Hadji was loaded with bamboo shoots, dried fish, and supplies saved over a period of two weeks from the grails.

  There was still about half an hour before the strait would be entered. Burton kept half his mind on his sailing and half on the crew. They were sprawled on the foredeck, taking in the sun or else sitting with their backs against the roofed coaming which they called the `fo'c'sle'

  John de Greystock was affixing the thin carved bones of a hornfish to the butt of an arrow. The bones served quite well as feathers in a world where birds did not exist. Greystock, or Lord Greystoke, as Frigate insisted on calling him for some private self-amusing reason, was a good man in a fight or when hard work was needed. He was an interesting, if almost unbelievably vulgar, talker, full of anecdotes of the campaigns in Gascony and on the border, of his conquests of women, of gossip about Edward Longshanks, and of course, of information about his times. But he was also very hard-headed and narrow-minded in many things – from the viewpoint of a later age and not overly clean. He claimed to have been very devout in Earthlife, and he probably told the truth, otherwise, he would not have been honored by being attached to the retinue of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. But, now that his faith had been discredited, he hated priests. And he was apt to drive any he met into a fury with his scorn, hoping that they would attack him. Some did, and he came close to killing them. Burton had cautiously reprimanded him for this (you did not speak harshly to de Greystock unless you wished to fight to the death with him), pointing out that when they were guests in a strange land, and immensely outnumbered by their hosts, they should act as guests. De Greystock admitted that Burton was right, but he could not keep from baiting every priest he met. Fortunately, they were not often in areas where there were Christian priests. Moreover, there were very few of these who admitted that they had been such.