Riverworld and Other Stories

by Philip José Farmer

  Bright in the early-morning sun, the city below him creaked as if it were a ship under full sail. He had ascended many staircases and climbed many ladders past many levels to reach the top floor of this sentinel tower, the highest structure of the gigantic skeletal building that was also a city. Though he had stood here for only two minutes, he felt as if he had endured an hour of watch on a vessel during a violent storm. Yet the view was certainly peaceful and undisturbed. The storm was within himself.

  Northward, the River ran for thirty miles before turning left to go around the shoulder of the mountain range. That marked the upper border of this kingdom. Southward, twenty miles away, the River came from around another bend. That was the lower border of this small yet mighty monarchy. The Inca Pachacuti ruled both sides of the River within these borders, and he was disobeyed only at the risk of torture, slavery, or death.

  Just past the edge of the City on the north was the Temple of the Sun, a flat-topped pyramid a hundred and fifty feet high and made of stone, earth, and wood. Below Davis was the Scaffolding City, the City of Many Bridges, the City Swaying in the Wind, the Airy Domain of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, who had ruled on Earth from A.D. 1438 to 1471. The Peruvians of that time knew him as the great conqueror and Emperor Pachacuti.

  The City that Pachacuti had built was like none known on Earth and was, perhaps, unique on the Riverworld. The view from the top level of the highmost sentinel tower would have made most people ecstatic. It made Davis feel like throwing up.

  The Incan sentinel was grinning. His teeth were brown from chewing the grail-provided cocoa leaf. He had seen Davis here many times and was enjoying his plight. Once, the guard had asked Davis why he came here if the place always made him ill. Davis had replied that at least here he could get away from the even more sickening citizens of the City.

  But, suddenly inspired, he had added, “The higher I get from the ground, the closer I am to the Ultimate Reality, the Truth. Up here, I may be able to see the Light.”

  The watchman had looked puzzled and somewhat fearful. He had moved away from Davis as far as he could get. What Davis did not tell him was that it was not only the height and the swaying that made him nauseous. He was also sick with longing to see a child who might not be and many never have been. But he would not admit that that could be the reality. He was certain that, somewhere up the River, was a woman who had borne a baby in a world where no woman, so far, had conceived. Moreover, Davis was certain that the baby was of virgin birth and that it was the reincarnation of Jesus.

  From below came, faintly, the voices of the people chattering away in Kishwa, Aymara, Samnite, Bronze Age Chinese, and a dozen other languages, the tinkling of windblown bundles of mica shards, the shrillnesses of whistles and flutes, and the deep booming of drums. All these floated upward, wrapped in the odor of frying fish.

  Except for the temple and the city, the plains and foothills looked like most other areas along the River. The mushroom-shaped grailstones, the conical-roofed bamboo huts, the fishing boats, the large oar-and-sail war or merchant vessels, the people moving around on the plains bordering the River, were nothing unusual. But the city and the temple were extraordinary enough to bring men and women from far-off places up and down the River. Like Earth tourists, they were gawkers who had to pay a price for admission. Their dried fish; wooden, fishbone, flint, and chert tools and weapons; rings and statuettes; containers of booze, cigarettes, dreamgum, and ochre enriched the kingdom. Even the slaves enjoyed the bounty to some extent.

  Presently, as Davis stood there, looking northward toward the invisible Light, the face of a man appeared just above the platform. He hoisted himself up from the ladder with powerful arms and stood erect. He towered over Davis and the sentinel. His shoulder-length hair was bronze-red; his eyes were large and light blue; his face was craggy yet handsome. He wore a kilt made of a blue towel, a necklace of colored fish bones, and a cap decorated with wooden pieces carved into the semblance of feathers. His tanned humanskin belt held a large stone ax.

  Despite his savage appearance, he, too, had a quest. During the flight from his former kingdom, he seemed to have been seized with a revelation. At least, he had said so to Davis. What it was, he kept to himself. Davis had not been able to tell that the illumination or whatever it was had changed his character for the better. But Ivar was determined to travel to the end of the River. There, Davis supposed, the Viking thought that he would find the beings who had made this planet and resurrected the dead of Earth. And they would reveal the Ultimate Reality, the Truth.

  Ivar the Boneless spoke to Davis in the Old Norse of the early-ninth-century Vikings. “Here you are, Andrew the Red, the Massager, enjoying the view and your sickness. Have you seen the Light?”

  “Not with my eyes,” Davis said. “But my heart sees it.”

  “What the heart sees, the eye sees,” Ivar said.

  He was now standing by Davis, his huge hands squeezing on the railing bar, his massive legs braced on the slowly rocking platform. Though he looked at the north of the Rivervalley, he was not trying to see Davis’s Light. Nor was he looking for his own Light. As always when here, he was planning an escape route while seeing the entire kingdom spread out before him. Being the general of one of the Inca’s regiments was not enough to detain a man who had been a king on Earth and in the Valley.

  “We’ve tarried here far too long,” he growled. “The source of the River beckons, and we have many a mile to go.”

  Davis looked anxiously at the sentinel. Though the Aymara did not understand War’s language, he still might report to the Inca that the two had been conversing in a suspicious manner. Pachacuti would then demand that Davis and Ivar tell him what they had said. If he was not satisfied with their answers, he would torture them to get the truth out of them. Suspicion floated through this land like a fever-breeding miasma. Hence, it was full of spies.

  As Ivar had once said, a man could not fart without the Inca hearing about it.

  “I go up-River tonight,” Ivar said. “You may come along with me, though you are not a great warrior. Yet, you have some cunning, you have been useful in frays, and you do have a strong reason to leave this place. I tell you this because I can trust you not to betray me if you decide to stay behind. That is praise, since few may be trusted.”

  “Thank you,” Davis said. His tone hinted at sarcasm, but he knew that the Viking was, according to his lights, being complimentary. “I will go with you, as you knew I would. What are your plans? And why tonight? What makes it different from all the others?”

  “Nothing is different. My patience is gone. I’m weary of waiting for events to open the way. I’ll make my own event.”

  “Besides,” Davis said, “the Inca is too interested in Ann. If you wait much longer, he will make her one of his concubines. I assume that she’s going with us.”

  “Correct.”

  “And Faustroll?”

  “The crazed one may stay here or go with us as he wishes. You will ask him if he cares to accompany us. Warn him to stay sober. If he is drunk, he will be left behind, most probably as a corpse.”

  Davis and Ivar talked in low tones as Ivar revealed his plans. Then the Viking climbed down from the crow’s nest. Davis stayed awhile so that the sentinel would not think that they had been conspiring and were eager to begin their wicked work against the Inca.

  At noon, Davis was by a grailstone on the edge of the River. After the top of the stone erupted in lightning and thunder, he waited until an overseer handed him his big cylindrical grail. He went off to eat from its offerings, walking slowly and looking for Faustroll in the crowd. He did not have much time for this. His appointment with the Inca was within the hour, and that bloody-minded pagan accepted no excuses for lateness from his subjects.

  After several minutes, Davis saw the Frenchman, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground. He was eating and at the same time talking to some friends. Faustroll’s appearance was no longer so grotesque. He had washed out of hi
s black hair the glue and mud forming a nest in the center of which was a wooden cuckoo egg. His hair now hung down past his shoulders. He no longer had a painted mustache, and he had also removed the painted mathematical formula from his forehead. He spoke only occasionally in the even-stressed words once distinguishing all of his speech. The change in him had encouraged Davis to believe that Faustroll was beginning to recover his sanity.

  But his fishing pole was always at hand, and he still called himself “we.” He insisted that using “I” made an artificial distinction between subject and object, that everybody was part of one body called humanity and that this body was only a small part of the even vaster universe.

  “We” included the “Great Ubu,” that is, God, and also anything that did not exist but could be named, and also the past, present, and future. This triad he considered to be indivisible.

  Faustroll had irked, angered, and repulsed Davis. But, for some reason, Davis also felt a sort of fondness for him and was, despite himself, fascinated by Faustroll. Perhaps that was because the Frenchman was also looking for the Ultimate Reality, the Truth. However, their concepts of these differed greatly.

  Davis waited until Faustroll happened to look at him. He signaled with a hand raised level with his forehead, his fingers waggling. Faustroll nodded slightly to acknowledge the signal, but he continued his animated talk in Esperanto. After a few minutes, he rose, stretched, and said that he was going fishing. Fortunately, no one offered to go with him. The two met by the very edge of the River.

  “What do we have in mind?” the Frenchman said, speaking in English.

  “Ivar is going to leave tonight. I’m going with him, and so is Ann Pullen. You’re invited. But you must not get drunk.”

  “What? Surely, we are jesting!”

  “We are not amused,” Davis said.

  “We are sometimes intoxicated, but we are never drunk.”

  “Come off it,” Davis said. “No clowning around tonight. Ivar said he’d kill you if you’re drunk, and that’s no empty threat. And you know what’ll happen to us if we get caught. Are you coming with us or not?”

  “We never leave a place. On the other hand, we are never in one place. That would be too mundane and scarcely to be tolerated. Yes, we will accompany us, though the answer to the Great Question, the uncompleted side of the formula, may be here in this minute metropolis of uncertainty and instability, not, as we hope, far up the River.”

  “Here’s what Ivar proposes,” Davis said.

  Faustroll listened without interrupting, something he rarely did, then nodded. “We believe that that is as good a plan as any and perhaps better than most. Which is not to say that it has any merit at all.”

  “Very well. We’ll meet at midnight at the Rock of Many Faces.”

  Davis paused, then said, “I do not know why Ivar insists on bringing Ann Pullen along. She’s a troublemaker and a slut.”

  “Ah! We hate her so much, we must love her!”

  “Nonsense!” Davis said. “She’s contemptible, wicked, vicious, the lowest of the low. She makes the Great Whore of Babylon look like a saint.”

  Faustroll laughed. “We believe that she is a soul who had and has the strength of intellect and character to free herself of the bonds, limits, and restrictions imposed upon women by men since time began or, perhaps, shortly before that. She snaps her fingers under the puissant but pinched proboscis of the god you worship and the puny pinched penises of the men who worship him. She …”

  “You will burn in hell as surely as a struck match burns,” Davis said, his blue eyes slitted, his hands clenched.

  “Many matches do not light because they are deficient in the wherewithal of combustion. But we agree with the dying words of the immortal Rabelais: ‘Curtain! The farce is finished! I am setting out to seek a vast perhaps.’ If we die the death of forever, so be it. There are not enough fires in Hell to burn all of us away.”

  Davis opened his arms wide and held out his hands, indicating hopelessness. “I pray that the good Lord will make you see the errors of your ways before it is too late for you.”

  “We thank you for the kind thought, if it is kind.”

  “You’re impenetrable,” Davis said.

  “No. Expenetrating.”

  Faustroll walked off, leaving Davis to figure out what he meant.

  But Davis hurried away to be on time for his daily appointment. Just as he had been the royal masseur for Ivar the Boneless, when Ivar was king of an area far to the south of this state, so Davis was now premier masseur for Pachacuti. His job angered and frustrated him because he had been on Earth an M.D., a very good one, and then an osteopath. He had traveled to many places in the U.S.A., lecturing and founding many osteopathic colleges. When he was getting old, he had founded and headed a college in Los Angeles based on his eclectic discipline, neuropathy. That used the best theories and techniques of drugless therapy: osteopathy, chiropractic, Hahnemanism, and others. When he had died in 1919 at the age of eighty-four, his college was still flourishing. He was sure that it would grow and would found new branches throughout the world. But late-twentieth-centurians he had met had said that they had never heard of him or of the college.

  Seven years ago, Ivar had been forced to flee from his kingdom because of treachery by an ally, Thorfinn the Skull-Splitter. Davis, Faustroll, and Ann Pullen had gone with Ivar. They did not know what to expect from Thorfinn, but they assumed that they would not like it.

  After many fights, enslavements, and escapes while going up the River, they had been captured by the Incans. And here they were, enduring what they must and plotting to get freedom someday.

  Ivar was as patient as a fox watching a toothsome hen, but his patience had been eroded away. Just why the Viking had not taken off by himself, Davis did not know. He would be burdened by them—from his viewpoint, anyway. But an unanalyzable magnetism kept the four together. At the same time that they were attracted to each other, they also were repulsed. They revolved about each other in intricate orbits that would have given an astronomer a headache to figure out.

  About ten minutes by the sand clock before his scheduled appearance, Davis was in the building housing the Inca’s court. This was a four-walled and roofed structure sitting on the intersection of many beams a hundred feet above the ground. The skeletal city creaked, groaned, and swayed around, above, and below them. It was noisy outside the building and only a trifle less so inside. Though the Inca sat on a bamboo throne on a dais while he listened to his petitioners, the people around him talked loudly to each other. Davis had threaded his way through them and now stood a few feet from the dais. Presently, the Inca would rise, a fishskin drum would boom three times, and he would retire to a small room with the woman he had chosen to honor with his royal lust. Afterward, Davis would massage the royal body.

  Pachacuti was a short and dark man with a hawk nose, high cheekbones, and thick lips. Around the hips of his short squat body a long green towel served as a kilt, and a red towel, edged in blue, was draped over his shoulders as a cape. His headpiece was a turban-towel secured by a circlet of oak from which sprouted long varicolored fake feathers made of carved wood.

  If Pachacuti had been naked, Davis often thought, he would not have looked like a monarch. Very few unclothed kings would be. In fact, even now, he was no more distinguished in appearance than any of his subjects. But his manner and bearing were certainly imperial.

  Who was the woman who would share the royal couch today? Davis had thought that he did not care. And then he saw his bête noir, Ann Pullen, preceded by two spearmen and followed by two more. The crowd gave way for her. When she reached the dais, she stopped and turned around and smiled with lovely white teeth set in bright rouged lips.

  Though Davis loathed her, he admitted to himself that she was beautiful. Those long wavy yellow tresses, the strikingly delicate and fine-boned face, the perfectly formed and outthrust breasts she was so proud of, the narrow waist and hips, and the long slim legs made
her look like a goddess. Venus as she would be if Praxiteles had happened to dream of Ann Pullen. But she was such a bitch, he thought. However, Helen of Troy probably had been a bitch too.

  The guards marched her toward the door of the room in which the Inca waited for her. A moment after she had entered the room, the guards admitted the little big-eyed priest who observed the virility of the Incan during his matings. When the king was done, and God only knew when that would be, the royal witness would step outside and announce the number of times the Inca had mounted his woman.

  The crowd would rejoice and would congratulate their fellows. The kingdom would continue to flourish; all was well with its citizens’ world.

  Beware, though, if the Inca failed once.

  Davis had never cursed. At least, not on Earth. But he did now.

  “Go-o-o-od damn her!”

  She had given herself to the Inca and now would become one of his wives, perhaps the favorite. But why? Had she quarreled with Ivar since he had been on the sentinel tower? Or had the Inca tempted her with such offers that she could no longer refuse him? Or had she, the Scarlet Woman, an abomination in the nostrils of the Lord, just decided that she would like to lie with the Inca before she left the kingdom tonight? The man was said to be extraordinarily virile.

  Whatever the reason, Ivar would not ignore her infidelity. Though he had done so now and then in the past, that was because Ann had been discreet and he had been lying at the same time with another woman. For Ann to copulate with the Inca in public view, as it were, was to insult Ivar. Though he was usually self-controlled, he would react as surely as gunpowder touched with a flaming match.

  “What’s gotten into that woman?” Davis mumbled. “Aside from a horde of men?”

  Ann Pullen was a late-seventeenth-century American who had lived—and she had lived to the fullest—in Maryland and Westmoreland County, Virginia. Born in a Quaker family, she had converted to the Episcopalian Church along with most of her tobacco planter family. She had married four times, a man by the name of Pullen being her final husband. Just when she took her first lover and when she took the last one even she did not know. But they had been coming and going for at least forty years during her turbulent life on Earth.