Riverworld and Other Stories

by Philip José Farmer

  The big ball struck thunder and quake and plaster through the building, and the pieces of ceiling falling on him awoke Brass. He dressed hastily and packed without folding anything. He had decided, as soon as he opened his eyes, that he was not going to force the authorities to carry him out after all. Buildings were almost as insubstantial as love; nothing lasted forever. A six-story high-rent apartment building would be erected here; other men and women would fall in love while living in it and would make their decisions to run away or to stay. And then that building, too, would be torn down.

  But it wasn’t easy to demolish love, which, after all, was more like an animal, a living creature, than a construction of inorganic material. He would make one more attempt. If he failed, he would at least have given Beverly Hills another item of folklore.

  It took him most of the morning to rent a horse in Griffith Park, rent a car and trailer, and transport the beast to the heart of downtown Beverly Hills, the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Drive.

  There he mounted his white horse and, repressing the desire to cry, “Hi-Yo, Silver, Awa-a-ay!”, he urged the horse into a gallop eastward on Wilshire. Inaudible music of Rossini’s Lone Ranger Overture. Audible shrill of police whistles, blare and bleep of car horns, scream of brakes, caw of curses flying by like ravens.

  Before reaching Doheny, he turned south on one of those streets named after trees, the sparks flying from the iron shoes of his charger and the cigars dropping from the mouths of the Rolls-Royce salesmen in the agency near the corner. There were, as usual, no parking spaces available, so he rode down the strip of grass between curb and sidewalk, slid to a halt, jumped off, tied the panting beast to a bush, and ran upstairs to the third floor past the astonished manager, who had just opened the front door.

  He beat on the door of the Golds’ apartment, got no answer, and shoved the door in with a kick followed by his shoulder. The maid was gone, but Samantha’s faint cries reached him. He ran down the hall and turned the corner.

  Samantha was stuck in the dog door.

  She looked up at him and said, “I tried to signal you, but you’ve kept your blinds down. Then I asked the maid to get you, and she told me Irving paid her wages, not me. But she did give me a special-delivery letter from my father.

  “Father took off in his model, his mini-Zeppelin he called it in the letter. He left this morning, headed for Sacramento. He said he was going to bomb that schweinhund in the governor’s mansion. And he wished you and me good luck.”

  Samantha started to cry. Brass tried to pull her out of the opening, but he stopped when she began to groan with pain.

  “I thought you would’ve lost weight since you stopped seeing me,” he said.

  “Irving decided to let me eat all the pork on rye and mushroom gravy that I wanted. That way, I wouldn’t be able to sneak out. He found out that the best jailor is the prisoner himself. Herself, in this case.

  “But then I heard that your building was going to be torn down, and I got my father’s letter. I knew that I had to do something brave and worthwhile, too. So I tried to get out so I could run off with you. With you I could have my sandwiches and love, too. So you drink too much and our floors are bare. So what?”

  Brass kicked the door until his feet hurt and then he battered it with chairs until he had shattered a dozen. But Irving, knowing the flimsiness and sleaziness of modern construction, had had the door built to order.

  A siren wailed decrescendo outside.

  “I wanted to carry you off on my horse,” Brass said. “For a few blocks, anyway. Then we would transfer to my rental Mustang and take off for the mountains.”

  “You go on,” she said. “But don’t wait for me. I just now saw why I’m stuck. I made my choice, even if I tried to cancel it. I knew that if I refused to eat so much, I could get out easily. But I couldn’t. So you go. I made my choice. Besides, truth to tell, I’m afraid of horses.”

  He got down on his knees and kissed her. Her breath had a not unpleasant odor of pork on rye and kosher pickles.

  He stood up. “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” she said.

  He walked down the front steps of the building. A policeman, looking at his hat and silver-buckled belt and boots, said, “This horse belong to you, Buck?”

  It lay on the sidewalk, breathing its last in bloodied foam. Ridden hard, it had been overloaded with a mixture of carbon monoxide, nitric acid, ozone, acetone, formaldehyde, and vaporized lead.

  “No horse of mine, officer,” Brass said politely. “You ought to call the fire department. There’s a woman in three oh eight trying to get born.”

  The policeman misunderstood him and called for an ambulance. Brass did not enlighten him. He walked away. Two deaths behind him and what lay ahead?

  On Wilshire, he stopped to watch a parade of several hundred young men and women. They were well dressed, well fed, well schooled, and obviously the sons and daughters of those they were marching against. They carried placards:

  WORSHIPPERS OF MAMMON. REPENT!

  BEVERLY HILLS SUCKS!

  UP YOUR LOVE OF MONEY!

  REMEMBER SODOM AND GOMORRAH!

  There were some older people in the parade, including some rabbis, ministers, and priests. Today was not a holy day, and so they might be scourged out of the city, but it would be by billies and mace, not credit cards. Police sirens were whooping in the distance; forces were hastening in response to the calls of alarmed citizens.

  Brass waved his hat and cheered and thought about joining them. But he had just gotten out of one kind of prison, and he did not, at that moment, feel up to enduring another. He needed to breathe some comparatively fresh air in the pines and to make more songs for the Goddess. Everyone served in his own way.

  In the car, pointed for the mountains, he turned the radio on. A UFO had been sighted heading for the state capital. The National Guard jets were scrambling. Their trails froze while the sun sparked on the mysterious slow-moving vehicle.

  The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod

  Foreword

  I’ve written a number of Tarzan pastiches and also a biography of the lord of the jungle, known in England as the very cosmopolitan and cultured nobleman, Lord Greystoke. (Yes, Virginia, there is a real Tarzan.)

  Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote highly fictionalized books about Tarzan, and it is his name that leaps to the mind when Tarzan is mentioned. (Unless you’re one of those people who know Tarzan only through the movies, and if you are you don’t know the real Tarzan.) I became hooked on Burroughs’ Tarzan books when I was very young and haven’t quite overcome this addiction yet.

  But in recent years I’ve read and admired (though I’ll never get hooked on them) the works of another Burroughs, first name William. His stories, if you can call them stories, are composed in a wild absurdist style and put together with some very unconventional techniques. I especially recommend his Nova Express.

  Almost all his works contain large elements of homosexuality, drug addiction, violence, sadism, masochism, paranoia, an aversion to and contempt for women, and an emphasis on the more nauseating aspects of this world (and other worlds, too).

  The mixture of these sounds very unattractive, but his vaulting imagination and wild metaphors make his unique works mentally stimulating.

  Unfortunately, even the most erudite reader is often puzzled by many of the references. They’re too subjective. Many of these can be understood by reading William Burroughs’ autobiography. Junkie. A reader shouldn’t have to go to this to comprehend William’s fiction. Nevertheless, even if the reader fails to grasp these references, he or she may find that his fiction is well worth reading and, in fact, mentally stimulating.

  And so, one day, while rereading Nova Express. I thought: What if it had been William Burroughs, not Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had written the Tarzan books?

  I was sure that there would be no market for such a double pastiche if I wrote it. The so-called obscenity and pornography in it would not keep i
t from being published. This was 1968, Henry Miller and William Burroughs were being published, and my own “Riders of the Purple Wage” had appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions the year before. But the pastiche would not be accepted by any science-fiction magazine. For some reason I didn’t think of sending it to Playboy magazine. However, I doubt they would have taken it. The editors might have enjoyed it but would have thought it unsuitable for the majority of their readers.

  Despite the lack of a sale, I wrote it because it seemed as if it would be fun doing so, and it was, and I wanted to find out if I could emulate William Burroughs’ style. It took three hours for the first writing. Two days later I went back to it and did the second and final draft in an hour.

  Well, it did sell and almost immediately. But to a very strange publication. I mean by strange that it was the very last place I would have thought it would be sold to.

  Roger Lovin, an editor for the American Art Agency publications, all porno, was also a science-fiction fan. He’d heard about the pastiche, asked to see it, read it, and arranged that it should be printed in Broadside. This was, according to Norman Spinrad, a very raunchy girlie magazine, godawful. But he laughed and added, “And it’s the best of the American Art Agency’s line, their class production.”

  Lovin didn’t care. He wanted to ensure that the pastiche was in print. So it came out in Broadside in the midst of huge naked breasts and stockings with garter belts filled by some pretty-faced but too-mammalian women. The other featured fillers were “French Girls For Sale” and “My Love Affair With 60 Starlets,” both nonfiction. All but 0.01 percent of the readers must have been very puzzled by my story, if they bothered to read it at all.

  I’m looking through that issue now. The photos of the women and the prose of the nonfiction items seem rather inhibited and innocuous. Almost innocent. Standards have changed much in eleven years.

  Two years later, Charles Platt got the “Kid” reprinted in New Worlds Science Fiction, an English magazine devoted to “new wave” experimental writing. Quite a leap.

  In 1971 Norman Spinradput together an anthology titled The New Tomorrows, a work which contained some of the best examples of the “new” type of science-fiction. He included “The Jungle Rot Kid On The Nod” and wrote a preface to it which credited my pioneering efforts in the field of science-fiction.

  A few years ago I tried to write a pastiche in which Edgar Rice wrote Nova Express. It didn’t work, so I threw it away. There’s a lesson in this failure somewhere, though I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it is that you shouldn’t push things too far. But you have to try. Otherwise, you get no place at all.

  If William Burroughs instead of Edgar Rice Burroughs had written the Tarzan novels …

  Forward

  Tapes cut and respliced at random by Brachiate Bruce, the old mainliner chimp, the Kid’s asshole buddy, cool blue in the orgone box

  from the speech in Parliament of Lord Greystoke alias The Jungle Rot Kid, a full house, SRO, the Kid really packing them in.

  —Capitalistic pricks! Don’t send me no more foreign aid! You corrupting my simple black folks, they driving around the old plantation way down on the Zambezi River in air-conditioned Cadillacs, shooting horse, flapping ubangi at me … Bwana him not in the cole cole ground but him sure as shit gonna be soon. Them M-16s, tanks, mortars, flamethrowers coming up the jungle trail, ole Mao Charley promised us!

  Lords, Ladies, Third Sex! I tole you about apeomorphine but you dont lissen! You got too much invested in the Mafia and General Motors, I say you gotta kick the money habit too. Get them green things offen your back … nothing to lose but your chains that is stocks, bonds, castles, Rollses, whores, soft toilet paper, connection with The Man … it a long way to the jungle but it worth it, build up your muscle and character cut/

  … you call me here at my own expense to degrade humiliate me strip me of loincloth and ancient honored title! You hate me cause you hung up on civilization and I never been hooked. You over a barrel with smog freeways TV oily beaches taxes inflation frozen dinners time-clocks carcinogens neckties all that shit. Call me noble savage … me tell you how it is where its at with my personal tarzanic purusharta … involves kissing off dharma and artha and getting a fix on moksha through kama …

  Old Lord Bromley-Rimmer who wear a merkin on his bald head and got pecker and balls look like dried-up grapes on top a huge hairy cut-in fold-out thing it disgust you to see it, he grip young Lord Materfutter’s crotch and say—Dearie what kinda gibberish that, Swahili, what?

  Young Lord Materfutter say—Bajove, some kinda African cricket doncha know what?

  … them fuckin Ayrabs run off with my Jane again … inter-solar communist venusian bankers plot … so it back to the jungle again, hit the arboreal trail, through the middle tearass, dig Numa the lion, the lost civilizations kick, tell my troubles to Sam Tantor alias The Long Dong Kid. Old Sam always writing amendments to the protocols of the elders of mars, dipping his trunk in the blood of innocent bystanders, writing amendments in the sand with blood and no one could read what he had written there selah

  Me, I’m only fuckin free man in the world … live in state of anarchy, up trees … every kid and lotsa grownups (so-called) dream of the Big Tree Fix, of swinging on vines, freedom, live by the knife and unwritten code of the jungle …

  Ole Morphodite Lord Bromley-Rimmer say—Dearie, that Anarchy, that one a them new African nations what?

  The Jungle Rot Kid bellowing in the House of Lords like he calling ole Sam Tantor to come running help him outta his mess, he really laying it on them blueblood pricks.

  … I got satyagraha in the ole original Sanskrit sense of course up the ass, you fat fruits. I quit. So long. Back to the Dark Continent … them sheiks of the desert run off with Jane again … blood will flow …

  Fadeout. Lord Materfutter’s face phantom of erection wheezing paregoric breath.—Dig that leopardskin jockstrap what price glory what? cut/

  This here extracted from John Clayton’s diary which he write in French God only know why … Sacre bleu! Nom d’un con! Alice she dead, who gonna blow me now? The kid screaming his head off, he sure don’t look like black-haired gray-eyed fine-chiseled featured scion of noble British family which come over with Willie the Bastard and his squarehead-frog goons on the Anglo-Saxon Lark. No more milk for him no more ass for me, carry me back to old Norfolk // double cut

  The Gorilla Thing fumbling at the lock on the door of old log cabin which John Clayton built hisself. Eyes stabbing through the window. Red as two diamonds in a catamite’s ass. John Clayton, he rush out with a big axe, gonna chop me some anthropoid wood.

  Big hairy paws strong as hold of pusher on old junkie whirl Clayton around. Stinking breath. Must smoke banana peels. Whoo! Whoo! Gorilla Express dingdonging up black tunnel of my rectum. Piles burst like rotten tomatoes, sighing softly. Death come. And come. And come. Blazing bloody orgasms. Not a bad way to go … but you cant touch my inviolate white soul … too late to make a deal with the Gorilla Thing? Give him my title, Jaguar, moated castle, ole faithful family retainer he go down on you, opera box … ma tante de pisse … who take care of the baby, carry on family name? Vive la bougerie! cut/

  Twenty years later give take a couple, the Jungle Rot Kid trail the killer of Big Ape Mama what snatch him from cradle and raise him as her own with discipline security warm memory of hairy teats hot unpasteurized milk … the Kid swinging big on vines from tree to tree, fastern hot baboonshit through a tin horn. Ant hordes blitzkrieg him like agenbite of intwat, red insect-things which is exteriorized thoughts of the Monster Ant-Mother of the Crab Nebula in secret war to take over this small planet, this Peoria Earth.

  Monkey on his back, Nkima, eat the red insect-things, wipe out trillions with flanking bowel movement, Ant-Mother close up galactic shop for the day …

  The Kid drop his noose around the black-assed motherkiller and haul him up by the neck into the tree in front of God and local citizens which is called g
o-mangani in ape vernacular.

  —You gone too far this time the Kid say as he core out the motherkillers asshole with fathers old hunting knife and bugger him old Turkish custom while the motherkiller rockin and rollin in death agony.

  Heavy metal Congo jissom ejaculate catherinewheeling all over local gomangani, they say—Looka that!

  Old junkie witch doctor coughing his lungs out in sick gray African morning, shuffling through silver dust of old kraal.

  —You say my son’s dead, kilt by the Kid?

  Jungle drums beat like aged wino’s temples morning after.

  Get Whitey!

  The Kid sometime known as Genocide John really liquidate them dumbshit gomangani. Sure is a shame to waste all that black gash the Kid say but it the code of the jungle. Noblesse obleege.

  The locals say—We dont haffa put up with this shit and they split. The Kid dont have no fun nomore and this chimp ass mighty hairy not to mention chimp habit of crapping when having orgasm. Then along come Jane alias Baltimore Blondie, she on the lam from Rudolph Rassendale type snarling—You marry me Jane else I foreclose on your father’s ass.

  The Kid rescue Jane and they make the domestic scene big, go to Europe on The Civilized Caper but the Kid find out fast that the code of the jungle conflict with local ordinances. The fuzz say you cant go around putting a full-nelson on them criminals and breakin their necks even if they did assault you they got civil rights too. The Kid’s picture hang on post office and police station walls everywhere, he known as Archetype Archie and by the Paris fuzz as La Magnifique Merde—50,000 francs dead or alive. With the heat moving in, the Kid and Baltimore Blondie cut out for the tree house.