Ivar bellowed in Esperanto, “Andrew the Red! Still dreaming of finding the woman who gave birth to a second Christ? Or have you given up that quest?”
“Not at all!”
“Then why do you sit on your ass day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year?”
“I haven’t!” Davis said indignantly. “I have made many converts to people who had rejected Christ! Or who had never heard of Him, who had not been in a state of grace!”
Ivar waved his hand as if dismissing their importance. “You could put them all under the roof of a small hut. Are you going to be satisfied with hanging around here forever when, for all you know, your Jesus is up-River and waiting for you to appear so that he may send you forth to preach?”
Davis sensed a trap of some sort. The Viking was grinning as if he were ready to pounce on him.
“It makes better sense to wait here for Him,” Davis said. “He will come someday, and I will be ready to greet Him.”
“Lazy, lazy, lazy! The truth is that you like to live here where no one is trying to kill or enslave you. You make feeble efforts to preach, and you spend most of your time fishing or tupping your wife.”
“Now, see here!” Davis said.
“I am here, and I see. What I see is a man who was once on fire, has cooled, and is now afraid to dare hardship and suffering.”
“That’s not true!”
“I reproach you, but I also reproach myself. I, too, had the dream of going up the River until I came to its mouth. There I expected to find the beings who made this world and who brought about our resurrection. If they would not answer my questions willingly, they would do so under duress. I say that though it would seem that they are immeasurably more powerful than I am.
“But I forgot my dream. To use your own phrase, I was at ease in Zion. But this place is not Zion.”
Davis nodded to indicate the man with Ivar. “Who’s that?”
Ivar’s large hand pushed the little man forward. “His name is Bahab. He’s a newcomer. Bahab the Arab. He was born in Sicily when his people held that island. I do not know when he lived according to your reckoning, but it does not matter. He has an interesting tale, one that reminded me of what I had forgotten. Speak, Bahab!”
The little man bowed. He spoke in a high voice and in a heavily accented Esperanto. Though some of his words were not in local usage, Davis figured out their meaning from the context.
“You will pardon me, I trust, for such an abrupt approach and possible intrusion. I would prefer sitting with you and having coffee and getting to know you before beginning my story. But some people are barbaric or, I should say, have different customs.”
“Never mind all that!” Ivar said loudly. “Get on with your story!”
“Ah, yes. Some years ago, I was up-River a long way from here. I talked to a man who had the most amazing news. I do not know if it was true or not, though he had nothing to gain from lying to me. On the other hand, some men lie just for the pleasure of it, sons of Shaitan that they are. But sometimes, if the lie is merely for amusement’s sake …”
“Are you going to make me regret bringing you here?” Ivar shouted.
“Your pardon, Excellency. The man of whom I spoke said that he had a curious tale. He had wandered far, up and down this Valley, but had never encountered anything so wondrous. It seems that he was once in an area where a certain woman, who claimed to be a virgin, conceived.”
“Oh, my God!” Davis said. “Can it be true?”
Bahab said, “I do not know. I did not witness the event, and I am skeptical. But others who had been there at the time swore that what the man said was indeed true.”
“The baby! The baby!” Davis said. “Was it a boy?”
“Alas, no! It was female.”
“But that couldn’t be!” Davis said.
Bahab paused as if he were wondering if Davis had called him a liar. Then he smiled. “I merely tell you what the man and his fellows, actually, five in number, told me. It does not seem likely that all would be conspiring to lie to me. But if I offend you, I will say no more.”
“Oh, no!” Davis said. “I’m not insulted. On the contrary. Please continue.”
Bahab bowed, then said, “All this had happened years before I came to that area. By now, the baby would be fully grown, if there was such a baby. The woman may not have been a virgin, as she claimed, and some man might be the father. But that would be miracle enough since all men and women seem to be sterile.”
“But a baby girl?” Davis said. “That’s can’t be!”
“I have talked to wise men and women of the late twentieth century, by Christian reckoning, scientists they call themselves,” Bahab said. “They told me that, if a woman could be induced to conceive by chemical methods, the child would be female. I did not understand their talk of ‘chromosomes,’ but they assured me that a virgin female can conceive only a female. They also said that, in their time, this had never happened. Or in any time before theirs.”
“They leave God out of their science,” Davis said. “It happened once … when Jesus was born.”
Bahab looked incredulous, but he said nothing.
“What you think should happen,” Ivar said, “and what does happen are often not the same. You still do not know the truth. The only way you can find that is to venture forth again and determine for yourself. Surely, you can’t be uninterested because this child was female? There were women goddesses, you know.”
“God does what He wishes to do,” Bahab said.
“You are right, Ivar,” Davis said. “I must search out this woman and her daughter and talk to them. You are also right, I confess, in that I have let sloth and peace lull me to sleep.”
“We go! I, too, have been asleep! But I am tired of this purposeless life. We will build a boat, and we will take it up the River!”
“Rachel will be pleased,” Davis said. “I think.”
Rachel was eager to go, though she also was disappointed that the Savior was a woman.
“But then, we don’t know that this story is true,” she said. “Or it may be a half-truth. Perhaps the child was male. But evil people have distorted the story, changed it to make the baby a female. It’s a lie which the Devil begat. He used many devices to lure the faithful into error.”
“I don’t like to think that,” Davis said. “But you could be right. Whatever the truth, we must try to find it.”
Faustroll said that he would go with them. “This virgin birth could be a pataphysical exception. Pataphysics, as we have remarked more than once, is the science of exceptions. We doubt that it happened since we do not remember having done it. We will be pleased to expose the charlatans who claimed that it did happen.”
Ann Pullen said that she was staying in Jardin. No one, however, had asked her to accompany them. Davis thought that he should have rejoiced when he heard the news. But he felt a pang. He did not know why he was disappointed or why he felt a hurt in his chest. He detested the woman.
A month later, the boat was complete, a fine ship with a single mast and twenty oars. Ivar had picked the crew, brawny men and their battle-tested women, all eager to put the soft life behind them. Only two of Davis’s disciples had been allowed to go on Ivar’s boat, and that was because they did not object to fighting in self-defense. The others, pacifists all, would follow in a smaller vessel.
At dawn of the day set for their departure, they gathered at a grailstone. After the stone had shot its thundering and white flash upward, they removed their grails, now filled with food of various kinds, beer, cigarettes, and dreamgum. Davis would pass out the tobacco, beer, and gum to the crew, though he would have preferred to throw them into the River. Since they would eat breakfast on the vessel later in the morning, they began boarding from the pier. The air was cool, but Davis was shivering with excitement. For a long time, he had been aware that something was missing from his life. Now he knew that it was the desire to explore and to find adventure. On Earth
, he had been a traveler over much of the United States, lecturing and founding colleges of osteopathy. He had been faced with the hostility of local doctors and of the crowds provoked by the M.D.s. He had charged head-on into the jeers, boos, death threats, and rotten eggs thrown at him. But he had persisted in a campaign he and his colleagues had finally won.
On the Riverworld, he had seldom stayed long in one place except when detained in slavery. He was a walker-to-and-fro of the earth and a far-venturing sailor, too. Real happiness was not his unless he had a quest beckoning him to far lands.
Ivar stood on the rear deck by the steersman and bellowed orders. He, too, was happy, though he complained of the crew’s slowness and clumsiness.
Two burly Norsemen began to loosen ropes securing the vessel to the pier. They halted when Ivar bellowed at them to wait a moment. Davis heard a man shouting, and he looked shoreward. The top of the sun had just cleared the mountains; its rays swept away the grayness and shone on the stranger. He was running across the plain, waving his arms and yelling in Esperanto.
“Don’t go yet! Wait for me! I want to go with you!”
“He’d better have a good reason for delaying us,” Ivar said loudly. “Otherwise, into the water he goes!”
Davis was curious about the mysterious stranger, but he also felt something unaccountable. Was it a premonition of dread? Did this man bring unsettling news? Though Davis had no reason to suspect this, he felt that he would be happier if the man had never showed up.
The fellow reached the pier and halted, breathing hard, his grail dangling from one hand. He was of middle height and rangy. His face was strong and handsome, long, narrow, though partly obscured by his black, wide-brimmed, high-crowned hat. Under the shadow of the hat were dark eyes. The long hair falling from under the hat was glossy black. A black cloak covered his shoulders. A black towel was around his waist. His jackboots were shiny black fish-hide. His black belt supported a wooden scabbard from which stuck the fish-hide-bound hilt of a rapier. If the weapon was made of iron, it was unique in this area.
“What brings you croaking like a raven of ill omen to us?” Ivar yelled.
“I just heard that you were leaving for up-River,” the man said in a deep voice. His Esperanto was heavily tainted by his native language, which must have had many harsh sounds. “I’ve run all the way down from the mountains to catch you. I would like to sign up. You will find me handy. I can row with the best, and I am an excellent archer, though recent events have robbed me of my bow. And I can fight.”
He paused, then said, “Though I was once a peaceful man, I now live by the sword.”
He drew out his rapier. It was indeed of steel. “This has pierced many a man.”
“Your name?” Ivar shouted.
“I answer to Newman.”
“I expect and get immediate obedience,” Ivar said.
“You have it.”
“What is your mission?”
“The end of the River, though I am in no hurry to get to it.”
Ivar laughed, then said, “We have something in common, though I suppose that many are also trying to get there. We have room for you as long as you pull your weight. Come aboard. You will take your turn at the oar later.”
“Thank you.”
The boat was pushed from the pier, and the two Norsemen jumped onto the vessel. Presently, it was making its way up the River. When the morning breeze came, the rowers shipped their oars, and the fore-and-aft sail and the boom sail were hoisted. The crew sat down to eat from their grails.
Ivar came down from the deck to talk to people amidships. He stood above the newcomer. “What tale of interest do you bring?”
The man looked up.
“I have many.”
“We all do,” Ivar said. “But what have you found most amazing?”
Newman half-lidded his eyes as if to shut out the light while he searched his inner darkness. He seemed to be feeling around for some treasure.
Finally, he said, “Perhaps the most amazing is a man who claimed to be Jesus Christ. Do you know of him or did you live in a time and a place on Earth where he was unknown?”
“My gods were Odin and Thor and others,” Ivar growled. “I have sacrificed many Christians to him on Earth. But, near the end of my life, I became a Christian. More from a desire to hedge my bets, you might say, than from true faith. When I came to this world and found that it was neither Valhalla nor Heaven, though much more like Valhalla than Heaven, I renounced both beliefs. But it is hard not to call out for my native gods when I need them.”
“Those who had never heard of Jesus on Earth have heard of him here,” Newman said. “But you know enough about him so that I do not have to explain who he is.”
“I could not escape knowing more of him than I care to hear,” Ivar said. He pointed at Davis. “That man, Andrew the Red, is constantly prating about him.”
Davis had been inching closer to Newman. He said, “I’m eager to hear your story, stranger. But this man who claimed to be Jesus cannot be He. He is in Heaven, though He may have been reincarnated as a woman on this world. Or so some say. My wife and I are going up-River to find her.”
“Good luck, what with all the many billions here and the chance that she might now be down-River,” the man said. “But you will not be offended, I hope, if I say that you will be disappointed even if you find the woman.”
“Enough!” Ivar said. “The tale!”
“I came to a certain area shortly after the man calling himself Jesus was crucified by a fanatical medieval German monk. He was called Kramer the Hammer. The crucified man was still living, so you will see how soon after the event I arrived. The short of it is that I talked to him just before he died. And then I talked to a man who had lived in the dead man’s time and place on Earth and knew him well. This man confirmed that the dead man had indeed been Yeshua, as the witness called him.
“I was very near him when he spoke his last words. He cried out, ‘Father! They know what they’re doing! Do not forgive them!’ He sounded as if his experiences on this world had stripped him of the faith he had on Earth. As if he knew that mankind was not worth saving or that he had failed in his mission.”
“Impossible!” Davis said.
Newman stared coldly at Davis. “I’m lying?”
“No, no! I don’t doubt your story of what happened. What I don’t believe is that the man on the cross was really Jesus. He’s not the first nor the last of those who said that they were the Savior. Some may have genuinely believed that they were.”
“How do you account for the testimony of the witness?”
“He was lying.”
Newman shrugged. “It makes no difference to me.”
Rachel touched Davis’s shoulder. “You look troubled.”
“No. Angry.”
But he was also downcast, though he knew he should not be.
That evening, the boat was moored near a grailstone. After the stone thundered, the crew ate the offerings of the grails. They also devoured the freshly caught and cooked fish offered to them by the locals. Davis sat in a circle around a bamboo wood fire. Faustroll was at his side.
The Frenchman said, “Your wife was correct when she said you seemed troubled by Newman’s tale. You still seem so.”
“My faith is not broken, not even shaken,” Davis said.
“You say so. Your body, your voice declare that you are plunged into black thoughts.”
“The Light will clear away the darkness.”
“Perhaps, friend,” Faustroll said. “Here, have some fish. It’s delicious. It’s something you can have faith in.”
Davis did not reply. The sight of Faustroll’s greasy lips and the thought of Faustroll’s shallowness sickened him. Or did the sickness come from another cause? He was far more disturbed than he had admitted to Rachel or the Frenchman.
“The stranger, he talked as if with authority,” Faustroll said. “Of course, all crazies do.”
“Crazies?”
>
“There is something deeply disturbing in that man, though he has much self-control. Did you not perceive it? He is dressed in black as if he is in mourning.”
“He just seemed like one more mercenary adventurer,” Davis said.
Faustroll put his hand on Davis’s shoulder.
“There is something we must tell you. Perhaps our timing is wrong, seeing that you are so melancholy. But, sooner or later, you who seek the Light must face it, though the Light may not be the color you expect.”
“Yes?” Davis said. He was not very interested.
“We speak of the time when you leaped across the void between Pachacuti’s gangplanks. You said that you were seized by a spiritual rapture as soon as your foot left the gangplank. The rapture lifted you as if it were a gas-filled balloon. You soared higher than you should have, higher than you were capable of leaping. It was, you said, given by God. But …”
Davis sat up straighter. Some interest flickered in him.
“Yes?”
“You crossed the gap and landed upon the plank. But your feet struck its end. As a result, you landed hard and painfully. You might have fallen off the plank then if you had not grabbed its sides.”
Faustroll paused. Davis said, “What about it?”
“Rapture is fine. It carried you across safely. But then you struck the plank. Reality entered; the rapture was gone.”
“What about that?”
“We are making an analogy, perhaps a parable. Think about that leap, friend, while you journey in a quest for what may be imaginary. Rapture is nontangible and temporary. Reality is hard and long lasting and often painfully crippling. What will you do if you find that the woman did not conceive and that there is no child?
“Reality may be a club which shatters your ability to ever feel that rapture again. We hope, and it is for your own good, that you never find that child.
“Think about that.”
Crossing the Dark River
1
“What? You prescribed lemon juice to cure cholera?”
“What? You had a sure cure for infants who held their breaths until their faces turned blue? And for young females in a hysterical seizure? You stuck your little finger up their anuses? Presto! Changeo! They’re rid forever of infantile behavior and the tantrums of the body?”
Riverworld and Other Stories Page 30