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people in the world," he snapped, thrusting his finger at the robed figure, "I would have expected at least you to be honest!"

Jim's face remained impassive, but for an instant there was a brief flicker of irritation in his eyes. "I have said very little to you," he said quietly. "So far, you've done most of the talking."

They stared at each other for a few moments. Through the door, John heard a shouting match in the corridor— "you fuckin' fucked-up fuck-off, why can't you handle a simple fuckin' song like..." and "Bugger off, you bloody sod..."—Keith and Sid, from the sound of it, having one of their usual post-gig tantrums. In a few minutes, they would be attempting again to flatten each other's noses.

"Billy, go break it up, please," he murmured without looking over his shoulder. He heard the stool scoot back as Billy maneuvered his Buick-size body down the corridor. Unless Sid unwisely attempted to kick Billy in the nuts again, the squabble was as good as settled. John hesitated, then walked back out to the edge of the glade where Jim was patiently waiting for him.

"So talk, then," he said.

"...this is the end..."

Long after midnight, John lay in his tent, gazing up at the long wooden rod of the ceiling pole.

Mary West Wind was fast asleep next to him, most of the bedsheets curled around her nude body. Out of sheer

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impulse, he had brought her back to his tent after the show; they had made love in a frantic, almost adolescent sort of way, yet despite her fervor she. had fallen asleep almost as soon as she had climaxed. John felt almost relieved, however; he didn't feel like talking, just as, indeed, he had felt a strange detachment from her even in middle of their sexual throes. They had used each other for their own purposes; she had finally fucked the sexy-looking guy on the back sleeve of the Meet The Beatles album, and he had found temporary surcease from the dark thoughts in his mind.

Now he lay naked atop the blankets, listening to the cool night-breeze, remembering another late night in a different lifetime.

Getting out of the car with his wife, the boxed tape of that day's studio session under his arm. The usual crowd of autograph-mongers and fans hanging around the front door of the Dakota. Walking down the sidewalk, Yoko passing in front of him, heading into the open archway of the building. Feeling pleased with the day's work, looking forward to playing with his young son before going to bed...

A young man's voice calling from somewhere behind him: "Mr. Lennon?"

Turning, seeing a shadowed figure in combat stance barely five feet away, aiming a pistol directly at him...

Barely a moment of confusion, wanting to say something... then loud gunfire, muzzle flashes, the horrible force of five bullets slamming into him...

Turning around, body screaming in anguish, mind numbed by what had just happened, disbelieving that he had just been shot... staggering toward Yoko... Christ, he's been shot... he collapses, saying something he can't

remember to his dear wife as the doorman dashes toward him...

Ambulance sirens, voices shouting, policemen all around, cold sidewalk concrete... a glimpse of a young man standing on the curb reading a paperback book... being loaded on a stretcher... nausea, weakness, the sense of passing from time and space...

"Do you know who you are?" the disembodied voice of a cop asks softly just before the end....

Well, constable, at least I think I do. I mean, it was right there on the tip of my tongue just a moment ago, right before some deranged asshole shot me. I once shook hands with the Queen, and I'm pretty positive that I once played Shea Stadium, if that's what you're asking. But if you'll only give me a few minutes, I'm sure I can give you a correct answer. Umm... you wouldn't mind making it multiple choice, would you?

"Not very bloody funny," he whispered to himself.

We can't allow you to continue, Jim had said. You're much too dangerous....

Without really thinking about it, John slowly slid his legs over the side of the bed; the soles of his feet came to rest on the coarse wooden boards of the tent-platform, and for a few moments he peered into the darkness, listening to Mary's rhythmic breathing.

We've been given a chance, don't you see? Jim's voice had almost been pleading. We've been brought here by the ancients, every one of us from time immemorial, to achieve personal salvation through our personal actions. We can yet achieve union with the Godhead, John, but only if we give ourselves the chance....

He could hear the wash of the River through the darkness. Downstream, somewhere close by, dugout ca-

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noes were stealthily making their way toward Graceland, paddled by Second Chancers who had been waiting for this hour when everyone on the island would be sound asleep.

But you and the others have revived the old ways. You brought technology to this island where only life-sustaining grailstones had once existed, and you use it to preach evil. You've brought back idol worship, debauchery, lust of every kind... all those very things that I myself once practiced before the resurrection....-

John bent and picked up from the floor the kilt that Mary had torn off him; he stood up and slid it around his waist. His eyes searched various objects resting on tables and chairs around his tent—spare clothing, his grail, a carved wooden tobacco box and other handmade ornaments given to him by visiting fans, his guitar—until his gaze found a long, flat thing in the corner.

/ had hoped you might join us, but I see now that's impossible. All I ask now is that you receive my testimony, and understand why we've done what we shall do, why I've led them here....

John reached out and picked up the dragonfish knife, sliding it out of its scabbard. As he did so, a dim, reddish glow was reflected off its sharp, polished-white surface.

Rock must die, John....

He looked around; through the open tent-flaps, he saw a sudden blaze of firelight from the amphitheater.

You must accept this....

Then he had vanished into the deeper shadows of the night.

"Bloody hell I will," John whispered to the fire. Clutching the knife in his fist; he strode out of the tent.

Already there was shouting from the campsites: cries of surprise, anger, shock, desperation. He could see people emerging from their tents, staring in disbelief at

the bonfire that was erupting from the stage area. Now there were new, smaller blazes being set; the backstage shed, the speaker stacks, the sound board, all in turn were being set ablaze by distant cloaked figures who had scaled the stockade walls and were now committing arson on the amphitheater. Everything was made of wood; once set afire, it would all go up in minutes.

There was a wash of heat against his skin. He could hear Elvis bellowing in rage. Through the trees, he glimpsed audience members moving toward the besieged stage. From somewhere not far off, there was a harsh scream of mortal pain, suddenly cut short as another knife found the passive throat of a Second Chancer. "John?" Mary called from somewhere behind him. "John, what's going on?"

John ignored her. Somewhere in the heart of the furnace, Jim was waiting for him, capering with a torch in hand, igniting precious sound-equipment and acoustic baffles and his own crude yet irreplaceable piano. The technology of music, deemed the root of all evil by a group of religious fanatics, was being systematically destroyed.

John took a few more steps into the night. It wouldn't be very difficult to find Jim. He must have known that he would die again before he left Graceland; he had all but told John what he intended to do, and John had attempted to escape the blunt reality of the threat by taking home a sweet little hippie-chick. If you smoke enough pot and fuck long enough, you can avoid coming to grips with anything. Hell, when it came down to it, he was a world-class champion when it came to avoiding responsibility.

No more. Not when something he loved was being torched.

Mary was still calling his name as he took a few more steps into the darkness, the palm of his hand sweating

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against the handle of the knife. Find the fucker. Grab him by the neck. Slash his goddamn throat...

Do you know who you are? the nameless policeman in the ambulance asked again.

He stopped in his tracks. He felt his knees buckle as he sagged to the ground.

He remembered the Cavern Club. He remembered the Royal Albert Hall. He remembered the first American tour and the groupies who sobbed over a patch of ground he had walked across. He remembered going to India while Epstein was dying. He remembered the final rooftop performance in London with the lads before they called it quits. He remembered falling in love with Yoko. He remembered their bed-in demonstration, and all the other countless protests and demonstrations against war and violence. He remembered Julian's birth, then Scan's. He remembered the one and only time he met Morrison, backstage in Toronto when the Plastic Ono Band and the Doors had been the headliners. He remembered writing a song about how it was permissible to give peace a chance....

"Good Lord," he whispered, "what am I doing?"

He didn't remember dropping the knife. In fact, he didn't remember much else until Keilh sat down next to him on the dew-soaked ground, lit up a joint, and offered it to him.

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"... with a little help from our friends..."

"Haven't seen anything like this since we played the pubs, eh, mate?" Keith said dryly.

John looked at the joint and shook his head. "Not exactly the proper sound," Keith went on, "but it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. A-hahaha..."

For once, his laughter was forced. John continued to silently stare at the burning amphitheater. Firelight reflected off the treetops, silhouetting figures rushing back and forth past die stage; the air smelled of burning wood. The Titanthrops had managed to muster a bucket brigade from various musicians and standbys, but it didn't look as if it was doing much good. Graceland's amphitheater was well on its way to becoming history; it would take much more man the King's considerable charisma to rebuild the venue. Keith picked up the knife and toyed with it, almost as if he were considering a quick round of mumblety-peg. "You could have stopped him, y'know," he said quietly.

John looked sharply at him. "I mean," Keith continued, "I saw you two out there having a chat, so I suppose you must have known what was going to happen...."

"Not worth killing him, though."

"Hmm, got a point there. But why didn't you at least let on to the rest of us?"

"Didn't really think he meant it. Not until it was too late." John thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. "Not sure if it would have made any difference. Elvis would have thrown 'im off the island, but that wouldn't have been the end of it. Even if we had stopped him this time, he would have just returned later."

His gaze returned to the flames. "This way, the arseholes got what they wanted. They won't be back again."

"Right." Keith stuck the knife into the ground between his legs, then sucked another hit off the joint and offered it again to John. John looked at it for a moment,

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then pinched it out of the drummer's fingers."Well, I suppose it makes a daft sort of sense...."

"You're not going to tell anyone, are you now?"

Keith exhaled and scowled at him. "What do I look like, a narco?" He shook his head. "But what makes you think there's going to be a next time?"

John tsked, letting the joint burn between his fingers. "Here, mate. You should know better than that. You can't kill rock 'n' roll that easy." He looked at the joint again, then stubbed it out on the ground. "I mean, you can ban it from school and burn all the Beatles records and get the holy rollers to carry on about how it's the devil's music and so forth, but it's a tough beast to knock off."

He waved a hand at the bonfire. "So they torch a stage. Big hairy deal. We can always build another. Rock 'n' roll will never die."

"If you say so." Keith picked up the joint again, straightened out the bend in the paper, and carefully relit it. From somewhere far off, they heard another harsh scream. John idly wondered if it was Jim....

"Next time, though," Keith muttered, "you wonder if we can get Elvis to sing?,"

John smiled slyly. "Only if he gives me back my glasses," he said, watching the smokes and flames rising into the first light of dawn over the endless River.

"Yeah," said Keith. "Right. And me gold tooth..."

"Now don't start with that gold tooth shit again...."

Every Man A God

Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg

Selous crept silently down the heavily wooded trail, shooting an occasional glance behind him. He wasn't especially worried; the rustle of the dried leaves and branches would alert him if his pursuer was getting too close.

He came to a small stream, stopped to slake his thirst, then waded halfway across it, turned to his left, and began walking down the middle of it. He continued for a quarter of a mile, then finally climbed out.

The bush was denser on the other side, and he had more difficulty passing through it. He looked off into the distance with practiced eyes, found the crooked tree that he had spotted before entering the wooded depression, and using it as his landmark, made a large semicircle around the worst of the thornbush.

Eventually he reached the tree. Beyond this, he knew, was a grassy plain, not large enough to be a savannah, but one that he must nonetheless cross, alone and unarmed. He continuously examined the ground for animal sign, but found none.

He broke through the last of the bush and stood at the

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edge of the plain. The silence was almost tangible: no birds, no monkeys, no grazing animals, not even the hum of insects. He estimated that he could trot across the plain to the safety of the forest beyond it in perhaps three minutes, but he hesitated to present any predators with the sight of a running man, so he began to walk slowly, carefully, his every sense alert.

To his surprise, he made it to the trees without seeing any sign, any indication of life, not even so much as a butterfly. For a moment he was plagued with self-doubt: could his bushcraft be deserting him on the strange new world? Then he saw the signs, barely visible: the broken twig, the crushed leaf, the human hair snagged on a low-hanging branch, and he knew he was still on the right trail. Burton had passed by here.

Of course, Burton couldn't know that Selous was following him; the latter had awakened on the Riverworld less than a day ago. The two men had met only once, for no more than twenty minutes, in Zanzibar. But when Selous had awakened on the Riverworld and started out to hunt for answers, the few people he had met had mentioned that another Englishman, an explorer, had come this way before him, and by putting together bits and pieces of information he had determined that it was Burton, and had immediately begun tracking him. Separately, the two of them had opened up half of Africa; together, they might find some way to solve the mysteries of the Riverworld.

And yet, during the past three hours, he had become aware that while he was tracking Burton, someone else was tracking him. It could be friend, it could be foe—but alone and unarmed as he was, he had no intention of remaining an easy or a stationary target if it was a foe.

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He'd meet his pursuer, but he'd do it under conditions of his own making.

He walked another mile, constantly alert, still unwilling to believe that such a primitive, untouched forest was totally devoid of animal life. Finally he slowed his pace. The trees were thinning out, and if he was going to lay a trap, there was no guarantee that he would find any better place for it up ahead.

He took the rope he had woven, sought out a sturdy tree with a branch that overhung the trail he was blazing, and slung the rope over it. He manipulated it to the edge of the branch and used his weight to pull the branch down to where he could reach and position it. Next he secured one end of the rope to the bole of the tree, being careful to make it invisible to anyone approaching from the direction he had just come. Then he set the trap, covering the loop with leaves and small sticks.

Not satisfied, he found some large fallen branches and positioned them carefully and naturalistically along the approach, so that the trail narrowed gradually and his prey would have to set one or both feet inside the prescribed circle.

Finally he stood back to examine his handiwork. It would never fool a leopard, that most cautious of animals, but he could think of no other living thing, including a human, that would notice a single twig out of place. He was a hunter, not a trapper, and he missed the heft and feel of his rifle in his hands, but he'd spent too many years in the bush not to take careful notice of how those natives who didn't own rifles, and probably would use them like clubs if they had possessed them, trapped animals for the pot.

For a moment he wished his friend Theodore were

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there with him. Bushcraft got you just so far, and then, even in the midst of the bush, you found that you needed statecraft even more. And nobody could charm a crowd, be they Republican, Democrat, British or Maasai, like Roosevelt.

Selous thought back to the last time he had seen him. It had been just eight years ago—or was it eight millennia? —that he had arranged the first professional safari in the history of the continent, and had inadvertently created an enormous new business, when he had hired hunters, trackers, skinners, porters, chefs, and camp boys—five hundred of them in all—for the ex-President's African hunting trip.

Then Roosevelt had gone back to run for the presidency again, and the Great War had started, and though he was in his sixties and had spent most of the past forty years in the bush, he was still British to the core, and had immediately volunteered to put a regiment together to drive the Hun out of Tanganyika.

Yes, it was all coming back to him now. Taking his men across the border, then rafting down the Rufiji River. The battles, the victories. And then, from nowhere, as he sat taking breakfast before his tent, the German bullet slamming home in his throat. He had tried to cry out, but had choked on his own blood.

He had always expected to die in Africa, perhaps beneath the claws of a lion or on the tusks of an elephant, perhaps of some tropical disease, possibly in the midst of battle against the Hun. But to die like this, sitting and sipping his tea...

Now he remembered what he was trying to scream: "Pointless! Pointless!"

For a man's life to mean something, his death also had

to have meaning, and it was as if the war and the German bullet had conspired to rob his life of its meaning. What mattered the books he had written, what mattered his slow conversion from hunter to ecologist to conservation-ist, what mattered his service to the Empire, if the ultimate act of his life was to clutch at his throat while spitting out a mouthful of tea and blood? His life read like a book that built to a climax, and then, on the last page, turned into a farce. Maybe this new land, this Riverworld, was created to give him a second chance, and as his hand gingerly sought the wound that no longer existed, he silently resolved not to botch it.

Suddenly he heard the sharp crack! of a small branch being broken, and he was once more the hunter. He melted silently into the bush, waiting as his pursuer walked closer and closer to what he now thought of as the killing ground, then crouched down and waited with the terrible patience of one of the predators he had hunted so often.

The footsteps came closer, and he resisted the urge to peek through the bushes to determine the nature of his pursuer. That would be made clear in less than a minute, unless he did something foolish to give his position away, and he hadn't lived into his seventh decade by being foolish.

Thirty more meters, Selous estimated. Now twenty, now ten, now—

"What's going on?" demanded an outraged voice. "Put me down this instant!"

Selous leaped out of his concealment, and found that his trap had netted a blond white man, who now hung upside down, one foof suspended by the makeshift lasso.

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"Who are you, and why are you following me?" replied Selous.

"Who do I look like, fool?" snarled the man.

"You look like a man who is in no position to make demands," replied Selous.

"Mem?" shrieked his prisoner. "Do you not recognize a god when you have captured one?"

Huey Long looked at Beethoven and thought, Oh, you sly bastard. You are more cunning than I would have ever thought—but you're closed in here too, aren't you? It's no different for you than for me.

Around them as they slogged their way from the city to me plains, the struggling forms of the rednecks—that was how he thought of them, anyway—seemed to rise and fall in the mud, clamoring at him to get moving, get back, get out of there. Or maybe Huey had made it all up in his head, maybe they were saying nothing at all. Maybe there were no rednecks, and he was hallucinating the whole bunch of them. Maybe this was all just some ghastly dream and he was lying on his back in the capitol building, the judge's slugs in his belly, his blood streaming away, the people weeping as they carried him off. Maybe he would wake up in a white room with tubes running hi and out of his head, and all this would be behind him.

Beethoven seemed real enough, though. Stolid Germanic fellow, five feet six, solid build, pustules all up and down his cheeks.

Huey kept on moving, stretching, rocking, easing back and forth in the mud, making small progress in the pelting rain, the rednecks in the distance cheering him on (or so he would like to think).

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It was a real bitch, a down-home Saturday-night fish-fry son of a bitch, slogging through all this mud, with this Beethoven stuck next to him, matching him stride for stride. It's a long way from the capital to here, and a longer way back, he thought.

But nothing could be done about it. It had been Beethoven's idea to quit the city. That made some sense to him: there was certainly no reason to hang around there, fighting for food, fighting even harder for attention, trying to clear some space among the mottled hordes, all of whom wanted him dead. (That was the conviction that had come over Huey in this place, an insight that he trusted, had relied upon from the immediacy of old experience: there people were so caught up with themselves that they could kill him.) If Beethoven wanted to get out, that was all right with Huey Long. Beethoven had his reasons, Long had others, but the idea was to put distance between themselves and the rest of them.

Oh, he wished he could get rid of this character too, but Beethoven had fixed him with those shining eyes, those deep, yearning, Boss-obsessed eyes that Huey Long could understand, having seen them at a thousand rallies.

"There is no emperor," Beethoven had said. "I thought he was there, but I was wrong."

Well, that was all right with Huey. There were no emperors in America either, not with every man a king. Every man a king: it had gotten him this far. It would get him farther still.

"The emperor is dead," Beethoven had said again. "Everyone is dead, everything is dead. That must be the only explanation. That is why we are here. In death there

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is nothing but betrayal. Of course, I saw that in the Missa Solemnis, that solemn mass. By the end, deaf and crazy, I could see through to the bottom of it all. I'm not deaf here, though; I am filled with sound and light, but for no purpose. There is no emperor."

"You're wrong," Huey had lied. "Sometimes there is an emperor."

Anything to pacify, to jolt Beethoven from those strange and sullen rages that would overtake the man. Meanwhile, you kept on going, regardless of the company you kept. The Boss still had his plans. Give him a break, give him an even chance at this fish-fry, and he would find a way to make it work for him. Getting out of the city was a decent enough first step. It wasn't so much a city as an encampment anyway. Beethoven had called it a city, but that was wrong, really, a different terminology from a different time and place.

All right, he said to himself: just keep moving.

"Pfui!" spat Beethoven.

It was strange how Huey could understand some German monosyllables and not others, how Beethoven's language wavered back and forth between foreigner talk and understandable Esperanto. It was yet another thing that was just too complicated for him, something that he didn't need to talk about, didn't want to consider.

"The emperor betrayed me," said Beethoven. "First he, and then the others. All of them. And they left us here to deal with that betrayal."

"You seem to be a little bit wound up, son," said Huey. "You should calm down a little."

"We need a new start," said Beethoven. "That was what they had promised, what I was looking for. But how

can there be a new start when it is all da capo again and again and no fine!"

"I don't understand you," said Huey, not unkindly. "I can follow some of your talk, but not all of it." He paused, trying to find some common ground. "This is pretty shoddy goods for me too, you know. One moment I'm walking through the capitol building and the next I have a slug in my heart that hurts like an explosion, like a firecracker lifting your balls to heaven, and I'm looking up at that damned ceiling, and then I wake up here. That isn't too easy, you know. It wasn't easy for you, I know—I was killed, son. I was murdered—assassinated. They killed me because they knew I was going to be the next president." He paused for breath. "That's a hell of a transition to make, you know, from being maybe the next president to waking up in this stinking place. It is a strange, strange business."

Oh, he could go on if he wanted. The old talent was still there, the line of language that he could unreel, turn out there to fend for itself in that nest of the world. Every man a king, and me their president, he reflected. Even Beethoven seemed awed, seemed to shut up at last, and backed away from him.

Huey smiled a secret smile. Going on and on in the Senate, opening up, filibustering from the Constitution of the United States, his favorite document, the greatest document hi the history of the world, something that could make Huey cry with its coiled language and beauty of intention if he thought about it, going on and on like that with the can strapped to his thigh so that he could piss right in the middle of a speech without having to leave the floor, break the filibuster—that was finding a new dimension for the meaning of the word "talk." If he

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considered the truth of it, it was much more difficult and challenging than anything that had happened to him here. This little bit of carrying on he had done on the Riverworld was for nothing, was little more than a practice shot in a small hall. The real stuff had been what he had managed hi the Senate and on the campaign trail. Yes, he had been a wonder in his age, that was for goddamned sure. Then he had gotten gut-shot on the floor of the capitol, and now here he was.

Except now there was no one to listen or give a damn. Everyone here, even the pretty women, the models and the fifty-dollar-a-night hookers whom he could tell right away, all of them had troubles, big troubles, and pretty much the same ones at that.

For one thing, they were all dead. They had closed their eyes and given up the ghost gently or in some violent manner, and the next thing they knew they had come to consciousness in this stinking place with a million other troops. That was a hell of a trauma, and it seemed to be pretty much the general condition of the place—and you had to understand that, grant everybody a little weight on that basis alone. Apparently the only way you made it here was to die, which was one hell of a thing.

"You know I'm right," said Beethoven. He was back to talking again. He produced one of his filmy handkerchiefs from some inner pocket, wiped his streaming forehead in the style of his period, and offered it to Huey in a friendly way.

Huey shook his head disgustedly. Pfui was the word, all right, it pretty well summed it up.

"Forget it," he said. "I don't want it. It's not necessary."

Nothing like this, nothing, never in the history of the

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world, that was what he thought now. He remembered standing on the shoulders of the bayou, battling his fear of alligators while half expecting the beasts to crawl from the swamp and swallow his ankles, all the time trying to keep the crowds at bay. That was one thing—but this, this was infinitely another. It was amazing how you could feel that your experience had prepared you to deal with a whole range of activity, and then it turned out that the experience was of no use whatsoever. In actual point of fact, he was counting on Beethoven more than the composer was relying on him. None of this made it any easier to take when the German seized his elbow, dragged him to a halt, and fixed him with shining eyes. "Listen!" said Beethoven. "Do you hear them?"

"All right," said Selous, cutting the pale blond man down. "Why have you been following me?"

"I owe you no answer, mortal," said the man, rubbing some life back into his leg.

"What makes you think you're a god?"

"Think I'm a god?" was the reply. "I am & god. I have proclaimed it."

"That's all it takes?" asked Selous with an amused smile.

"Enough of your insolence!" snapped the man. "I've slaughtered whole cities for less!"

"Have you indeed?"

"Yes. Now help me to my feet."

Selous placed a foot against the man's chest and shoved, hard.

"Either strike me dead for that, or get ready to do some explaining," he said.

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"I will kill you!" screamed the man, starting to get up again. Once more Selous shoved him down.

"I'm running out of patience with you," he said. "Who are you, and why were you following me?"

"I am Gaius Caligula Caesar, and I explain myself to no one."

"Caligula?" repeated Selous, arching an eyebrow.

"You know of me?"

Selous nodded.

"Then bow down and pay homage to me, and perhaps I shall let you live."

"Answer my questions, and perhaps I'll let you live."

"I am immortal," said Caligula. "I cannot die."

Selous chuckled. "Where do you think you are, and how do you suppose you got here?"

Caligula concentrated for a moment. "I had a dream," he said. "I dreamed that my retainers stabbed me, cut me to ribbons. And then I seemed to awaken on the bank of a broad river. But it was only a dream, for here I am."

"It was not a dream."

"Then this must be heaven."

"It is not heaven," answered Selous. "I assure you of that."

"It must be heaven," Caligula said again. Suddenly he looked around. "But where is Jupiter? Where are Mars and the fleet-footed Mercury? More important, where is Venus? Where is Aphrodite? Where are the Helens of our mission? Where are the women?"

"That I cannot tell you," said Selous, "though I know of your reputation."

"And well-deserved it is," said Caligula. "Who but I would know all the hundred and one ways to pleasure

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Venus and take her pleasure for his own?" He paused and stared at Selous. "And what god are you?"

"My name is Frederick Courtney Selous, and I'm no god. On the other hand, you do not strike me as a pleasurer of women or anything else."

"Then you simply demonstrate your ignorance," said Caligula. "You do not know the splendid technique to which I am privy. But, of course, you would not have an emperor's phallus, a god's constancy."

"You do think well of yourself, don't you?" said Selous.

"And why should I not?"

"At any rate, I assure you that no gods exist here."

"No?" said Caligula, touching himself in a familiar and, to Selous, disgusting way. "Then I am the last and thus the greatest. I command you now to let me rise."

"You seem to do that quite well on your own."

"I will show you a rising in time of which you could not dream." Caligula glared at him. "You must be one of the gods' servants. Let me up and take me to them, or it will go hard with you, Frederick Courtney Selous."

"I've killed more elephants and lions and buffalo than you can count," said Selous. "Don't make me add a god to the list."

"I cannot die," answered Caligula confidently. "They tried in Rome, and all that happened is that I ascended to heaven."

"This isn't exactly heaven," said Selous.

"If I am here, then it must be."

Selous stepped back and allowed Caligula to get to his feet, watching him every second. "Why were you following me?"

"I seek the city of the gods," answered the Roman. "I

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saw you disappear into the forest, and I decided that you knew where it was and would lead me to it."

"You were wrong."

"A god cannot be wrong," said Caligula. "Therefore, you must be lying."

"It is true that I seek a city," said Selous. "Any city. There must be some force governing this world, some set of rules and rulers, and since they have not manifested themselves along the riverbank, I decided to go in search of their civilization. I was following the trail of Sir Richard Burton, whose name will be as unknown to you as my own. It seems to have vanished, but I hope to pick it up again. I do not know where he is headed, but I assume he also has the intelligence to seek out the rulers of this place, and I hope to join forces with him before he reaches his goal. That is the whole of it."

"Why should I believe you?"

"You are free to believe what you wish," said Selous. "You are also free to go your own way. I warn you now not to follow me: my next trap may not be so pleasant."

He turned and started walking off.

"Wait!" cried Caligula.

Selous stopped and turned to face the Roman. "What is it?"

"I am tired, and my leg pains me. I shall permit you to carry me until I regain my strength."

Selous chuckled. "That's very generous of you, but it's an honor I think I can do without."

He turned to leave, and the Roman hurled himself on his back, clawing at his eyes and biting his shoulder.

Selous dropped to the ground, rolled over once, then managed to grab one of Caligula's hands and twist it

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sharply. The Roman screamed and released his hold, and Selous scrambled to his feet.

"If you touch me again, I'll kill you!" he snapped.

"You hurt me!" said Caligula. Suddenly he began crying like a baby. "Why would anyone want to hurt me?"

Selous stared at him and said nothing.

"Don't you know that you are not permitted to touch the person of a god?" wept Caligula. Suddenly the tears vanished, to be replaced by a smile. "Still, I admire your courage, Frederick Courtney Selous. Perhaps I shall let you be my general. We shall cut a bloody path through my enemies."

"That's a generous offer," said Selous sardonically, "but right now I'm the only enemy you've got."

"Nonsense," said Caligula. "Is not the forest our enemy? Does it not hide the path we seek?" He ripped a small dead branch from a nearby tree. "I shall take this plunder to prove we have conquered it!"

"I think Gibbon understated the problem," murmured Selous, staring at the Roman as he went around gathering up more tokens of victory.

"Well?" demanded Caligula, his arms filled. "Don't just stand there! We've got a city to find and a world to conquer!"

"I think we'll find the city much faster if we split up," said Selous.

"An excellent suggestion," said Caligula. "But then who would draw my bath for me and bring me my meals?"

"I thought I was a general."

"You are whatever I want you to be," said Caligula.

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"Otherwise, what's the purpose of being a god in the first place?"

"You have a very short memory," said Selous.

"My memory is perfect."

"But you have already forgotten what happened the last time you tried to give me an order."

"That was different," said Caligula. "That was before I made you my general and we brought the forest to its knees." He paused. "Tomorrow morning I shall create some women for us to enjoy, and perhaps some birds to sing of our coming, and we shall march off to find the city."

Selous shook his head. "I'm leaving now."

"Then I will follow you."

"I might not wait by my next trap. You could spend all eternity hanging upside down, or impaled on sharp sticks at the bottom of a pit."

"I allowed you to catch me," answered Caligula. "I was tired of chasing you, and it seemed the easiest way to meet you."

"Sure you did," said Selous.

"Be not clever with me, mortal, or you risk bringing down my godly wrath upon you."

"It's a chance I'll have to take," said Selous, unimpressed.

"At the very least, I will have the members of my guard run you through."

"First find them, and then I'll worry about it."

"Then I shall do it myself," said Caligula, picking out the longest, sharpest branch he could find and brandishing it like a sword.

"You take one step closer and I'll wrap that thing around your neck," said Selous.

"You are but a mortal," said Caligula with a maniacal laugh.

"I didn't give in to the whims of madmen the first time around," answered Selous. "I don't propose, to change my ways in this life."

Caligula stared at him, puzzled. "Why didn't it all end when I died?"

"The Empire?"

"The world. How could it go on without me?"

"It managed quite well without you," answered Selous.

"Who succeeded me? Did Jupiter himself descend to sit on the throne?"

"You were succeeded by Claudius."

"That crippled old fool?" yelled Caligula. "Now I know you lie! He could barely speak his own name!"

"But he didn't go to war with a bunch of trees," noted Selous.

"I always knew he was a coward." Caligula paused, trying to remember the thread of the conversation. Finally he shrugged. "Well, don't just stand there. We've got a city to find!"

Selous stared at him for a long moment, and decided that he'd probably be better off knowing where this lunatic was every second than having him pop out of the bush at the most inopportune moment. Finally he shrugged.

"Follow me," he said.

"Do you hear them?" repeated Beethoven.

Huey Long swayed to a halt and looked over Beethoven's shoulder, far past the composer into the smoke and haze of the fading Riverworld.

"Hear whatT' he said. "I don't hear anything. Just

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the gulls, maybe—the bird calls. That's all. Nothing exceptional."

"Horses," said Beethoven. "Napoleon's troops. They're coming after us."

"I don't hear horses," said Huey.

"They are sending the troops on horseback with spears and muskets," said Beethoven with total conviction. "They know where we are. That was their plan all the time. We're going to be killed here like pigs." He turned to Huey. "I warned you," he continued, "we should have gotten out of there days ago. I said, let's go, let's leave, but you wanted to stay."

"Wait a minute, now," said Huey. "You're wrong. There are no troops, no horses, no muskets. Just the usual sounds." Agitato, that was one of Beethoven's words. Excited, frenzied. That was what was happening before him. "Just stay calm, son," said Huey Long. "Ain't nothing happening that we can't control."

But Beethoven was a trembling, palsied mess before him now, tears leaking from his astonished eyes, that huge forehead clotted with sweat. The musician gasped, grabbed a big towel that he used as a cloak, then fell gracelessly to the mud and rocked there, grasping his knees.

It's an epileptic fit of some sort, decided Huey. I should have stumbled off, kept to myself, tried to understand this place before things began to happen. But when I came to myself on the banks of this crazy place, he was the first I saw; he helped me and guided me to some kind of consciousness. How could I have left him?

Still, it was confusing. One moment surrounded by your bodyguards, striding through the lobby of the capi-tol into history, the future and your destiny ahead like a

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dream, the next minute crushed to the ground, astonished, surely dead and quaking with this German musician.

How much could a man take? How much could a man truly understand? It was all too much for him. You did the best you could, after all, and you tried to make sense of the senseless, but this was really too much.

Beethoven began to cough, shudder, and shake.

I should never have done this, thought Huey. I should have stayed at fish fries, stayed in the back woods, aimed for the legislature. All right, maybe that wasn't enough for me, maybe I had to be governor. But that was enough, surely. I could have taken steamboats up and down the river and played with honeyed tits and taken casual graft forever.... But instead what did I do? I went to Washington and drove FOR crazy and then came back to the capitol to meet the bullet they had prepared for me. Every man a king, but sometimes even kings get killed.

Too late now, he thought, too late. They got me, they just goddamned got me. Hell, maybe those were horses Beethoven heard in the distance, maybe Beethoven was right, maybe the whole goddamned Napoleonic guard is heading toward us.

"Come on, Ludwig," he said. "Get up! Let's get the hell away from the city. It was your idea, remember?"

Beethoven finally heaved himself to his feet, mumbling about betrayal and heroes and the brutal blows of fate, and Huey knew that he would be all right. As long as the man sounded like himself, he was himself. That was something you came to understand quickly on the Riverworld.

"Why have we stopped?" demanded Caligula. Selous squatted down, staring at the ground. "Someone passed this way not too long ago."

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"Doubtless it was your friend Burton."

"He's not exactly my friend," said Selous. "And it wasn't him. I lost his trail miles ago. This was someone who came by in a hurry, at kind of a half-run. Also, whoever it was has never worn shoes. The toes are all straight, not bunched together at the edge."

"What is that to us?"

"I don't know yet."

"Then why are we pausing?"

"There may be people ahead of us, and they may not be friendly."

"They will fall to their knees and worship me, and perhaps, in my magnanimity, I will let some of them live," said Caligula, striding confidently past Selous.

For a moment the Englishman was tempted to grab his arm and hold him back. Then he shrugged. What the hell, if someone was going to take the first shot or the first arrow, far better this madman than himself.

He fell into stride behind the blond god.

Beethoven had turned to Huey Long in the first flush of their acquaintance, a few days earlier, and said, "They lied to us. From the beginning, from the very start, we were lied to."

"Lying is what it's all about," the politician had said. "Without lies, son, there woudn't be any politicos at all. There would just be a bunch of people hitting each other with clubs to see who came out on top. It's the lies that bring structure to the whole mess, you understand what I mean?"

"No," Beethoven had replied, "I don't understand what you mean." Everything seemed so clear in his mind until he started talking, and then it drifted away, simply

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left him. It was an embarrassment, a disgrace of sorts to be out-talked and out-thought by this fool of an American. "How could I understand?" he continued bitterly. "But surely you see they are not telling the truth about this place. It is not like something we have seen before, but is something else."

"That's true, son," Huey agreed. "Everything is something else, which is why we must apply our higher reasoning powers to the situation."

"But the situation is not as you think," Beethoven said, and wanted to continue in a long speech to the politician about the nature of thought and the different kinds of liars with whom he had had to struggle all his life, but a shocking C Minor triad directly out of the first movement of the C Minor Symphony, the loudest he had heard since the deafness had been stripped from him in this place, came thundering through with the force of light and left him surprised and numb.

"C Minor, C Minor!" he said wildly. "That's all of life, don't you understand, tonic to dominant C and back again!" He remembered how it had been in the last years • before the deafness struck, when the music had seemed so absolute in its purity and force that even the Hammerklavier had seemed to be only a preparation for what he might do. And then to lose hearing, lose patience, lost all of the fawning, miserable dilettantes who had made ease possible, all of the time understanding that he was sinking slowly beneath his own shame.

"Enough!" he shouted suddenly. "Enough!" He heard the triad shift to the major, now a clashing C major triad signaling the opening of the final movement after the crawl through the bassi.

"I can't understand how this happened," he said to

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Huey Long. "Of this destiny there was not any indication at all. Not a hint of prayer or light. Even when I tore the curtain aside in the Missa Solemnis, it was nothing like this, it was acres and acres of the graveyard, the encased dead, the unwrapped dead, rising, singing, ascending slowly...."

"Oh, son," said Long, not unkindly, "you're really gonna have to stop with this nonsense. You're just tearing yourself up with the anxiety, and you ain't getting nowhere at all."

All this was before Beethoven realized that they must leave the city, that the way to redemption lay in the empty spaces far beyond the enclosure, when he was still trying to piece some meaning out of these circumstances.

How foolish he had been then! He seemed years older now, though of course only a few days had elapsed. Conferring with the wretched Long, whom had he seen arriving in the same stunned and disastrous state that Beethoven remembered so well, he had felt not only sympathy but indeed a kind of necessity, a need to reach out and rescue this man from the horror embodied always in that first view of the Riverworld. As the peasant boy from Stockholm had done it for him before vanishing into the tablelands, so he had done it for Long, had soothed him, calmed him, eased the ferocity of the terror as his new situation first opened up before him, then conveyed him to a safer and more secluded space where Long could finally make some sense of what had happened to him.

Beethoven had not understood much of the Riverworld then, either, but what he knew he tried to impart in short, gentle phrases that would give Long the little material he

needed to somehow recover himself and move past that first point of terror.

Now here they were, and Long had slowly become acclimated.

"Son," said Long, touching Beethoven gently on the top of the head, propelling him gently forward, "we'll just stop and rest a spell now if you don't mind."

"But we are being followed! They'll be here any moment."

"I know," said Huey, "but I feel a speech coming on. I just want to make a little address to the troops. I was a mighty fine speechmaker in my day, and now I think it is time to make my position known."

They had finally come to the end of the forest. The trees had been thinning for the past mile, the scrub was sparser, and now Selous stared out across a large clearing. He stood, hands on hips, trying to make up his mind which way to go next. Far in the distance to his left was a small lake.

Suddenly he heard a savage, almost inhuman scream behind him. He whirled around instantly, just as Caligula was swinging a huge log at his head. He raised a hand, slightly cushioning the blow, but fell backward before the Roman's onslaught.

"You're a brave man!" muttered Caligula, pummeling him with both hands. "I will take your bravery unto myself!"

Selous tried to roll free of the blond man's weight, but he was still dizzy from the blow to the head.

"Get off me!" he snapped. "You're crazy!"

"As I ate my unborn son, so shall I eat your heart!"

Selous felt consciousness slipping away from him, and

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then Caligula lowered his head to the Englishman's chest and took a huge bite of it.

It was the horror of what would happen should he pass out more than anything else that seemed to provide Selous with a fresh burst of adrenaline, and he brought his knee up hard into Caligula's groin. The Roman emitted a falsetto shriek, rolled over on the ground, and began screaming incoherently.

Selous, blood flowing down his torso onto his belly, leaped to his feet and examined himself as best he could. It really could use some stitches, but wounds seemed to heal magically on this world. Besides, he'd received worse from lion and leopard; if Caligula's teeth weren't septic, and there was no reason to assume they were, it would be only a temporary annoyance.

Still, it hurt like the devil, and he walked over to the fallen god and kicked him again, this time on the side of the head. There was no further reaction from Caligula, who was still howling and hugging his groin, and all he got for his trouble was a sharp shooting pain in his foot.

He searched around for the rope that he had been carrying coiled over his shoulder, found it where he had fallen, and brought it over to Caligula. Before the Roman could resist, Selous had tied his hands behind his back and then wrapped the rope a few times around his neck, giving him about a ten-foot slack.

"All right," he grated. "On your feet!"

He jerked the rope, and Caligula, gasping and choking, rose awkwardly.

"You hurt me!" he said accusingly.

"You tried to kill me," answered Selous.

"But it is an honor to die for a god's pleasure," said Caligula, honestly puzzled by Selous's reaction.

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"It's an honor I can do without."

"Then you are a fool."

Selous jerked the rope, and Caligula began gasping again.

"What about a god dying for my pleasure?" he asked.

"Blasphemy!" cried Caligula, charging at Selous with his head lowered.

Selous sidestepped him just as he would sidestep a rhino that had lowered its head to charge. Instead of putting a bullet in his ear, as he would then have done with the rhino, he simply waited until Caligula reached the end of the rope and gave it a quick, hard tug. The Roman did a complete flip in the air and landed heavily on his back.

"I think I broke my arms!" he wailed.

"I thought gods couldn't feel pain," said Selous sardonically.

"Help me!" whined Caligula. "I'm hurt!"

"I'll help you," said Selous, approaching him. "You've got three seconds to get up before I kick you in the groin again."

"No!" shrieked Caligula, jumping to his feet. "My person is sacrosanct! You can never touch it again!"

"Just so we understand each other," said Selous, approaching him and slapping his face.

He expected Caligula to curse, or cry, or perhaps even giggle. Instead the Roman looked at him as if nothing had happened, and said conversationally, "I think we're more likely to find a city by the River. Cities need commerce, and the lake doesn't afford much likelihood of that."

Once he got over his temporary surprise, Selous found

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that he agreed with his prisoner. "All right," he said. "Let's start walking toward the River. You first."

"We could use some horses," commented Caligula as he headed off to his right.

"If we find any, I'll trade you for them."

"Gods are not property to be traded by merchants," said Caligula, suddenly haughty.

"What makes you a god, anyway?" asked Selous.

"I am a god by proclamation."

"Whose proclamation?"

"My own," answered Caligula.

"That's all there is to it?"

"No one has ever challenged it."

"No one?"

"Well, no one who was still alive an hour later."

"Nice work if you can get it," commented Selous dryly.

"I am a god," insisted Caligula. "Without me there would be no night or day, no rain or sunshine. When I die the heavens will open up and pour forth a stream of black lava that will kill all living things and cover the earth."

"That must comfort you in times of need," said Selous.

"You don't believe me?"

"If you're a god, create a pair of horses for us. If not, stop talking; you'll need all your strength for the march that lies ahead of us."

"I can create horses," said Caligula with conviction. "I can bring them to life right here this instant."

"Then why don't you?"

"Because you dared to lay your hand on a god. You don't deserve to ride."

"Do you deserve to walk, too?" asked Selous.

"I am a god. I feel no pain, no fatigue. The sun is my brother; it cannot burn my skin. The grass is my lover; it renews me with every step I take."

"How very fortunate for you."

"I require no nourishment, no water, no sleep," continued Caligula. "Later tonight, when you finally can remain awake no longer, I shall change into a snake and squeeze the life from you. Then," he continued conversationally, "I will eat your heart, and very possibly your eyeballs, for you have truly excellent vision, and I will go find my city."

"Since you are capable of all these things, I assume you won't mind if I tie you securely to a tree before I go to sleep?" said Selous.

"Not at all," said Caligula pleasantly. "I would expect no less of you... though of course it will do you no good."

They walked another mile in silence, and then Selous stopped, causing Caligula to choke when he reached the end of the rope.

"Are you tired already, mortal?" asked the Roman.

"Be quiet," said Selous, raising his free hand to shade his eyes from the sun.

"What do you see out there?" asked Caligula.

"I'm not sure. Something. It could be a group of men."

"Come to worship me, no doubt."

"Or to kill you."

"I cannot die."

"Try to stay sane long enough to remember that you are no longer an emperor and never were a god, and

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keep your mouth shut until I can find out if these people are friends or foes."

"I will turn myself into a hummingbird, so they cannot see me until I know why they are here," agreed Caligula promptly.

"A very quiet hummingbird," said Selous. "Start walking."

"Flying," corrected Caligula.

"Whatever."

"I can't fly," said Caligula suddenly. "You have bound my wings."

"Even birds have feet," noted Selous.

"True," said Caligula. "You are a very wise man. In a way, I will be almost sorry to rip you open and eat your innards."

And then, chirping very quietly to himself, the Roman began leading the Englishman across the savannah toward the distant cluster of men.

Hie command had seemed to come from inside him, as it always did when a real stemwinder was building.

"Here I stand my ground," said Huey Long. "Come around! I want to talk to you!"

In the dim light of the infernal sun, Huey thought he could see them beginning to stumble before him, but then again it might have been only an illusion. He had Beethoven's attention, though; the musician was crouched in place, squatting there, looking at Huey with those odd and flickering eyes, a crazy man's eyes.

"Let me tell you about my friend the great musician here," continued Huey. "He had plans. He wanted to enter the city and find the emperor, to settle old accounts

with him, but he has changed his plans. Do you know why? Do you?"

There was no response to the question, just the sound of empty breathing and perhaps a rumble in the distance. You had to have confidence, however; then you could draw them in.

"He gave it up," said Huey, "because, like you, he thought that there was nothing in the city, that it was all random, that some would come and some would go, but that the reincarnation made no sense at all and there was no way that the emperor could be found because the emperor could be a thousand miles down the other way. And he grew discouraged, tired of the noise, the heat, the feeling that nothing at all could be changed, nothing could be done." Huey paused and looked around him, measuring their response. "But now I am here to tell you that my friend has seen differently, that he has understood the nature of his portion and he must recant his obstinacy, for the emperor is there, he is there for all of us and everything that we want can be found in that city of desires. The truth of Riverworld has been launched upon us."

Now he knew that he had their attention. "Do you know what the truth is?" he continued. "It is here for all of us. That is the truth. We have been granted all power, all possibility, all fundamental circumstance in this bedeviled place. Every man a king, every woman a queen! We can do anything we want, all of us kings and queens of our domain, waiting for that entitlement, for the cloak of possession to be put upon us. And that is why we are going to change our ways." He paused dramatically. "We are going to go back. We are going to reclaim the city."

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"What are you talking about?" someone said. It was a British accent, clipped and almost indecipherable in the thick haze, but Huey could infer the message. "You're out of your mind," the voice said. "You Americans don't know shit!"

"Where is that man?" shouted Huey. "Let me see the man who said that! Bring yourself forward and confront me! If you have the courage to do that, then you have the courage to go back to the city."

"Not courage," the voice said, attached to a spindly figure who came through the haze and dropped to one knee before him, crouching in the mud beneath the tree stump upon which Huey stood. "Hey, mate, why don't you give it up and just face the truth? We are lost. We are as lost as we all have ever been. We are so lost that we don't even know the wood. Why don't you let us sleep? Why don't you let us buy out of this terrible place?"

"If you have the courage to say this," answered Huey, "then you have the courage to move on from here. We can take back the city. We can find our souls within that place. We can reclaim ourselves and we can begin anew."

He was sure of this, Huey thought. It was not only the sound of his own voice pounding that realization into him, but indeed some intimation of what they had become. He clambered down off his perch on the tree stump, staring at the Brit who had baited him, and behind that Brit the ragamuffin crowd that had assembled, the worst army he had ever seen—and yet it was an army, it could be taken in that direction.

"Beethoven," he said, "stand up and give us a march! Give us a march, do you hear me? We are going to take back the city!"

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And without thinking about it further, without stopping to consider the amazing and preposterous dimensions of what he had somehow suggested, Huey Long pushed his way through them and began to advance upon the city.

Suddenly a voice rang out:

"It's a very big city, and you're a very small army. If you're going to take it, then you're going to need an advantage, something to even the odds."

"Yeah?" said Huey, turning to face the lean, bearded newcomer. "What have you got in mind?"

Selous smiled and displayed a youthful blond man who struggled against the rope that bound him. "A god," he said. "A genuine gold-plated god."

Caligula looked up at the man and said, "He's right. That's exactly what I am. You will unbind me immediately. You will release me from these ropes or I will strike a curse—"

"He talks like that," interjected Selous. "Up and down, like nothing you have ever heard. You might as well give him a try. After all, not only does he have plans, big plans for reckoning, but how can you be defeated with a god at your fore? In any event," Selous concluded with a sweeping gesture, "I turn the situation over to you. Deal with him as you will."

Caligula examined the others carefully: the wild-haired man with the poisoned features of a Claudius, the somewhat younger, smooth-faced man with funny hands and strange gestures. They were not the kind of troops he would have envisioned, but on the other hand, you had to use what you had. In court, out of court, in or out of the city, surrounded by fools or madmen, you lived as you

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must, transcendent, and you brought order from the sinister.

"Well," said Caligula with a haughty tilt of his head, fixing his attention on the smooth-faced man who seemed the most reasonable, perhaps the most reverent of them all, "are you going to release me? Are you going to serve my powers? Or will you defy me and bring down my terrible curse?"

"He talks that way," said Selous. "Almost all the time. I can't do anything with him; maybe you can."

"Yes," said the smooth-faced man, his eyes filled with reverence, or at least a decent sense of the occasion. "Yes, I think we can do that." He reached out, began to tug on the ropes. "Stand clear," he said, "and let me release this god from his altar." He smiled at Caligula. "My Latin ain't all it used to be, and truth to tell, it was never that good. What did you say your name was?"

"Quickly unbind me," said Caligula, "and you will know my name and my curse, all of my circumstances...."

"He talks that way all the time," Selous said again. "I'm a solitary man, used to the silent places. You deal with him; I've had quite enough, thank you."

"We've all had enough," said the smooth-faced man. "It's amazing how much you can take, though." He stared at Caligula intently, knelt, tugged at a knot. "Every man a god, that's my philosophy," he said. "What else would have brought us here?"

"Godhood is restricted," said Caligula. "It becomes only one of us."

"Oh, calm down," said his rescuer. "Calm down and stop babbling, at least for a moment. Beethoven, come and step on this cord, will you? We're never going to get him loose at this rate."

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They bent intently to minister to him. Caligula crouched proudly, his head inclined at an angle, seeking the sun, the thin blades penetrating the heavy rolling clouds. An image pressed upon his mind, an image that inserted itself, unbidden, and that he could not remove. Hunched as if in this position, clinging to the stones, his belly heaving and inverted, his knees feeling the cold damp of the stones as he clutched the handles.

The vomitorium.

. Without instruments he could not carry a tune, and this place yielded not even percussion, but Beethoven gave them a march anyway as they labored up and down with the one called Caligula at their head. It was the Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens, not his favorite, but good enough for this rabble with its piercing woodwinds and rattling snare drums, effects that he could reproduce in his head if not his muttering, groaning voice.

Take the city, that was Selous's idea too, take back the city. Not that they had ever had it in the first place, not that the city was anyplace to take. What could you do with it? But the Roman emperor, the strange youth with the glaring eyes, seemed to know his business: he had the assurance of Napoleon and the madness of an archbishop, moving out at the end of them in a curious, shuffling stride that conveyed, if not regality, then a kind of determination that Beethoven could appreciate.

Selous and Huey Long seemed deep in conversation as they shuffled along. From time to time some form would leap from the crowd that streamed alongside them and slap at the Roman emperor, then fall back with a roar.

It was a procession unlike any Beethoven had ever known. He had written his share of marches and

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contradances in his time, junk and diversions for the rabble, but he had never seen a group such as this. He could tell that things had changed since they had come upon Selous and Caligula, had released Caligula from his bondage and started back toward the place from which he had come. Matters were not at all as they had been. The air was thicker, clotting his nostrils, and the crowds pressed with an insistence he had not known before. Every man a god, Huey Long had said, and indeed attention was being paid to this Caligula unlike anything Beethoven had ever seen. Maybe there really was something at the end of this trek; Beethoven did not know, and it was not worth thinking about. What you did was take the staff and make your way with the rest of it: Roman emperors, Gallic emperors, democrats, freedmen, archbishops or slaves, they were all the same. There was almost an insight there, but he would not think about it. Not with the music roaring in his head, the cymballo rattling, the pedal of the snare drum furious against the screen of his consciousness.

When they came to the rise and looked down upon the enclosure, the huts erected along the River, Selous felt a sense of triumph, of vindication.

"You see?" he said, turning to Huey Long. "I told you we could get here. I knew it was just a matter of turning around and coming back, that no one would stop us!" Indeed, no one had stopped them, and they had in fact gathered a considerable group that was not discouraged by the heat and the brutality of the conditions, nor by Caligula's ravings. "Now we go on to the next step."

"And what is the next step, son?" asked Huey Long. The walk had not winded him, nothing on the Riverworld

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seemed to have the effect that it might have had in what he had come to think of as civilian life. "Am I supposed to make a speech? Is there a place we're supposed to occupy? Are we empowered to take something?" His eyes twinkled with a mad light, and he suddenly seemed to Selous to be not only an odd but possibly a dangerous man. Then the intimation passed and he was just a fat American politician with no constituency.

"I'm quite sure that matters will resolve now," said Selous. "Once they see us, once they know we've returned here, they will make arrangements for us."

Huey Long stared at him with that odd, kindly expression that could so suddenly and awkwardly shift to brutality, and said, "I don't know what you're talking about, son. I truly do not."

Selous shrugged. "Do any of us? Do any of us really know what is going on in this damnable place?"

"/ do," said Caligula. "I know exactly what is going on." He turned to them, his body at attention, his eyes ferocious and insistent. "Now," the emperor said, "now we will bring this to an end." He raised his hand, stared at Selous, then Long, then passed his gaze along the thin ranks that had staggered to surround them.

"Bring me a virgin," he said. "Bring me a virgin at once!"

But, of course, he had known that this was their mission, that this was what had been waiting for them all along. Caligula felt the godhood coursing within him, felt in these burning moments the fullness of his need, and as he cast his eyes slowly down the line of followers he sought out the women in the ranks. He could feel the familiar power of his sex stirring deep within him. They

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would not dare to refuse, for soon they would know his true power.

"Bring me a virgin," he repeated, "or soon all of you will be dead. I will pronounce a curse upon you that will bring you to the dung that you are." He reached out, snagged Selous in a surprising and huge grasp, then flung the man out of his way with a power born of the madness now inside him, and ran toward the dim line he saw before him.

"I'll have you!" he yelled. "I'll have you all!" Destiny filled his loins as gracefully as if it had been the blood and sex of the virgin he craved. "You will acknowledge my godhood!" he cried. "I will open the gates of this city in the game of the anointment and I will have you all, just as it was decreed!"

He reached out, snared a body, ran his hands cruelly up and down it, seeking breasts, seeking the familiar pudenda, an amazing sense of destiny overwhelming him. Why, this place was splendid! He had not judged its splendor until this very moment. For he was truly a god here. He could do as he wished to any of them. Why had he not understood this before? They were all gods.

He started to mount the body, his needs urgent. He had never dreamed there could be a place such as this, but here it was. This was surprising, enormous, absolutely astonishing to him. In his head there was a ribbon of screaming, and he seized on to it, held it, and let the screaming drag him home.

Beethoven stared in despair. He had never seen such things. Even when the mobs had stormed the gates of Paris in 1789 there had not been anything like this, he was sure. But here it was. Huey Long was staring,

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laughing. Selous was rubbing his hands and yelling at Caligula in Victorian outrage... but no one moved on the young emperor in the small space that he had opened as he continued his cruel and amazing act.

The cymbals in Beethoven's head had stopped, the piccolo too, and all that was left was the droning of the bassi in the trio of the C Minor Symphony, that grotesque dance toward Hell.

"What are we doing?" he said to Huey Long. "Is this what we have become? Is this the end for us?"

He had a sudden blazing insight: Long and Selous had talked them back to the gates of the city for precisely this reason, so that pillage and rape could be undertaken, and Caligula had been unbound to lead them because only Caligula could manage what was necessary without hesitation.

"Aren't you going to stop this?" continued Beethoven. Long bit his lip, shook his head, smirked a negative. Selous shrugged; he seemed fascinated with what was going on, engaged but disengaged.

"From here I can't even tell if it's a man or a woman," said Selous.

"Does it make any difference?" said Long.

"Then /'// stop it!" Beethoven, without quite realizing what he was doing, flung himself at the rounded, heaving flanks of the emperor, feeling a revulsion such as he had never known. That other emperor, Napoleon, had betrayed him, but that had been impersonal, it had not been like this. This was revolting. It was obscene, disgusting, it was the revocation of all that he had lived his fifty-seven years to negate. Freedom, yes, but freedom for all, not just the insane and the wicked.

"Stop!" he shrieked, lunging toward them. Then he

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felt Huey Long's hands upon him, enormous, pulling him back.

"No!" said Huey Long. "Don't stop him! This is what we came here to see."

"Every man a god," said Huey Long. Selous stared at the American in shock and approval. "That is why we were taken to this place," continued Long; "so that we could do as we wished."

Beethoven struggled in his embrace, tried feebly to escape, but Long was much too powerful for him.

Selous looked upon the two of them in that embrace, looked further to see Caligula humping and scuttling away in the position of an insect, and thought: the man is right. The American is right, every man is a god, and we have come to this accursed place to make gods of ourselves, be they in the most despicable of fashion. That is the answer that lay in the heart of the city; that is what we have always understood. All of his life he had aspired, just as others must, to this position, and now that he had found it there was nothing to do but submit.

"Submit!" Selous screamed to Beethoven. "Let it be! Do as you will!" He scanned the land, the encampment in the distance, the near forms that in the intensity of Caligula's necessity had scattered to open ground. I'd do it myself if I could, thought Selous, and I will, I will. "Now I understand why we came back to the banks of the River," he said to Huey Long. "This was waiting for us all the time, wasn't it?"

Long smiled, shook his head, opened his hands to Selous. His expression was curious, abstracted. Beethoven, scrambling in Long's enormous hug, gave up sud-

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denly, sunk to his knees, then leaned over the ground and rubbed his forehead in the mud.

"You won't stop him," muttered Beethoven. "None of us will stop him. Nothing will ever be stopped again. That's the answer, isn't it? That's what you wanted me to know, why you brought me back to humiliate me."

"I don't know anything about that, son," said Huey Long. He smiled easily and stared at Selous. "But we think we know the answer now, don't we?"

"Yes," said Selous. There was a dim and insistent haze in front of him; he could have whisked it away with a few motions of his hand, but he chose not to. "Yes, I understand. Every man a god." He looked at the entrapped, sullen Beethoven. "Even you," he said. "And me, and the rest of them. That is for us to discover."

Caligula's voice bleated through the haze, through the shocking stillness of the Riverworld. Selous heard the chanting of the emperor and then the dull scream of his release. I'll be damned, he thought, and then, Yes, I guess I am. I guess we all are. Which is exactly the same thing as being free.

"He sure put that chicken in the pot, didn't he?" said Huey Long. "Look at the man put that there car in the garage." He cackled and wondered what Selous would say to that. "Say, there," he said to Beethoven, who was now softly weeping beneath him, "what do you think the Englishman would say?"

"Muss ess sein," Beethoven said. "Ess muss sein."

Magnificent in his duties, triumphant in his discharge, the god Caligula rolled from the inert form that had served him so well—adequately, anyway, enough for the

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time being, though of course there would be better—and looked at his subjects encamped in the distance, fallen to their knees to revere and serve him.

"Oh, yes," he said quietly. "Oh, yes, reverence and service, they are the same thing."

He readjusted his garments, stood, pushed the husk of his revenant to one side, and strode to the small place that had been made for him by the servants of the Riverworld, his parapet from which he would speak. He would gather them to him and give them his orders, and then the true and final nature of his reign would begin. In the distance he heard the shrieks of homage, Claudius himself soon to come, to bear witness, to bow down in service. Every man a god, yes—

—But this god, granted the Riverworld, its indulgence, its folly and its treasure... this god a man.

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Phillip G. Jennings

' 'Has even death become unsure? Are we mockeries of ourselves? Are you the Mocker?"

The Big Cheese's voice echoed down from the throne. P.G. Wodehouse, Bart., was urged to his knees by the guards at his side, and the Grand Panjandrum—this "al-Hakim" chappie—took wind for another set-to in what Plum had to admit was exceptionally refulgent Arabic.

"To say that God speaks is to suggest he may ever be silent. This—this 'river world' is not reality, but a code, and therefore a message and not of God. But it implies a message very like the Druze da'wa, and therefore a thousand times deceitful. What do you know of the Deceiver?"

Hakim's mighty line of thought seemed almost logical. Some Oxford wallah might grasp how one sentence led to the next, each conclusion grimmer than the one before it. "Well now, dash it! I mean—codes and all!" Saddled with the habits of a myopic lifetime, Plum blinked about, trying to make something of a hall built of cyclopean slabs. His spirits certainly needed fortifying. A casual

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viewer of these mustered ranks hi black robes and white turbans—said viewer might easily hop to the conclusion that he was "in for it."

It was not a conclusion Plum Wodehouse liked to embrace. Death may have lost much of its sting by the third or fourth inning, but his last incarnation he hadn't even gotten a chance to eat, and his faith in the better nature of humanity was taking a beating. "If you think I'm the Devil, or that I've met him, I have to answer not to my knowledge. No. I mean, I don't think so."

"Truth knows what it means."

"I suppose it does," Plum conceded. In moments of desperate anxiety his smile widened to the straining point and became almost horrible. "But I can't vouch for anyone but myself, and I've met a lot of strange coves and covesses these last few lives...." His eyes narrowed with sudden cunning. "Besides, didn't you say we might not be ourselves? Under the circ.s, I don't know how to prove my bona fides."

"We tolerate one people here, and one language. Assuredly I've never heard Arabic spoken as you do," al-Hakim thundered from his high and distant seat. "Nevertheless, it is Arabic—of a sort."

He pondered, and the flanking spear-carriers shifted in waiting, ready to extirpate this infidel at the crook of a finger. "You've lived several lives? After the feast, attend us privately in our garden, and we will hear your testimony."

Plum took this for good news, and breathed again. The four hours of this present existence might become eight, and then sixteen.... Socially inept, yes, but he'd always charmed—well, not everybody. In his last incarnation Hans Horbiger had it in for him, with bells on. Still, al-Hakim

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bi'Amr Allah would feel better for a few rashers under his belt, and in a tete-a-tdte encounter...

Plum felt a tap on his shoulder. His travail was over, but the business of court went on—the business of recessing for lunch in conformity with the inexorable schedule of the local grailstones.

One of the spearmen sat him in an alcove with a few heterogenous gents, and took his tiffin-tin. The usual magic was done offstage, and it came back not quite an hour later for Plum to open.

The fee for this service was all his cigarettes and alcohol. Plum hardly minded crossing the callused palm of the local IRS. At some date umbrage might set in, but for the nonce he took a larger view. Made affable by a melange of chicken, paprika, onions, and sour cream, he tried his French on the swarthy gang around him. French, language of diplomacy, perfect for the exchange of secrets— but his halting attempts ne marche pas.

German? Latin? Carpe diem might as well be a Vietnamese fish recipe. After some diffidence and throat-clearing, the Apache-looking customer ventured his English. "Don't use Jesus dates. He'll ask you. Subtract six hundred thirty from everything."

Plum beamed mutely, his mouth full. The Apache went on. "It's not always the same number, because they got shorter years. But if you lived on Earth after 1200 his time, he'll be interested in you."

Plum did the math. The six hundred part was easy: Thirteen dah-de-dah. Thirteen forty-two. He might round it upward—fifty, sixty, seventy. "Do I want to be interesting?" he asked.

The Apache laughed. He might have said louche, but the Norman conquest had never reached Arizona.

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After the pudding, Plum tried to ease himself among this crowd: "Ah, an afterlife of leisure." The irony, apparent in the English, did not survive translation. He reconsidered his cheerfulness, adopting the general silence until a pair of black-robes—lots of kiltcloth wasted here—strode in and grunted him to his feet.

The local gendarmerie marched him left through an atrium and out a roofless corridor. Under a semitropic sun the corridor doubled on itself, stones like polished incisors on both sides. Giant chiclets, Plum thought, always keen to improve a metaphor. His way ramped into a shallow pool and out again. The three left wet footprints for a distance, and the labyrinth opened to compass a field just too small for a cricket match.

The man Hakim waited under a tree. Close up, he boasted a heroically Semitic face: like an Assyrian fresh off the frieze, minus the beard and trimmings. A guard or two stood at wide distances, as unmenacing as they could get, but still Plum thought of those biblical stories—the ones involving wolves on the fold, and mountains of severed heads. He bowed, unsure of the protocol, and his escorts beetled away to join the others. "When did you die?" Hakim asked, getting straight to the point.

Plum took the plunge and exaggerated manfully. "The year 1380," he said. "—after Mohammed did whatever it was."

"You've worked it out. Good." Good puppy, he might have said. Good infidel. Hakim paced a circle. "You shall have a hut. See that row? A hut to each of my historical consultants. I labor under a disadvantage, and you will help me. Who have you run into?"

This al-Hakim bi'Amr Allah had one thing going for

him—he knew how to keep a chap off balance. "What? Where?"

"In your several lives," Hakim said. "Hitler? Lenin?"

Plum shook his head. "Queen Bilkis. That was my first resurrection. She and Madame Blavatsky set up an aunt-aucracy of women who lived long lives on Earth, and learned not to take backchat from me. La Blavatsky— she got this religion going when I was a schoolboy. Er—ah."

"Yes?"

"I do a splendid job of organizing things on paper; it's only in real life that I'm a broken reed. Do you want to know all the Hollywood types I met on Earth? Movie stars," he went on. "Clark Gable. Fred Astaire. Broadway chappies, too."

"Queen Bilkis is a mythical figure," Hakim said.

"There was a good muchness to her, for a myth," Plum answered. "She had the advantage on me of a stone or two, and made dashed sure I learned Arabic. Who else? Bilkis's neighbors across the river tugged their forelocks at Prince Fernando Montesinos, who claimed to be somebody. You couldn't prove it by me. I mean, I couldn't tell you if Rowena was Horsa's daughter, or Hengist's."

"Rowena?" Hakim had the gift of patience.

"Gossip drifted up-River that she'd married H. Rider Haggard, but Allah knows how many kingdoms away from me that was; somewhere the far side of Emperor Alexius. I got killed for Bilkis, don't you know. I walked into a spear because my new eyes were too good."

Since he had Hakim's attention, Plum took wind. "The real me used to be blind as a bat. I'd take my glasses off before going to sleep. I needed to get blurry, or it didn't

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go. All that time with Bilkis and her sanhedron of aunts, I had insomnia like nobody's business. I was groggy on my toes when Prince Fernando launched his armada. 'Invasion!' the locals hued and cried. 'Invasion? What? Where?' I yawned, fumbling for my bludgeon—"

Hakim's black eyes beaded steadily on despite this diversion. "But perhaps you know about Lenin," he interrupted. "And the Bolshevik movement? Had they achieved true communism by your time on Earth?"

Surely this wrench in topics meant something profound, Plum thought to himself. "Lenin died—spare me the math—but fifty years before me. Russia kept going and picking up satellites. They bought my books, don't you know. Bought 'em like billy-o. I had the deuce of a time doing anything with their rubles, but my characters were all idiot English capitalists, and they liked that."

"You wrote books."

"Fiction. Music hall stuff. Funny."

The man Hakim filed this away. "Fifty years. And Lenin's cause was prospering?" An eagle had the same way of plucking here, plucking there, and pausing between times to contemplate its dead fish. Hakim had an eagle's craggy face, and all the time in the world.

"The Reds? In a glum sort of way, rising on the stepping-stones of dead multitudes to higher things. Politics wasn't my game. When it's summer, one doesn't dwell on the torments of winter, and I'm a summer person."

Hakim nodded at the metaphor. He spoke in ponderous sympathy. "All these people in black robes: winter people. Religion does that. They migrate up-River and down, dozens a week, because they've heard mat their Hakim is back from occultation. I have to conquer new grailstones

to feed them all, and so my neighbors hate me. Perhaps they're right. Messiahs are evil, no?"

Plum shrugged. In his hours here, he'd gotten the impression that Mr. al-Hakim bi'Amr Allah was a god in the flesh to the Druze who dominated this bit of river-bank. He was a latter-day Mohammed. Tact required that he show some reluctance to damn the man to his face.

He cogitated—what should he say? As he ransacked his wits, Hakim went inscrutable. "Your cabin. The last one in the corner. We'll walk there."

They did. It had a bed, a small table, a door, and a window. During his internment in World War Two, Plum had endured worse than this. Much worse. Given the dearth of structure around Riverworld, this bamboo box was a suite at the Ritz.

The godlike and possibly evil Hakim made a gesture— this is yours—and left. Plum stepped inside, put his tiffin-grail on the table, and tested his frame-and-mattress. Ropes took the place of bedsprings, but it was comfortable.

Privacy!

Plum's face fell. This was as good as it got, but Riverworld was still hell. No paper, no ink, no printing presses. How could he function? The one thing he did well was no longer an option. Except for that, he was a fool. His role as "historical consultant" was pure folly. No one forced to be there had paid less attention to the twentieth century.

Then there was Hakim. When Plum talked, the vagaries of his mind took play. Hakim was equally inconsistent, but here was the terrifying difference: He had depths behind him. In switching topics, he followed a cunning mental algorithm that left his victim plundered.

Literarily speaking, Plum had always found it a bad

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idea to get into the psychology of his villains. It ruined them. Now that he was in the story instead of writing it, his feelings were different. Plum regretted that he could guess nothing of his master's inner compulsions. He was Hakim's poor mule, goaded by carrot and stick, but why?

Why had Hakim hinted that he was not really the figment his followers worshiped? Something didn't wash. What was going on here? After a time Plum got up and went back outside, into the "garden"—this giant-chiclet-walled cricket meadow—to see if his fellow historical consultants had any idea.

They were fonts of information. The ex-haberdasher from Smyrna pointed off right, to the wall opposite this row of huts. "Beyond that's the women's side," he explained. "Hakim spends much more time with them. We're the second team. He uses us to check their facts. When Maria tells him that Kemal Ataturk did thus and so, he noses around to make sure of it."

"Maria?"

"We're not supposed to know their names," said Nabuch ad-Nasr, who was an expert on Middle East politics two thousand years before Hakim became Imam-Caliph. Plum thought it odd that a fellow of Old Testament times should bounce around in the vigor of youth, as giddy a lad as the Afghan resistance fighter—notwithstanding his love of makeup and elaborately pretty eyes, this last was an expert on nine guerrilla organizations fighting the Soviet invaders.

None of the aforementioned chaps came by Arabic honestly: they were Turkish, Amorite, and Pathan. But it was a condition of living here that they could make themselves understood, and so they had huts, while Jim the Apache was obliged to camp in odd corners until he

grew fluent. Plum repeated the name in translation, as if "Maria" sounded different in English. Before he could laugh at himself for this stupidity, Jim answered in broken Arabic: "She's best. Queen of harem. She talk much Lenin."

"Hitler too," said the haberdasher.

"Hakim is jealous. He thinks he should rank in history with those two," said a junior prince of Iraq, assassinated in some coup in the 1950s. Plum was surprised at the princeling's open hostility, and at the general freedom of speech within these walls, but most of this cabal had gotten here the same way he had, by taking the "cheap trip." They were half ready and half willing to die again.

There were worse punishments than death. One heard of slaver kingdoms: blind, mutilated starvelings kept in confinement for the booty in their tiffin "grails." If Hakim wanted a reputation for villainy, he could have done the like. He hadn't. It gave one pause. It made one wonder if there was a goodish bloke inside Hakim, trying fitfully to make himself known.

Plum Wodehouse slept on the problem that night without coming to an answer. The daily rains came just before dawn. Breakfast was a bun and hot noodle soup, the guard absconding with the usual tax. There'd be no tobacco for Plum's nonexistent pipe, and afterward no typewriter to lay hands on, no audience for the latest adventure at Standings Castle. What was left? How could life be worth living?

That afternoon, good bloke Hakim and his entourage visited the male side of his garden, filing from hut to hut for chats with the locals. Reaching Plum at last, the Occult Master of Druze-dom played the generous host.

"What is wrong?" he asked, after Plum made a botch

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of gratitude for his lodgings. "Would you like to wander around this land of winter piety? I myself feel circumscribed, and so we organize hikes and tours and picnics. You mustn't think you're a prisoner."

Really? "No, it's not that. I just—I'm addicted to writing," Plum answered. "For sixty-plus years that's all I did. Writing, and a spot of walking, or wrestling now that I'm in my vigor again. Dogs. I liked dogs. But nothing quite does it for me like putting words on a blank Page-He averted his face, appalled at the surge of his emotions. He spoke on, brokenly. "I've never seen paper on Riverworld."

Hakim took Plum's hand, as a minister might pluck the limp hand of a mourning widow, and gave it a ministerial pat. "I can bring you paper! We make it out of bamboo. I knew there was something. People are sent to me for a purpose. Yesterday I didn't know what you were for, but now it becomes clear."

"Allah wouldn't send you P.O. Wodehouse to write funny stories," Plum answered. Even as his spirits launched upward on the giddy wings of hope, he recoiled against the grandeur of Hakim's concepts.

"You must have faith! The universe is broken," Hakim answered. "Logic demands that all the casual chains should cycle beginning to end, in a round of time, and each link of that round chain-, when you come to it, is the same link as eighty billion years before. The same Hakim meeting the same P.G. Wodehouse, but thanks to Allah, the doom of that eternal cycle cycle of Big Bang and collapse is not for us. The universe of Physics has cracked, and His grace leaks in through His instruments. I know nothing except what I experience—I am a vessel

of mat grace. I trust in it. I use it. When I was younger, I used it very badly, although grace has a way of making bad things good.

"I was not sure yesterday. You seemed very bad: a mocker. A man of un-Druze-like character hi a world that makes a joke of Druze beliefs. But now you can prove yourself. Come. We must whisper."

Bending away from his guards into Plum's hut, Hakim touched his finger to his lips. "This is a secret you will be unable to betray: my followers would kill you at the suggestion of the truth. Nine hundred years before your time, they say I left Cairo and fled my honors and titles. I wrote letters from hiding the next three decades. These letters instructed them in their religion. Lies, lies! But naturally I'd be interested in reading them myself! To know what I said! On Resurrection Day we all woke on Riverworld, naked and bookless, and I have no good way to quote myself."

Hakim went to the window to make sure no one was listening. After a moment he came back. "Hence my interest in paper and ink. All I need do—all I can do, is cause to have published as much of those texts as my elders here can remember. We are all enthusiastic about this project, for various reasons, mine being survival.

"Survival? But—"

"I know I'd resurrect if all they did was kill me. Consider that they could do worse. Consider also: I have not died once since the morning in Cairo when I 'went into occultation.' I'm not as used to the idea as you are. But I'm not merely a coward who plays a bully hi self-defense: the fealty of these people gives me wonderful opportunities. What I told you is true. Unless I'm

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insane to say so, I am one of Allah's vessels of grace. I was born to it, and I have felt the power in me."

Plum cleared his throat. Why me? he thought to himself. If this cove unbosoms himself to every customer he meets within forty-eight hours... One possibility had to be that he really was insane.

Fortunately, Hakim kept up his end of the conversation without Wodehouse's active help. "In your life on Earth, al-Hakim bi'Amr Allah meant nothing to you. You never heard of me before yesterday."

"Er, ah... I guess—"

"Few people have, outside the Jebel Druze. Yet until my sister had me assassinated I was the Lenin of my age. I ruled from Cairo, and Cairo was as great a city as Byzantium had ever been. Greater than Damascus, much greater than Rome!

"Being a vessel of God, I hated religion. I was impartial—I hated them all. I destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I suppressed all pilgrimages, emphatically including the sacred Hadj to Mecca and Medina. But I ruled through my Shi'ite followers, and they were biased. Christians and Jews suffered much worse than Moslems.

"What use was it to drive people of the Bible into apostasy, if all they did was convert to Islam? My solution was to create a new religion without priests and real estate and vested interests, so fanaticism could work for me, and Allah sent me proselytes to do the work. If we'd had more than four years... if we'd had eight, or twenty..."

Hakim shrugged. "Before I came along, Moslems, Christians and Jews lived peacefully in my realms. I set the precedent of oppression, and did not survive to see it

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work properly—it was always unjust oppression, never just. For years afterward, rulers continued to harass Christians with biased zeal. A lifetime later, the Franks responded with the First Crusade."

Hakim paused at this dramatic juncture. Plum took up the slack. Apparently the man wanted blame—or credit. Yesterday he'd almost begged to be called evil. "So you caused all that."

"All that harm. Useless bloodshed in the name of religion, because I wanted to break those institutions, not use them. Should I not be famous over the centuries for my mistakes? Perhaps Lenin was greater than me. He succeeded where I failed."

Plum shook his head. "The verdict isn't in. Not as of my former life span. Anyhow, Lenin's religion of communism—I can't see it's better than the others. People die for it the same way."

Hakim smiled. "I like the way your mind works. But Maria and I have anticipated your reservations. Secrets within secrets! This is one I cannot give away. An extraordinary woman!"

He went to the window again and spoke in a more public voice: "For you, my women do not exist. You will never be useful in the same measure as my favorite among them. There is no scoundrel in you. No energy I can grasp and use. I must simply give you paper and ink, and trust in the results."

On this note he swept off, except this one-room shack lacked the dimensions. A good sweep needs three paces— two if there's a door one shuts dramatically. By Hakim's third pace he was well outdoors and talking about someone's prospective execution.

A tyrant's agenda was a busy one. Plum reconstructed

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the last ten minutes, and decided the man had done it again. Overwhelmed him. What he was proudest of in his work wasn't his lyrical English, his mastery of the storyteller's rules. No, he prized those Rube Goldberg plots, full of hairsbreadth timing and improbable coincidences. It cost him half his eflforts putting them together— the harder half. The easier half was slathering on the verbiage.

Hakim? Hakim was a plot on the hoof. You could hardly help having a story with a dervish like him whirling around. Wodehouse didn't like it. Reality was reality and fiction was fiction, and never the twain should meet. He'd always been fond of the characters in his stories, but did those characters like their author? The issue came up with a vengeance, because Hakim had an author's power over him.

Plum fulminated. What one had here in spades were: plush digs, servants, impostors. Familiar elements to any of his readers. What about the love angle? The dreaded aunt? Well, there'd be enough of that on the other side of the wall, in the women's garden.

Yes, he could work something out. It might be therapeutic. If Hakim made good on his promised paper, Plum might manage a story: Blandings-on-Riverworld. Something to restore his sense of balance. Something to put Hakim in his place.

Careful. 'Twere best to be subtle indeed, given all this bally fanaticism. The cast must play in disguise. It made a pretty problem, and Wodehouse devoted the rest of the afternoon and evening to working it out.

By morning he was adding details, and wishing he could remember them all. Hakim-and-crew came by again on their daily constitutional. "People who die

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simultaneously—do they resurrect in the same place? Have you heard rumors? Lovers' compacts and the like?"

Plum blinked. "I—I don't know."

"We'll experiment. Nabuch and the Afghan can be lovers somewhere else, with my blessings." He shifted his voice, as newscasters did when they sat in front of a mike. "Unnatural vices are not tolerated here."

"Ah." Plum focused on the sight of two historical consultants being led to the big tree. Thrust up against the bark. Tied. If this happened often, no wonder there were empty huts for new arrivals like himself.

Hakim reached behind him and handed over a parcel. "Paper, pens, and ink. Don't watch if it distresses you."

Plum collected the treasured objects and ducked into his cabin. He heard spear thunks. They were not very simultaneous, after all.

For an hour afterward, Wodehouse found it impossible to write. The story was to have circled around an American rubber-toy magnate who funded a cult combining health and religiosity, a son of Seventh-Day Adventism. The chap had a happy-go-lucky twin with a thirst for alcohol....

Both twins were Hakim, the good Hakim and the bad one. But Plum's juices froze at any thought of that awful man, mat vortex of contradictions. He only thawed out by parking that story on a mental shelf and starting something new.

In what language? Arabic. And if so, make it a short story. Plum wasn't up to being clever for over five thousand words in his adopted language.

Using what script? Plum was illiterate in Arabic. He threw down his pen and stood. Talk about adversity! Phonetic Roman, then. If all the whilom inhabitants of

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Planet Earth decorated the landscape somewhere on Riverworld, there must be dozens, even hundreds, who would enjoy a good Arabic screed penned by guess and by gosh. He returned to his table and started to scribble.

Plum took days to get up to speed. Even under better circumstances a five-thousand-word story needs a week to write. Hakim the Patient failed to understand. On his sixth visit, he tapped Wodehouse's finished pages. "I make nothing of your foolish ciphers. If this bears sense at all, read me this to prove it."

"I—I'm fairly horrible," Plum responded. "I've been told on good authority I should never read out loud."

"Try."

With a grimace Plum plucked up page one and began to orate. He faltered and droned, skipping lines, backtracking and scratching his head.

"Hah!" Hakim barked after two minutes of torment. "Give it to me! I know what needs to be done."

He left with Plum's half-finished work. Wodehouse sank in defeat. He had failed—and why not? How did he ever think otherwise? Would Hitler laugh at witticisms in pidgin German, penned in Hebrew? Gents like Lenin weren't famous for their senses of humor, were they? Hakim was no different. Hakim, who could keep him from reaching any audience at all!

In Plum's frame of mind the sight of his worktable was hateful. He got up and plunged into the garden, walking fast loops around the periphery, averting his face from the central tree. What had Hakim done with his wretched manuscript? Used it for toilet paper? Thrown it into the river?

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Every fifth time he changed directions. Clockwise— counterclockwise—clockwise again. From the women's side of the wall, he heard laughter. The word "guffaw" sprang to mind, hard as it was to imagine girlish lungs guffawing. Life was sweet over there. The sun shone.

Perhaps if he spread-eagled himself across the tree, some guard would obligingly chuck a spear in his direction. "Hakim's a fake!" he'd shout to encourage the blighter. "He never wrote your scriptures! It's all lies!"

That would do it. Plum left the path he was burning in the grass, the better to make a target of himself.

As he reached the tree Hakim appeared at the labyrinth entry, his face creased with smiles. "Excellent! Wonderful!"

He handed over Plum's pages and left again, a man with a penchant for sudden departures. So it is with your general run of critic, Wodehouse thought to himself. You want them to omit no details of your excellent wonderful-ness; this line, this joke, this felicity of expression, and instead they zoom off.

The world had just turned a hundred eighty degrees, so to speak. Plum did too. He went back into the hut....

Girlish laughter. Girlish laughter at his story? Then they knew about him over there. Someone knew. What would she look like?

Perhaps a bit hearty. The sort of woman who brayed. Ah, no. Assuredly there was a bray-er, but why not another woman too? Who knew the density of population over there? Dozens of ears may have heard. Lips were lisping: "Wodehouse. Could it be the same? That Wodehouse?"

Plum was a lonely man, kept company by the creatures of his imagination. Take that dashed wall away, and he'd still be lonely. It was better this way. He could pretend

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there were people who thought about him. People he could excite.

No, no pretense. He could excite them. He could reach them. He sat at his table, fired with new ambition. A story? A book! In English, at least the first draft. No more weird mishmashes!

Once Plum immersed himself in his grand enterprise, time whizzed by, with occasional interruptions to tie on the old nosebag. He almost resented these breaks, made worse by the officiousness of the tiffin man, who never failed to collect his tobacco, his marijuana, his liquor, and/or his dreamgum. No altered mental states allowed in Druze-dom!

Hakim visited daily, and then absented himself on a tour of his domains. Plum scribbled on. Now and again he'd walk for exercise, having the sort of strappingly large body that insisted on its own health.

Chapter one took shape. It would remain chapter one. The chapters one of other authors became chapters twelve or chapters seventeen before their books were through, or got distributed in parcels through the work, or ditched entirely. Such was not the way of P.O. Wodehouse.

He launched chapter two. Hakim came back from his royal progress. He collected Plum's first closely written pages and felt the sting of the Wodehouse wrath. "Hey! What do you think you're doing?"

"You said this much was done. Maria wants to see it."

Plum insisted on promises. Hakim scowled, and left.

A guard returned the pages some hours later. Plus a pipe. Plus a pouch of tobacco. He turned and left. Plum danced a caper around his hut, puffed a bowlful, and got back to work.

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He labored until the gilded evening dimmed and took his light away, and then took another walk, nodding cheerfully at Jim the Apache, the Smyrnese haberdasher, and a new arrival, a French Algerian with a smoldering resentment of everything Arabic. The Iraqi prince bowed grandly as Plum swung by, not a nice bow, but an accusation. Plum could not account for it. Jealousy? Word of the gift pipe had gotten around.

No butler shimmered into view at nine-thirty with whiskey-and-soda. Plum went to bed.

He was awakened by a "Shhh!" Someone was in the hut with him. "Please!" she whispered. "Don't make a sound."

Plum fumbled, then remembered he didn't need glasses anymore. He spoke to a scented silhouette. "How did you get here? Who are you?"

"I knew it was you. I had to see." She spoke English in the accents of the warm south, somewhere between Alps and Ganges. "I loved your story. The pipe was my idea."

"Oh." As he gained fuller consciousness, Plum was seized by terror. "This—you have to get back. This is madness! We'll be killed for it!"

The shadow shook her head. Plum's bed creaked as she sat at his side. "It does not occur to Hakim that resurrectees are random. He suspects purpose. You are either something dangerous or useful. Me? I'm one of the usefuls. If his alchemists can extract the essence of dreamgum and make his people children again, I will help mold them in ways—of freedom? So he says: freedom and goodness. He says he must put on the grand show of Druze-ism, but in his heart he is against it.

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Survival! First he must stay alive here, where his position is unique."

Hers was a tidy synopsis of what Plum already had been told, but it touched too lightly on the one fact that put an edge on the knife. "He's a bally impostor. He never wrote their scriptures. He's just muddling along." "You are always putting impostors in your Blandings Castle," the woman answered. "I think he wants this. He wants to be written up in allegory; warmly, a well-intentioned man. Your book will appeal to the new people we make. The orthodox will hate it. You will be a rod for their lightnings. Druze-land will be your prison, but your work will sneak out into the greater world."

"Until, not too guiltily, Hakim has me killed."

The visitor shook her head. "I don't see how he can pull it off. Creating a race of 'summer children' in the midst of this spiritual winter. He'll be killed too. And the new ones. But we'll be resurrected, knowing how to re-create ourselves with concentrated essence of dreamgum. The ratio of summer to winter will edge our way."

Plum made out the features of a comely face—though taxed by care, and less so than it might have been. She bent and kissed him. "You are purest summer—unless you have hidden depths."

Plum stammered. "No, no depth at all. I stay away from depth."

She smiled. "Yes, you are heroically shallow. Can you write your book? The book of the good impostor Hakim?"

Plum lurched clumsily, the better to pat his seductress's ankle. "He sent you. Your feet are dry. There's no way to get here dry-shod. There's a pool in the way. Except Hakim does it all the time. He's got a secret route."

The woman looked side to side. "I've never been on this half before. I wanted to come. It was made possible. I bring out the summer side of Hakim. Besides, I'm safe with you. I told Hakim you are not an ardent man. Anyone educated in an English boy's school and fond of wrestling and boxing—I told him you were assuredly a closet homosexual, or maybe a pedophile."

"Oh, I say—.'"

She put a finger to his protesting lips. "That will make it easier. I must be your editor, you see."

"Are you—Maria?"

"Maria Montessori. World's foremost expert on the education of children!" She went on in bitter amusement. "If you were useless in Riverworld without paper, imagine me with no young minds to guide."

Wodehouse felt the warmth of her body. The hand he'd used to check her feet slid upward to take stock of her dimensions. This bed wasn't very big after all, even with him pressed against the wall in a semi-aroused state of anxiety. "Ahh," he said. "Ann."

She went tilt. For a while there was confusion: knees and elbows being what they were. "Why Lenin?" Plum blurted after a first passionate clinch. "Why all this natter about Lenin and Hitler?"

"They stole my ideas about the plasticity of young minds. The New Communist Man. The Hitler youth. Get children early enough, and you make them anything!"

A kiss, and more lecture. "Of course their directions were wrong, but the concept! The tabula rasa! Did communism prove it, or not? If we make adults children again, and convert them into— You invented the words. Summer people. That's what we want."

"And you're sure about Hakim? You trust him?"

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Maria laughed. "I can out-trick him any day. I'm here, aren't I? And he knows it. Let him kill me. I'd pop back with all my knowledge somewhere else, and start my own regime. So I'm not worried. Come now. Let's not talk about this. Goodness, you're a long-distance head-to-toe! And such baby-soft hair!"

Next day Plum zoomed through chapter two, and took a walk. The Iraqi prince stepped into his path. "Ah, the aristocrat's lapdog."

"Sorry?"

"I'm told you write about dukes and earls. The upper crust. Ordinary people not good enough for you."

"My dukes and earls are very ordinary," Wodehouse answered. "Really, I'm one with the masses. The masses who buy the Saturday Evening Post, anyhow."

"The despised masses. Hakim despises them. Don't you suppose he's told me? He only does bad things because they demand it. I've heard politicians whimper that sort of thing all my several lives. Have any of them had the courage to expect the best of their subjects? Or do they pander to the worst?"

"Some of each, I suppose," Plum muttered.

"Yes. And you know which kind of man Hakim is, and you write for him anyhow."

Plum colored. "I write what I write. Anybody who puts meaning into it is an idiot. You'd know if you'd ever read my stuff."

"And you spoke on Nazi radio in World War Two. Unfair of people to put meaning into that, right?"

Plum's blush deepened. "It was a mistake. I was isolated and naive. I didn't want people to worry about me. I didn't know my chipper bleat would give pain to Londoners who'd gotten blitzed."

"Stop pushing him around," Jim the Apache said from behind.

The princeling sneered. "I hear the voice of Hakim's Indian scout. The one who runs free, and tracks skulkers by their broken twigs. Your Arabic has improved."

"Don't let him bug you," Jim told Plum, ignoring the

irksome Iraqi,

"Thanks. I'll try not."

"—Because when we have fights here, sometimes the guards execute everybody involved. I've seen it."

Plum made a face, but bad news or no, Jim's helpfulness deserved a reward. "Do you smoke? Would you share a bowl of shag with me?"

Jim smiled assent. Once in his hut and away from princely ears, Plum asked: "Er, about that broken twig business..."

"Maria's visit last night? I know nothing about it. There's a stone that pivots open, but I don't know about that either. Third on the left, this side of the pool."

Plum puffed and passed over his pipe. "I owe you. Concerning that woman—well, I've been pondering the archetypes. Tyrant, vamp, and fool. Publisher, editor, and writer. It's no different than in New York or London. The Doubleday gang didn't fling spears so enthusiastically, but you have to make allowances for local customs."

Plum sighed. "Maybe I shouldn't be here. Our Iraqi seems keen to take another "cheap trip." I could speed us both on our way."

Jim smiled, his brown face wreathed in smoke. "Hakim's spearmen have been practicing. They've gotten good. If

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it's true about people who get killed the same time, you and him could end up resurrecting side by side."

"I don't want that!" Plum laughed. He took another draw on the pipe, then traded it back. After five minutes of nicotine-tinged meditation, the Apache nodded thanks and left. Plum turned his hand to writing, and began chapter three.

Chapter four took shape. "Snookers" Van Doorp left his bedroom with the dead cat under his smoking jacket and bumped into the housemaid. Just then, a work-gang invaded Plum's hut, dismantled his bed, and began stringing a larger one "because you're so tall."

It was longer, and wider. Maria visited again that night, and left two hours later with chapters one to three. "You'll see," she whispered. "Ironwood is strong. We carve it into type for our printing press. This will look wonderful."

Plum instructed her in the publishing business. "First you frolic in the margins. Then I rewrite. Then your side sets type and runs off a proof. I look, and fuss, and fix all the mistakes that have crept in. Only after all that do you chug out the copies."

"I was an author in my day," Maria assured him. "Don't worry. I know what I'm doing."

She left. Plum heard the familiar sneers of the Iraqi prince just outside the door: "Oh, gua-a-a-ards! Look what we have here—ugh!"

Silence. Plum poked his head out of the hut and saw a body clutching itself in the grass. He scratched his head. Hadn't Maria Montessori been a pacifist in former times? There she was, twinkling off in utter haste....

"Ugh!"  Another figure was doing the damage; a

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second riposte from the bushes and back again. The Iraqi bubbled a bit, and Plum withdrew to let the night shroud its secrets. In Hakim's gardens, this was ever the wisest course.

Plum was troubled to discover that murders no longer impeded his writing. His sleep, yes, but despite insomnia he insinuated Reverend Pancroft into chapter six, no matter that he had to fly the blighter home from France. The Toby Winkleman urchin insulted the cook, who quit the day of the Important Dinner....

Maria Montessori edited with a light hand. On her third visit, she whispered about Sijill magazine, issue one, a Druze tract with news, views, a sermonette about the glories of Hakim—and Wodehouse's serialized book. "We'll send it down-River and up, to the Malagasies, the Rastafarians, the Phrygians, and the Shang. English, Esperanto, and French. Hakim needs food for his hordes. He'll put it to his neighbors—subscribe and pay in rations, or we attack."

"The tyrant publisher!" Plum sighed. "Didn't you write essays for peace? Didn't you sponsor a pacifist conference before World War Two?"

"Yes. And if I can make this work, we'll have peace," Maria Montessori answered.

A few days afterward, a guard delivered another pouch of tobacco and a proof of Plum's soon-to-be published pages. Perhaps because Fatima the copy editor knew little English, she did nothing to "correct" Wodehouse's immortal prose. All the errors had to do with commas, capitals, and italics. Plum fixed them, and swung his attention to chapter eight. Good old "Snookers" hid on the balcony, with no escape but to slide down the water pipe....

r

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Things went from bad to worse for Snookers, utter humiliation approaching in chapter twelve. New historical consultants popped in and became Wodehouse's neighbors. The Sijill rolled off its wooden press. Hakim's dhows and godowns paddled east and west, hawking a sugarcoated religion the Occult Master claimed not to believe.

Silence. Where were the raves to the editor? The press interviews? The literary luncheons? According to rumor, a hill-size node of metal had been dug up on the far side of the planet. Antipodeans used it to make steamships and radios. This business of ferrying the magazine beyond Hakim's borders facilitated gossip of all sorts: Druze immigrants confirmed talk about a metal steamer "approaching this way!"

None of this got into issue two. Maria's "institute" won six column-inches of glory, laud, and honor, touching only lightly on the facts: extract of dreamgum had made mental children of a few experimental subjects, who gibbered and ran mad in the ideal classroom she'd set up.

The good news was that this most potent of drugs had a permanent effect on their "winter" personalities. The bad news? It made them animals. "I have to find then-souls," Maria told Plum on her next nocturnal visit. "I still have hope. Once they regain speech, we may discover what we did wrong. How we traumatized them. They might tell us."

"What does Hakim say?" Plum asked.

Maria sighed. "I have to,repair my damage, or—ft could be bad. I've lost influence. He's a politician. This business of summer people and winter people—he adopted the idea as his own for a while, but..."

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"He took a flier, eh? And now he means to cut his losses."

She shook her head. "Not quite yet." Her eyes filled with tears. "Wouldn't I deserve it if he did punish me? But the makers of this world provided us with no experimental animals. What else could we do?"

"Shh. I hear voices. People are shouting out mere."

"God!" Maria felt around the side of the bed for her domes..

"Quick. Get under. I'll go see what's on."

A metal steamship is fast. At an unflagging twenty miles an hour, the Potemkin outpaced anything she had ever encountered. She was almost faster than rumor. No one in Hakim's domain had considered the possibility of such speed until the lights of her portholes gleamed on the River. Summoned from some women's-garden bed, Hakim called out the militia. An armed and vigilant citizenry crowded the shores. The Potemkin slid by, and dwindled, her name blazoned in characters few Druze could read. The valley narrowed to the left, and the mighty monster puffed on to the next regime in sequence.

Clouds bulked up for the predawn rain, and still the buzzing populace didn't go back to bed. In the men's garden, historical consultants and Druze guards chattered in excited clumps. Plum went in and told Maria the bad news. How could she sneak out of here?

For the purpose of these furtive rendezvous, someone had supplied her with the robes of a Druze elder. "Do I look male?" she asked nervously, wrapped to the nines. "I shall walk stiffly to the exit, as if I had a poker up my ass."

Plum winced. As a man she seemed woefully uncon-

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vincing. "Wait a minute. I'll create a diversion." He ran outside. "Jim! Jim! Let's fight."

"What?" Weary of the night's drama, the Apache had returned to his blanketed repose under the tree. He hoisted himself on one elbow.

Plum dropped to his knees and shouldered into him. "You bloody redskin. I'll take your scalp!" "Hey!"

"Whoop it up. That's good!" Jim tumbled Wodehouse to the right. He stood. Plum stood too, bellowed, and charged again.

Jim kicked. Plum grabbed his foot and danced around. A gaggle of Dnize guards converged on them. "Stop that! What are you doing?"

Plum dropped Jim's pedal appendage and squatted like a frog. "Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote," he roared with a mad glint in his eye, and hopped in frog fashion. "The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote—"

"You want to get killed?" Jim shouted. "Are you crazy?"

By now, Maria had made her exit. Plum rose and dusted himself. "Excuse me. I got excited. I'll be better now."

The guards muttered. "Go back in your hut!" Meekly, Plum accommodated them.

The next day Hakim was too busy to pass judgment on Plum's madness. A Druze spear-wallah came for the proofs for issue three, collecting them far ahead of the deadline. The next Sijill had to be hurried out, with Hakim's sermonette on the Potemkin's night passage and what it meant. The neighboring kingdoms might get uppity, after all. They'd be less afraid of the Druze, after

seeing how their technology was outclassed. They had to be preached back into a cooperative frame of mind.

Again the hawkers went out in their dhows, and came back with news: The Potemkin had interrupted its long voyage to the end of the river. The Rastafarians were entertaining the ship's sailors along their downstream shores.

The good news was that the magazine was a hot item among both Russians and Jamaicans, so much that the dhows returned laden with food. The slowest breezed into home port just ahead of the lights: Hours before the Potemkin had slipped anchor and reversed course.

From the steamship's bridge, an officer shouted in Esperanto, then English. "Bring us P.O. Wodehouse!" Such was Plum's isolation that his first inkling of this was when the garden guard was redoubled. The place bristled with spearmen.

"I could go to them," Plum announced to the Druze generality, who glinted at him in resentment, ice forming on their upper slopes. "I'd hate for there to be any fighting. Not for my sake. Jim, what's going on?"

Jim hustled to Plum's side, back from some palace excursion. "Hakim's digging in. He's being stubborn."

Clearly the Apache had more to say. "Yes?" Plum prompted him.

"You're a hostage. Hakim'11 kill you if they attack. That's what he's told them."

"Cor!"

There was a fuss by the garden entry. "Let me through!" Maria announced in her queenliest tones. "I come from Hakim."

Plum converged on her. "What—?"

"Those Jamaicans!" she spluttered. "They put the

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Russians up to it. You're just a cause celebre. Something to make the war popular. You've got fans in the Russian crew who think you're what this is all about, and so they'll do anything.-1 know the truth, and Hakim does too. This ultimatum is all to humble the Druze, but what can he do? Spears against guns!"

"I'm supposed to feel sorry for the blighter?" Plum asked incredulously. "He's threatened—"

"I know. He's lost his soul to power. Nothing's too low for him anymore. I'm just the same. Nothing's too low for me, either." Maria Montessori undid a knot, and flung off her robes. Naked, she stepped to close the final distance. "Kiss me. We'll die together."

"Of all the bally—!"

It was the last straw for the outraged Druze guards. On the far side of the chiclet stones, a great gun boomed. On this side, arms dragged Plum and Maria to the tree trunk. "Kill the mockers! This is all their doing!"

"We'll try again together!" Maria shouted. "Another funny book!"

The gun boomed again. Masonry walls toppled in on Hakim's throne room. In the Occult Master's garden, spears flew simultaneously.

"—And so, here we are," Plum told President Firebrass of the Republic of Parolando. "I'd never heard about this 'simultaneous resurrection' business before. Have you?"

Firebrass shook his great head.

"Hakim's wishful thinking. But there's always a first time," Plum conceded.

Maria poured herself another cup of wine and curled into her seat by the fireplace. ' "These stores—mysterious strangers. Agents. The gods behind the curtains, who

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move among us like spies. Parolando is full of rumors."' She looked at Plum. "What do you think about your friend Jim?"

"Jim?"

"Who else could have arranged this unique 'cheap trip' for us? Hakim himself?"

"Hakim! What can I do with that man?" President Firebrass asked. "He sounds like a complete scoundrel."

Plum's eyes widened. "Yes! Maybe it was Jim after all! I remember telling him: Tyrant, vamp, and fool. Publisher, editor, and writer. Why else send the three of us to be reborn in Riverworld's greatest literary tnecca?"

Maria set down her glass. "You can do better than Hakim for a publisher."

"I think so too." Plum beamed. "I can make my plots work just fine without any villains at all. Why shouldn't real life be the same?"

'Til drink to that!" Maria, Plum, and President Firebrass raised glasses in a final toast.

TWo Thieves

Harry Turtledove

Alexios Komnenos folded his arms across his chest. "You have heard my demands," he said in Arabic, the only language he had in common with New Constantinople's neighbors just down the River. "Obey them or face the consequences."

"You are an infidel. We shall never yield to you." Idris Alooma was the Sultan of Bornu's representative in the town of New Constantinople. Tall and lean and black, he towered over Alexios. To show his contempt, he spat at the Basileus's feet.