The Riverboat moved through his dream like a glittering, twenty-million-carat diamond.
There had never been a boat like it nor would there ever be another.
It would be named the Not For Hire. No one would ever be able to take it away from him, it would be so strongly armored and weaponed. Nor would anyone be able to buy or rent it from him.
The name glowed in great black letters against the white hull. NOT FOR HIRE.
The fabulous Riverboat would have four decks: the boiler deck, the main deck, the hurricane deck and the landing deck for the aerial machine. Its overall length would be four hundred and forty feet and six inches. The beam over the paddle-wheel guards would be ninety-three feet. Mean draft, loaded, twelve feet. The hull would be made of magnalium or, perhaps, plastic. The great stacks would spout smoke now and then, because there was a steam boiler aboard. But this was only to propel the big plastic bullets for the steam machine guns. The giant paddle-wheels on the sides of the Riverboat would be turned by enormous electrical motors.
The Not For Hire would be the only metal boat on The River, the only boat not propelled by oars or wind, and it would make anybody sit up and stare, whether he was born in 2,000,000 B.C. or in A.D. 2000.
And he, Sam Clemens, would be The Captain, capital T, capital C, because, aboard this vessel, carrying a crew of one hundred and twenty, there would be only one Captain.
King John of England could call himself Admiral if he wished, though if Sam Clemens had anything to do with it, he'd be First Mate, not Admiral. And if Sam Clemens really had anything to do with it, King John—John Lackland, Rotten John, Dirty John, Lecher John, Pigsty John—would not even be allowed on the boat. Sam Clemens, smoking a big green cigar, wearing a white cap, dressed in a white kilt with a white towel over his shoulders for a cape, would lean out of the starboard port of the great pilothouse and yell, Avast there, you lubbers! Grab hold of that putrescent mass of immortality and treachery and toss him off the gangplank. I don't care if he lands in The River or on the bank! Get rid of that human garbage!
Over the railing of the boiler deck Prince John would sail. Slyboots John, screaming, cursing in his Frenchaccented Middle English or in Anglo-Norman French or in Esperanto. Then the gangplank would be drawn up, bells would ring, whistles would blow, and Sam Clemens, standing behind the pilot, would give the order to begin the voyage.
The voyage! Up a River for maybe ten million miles or maybe twenty million miles, for maybe forty years or a hundred years. Such a Riverboat, such a River, such a voyage had never been dreamed of on Earth, long dead Earth! Up The River, the only one on this world, on the only boat like this, with Sam Clemens as La Sipestro, The Captain, and also addressed as La Estro, The Boss. He was so happy!
And then, as they headed out toward the middle of The River, just to test the current, which was strongest in the center of the mighty stream, as the thousands along the bank waved and cheered or wept after the boat, after him, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain—The Captain, The Boss—he saw a man with long yellow hair and broad shoulders pushing through the crowd.
The man wore a towellike cloth, secured by magnetic tabs under the material, as a kilt. His leather sandals were made of the hide of the whale-sized Riverdragon-fish, Around his thickly muscled neck he wore a string of brilliantly colored hornfish vertebrae. In his huge powerful hand he gripped the wooden shaft of a large war ax of iron. His pale-blue eyes were fixed on Samuel Clemens and that broad hawk-nosed face was grim.
Sam Clemens screamed to the pilot, "Faster! Faster! Full speed ahead!"
The great paddle-wheels began to dip into the water more swiftly—Chunk—chunk. Even through the fiberglass-insulated deck the vibrations made the deck quiver. Suddenly the blond man, Erik Bloodaxe, tenth-century Viking King, was in the pilothouse.
He shouted at Sam Clemens in Old Norse. Traitor! Droppings of Ratatosk! I told you I would wait along the banks of The River! You betrayed me so you could get the iron from the fallen star and build your great Riverboat!
Sam fled the pilot house and down the ladders from deck to deck and down into the dark bowels of the hold, but Erik Bloodaxe was always two steps behind.
Past the colossal rotating electric motors Sam Clemens ran, and then he was in the chemistry room, where the engineers were making potassium nitrate from human excrement and mixing it with sulfur and charcoal to make gunpowder. Sam grabbed hold of a lighter and a resin torch, pressed the slide, and a white-hot glowing wire slid out of the case. Stop, or I'll blow up the whole boat! Sam screamed.
Erik had stopped, but he was swinging the big ax around and around over his head. He grinned and said, Go ahead! You haven't got the guts! You love the Riverboat more than you love anything, even your faithless but precious Livy! You wouldn't blow her up! So I'm going to split you down the middle with my ax and then take the Riverboat for myself!
No! No! Sam screamed. You wouldn't dare! You can't! You can't! This is my dream, my love, my passion, my life, my world! You can't!
The Norseman stepped closer to him; the ax whistled over his head. I can't? Just stand there and see!
Over his shoulder Sam saw a shadow. It moved forward and became a tall, faceless figure. It was X, the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical who had sent the meteorite crashing into the Rivervalley so that Sam could have the iron and nickel to build his Riverboat on this mineral-poor planet. And so he could sail up The River to the North Polar Sea where the Misty Tower, the Big Grail, call it what you would, was hidden in the cold fog. And there Sam, with the eleven men chosen by X for his as-yet-unrevealed plan, would storm the Tower, and find—find what? Whatever was there. Stranger! Sam called. Save me! Save me!
The laughter was like a wind from the polar sea, turning his guts to crystal. Save yourself, Sam!
No! No! You promised! Sam yelled. And then his eyes were open and the last of his groans died away. Or had he dreamed that he was groaning?
He sat up. His bed was made of bamboo. The mattress was a bamboo fiber cloth stuffed with giant leaves of the irontree. The blanket was made up of five towels secured together by magnetic tabs. The bed was against the wall of a room twenty feet square. It held a desk and a round table and about a dozen chairs, all of bamboo or pine, and a fired-clay chamber pot. There were also a bamboo bucket half full of water, a tall broad case with many pigeonholes for rolls of paper, a rack with bamboo and pine spears with flint and iron tips, yew bows and arrows, a war ax of nickel-iron and four long steel knives. On the wall were a number of pegs from which white towels hung. On one hatstand was a naval cap, an officer's, made of leather covered with a thin white cloth.
On the table was his grail, a gray metallic cylinder with a metal handle.
On the desk were glass bottles containing a soot-black ink, a number of bone pens, and one nickel-iron pen. The papers on the desk were of bamboo, though there were a few sheets of vellum from the inner lining of the stomach of the hornfish.
Glass windows (or ports, as he called them) looked out all around the room. As far as Sam Clemens knew, this was the only house with glass windows in the entire rivervalley. Certainly, it was the only one for 10,000 miles either way from this area.
The sole light came from the sky. Though it was not yet dawn, the light was a trifle brighter than that cast by the full moon on Earth. Giant stars of many colors, some so big they looked like chipped-off pieces of the moon, jampacked the heavens. Bright sheets and streamers hung between the stars, behind them, and even, seemingly, in front of some of the brightest. These were cosmic gas clouds, glories that never ceased to thrill the more sensitive of humanity along The River.
Sam Clemens, smacking his lips at the sour taste of the liquor he had drunk that evening and the even sourer taste of the dream, stumbled across the floor. He opened his eyes completely when he reached the desk, picked up a lighter, and applied the extended hot wire to a fish-oil lamp in a stone bracket.
He opened a port and looked out toward The River. A year ago he would have seen only a flat plain about a mile and a half wide and covered with short, tough, brightgreen grass. Now it was a hideous mass of piled-up earth, deep pits and many buildings of bamboo and pine containing brick furnaces. These were his steel mills (socalled), his glass factory, his smelters, his cement mills, his forges, his blacksmith shops, his armories, his laboratories, and his nitricand sulfuric-acid factories. A half a mile away was a high wall of pine logs enclosing the first metal boat he would build.
Torches flared to his left. Even at night the men were digging out the siderite chunks, hauling up pieces of the nickel-iron.
Behind him had been a forest of thousand-foot-high irontrees, red pine, lodgepole pine, black oak, white oak, yew trees and thick stands of bamboo. These had stood on the foothills; the hills were mostly still there but the trees, except for the irontrees, were all gone, along with the bamboo. Only the huge irontrees had withstood the steel axes of Clemens' people. The tall grasses had been cut down and their fibers chemically treated to make ropes and paper, but their roots were so tough and so tangled that there had not been enough reason to chop them out. The labor and the materials used in chopping through the roots of the short grass of the plains to get to the metal there had been very expensive. Not in terms of money, because that did not exist, but in terms of sweat, worn-out stone and dulled steel.
Where this area had been beautiful with its many trees and bright grass and the colored blooms of the vines that covered the trees, it was now like a battlefield. It had been necessary to create ugliness to build a beautiful boat.
Sam shivered at the wet and chilly wind which always came late at night from upRiver. He shivered also at the thought of the desolation. He loved beauty and nature's order and he loved the parklike arrangement of the valley, whatever else he thought about this world. Now he had made it hideous because he had a dream. And he would have to extend that hideousness, because his mills and factories needed more wood for fuel, for paper, for charcoal. All that his state possessed was used up and he had about used up all that Cernskujo to the immediate north and Publiujo to the immediate south would trade him. If he wanted more he would have to war on his closest neighbors or make arrangements for trading with the more distant states or those just across The River. Or else conquer them and take their wood away from them. He did not want to do that; he abhorred war in principle and could barely stand it in practice.
But if he was to have his Riverboat he had to have wood as fuel for his factories.
He also had to have bauxite and cryolite and platinum if he was to have aluminum generators and motors.
The nearest source of all three was in Soul City, that nation twenty-six miles downRiver dominated by Elwood Hacking, who hated whites.
So far, Sam had been able to trade iron weapons for bauxite, cryolite, cinnabar and platinum. Sam's own state, Parolando, needed the weapons badly. Adding one burden to the other, Hacking insisted that Parolando use its own -men to mine and transport the ore.
Sam sighed deeply. Why in hell hadn't the Mysterious Stranger directed the meteorite to fall right by the bauxite deposits? Then, when Sam and Bloodaxe's Vikings had sailed into this area immediately after the meteorite had struck, they could have claimed the land that was now Soul City for their own. When Hacking arrived, he would have been forced to join Clemens or to leave.
Still, even with the Stranger's powers, it could not be easy to deflect a hundred-thousand-ton iron-nickel siderite from its course and make it fall only twenty-six miles from the bauxite and other minerals. Actually the Stranger had supposed that he had hit the target on the bull's eye. He had told Sam, before he disappeared on some unknown mission, that the minerals were upRiver, all within a seven-mile range. But he had been mistaken. And that had made Sam both glad and angry. He was angry because the minerals were not all within his reach, but he was also happy that the Ethicals could make a mistake.
That fact did not help the humans imprisoned forever between sheer mountains 20,000 feet high in a valley about 9.9 miles wide on the average. They would be imprisoned for thousands of years, if not forever, unless Samuel Langhorne Clemens could build his Riverboat.
Sam went to the unpainted pine cabinet, opened a door and pulled out an opaque glass bottle. It held about twenty ounces of bourbon donated by people who did not drink. He downed about three ounces, winced, snorted, slapped his chest and put the bottle back. Hah! Nothing better to start off the day with, especially when you woke up from a nightmare that should have been rejected by the Great Censor of Dreams. If, that is, the Great Censor had any love and regard for one of his favorite dream-makers, Sam Clemens. Maybe the Great Censor did not love him after all. It seemed that very few did love Sam anymore. He had to do things he did not want to do in order to get the boat built.
And then there was Livy, his wife on Earth for thirty-four years.
He swore, caressed a nonexistent moustache, reached back into the cabinet, and pulled the bottle out again. Another snort. Tears came, but whether engendered by the bourbon or the-thought of Livy, he did not know. Probably, in this world of complex forces and mysterious operations—and operators—the tears were caused by both. Plus other things which his hindbrain did not care to let him peep into at this moment. His hindbrain would wait until his forebrain was bent over, tying its intellectual shoestrings, and would then boot the posterior of said forebrain.
He strode across the bamboo mats and looked through the port window. Down there, about two hundred yards away, under the branches of the irontree, was a round, conical-roofed, two-room hut. Inside the bedroom would be Olivia Langdon Clemens, his wife—his ex-wife—and the long, lanky, tremendously beaked, weak-chinned Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac, swordsman, libertine, and man-of-letters.
"Livy, how could you?" Sam said. "How could you break my heart, the heart of Your Youth?"
A year had passed since she had shown up with Cyrano de Bergerac. He had been shocked, more shocked than he had ever been in his seventy-four years on Earth and his twenty-one years on the Riverworld. But he had recovered from it. Or he would have recovered if he had not gotten another shock, though a lesser one. Nothing could exceed the impact of the first. After all, he could not expect Livy to go without a man for twenty-one years. Not when she was young and beautiful again and still passionate and had no reasonable hope of ever seeing him again. He had lived with a half dozen women himself, and he could not expect chastity or faithfulness from her. But he had expected that she would drop her mate as a monkey drops a heated penny when she found him again. Not so. She loved de Bergerac.
He had seen her almost every day since the night she had first come out of the mists of The River. They spoke politely enough and sometimes they were able to crack their reserve and laugh and joke just as they had on Earth. Sometimes, briefly but undeniably, their eyes told each other that the old love was vibrating between them. Then, when he felt that he had broken out with longing, just like the hives, so he told himself later, laughing while he felt like crying, he had stepped toward her, despite himself, and she had stepped back to Cyrano's side if he happened to be there or looked around for him if he wasn't.
Every night she was with that dirty, uncouth, big-nosed, weak-chinned, Adam's-appled, but colorful, strongminded, witty, vigorous, talented, scary Frenchman. The virile frog, Sam muttered. He could imagine him leaping, croaking with lust, toward the white, blackly outlined, curving figure of Livy, leaping, croaking . . .
He shuddered. This was no good. Even when he brought women up here secretly—though he did not have to hide anything—he could not quite forget her. Even when he chewed dreamgum he could not forget her. If anything, she sailed into the drug-tossed sea of his mind more strongly, blown by the winds of desire. The good ship Livy, white sails bellying out, the trim cleancut curving hull ...
And he heard her laughter, that lovely laughter. That was the hardest thing to endure.
He walked away and looked out through the fore ports. He stood by the oak pedestal and the big-spoked Riverboat's wheel he had carved. This room was his "pilothouse" and the two rooms behind made up the "texas." The whole building was on the side of the hill nearest to the plain. It was on thirty-foot stilts and could be entered through a staircase or ladder (to use a nautical term) on the starboard side or through a port directly from the hill behind the rear chamber of the texas. On top of the pilothouse was a large bell, the only metal bell in the world, as far as he knew. As soon as the waterclock in the corner struck six, he would clang the big bell. And the dark valley would slowly come to life.
Mists still overhung The River and the edge of the banks, but he could see the huge squat mushroom shape of the grailstone a mile and a half down the slope of the plain just by the water's edge. A moment later, he saw a boat, toy-size, emerge from the mists. Two figures jumped out and pulled the dugout onto the shore, then ran off to the right. The light from the skies was bright enough for Sam to see them, though he sometimes lost them when buildings intervened. After going around the two-story pottery factory, they cut straight into the hills. He lost them then, but it seemed that they were heading for John Plantagenet's log "palace."
So much for the sentinel system of Parolando. Every quarter mile on The River's front was guarded by a hut on thirty-foot stilts with four men on duty. If they saw anything suspicious, they were to beat on their drums, blow their bone horns and light their torches.
Two men slipping out of the fog to carry news to King John, ex-King John, of England?
Fifteen minutes later Sam saw a shadow running between shadows. The rope attached to the small bell just inside the entrance rang. He looked through the starboard port. A white face looked up at him. Sam's own spy, William Grevel, famous wool merchant, citizen of London, died in 1401 in the Year Of Our Lord. There were no sheep or, in fact, any mammals other than man along The River. But the ex-merchant had shown great aptitude for espionage, and he loved to stay up all night and skulk around.
Sam beckoned to him; Grevel ran up the "ladder" and entered after Sam had unbarred the thick oak door.
Sam said, in Esperanto, "Saluton, leutenanto Grevel. Kio estas?"
(Translation: "Hello, Lieutenant Grevel. What's the matter?") Grevel said, "Bonan matenon, Estro. Ciu grasa
ripono, Rego Johano, estas jus akceptita duo spionoj."
(Translation: "Good morning, Boss. That fat rascal, King John, has just received two spies.")
Neither Sam nor Grevel could understand each other's English, but they got along very well in Esperanto, except now and then.
Sam grinned. Bill Grevel had let himself down from the limb of an irontree, passing directly over a sentry, and down a rope onto the edge of the roof of the two-story building. He had passed through the bedroom, where three women slept, and then crawled to the top of the staircase. John and his spies, a twentieth-century Italian and a sixthcentury Hungarian, were at a table below Grevel. The two had reported the results of their trip upRiver. John was furious and justly so, from his viewpoint. Sam, hearing Grevel's report, also became furious.
"He tried to assassinate Arthur of New Brittany? What is that man trying to do, ruin all of us?"
He paced back and forth, stopped, lit a big cigar and began pacing again. Once he stopped to invite Grevel to a bite of cheese and a glass of wine.
It was one of the ironies of Chance or, perhaps, of the Ethicals, for who knew what things they arranged, that King John of England and the nephew he had murdered most foully should have been located within thirty-two miles of each other. Arthur, Prince of Brittany of dead Earth, had organized the peoples among whom he found himself into a state he called New Brittany. There were very few old Bretons in the ten-mile-long territory he ruled, but that did not matter. New Brittany it was.
It had taken eight months before Arthur had discovered that his uncle was his neighbor. He had traveled incognito to Parolando to verify with his own eyes the identity of the uncle who had slit his throat and dropped his weighted body into the Seine. Arthur wanted to capture John and keep him alive for as long as possible under exquisite torture. Killing John would only bar him, possibly forever, from getting his revenge. John, murdered, would awake the next day someplace thousands of miles away on The River.
But Arthur had sent emissaries demanding that John be given up to him. These demands had been rejected, of course, though only Sam's sense of honor and his fear of John kept him from agreeing to Arthur's demands.
Now John had sent four men to assassinate Arthur. Two had been killed; the others had escaped with minor wounds. This would mean invasion. Arthur not only had wanted revenge on John, he would like to get possession of the meteorite iron.
Between Parolando and New Brittany, a fourteen-mile stretch of the right bank of The River was known as Chernsky's Land, or in Esperanto, Cernskujo. Chernsky, a sixteenth-century Ukrainian cavalry colonel, had refused an alliance with Arthur. But the nation immediately to New Brittany's north was governed by Iyeyasu. He was a powerful and ambitious person, the man who had established the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600 with its capital at Yedo, later called Tokyo. Sam's spies said that the Japanese and the Breton had met six times in a war conference.
Moreover, just to the north of Iyeyasujo was Kleomanujo. This was governed by Cleomenes, a king of Sparta and half-brother to that Leonidas who held the pass at Thermoplyae. Cleomenes had met three times with Iyeyasu and Arthur.
Just south of Parolando was an eleven-mile stretch called Publia, after its king, Publius Crassus. Publius had been an officer in Caesar's cavalry during the Gallic campaigns. He was inclined to be friendly, although he extracted a big price for letting Sam cut down his timber.
South of Publia was Tifonujo, ruled by Tai Fung, one of Kublai Khan's captains, killed on Earth when he fell drunk off a horse.
And south of Tifonujo was Soul City, headed by Elwood Hacking and Milton Firebrass.
Sam stopped and glared from under bushy brows at Grevel. "The hell of it, Bill, is there isn't much I can do. If I tell John I know about his trying to murder Arthur, who may deserve murder, for all I know, then John knows that I've got spies inside the house. And he'll just deny everything, ask that I bring his accusers forth—and you know what would happen to them, to you." Grevel paled.
Sam said, "Start your blood running again, I won't do it. No. The only thing to do is to keep quiet and watch for developments. But I'm choking up to here with keeping quiet. That man is the most despicable I ever met—and if you knew my vast range of acquaintances, including publishers, you would feel the depth of my words."
"John could be a tax-collector," Grevel said, as if he had plumbed the depths of insult. And he had, for him.
"It was a bad day when I had to agree to take John on as a partner," Sam muttered, blowing out smoke as he turned toward Grevel. "But if I hadn't taken him in, I'd have been robbed of my chance at the iron."
He dismissed Grevel after thanking him. The skies just above the mountains across The River were red. Soon the entire vault would be rosy on the edges and blue above, but it would be some tune before the sun cleared the mountain. Before then, the grailstones would be discharging
He washed his face in a basin, combed his thick bush of reddish hair straight back, applied the toothpaste with the tip of his finger to his teeth and gums, and spat. Then he fastened a belt with four sheaths and a bag dangling from a strap and put it around his waist. He placed a long towel around his shoulders as a cape, picked up a cane of oak shod with iron and, with the other hand, picked up the grail. He went down the stairs. The grass was still wet. It rained every night at three o'clock for a half hour, and the valley did not dry until after the sun came up. If it were not for the absence of disease germs and viruses, half the valley's humans would have died of pneumonia and flu long ago.
Sam was young and vigorous again, but he still did not like to exercise. As he walked, he thought of the little railway he would like to build from his house to the edge of The River. But that would be too restrictive. Why not build an automobile with a motor that burned wood alcohol?
People began joining him: he was kept busy with "Saluton!" and "Bonan Matenon!" At the end of his walk, he gave his grail to a man to put on a depression on the top of the gray granite mushrooms-shaped rock. About six hundred of the gray cylinders were placed in the depression, and the crowd retreated to a respectful distance. Fifteen minutes later, the rock erupted with a roar. Blue flames soared twenty-five feet high and thunder echoed from the mountain. The appointed grail keepers for the day got onto the rock and passed the cylinders around. Sam took his back to the pilothouse, wondering on the way why he did not delegate someone to carry his grail down for him. The truth was, a man was so dependent on the grail, he just could not trust it out of his sight.
Back in the house, he opened the lid. In six containers in snapdown racks were breakfast and various goodies.
The grail had a false bottom in which was concealed an energy-matter converter and programmed menus. This morning he got bacon and eggs, toast with butter and jam, a glass of milk, a slice of cantaloupe, ten cigarettes, a marihuana stick, a cube of dreamgum, a cigar, and a cup of some delicious liqueur.
He settled down to eat with gusto and got, instead, a. bad taste. Looking out through the starboard port (so he wouldn't see into Cyrano's door), he saw a youth on his knees before his hut. The fellow was praying, his eyes closed, his hands church-steepled. He wore only a kilt and a spiral bone from a Riverfish suspended by a leather string around his neck. His hair was dark blond, his face was broad, and his body was muscular. But his ribs were beginning to show. The praying man was Hermann Goring.
Sam swore and reared up from his chair, knocking it backward, picked it up and moved his breakfast from his desk to the big round table in the center of the room. The fellow had spoiled his appetite more than once. If there was one thing Sam could not stand, it was an ex-sinner, and Hermann Goring had sinned more than most and was now, by way of compensation, holier than most. Or so it seemed to Sam, though Goring claimed that he was the lowliest of the low—in a sense.
Take your damned arrogant humility away, Sam had said. Or at least take it downwind . . .
If it had not been for the Magna Carta which Sam had drawn up (over King John's protests, thus repeating history), Sam would have kicked Goring and his followers out long ago. Well, at least a week ago. But the Carta, the constitution of the state of Parolando, the most democratic constitution in the history of mankind, gave total religious freedom and total freedom of speech. Almost total, anyway. There had to be some limitations.
But his own document forbade Sam to stop the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chances from preaching.
Yet if Goring continued to protest, to make speeches, to convert more to his doctrine of pacifist resistance, Sam Clemens would never get his Riverboat. Hermann Goring had made a symbol of the boat; he said that it represented man's vanity, greed, lust for violence, and disregard of the Creator's designs for the world of man.
Man should not build riverboats. He should build more stately mansions of the soul. All man needed now was a roof over his head to keep off the rain and thin walls for a little privacy now and then. Man no longer had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. His food and drink were given to him with nothing expected in return, not even gratitude. Man had tune to determine his destiny. But man must not transgress on others, not rob them of their possessions, their love or their dignity. He must respect others and himself. But he could not do this through thievery, robbery, violence, contempt. He must . . .
Sam turned away. Goring had some fine sentiments to which Sam subscribed. But Goring was wrong if he thought that licking the boots of the people who had put them here was going to lead to any Utopia or salvation for their souls. Humanity had been tricked again; it was being used, misused and abused. Everything, the resurrection, the rejuvenation, freedom from disease, free food and liquor and smokes, freedom from hard work or economic necessity, everything was an illusion, a candy bar to lead baby-mankind into some dark alley where . . . Where? Sam did not know. But the Mysterious Stranger had said that mankind was being tricked in the cruelest hoax of all, even crueler than the first hoax, that of life on Earth. Man had been resurrected and put on this planet as the subject of a tremendous scholarly study. That was all. And when the studies were completed, Man would go down into darkness and oblivion once more. Cheated again.
But what did the Stranger have to gain by telling this to certain selected men? Why had he chosen a small number to help him defeat his fellow Ethicals? What was the Stranger really after? Was he lying to Sam and Cyrano and Odysseus and the others whom Sam had not yet met?
Sam Clemens did not know. He was as much in The Great Dark as he had been on Earth. But he did know one thing for certain. He wanted that Riverboat.
The mists had cleared away; breakfast time was over. He checked the water clock and rang the big bell on the pilothouse. As soon as it had ceased tolling, the wooden whistles of the sergeants began shrilling. Up and down the ten-mile stretch of the Rivervalley known as Parolando the whistles shrilled. Then the drums began to beat, and Parolando went to work.
There were 1,000 people in Parolando, but the Riverboat would be taking only one hundred and twenty. Twenty of these already knew for sure they would be going. Sam and Joe Miller, Lothar von Richthofen, Van Boom, de Bergerac, Odysseus, three engineers, King John, and their hutmates had been promised. The rest would know whether or not they had worked for nothing a few days before the boat sailed. At that time, the names would be written on slips of paper and placed inside a big wire cage. The cage would be whirled around and around, and then Sam would stop it, and, blindfolded, would reach in and pull out, one after the other, one hundred names. And these lucky ones would be the crew of the Not For Hire.
The Not For Hire had about 5,000,000 miles to travel, if the Stranger could be believed. Averaging about 335 miles every twenty-four hours, it would take over fortyone years to reach the end of The River. But it would not average that much, of course. The crew would have to put into shore for extensive vacations on land and repairs would have to be made. In fact, the Riverboat might wear out, although Sam planned on taking many spare parts. Once the boat was on its way it could not put back for parts or pick them up anywhere else. There would be no metal of any consequence from this place on.
It was strange to think that he would be about one hundred and forty years old when he got to the headwaters of The River.
But what was that when he had thousands of years of youth to go?
He looked through the bow ports. The plain was full of people streaming down from the hills to the factories. Behind him the hills would be alive with others on their way to the factories in the hills. A small army would be working on the big dam to the northwest, near the base of the mountains. A concrete wall was being constructed between two steep hills to dam up the water flowing from a spring near the top of the mountain. When the lake behind the dam was full, its overflow would drive electrical generators to power the mills.
At present, the electrical energy needed came from a grailstone. A giant stepdown transformer of aluminum took the energy three times a day, sent it through brobdingnagian aluminum wires to a two-story device known as the batacitor. This was a late-twentieth-century electronic discovery that could accept hundreds of kilovolts in a hundredth of a microsecond and could discharge it at any rate from a tenth of a volt to one hundred kilovolts. It was the prototype of the batacitor that would be put on the Riverboat. At present the energy was chiefly used in a cutting device made by van Boom that sliced through the pieces of nickel-iron dug up on the plain. The energy could also be moderated to melt the metal. The aluminum for the wires and the batacitor had been laboriously and expensively made from aluminum silicate derived from the clay under the grass along the base of the mountains. But that supply had run out and now the only economically feasible source was in Soul City.
Sam sat down at his desk, pulled out a drawer and removed a tall book bound in fish-bladder leather and with pages of bamboo-fiber paper. It was his diary, The Memoirs of a Lazarus. For the time being he was using ink made of water and tannic acid from oak bark and of carbon from finely ground charcoal-in-suspension to write down day-by-day happenings and his reflections. When the technology of Parolando was improved enough, he would use the electronic recorder that van Boom had promised him.
He had no sooner started writing than the drums began beating. The big bass drums represented dashes; the small soprano drums, dots. The code was Morse; the language, Esperanto. Von Richthofen would be landing in a few minutes.
Sam stood up to look out again. A half a mile away was the bamboo catamaran on which Lothar von Richthofen had sailed downRiver only ten days ago. Through the starboard ports Sam saw a squat figure with tawny hair coming out of the gateway of King John's log palace. Behind him came bodyguards and sycophants.
King John was making sure that von Richthofen did not give Sam Clemens any secret messages from Elwood Hacking.
The ex-monarch of England, present coruler of Parolando, wore a kilt with red and black checks, a poncholike arrangement of towels, and knee-length, redleather Riverdragon boots. Around his thick waist was a wide belt with a number of sheaths containing steel daggers, a short sword, and a steel ax. One hand held a steel rod coronet, one of many sources of contention between Sam and King John. Sam did not want to waste metal on such useless anachronisms, but John had insisted and Sam had given in.
Sam found some satisfaction now in thinking about the name of his little nation. Parolando in Esperanto meant pair land and was so called because two men governed it. But Sam had not mentioned to John that another translation could be Twain Land.
John followed a hard-dirt path around a long, low factory building, and then he was at the foot of the staircase of Sam's quarters. His bodyguard, a big thug named Sharkey, pulled the bell rope and the little bell tinkled.
Sam stuck his head out and shouted, "Come aboard, John!"
John looked up at him from pale blue eyes and motioned to Sharkey to precede him. John was cautious about assassins, and he had reason to be. He was also resentful about having had to come to Sam, but he had known that von Richthofen would report to Sam first.
Sharkey entered, inspected Sam's pilothouse and looked through the three rooms of the texas. Sam heard a growl, as low and powerful as a lion's, from the rear bedroom. Sharkey came back swiftly and closed the door. Sam smiled and said, "Joe Miller may be sick, but he
an still eat ten Polish prizefighters for breakfast and call for a second helping."
Sharkey did not reply. He signaled through the port that John could come up without fear of being ambushed.
The catamaran was beached now, and the tiny figure of von Richthofen was coming across the plain, holding his grail in one hand and the wooden winged ambassadorial staff in the other. Through the other port Sam could see the lanky figure of de Bergerac leading a platoon toward the south wall. Livy was not in sight. John entered. Sam said, "Bonan matenon, Johano!"
It galled John that Sam refused to address him as Via Rega Mosto—Your Majesty—in private. La Konsulo—the Consul—was their correct title and even that came reluctantly from Sam's lips. Sam encouraged others to call him La Estro, The Boss, because that angered John even more.
John grunted and sat down at the round table. Another bodyguard, a big dark proto-Mongolian with massive bones and immensely powerful muscles, Zaksksromb, who presumably had died about 30,000 B.C., lit up a huge brown cigar for John. Zak, as he was known, was the strongest man in Parolando, with the exception of Joe Miller. And it could be argued that Joe Miller was not a man—or, at least, certainly not Homo sapiens.
Sam wished Joe would get out of bed. Zak made him nervous. But Joe was sedating himself with dreamgum. Two days ago a chunk of siderite had slipped from a crane's tongs as Joe was passing beneath it. The operator swore it had been an accident, but Sam had his suspicions.
Sam puffed on his cigar and said, "Hear anything about your nephew lately?"
John did not start, but his eyes did widen a trifle. He looked at Sam across the table. "No, should I?"
"I just wondered. I've been thinking about asking Arthur down for a conference. There's no reason why you two should be trying to kill each other. This isn't Earth, you know. Why can't we call off old feuds? What if you did drop him off in a sack into the estuary? Let bygones be bygones. We could use his wood, and we need more limestone for calcium carbonate and magnesium. He's got plenty." John glared, then hooded his eyes and smiled.
Tricky John, Sam thought. Smooth John. Despicable John.
"To get wood and limestone we'd have to pay with steel arms." John said. "I'm not about to permit my dear nephew to get his hands on more steel."
"Just thought I'd broach the subject to you," Sam said, "because at noon—" John stiffened. "Yes?"
"Well, I thought I'd bring up the subject to the Council. We might have a vote on it." John relaxed. "Oh?"
Sam thought, You think you're safe. You've got Pedro Anseurez and Frederick Rolfe on your side and a jive-tothree vote in the Council is a nay vote . . .
Once again he contemplated suspending the Magna Carta so that things could be done that needed to be done. But that might mean civil war and that could mean the end of the dream.
He paced back and forth while John described in a loud voice and sickening detail his latest conquest of his latest blonde. Sam tried to ignore the words; he still got mad because the man boasted, although by now any woman who accepted John had only herself to blame.
The little bell tinkled. Lothar von Richtofen entered. He was now wearing his hair long and so, with his handsome, somewhat Slavic, features, he looked like a less stocky and better-looking Goring. The two had known each other well during World War I, since both had served 'under Baron Manfred von Richthofen, Lothar's older brother. Lothar was a wild, brash, and essentially likable person, but this morning his smiles and his debonair bearing were gone. "What's the bad news?" Sam said.
Lothar took the cup of bourbon that Sam offered, downed it, and said, "Sinjoro Hacking has just about finished putting up fortifications. Soul City has walls twelve feet high and ten thick on all fronts. Hacking was nasty to "me, very nasty. He called me an ofejo and a honkio, words new to me. I did not care to ask him for an explanation."
"Ofejo might be from the English ofay," Sam said, "but I never heard the other word. Honkio?"
"You'll hear those words a lot in the future," Lothar said, "if you deal with Hacking. And you will. Hacking finally got down to business after spewing out a torrent of abuse, mostly about my Nazi ancestors. I never heard of the Nazis on Earth, you know, since I died in a plane crash in 1922. He seemed to be angry about something—maybe his anger had nothing to do with me originally. But the essence of his speech was that he might cut off the bauxite and other minerals."
Sam leaned on the table until things came back into focus. Then he said, "I'll take a shot of Kentucky courage myself."
Von Richthofen continued, "It seems that Hacking isn't too happy with the makeup of his state. It's one-fourth Harlem blacks who died between 1960 and 1980, you know, and one-eighth eighteenth-century Dahomeyan blacks. But he has a one-fourth nonblack population of fourteenth-century Wahhabi Arabs, fanatics who still claim that Mohammed is their prophet and they're here just for a short trial period. Then there is the one-fourth composed of thirteenth-century, Asiatic-Indian, Dravidian, black-skinned Caucasians, and one-eighth of people from anywhere and anytime. A slight majority of the oneeighth is twentieth-century."
Sam nodded. Though resurrected humanity consisted of persons who lived from 2,000,000 B.C. to A.D. 2008, one-fourth had been born after A.D. 1899—if estimates were correct.
"Hacking wants his Soul City to be almost entirely black. He said that he had believed that integration was possible when he lived on Earth. The young whites of his day were free of the racial prejudices of their elders and he had known hope. But there aren't too many of his former white contemporaries in his land. And the Wahhabi Arabs are driving him out of his mind. Hacking became a Moslem on Earth, did you know that? First, he was a Black Muslim, an American home-grown variety. Then he became a real Moslem, made a pilgrimage to Mecca and was quite certain that the Arabs, even if they were white, were not racists.
"But the massacre of the Sudanese blacks by the Sudanese Arabs and the history of Arabic enslavement of blacks disturbed him. Anyway, these nineteenth-century Wahhabi are not racist—they're just religious fanatics and too much trouble. He didn't say so, but I was there ten days and I saw enough. The Wahhabis want to convert Soul City to their brand of Moslemism, and if they can't do it peacefully, they'll do it bloodily. Hacking wants to get rid of them and the Dravidians, who seem to regard themselves as superior to Africans of any color. Anyway, Hacking will continue to furnish us bauxite if we will send him all our black citizens in return for his Wahhabi and Dravidian citizens. Plus an increased amount of steel arms. Plus a larger share in the raw siderite."
Sam groaned. King John spat on the floor. Sam scowled and said, "Merdo, Johano! Not even a Plantagenet gobs on my floor! Use the spittoon or get out!"
He forced himself to push down his rage and frustration as King John bristled. Now was not a time to bring about a confrontation. The vainglorious ex-monarch would never back down on the spitting issue, which was, in reality, trifling.
Sam gestured self-deprecatingly and said, "Forget about it, John. Spit all you want to!" But he could not resist adding: "As long as I have the same privilege in your house, of course."
John growled and popped a chocolate into his mouth. He used the growling, grinding voice that indicated that he, too, was very angry but was imposing great self-control. "This Saracen, Hacking, gets too much. I say we have issed his black hand long enough. His demands have slowed down the building of the ship—"
"Boat, John," Sam said. "It's a boat, not a ship."
"Boato, smoato. I say, let us conquer Soul City, put the citizens to the sword, and seize the minerals. Then we will be able to make aluminum on the spot. In fact, we could build the boat there. And, to make sure that we were not interfered with, we should conquer all the states between us and Soul City." Powermad John.
Yet, Sam was inclined to think that he might, for once, be right. In a month or so Parolando would have the weapons that would enable it to do just what John was proposing. Except that Publia was friendly and its bills were not high, and Tifonujo, though it demanded much, had permitted itself to be stripped of trees. It was, however, possible that both states planned to use the nickel-iron they got for their wood to make weapons so that they could attack Parolando.
The savages across The River were probably planning the same thing.
"I'm not through," von Richthofen said. "Hacking made his demands about the trading of citizens on a oneto-one basis. But he won't come to any agreement unless we send a black to deal with him. He says he was insulted when you sent me, since I'm a Prussian and a Junkers to boot. "But he'll overlook that, since we don't know any better, if we send him a member of the Council the next time. One who's black." Sam's cigar almost fell out. "We don't have a black Councilman!"
"Exactly. What Hacking is saying is that we had better elect one."
John passed both hands through his shoulder-length tawny hair and then stood up. His pale blue eyes were fiery under the lion-colored eyebrows.
"This Saracen thinks he can tell us how to conduct our internal affairs. I say, War!"
Sam said, "Now, just a minute, Your Majesty. You have good reason to be mad, as the old farmer said when he fell in, but the truth is, we can defend ourselves quite well—but we cannot invade and occupy any large territory."
"Occupy?" John shouted. "We will slaughter half and chain the other half!"
"The world changed much after you died, John—uh, Your Majesty. Admittedly there are other forms of slavery than the outright form, but I don't want to get into an argument about definitions. There is no use making a fuss, as the fox said to the hens. We just appoint another Councilman, pro tem. And we send him to Hacking."
"There is no provision in the Magna Carta for a pro tern Councilman," Lothar said. "We change the Carta," Sam said. "That'll take a popular election."
John snorted disgust. He and Sam Clemens had gone through too many blazing arguments about the rights of the people.
"There's one other thing," Lothar said, still smiling but with an exasperated note in his voice. "Hacking asks that Firebrass be allowed to visit here for a tour of inspection. Firebrass is especially interested in seeing our airplane." John sputtered. "He asks if we care if he sends a spy!"
"I don't know," Sam said. "Firebrass is Hacking's chief of staff. He might get a different idea of us. He's an engineer—I think he had a PhD, too, in physics. I've heard about him. What did you find out, Lothar?"
"He impressed me very much," von Richthofen said. "He was born in 1974 in Syracuse, New York. His father was black, and his mother was half Irish and half Iroquois Indian. He was in the second party to land on Mars and the first to orbit Jupiter—"
Sam was thinking, Men really did that! Landed on the Moon and then Mars. Right out of Jules Verne and Frank Reade, Jr. Fantastic, yet no more fantastic than this world. Or, indeed, than the mundane world of 1910. None of it could be explained in a manner to satisfy any reasonable man. It was all incredible. "We'll put it up to the Council today, John," Sam said,
if you have no objection. We'll have a general election on the pro tem Councilman. I personally favor Uzziah Cawber."
"Cawber was a slave, wasn't he?" Lothar said. "I don't know. Hacking said he didn't want any Uncle Toms."
Once a slave, always a slave, Sam thought. Even when a slave revolts, kills, and is killed as a protest against his slavery—resurrected, he still does not think of himself as a free man. He was born and raised in a world soaked with the rotten essence of slavedom and every thought he thinks, every move he makes is stained with slavery, subtly altered with slavery. Cawber was born in 1841 in Montgomery, Alabama, he was taught to read and write, he served in the house of his master as his secretary, he killed his master's son in 1863, escaped, and went West and became a cowboy, of all things, and then a miner. He was killed with a Sioux spear in 1876; the ex-slave killed by a man about to become a slave. Cawber is delighted with this world—-or claims to be—because no man can enslave him here or keep him enslaved. But he is the slave of his own mind and of the reaction of his nerves. Even when he holds his head high, he will jump if somebody cracks a whip, and his head will bow before he can stop it . . .
Why, oh, why had man been brought back to life? Men and women were rained by what had happened on Earth, and they would never be able to undo the damage. The Second Chancers claimed a man could change, entirely change. But the Second Chancers were a pack of dreamgummers.
"If Hacking calls Cawber an Uncle Tom, Cawber will kill him," Sam said. "I say, let's send him."
John's tawny eyebrows rose. Sam knew what he was thinking. Perhaps he could use Cawber, one way or another.
Sam looked at the waterclock. "Time for the inspection tour. Care to come along, John? I'll be with you in a minute," and he sat down at his desk to make a few more entries in his diary. That gave John the chance to leave first, as befitted the ex-King of England and of a good part of France. Sam thought it was ridiculous to worry about who preceded whom, yet he disliked John so much he could not bear to let him gain even this minor victory. Rather than argue about it, or just walk out ahead of Mm, and so cause John to throw a fit, he pretended he had work to do.
Sam caught up with the group, which included the six Councilman, just outside the nitric-acid factory. They went through the factories swiftly. The stinks emanating from the nitric and sulfuric acids; from the destructive distillation of wood to make alcohol, acetone, creosote, turpentine and acetic acid; the formaldehyde vats and the treatment of human excrement and lichen scraped off the mountains to extract potassium nitrate—these, combined, were enough to make a hyena lose its breakfast. The Councillors were roasted and deafened in the steel mill and the grinding mills and the forges and blacksmith shops. They were covered with a white dust in the limestone mills and magnesium factory. In the aluminum factory they were again roasted, deafened, and stunk out.
The gunsmith shop up in the hills was not operating at the moment. Except for distant noises, it was quiet. But it was not beautiful. The earth had been dug up, the trees cut down, and smoke from the factories up The River was black and acrid along the mountains.
Van Boom, the late-twentieth-century, half Zulu, half Afrikaans, chief engineer, met them. He was a handsome man with a dark bronze skin and curly hair. He stood about six-three and weighed about two hundred and fifty. He had been born in a ditch during The Bloody Years.
He greeted them cordially enough (he liked Sam and tolerated John), but he did not smile as usual.
"It's ready," he said, "but I want my objections recorded. It's a nice toy and makes a lot of noise and looks impressive and will kill a man. But it's wasteful and inefficient." "You make it sound like a Congressman," Sam said.
Van Boom led them into the high doorway of the bamboo building, where a steel handgun lay on a table. Van Boom picked it up. Even in his big hand, the gun was huge. He strode past the others and out into the light of the sun. Sam was exasperated. He had held out his hand for the gun and the fellow had ignored him. If Van Boom intended to demonstrate it outside, why hadn't he said so in the first place?
"Engineers," Sam muttered. Then he shrugged. You might as well hit a Missouri mule between the eyes with your pinkie as try to change Van Boom's ways.
Van Boom held up the gun so that the sunshine twinkled against the silvery gray metal. "This is the Mark I pistol," he said. "Called so because The Boss invented it." Sam's anger melted like ice in a Mississippi River thaw,
"It's a breech-loading, single-shot, flintlock hand weapon with a rifled barrel and a breakdown action."
He held the gun in his right hand and said, "You load it so. You press forward the lock switch on the left side of the barrel. This releases the breech lock. You then press down the barrel with the left hand. This action forces the trigger guard into the grip, where the guard acts as a lever to cock the hammer."
He reached into a bag strapped to his belt and removed a large brown hemispherical object. "This is a bakelite or phenol-formaldehyde-resin bullet, sixty caliber. You press the bullet, so, until it engages the lands of the barrel."
He removed from his bag a shiny package with black contents.
"This is a charge of black gunpowder wrapped in cellulose nitrate. Some time in the future, we'll have cordite instead of gunpowder. If we use this gun, that is. Now, I insert the load into the chamber with the primer end first. The primer is a twist of nitrate paper impregnated with gunpowder. Then I lift the barrel with my left hand, thus, locking it into place. The Mark I is now ready to fire. But, for emergency, if the primer does not ignite, you can pour priming powder into the touchhole just forward of the rear sight. In case of misfire, the gun may be cocked with the right thumb. Note that this flash vent on the right side of the action shield protects the shooter's face."
A man had brought out a large wooden target and had inserted it in a frame on four legs. The target was about twenty yards away. Van Boom turned toward it, held out the gun, clenched both hands and sighted along the front and rear sights.
"Get behind me, gentlemen," he said. "The heat of the passage through the air will burn off the surface of the bullet and leave a thin trail of smoke which you may be able to see. The plastic bullet has to be of such large caliber because of its light weight. But this increases the wind resistance. If we decide to use this gun—which I definitely am against—we might increase the caliber to seventy-five in the Mark II. The effective range is about fifty yards, but the accuracy is not good beyond thirty yards and nothing to brag about within that range."
The flint was in the hammer. When Van Boom would pull the trigger, the hammer would fall and scrape along the filelike surface of the frizzen. The frizzen covered the priming pan and should be knocked forward by the flint, uncovering the primer twist of the powder charge.
There was a click as the sear let the hammer go, a flash as the primer twist burned, and a booming. The clickflash-boom took up a tune equal to saying click-flashboom and Van Boom had had tune between the click and the boom to bring the gun back into line after it had been jarred away by the impact of the heavy hammer and flint.
The bullet did leave a very faint trail of smoke, quickly dissipated by the fifteen-mile-an-hour wind. Sam, looking past Van Boom's arm, could see the bullet curve out and then back, carried by the wind. But Van Boom must have been practicing, because the bullet struck near the bull's eye. It went halfway into the soft pine, shattered and left a large hole in the wood.
"The bullet won't penetrate deeply into a man," Van Boom said, "but it will leave a large hole. And if it hits near bone, the fragments should break the bone."
The next hour was spent busily and happily with the Consuls and Councillors taking turns shooting. King John was especially delighted, though perhaps a little awed, because he had never seen a gun before. His first experience with gunpowder had come several years after he had been resurrected and he had seen only bombs and wooden rockets.
At last Van Boom said, "If you keep up, gentlemen, you will exhaust our supply of bullets—and it takes a lot of labor and materials to make these bullets. Which is one reason why I object to making any more. My other reasons are: one, the gun is accurate only at close range; two, it takes so long to load and shoot that a good bowman could drop three pistol handlers while they're loading and stay outside the effective range of the guns. Moreover, a plastic bullet isn't recoverable, whereas an arrow is."
Sam said, "That's a lot of nonsense! The mere fact that we would have these guns would demonstrate our technological and military superiority. We'd scare the enemy half to death before the battle started. Also, you forget that it takes a long time to train a good bowman, but anyone can shoot one of these after a relatively short lesson."
"True," Van Boom said. "But could they hit anyone? Besides, I was thinking of making steel crossbows. They can't be handled as fast as longbows, but they don't require any more training than guns do, and the bolts are recoverable. And they're a hell of a lot more deadly than these noisy, stinking gadgets."
"No, sir!" Sam said. "No, sir! I insist that we make at least two hundred of these. We'll outfit a new group, the Parolando Pistoleers. They'll be the terror of The River—you watch them! You'll seel"
For a change King John was on Sam's side. He insisted that the first two pistols should go to Sam and himself and the next dozen to their bodyguards. Then the new group could be organized and trained.
Sam was grateful for the backing, but he told himself to check on the men who formed the Pistoleers. He did not want it made up largely of men loyal to John.
Van Boom made no effort to hide his disgust. "I'll tell you what! I'll take a good yew bow and twelve arrows and stand fifty yards away. At a signal all eight of you can advance on me, firing at will with your Mark I's—and I'll drop all eight of you before you get close enough to hit me! Is it a deal? I'm willing to lay my life on the line!" "Don't be childish," Sam said.
Van Boom rolled his eyes upward. "I'm childish,? You're jeopardizing Parolando—and your boat—because you want guns to play with!"
"Just as soon as the guns are made you can start making all the bows you want," Sam said. "Look! We'll make armor, too, for the Pistoleers! That should dispose of your objections! Why didn't I think of that before? Why, our men will be dressed up in steel that'll repel the Stone Age weapons of the enemy as if they were straws. Let the enemy shoot his yew bows with his flint-tipped arrows. They'll bounce off the steel and the Pistoleers can take their time and blow the enemy into the next county!"
"You forget that we've had to barter our ore and even metal weapons for wood and other materials we need." Van Boom said. "The enemy will have arrows with steel tips that can drive through armor. Don't forget Grecy and Agincourt."
"There's just no dealing with you." Sam said. "You must be half Dutch—you're so stubborn." "If your thinking is representative of the thinking of
hite men, then I'm glad I'm half Zulu," Van Boom said.
"Don't get huffy," Sam replied. "And congratulations on the gun! Tell you what, we'll call it the Van BoomMark I. How's that?"
"I'd just as soon not have my name attached to it," the engineer said. "So be it. I'll make your two hundred guns. But I'd like to make an improved version, the Mark II we talked about."
"Let's make two hundred of these first, then we'll start on the Mark II," Sam said. "We don't want to mess around so long trying to get the perfect weapon that we suddenly find we don't have any at all. Still—"
He talked for a while about the Mark II. He had a passion for mechanical gadgets. On Earth he had invented a number of things, all of which were going to make nun a fortune. And there was the Paige typesetting machine, into which he had sunk—and it had sunk—all the wealth he had made from his books.
Sam thought of the typesetting monster and how that wonderful contraption had bankrupted him. For a second, Paige and Van Boom were one and he felt guilty and a little panicky.
Van Boom next complained about the materials and the labor put into the AMP-1, their aerial machine prototype. Sam ignored him. He went with the others to the hangar, which was on the plains a mile north of Sam's quarters. The craft was only partly finished but would look almost as skeletal and frail when ready to fly as it did now.
"It's similar to some of the planes built in 1910," von Richthofen said. "I'll be exposed from my waist up when I sit in the cockpit. The whole machine looks more like a metal dragonfly than anything else. The main object is to test out the efficiency of the wood alcohol-burning motor and our materials."
Von Richthofen promised that the first flight would be made within three weeks. He showed Sam the plans for the rocket launchers which would be attached under the wings. "The plane can carry about six small rockets, but it'll
ostly be good only for scouting. It won't go faster than forty miles an hour against the wind. But it'll be fun flying it."
Sam was disappointed that the plane wasn't a twoseater. He looked forward to flying for the first time in his life—his second life, that is. But von Richthofen said the next prototype would be a two-seater and Sam would be his first passenger.
"After you've tested it out," Sam said. He expected John to protest about this and to insist that he be taken up first. But evidently John was not too eager to leave the ground.
The last stop was at the boatyard, located halfway between the hangar and Sam's house. The craft within the pine-log enclosure would be completed within a week. The Firedragon I was the amphibious prototype of the boat that would be the launch for the big boat. It was a beautiful machine, made of thick magnalium, about thirtytwo feet long, shaped like a U.S. Navy cruiser with wheels, with three turrets on its sleek top deck. It was powered by steam, burned wood alcohol, could operate in water or on land, carried a crew of eleven and was, so Sam declared, invincible.
He patted the cold gray hull and said, "Why should we worry about having bowmen? Or having anything but this? This juggernaut could crush a kingdom all by itself. It has a steam-powered cannon the like of which the world, Earth or this planet, has never seen. That is why it is steam-driven and why it has such a huge boiler."
All in all, the tour had made him happy. It was true that the plans for the great Riverboat had barely been started. But those took time. It was vital that the state be well protected at first, and just making the preparations was fun. He rubbed his hands and puffed on a new cigar, drawing the green smoke deeply into his lungs. And then he saw Livy.
His beloved Livy, sick for so many years, and dead, finally, in Italy, in 1904.
Restored to life and youth and beauty, but not, alas, to him.
She was walking toward him, carrying her grail by its handle, wearing a white scarlet-edged kilt that came halfway down her thighs and a thin white scarf for a bra. She had a fine figure, good legs, handsome features. Her forehead was broad and satiny white. Her eyes were large and luminous. Her lips were full and shapely; her smile, attractive; her teeth, small and very white. She customarily wore her dark hair parted, combed down smooth in front but twisted into a figure eight in the back. Behind an ear she wore one of the giant crimson roselike blooms that grew from the vines on the irontrees. Her necklace was made of the convoluted red vertebrae of the hornfish. Sam's heart felt as if it were being licked by a cat.
She swayed as she walked toward him, and her breasts bounced beneath the semi-opaque fabric. Here was his Livy, who had always been so modest, had worn heavy clothes from the neck down to the ankle, and had never undressed before him in the light. Now she reminded him of the half-naked women of the Sandwich Islands. He felt uneasy, and he knew why. His queasiness among the natives had been as much due to their unwanted attraction for him as repulsion, each feeling dependent on the other and having nothing to do with the natives per se.
Livy had had a Puritanical upbringing, but she had not been ruined by it. On Earth she had learned to drink and to like beer, had even smoked a few times and had become an infidel or, at least, a great doubter. She had even tolerated his constant swearing and had let loose with a few blisterers herself if the girls were not around. The accusations that she had censored his books and thus emasculated them were off the target. He had done most of the censoring himself. Yes, Livy had always shown adaptability.
Too much. Now, after twenty years of absence from him, she had fallen in love with Cyrano de Bergerac. And Sam had the uneasy feeling that that wild Frenchman had awakened in her something that Sam might have awakened if he had not been so inhibited himself. But after these years on The River and the chewing of a certain amount of dreamgum, he had lost many of his own inhibitions. It was too late for him. Unless Cyrano left the scene . . .
"Hello, Sam," she said in English. "How are you on this fine day?"
"Every day is fine here," he said. "You can't even talk about the weather, let alone do anything about it!"
She had a beautiful laugh. "Come along with me to the grailstone," she said. "It's almost time for lunch."
Every day he swore not to come near her because to do so hurt too much. And every day he took advantage of the smallest chance to get as close to her as he could. "How's Cyrano?" he said.
"Oh, very happy because he's finally getting a rapier. Bildron, the swordsmith, promised that he'd have the first one—after yours and the other Councilmen's, of course. Cyrano had taken so long to reconcile himself to the fact that he would never hold a metal sword in his hand again. Then he heard about the meteorite and came here—and now the greatest swordsman in the world will have a chance to show everybody that his reputation wasn't a lie, which some liars say it was."
"Now, Livy," he said, "I didn't say people lied about his reputation. I said that maybe they exaggerated some. I still don't believe that story about his holding off two hundred swordsmen all by himself."
"The fight at the Porte de Nesle was authentic! And it wasn't two hundred! You're the one pumping it up, Sam, just as you always do. There was a crowd of hired thugs that could have been a hundred or might just as well have been. Even if there had been only twenty-five, the fact is that Cyrano attacked them all single-handed to save his friend, the Chevalier de Lignieres.
He killed two and wounded seven and ran the rest of them off. That is God's truth!"
"I don't want to get into an argument about the merits of your man," he said. "Or about anything. Let's just talk like we used to when we had so much fun—before you got sick."
She stopped. Her face set grimly. "I always knew you resented my illness, Sam."
"No, that wasn't it," he said. "I think I felt guilty that you were sick, as if somehow I were to blame. But I never hated you for it. I hated myself if I hated anyone."
"I didn't say you hated me," she said. "I said you resented my illness and you showed it in many ways. Oh, you may have thought you were always noble and gentle and loving—and most of the time you were—you really were. But there were enough tunes when you looked, you spoke, you muttered, you gestured—how can I describe exactly how you were? I can't, but I knew you resented me, sometimes loathed me, because I was sick."
"I didn't!" he cried so loudly that a number of people stared.
"Why argue about it? Whether you did or not doesn't matter now. I loved you then and I still do, in. a way. But not as I did."
He was silent during the rest of the walk across the plain to the big mushroom-shaped stone. The cigar tasted like burning skunk cabbage.
Cyrano was not present. He was superintending the building of a section of the wall which would eventually guard the shore of The River. Sam was glad. It was difficult enough for him to see Livy alone, but when she was with the Frenchman, he could not endure his thoughts. In silence, he and Livy parted.
A beautiful woman with lovely, honey-colored hair approached him, and he was able to set aside his feelings about Livy for a while. The woman's name was Gwenafra. She had died at about the age of seven in a country that must have been Cornwall about the tune the Phoenicians came there to exploit the tin mines. She had been resurrected among people of whom none spoke her ancient Celtic language and had been adopted by a group that spoke English. From her description, one of them had been that Sir Richard Francis Burton whom Sam had thought he'd seen on the shore just before the meteorite struck. Burton and his friends had built a small sailboat and set out for the headwaters of The River—as might have been expected of a man who had spent half his life exploring in the wildernesses of Africa and the other continents. On Earth Burton had sought the headwaters of the Nile and had found, instead, Lake Tanganyika. But on this world he had again been seeking the source of a river—the greatest River of them all—undaunted by the prospect that it might be ten million miles long or even twenty.
After little more than a year, his boat had been attacked by evil men, and one had stuck a stone knife into little Gwenafra and thrown her into The River, where she had drowned. She had awakened the next day on the banks somewhere far up in the northern hemisphere. The weather was colder, the sun weaker and the people there said that you did not have to go more than twenty thousand grailstones before you were in an area where the sun was always half above, half below the mountains. And there lived hairy, ape-faced men ten feet tall and weighing seven to eight hundred pounds.
(This was true, Joe Miller had been one of the titanthrops there.)
The people upRiver who adopted her spoke Suomenkielta, which in English meant Finnish. DownRiver a little way were Swedes, twentieth-century people who lived a peaceful life. Gwenafra grew up relatively happy with her loving foster parents. She learned Finnish, Swedish, English, a Chinese dialect of the fourth century B.C., and Esperanto.
She drowned again by accident one day and woke up in this area. She still remembered Burton; she cherished a childhood crush she had had for him. But, being a realist, she was ready to love other men. And she had—and had just split with one, Sam had heard. She wanted a man who would be faithful to her, and these were not easy to find in this world.
Sam was very much attracted to her. The only thing that had kept him from asking her to move in with him had been the fear of angering Livy. That fear was ridiculous—she had no claim on him as long as she was living with Cyrano. And she had made it plain that she did not care what he did in his private life or his public life. Nevertheless, against all logic, he was afraid to take another woman as his hutmate. He did not want to snap the last thin link.
He chatted with Gwenafra awhile and confirmed that she was still unattached.
Lunch was upsetting. The "roulette wheel" concealed somewhere in the false bottom of the grail, the wild caster of dice, came up with a meal that only a Goshute Indian could have swallowed and even he might have gagged a little. Sam threw out all the food but was able to console himself with two cigars, cigarettes and six ounces of an unfamiliar but delicious liqueur. Just smelling it sent his taste buds into a dance.
The meeting with John and the Council took three hours. After much wrangling and a number of votes, it was decided to put to the people the question of amending the Carta so that a pro tem Councilman could be elected. John held up things for an hour, arguing that a vote wasn't needed. Why couldn't the Council simply say that the amendment was passed and that would be the end of it? No amount of explaining ever seemed to clarify such matters in John's head. It was not that he was unintelligent. It was just that he was not emotionally able to comprehend democracy.
The vote was unanimous to accept Firebrass as Hacking's official visiting fireman. But he would have a close eye kept on him.
After all this John rose and made a speech, occasionally lapsing from Esperanto into Norman French when he was overpowered by emotion. He thought that Parolando should invade Soul City before Soul City invaded Parolando. The invasion should be launched as soon as the handguns and the armored amphibian, Firedragon I, were ready. However, it might be best to test the mettle of their iron and the troops on New Brittany first. His spies were certain that Arthur planned to attack them soon.
John's two toadies backed him, but the others, including Sam, voted them down. John's face became red, and he swore and beat his fists on the oak table, but nobody decided to change his mind.
After supper the drums relayed a message from Hacking. Firebrass would be arriving tomorrow, some time before noon.
Sam retired to his office. By the light of lamps burning fish oil—soon they would have electricity—he and Van Boom and Tanya Velitsky and John Wesley O'Brien, the engineers, discussed their ideas about the Riverboat and drew rough sketches on paper. Paper was still scarce, but they would need enormous amounts for their blueprints. Van Boom said that they should wait until they were able to make a certain kind of plastic. Lines could be drawn on this with magnetized "pens" and corrections could easily be made by demagnetizing. Sam replied that that was fine. But he wanted to start building the Riverboat the moment the amphibian was completed. Van Boom said that he could not agree to that. Too many things were in the way.
Before the meeting broke up Van Boom pulled a Mark I gun out of a large bag. "We have ten of these now," he said. "This one is yours, compliments of Parolando's Engineering Corps. And here are twenty packages of powder and twenty plastic bullets. You can sleep with them under your pillow."
Sam thanked him, the engineers left and Sam barred the door. Then he went into the back room to talk to Joe Miller awhile. Joe was still awake, but he said he was taking no sedation that night. He would be getting up in the morning. Sam bade the giant good night and went into his bedroom, next to the pilothouse. He drank two shots of bourbon and lay down. After a while he managed to doze, though he was afraid that the three-o'clock rain would wake him as usual and he would have trouble getting back to sleep.
He awoke, but the rain was long past. Shouts came from somewhere and then an explosion that rattled the pilothouse. Sam leaped out of bed, wrapped a kilt around his waist, seized an ax and ran into the pilothouse. He suddenly remembered his pistol, but he decided he would go back for it when he found out what was going on. The River was still smothered in fog, but hundreds of dark figures were spilling out of it, and the tops of tall masts were sticking out above it Torches were flaring all over the plains and in the hills. Drums were beating.
There was another explosion. A brightness in the night with bodies flying in all directions.
He looked through the starboard port. The gates of the log wall around King John's palace were open, and men were streaming out. Among them was the stocky figure of John.
By then more men had appeared out of the mists over the River. Bright starlight showed them lining up and moving out, rank after rank. The first of the invaders were by now in the great factories and advancing swiftly across the plain toward the foothills. Some explosions occurred inside factories as bombs were thrown to dislodge the defenders. And then a red tail flared out, disappeared, and something black shot toward him. Sam threw himself to the floor. A roar came beneath him, the floor heaved, and the glass ports blew in. A whiff of acrid smoke came to him and was gone.
He should get up and run, but he couldn't. He was deafened and frozen. Another rocket would be coming his way, and that one might be closer.
A giant hand gripped his shoulder and pulled him up. Another hand slid under his legs and he was being carried out. The arms and the chest of the giant were very hairy and as hard-muscled and as warm as a gorilla's. A voice as deep as if it were at the end of a railroad tunnel rumbled. "Take it eathy, Bothth."
"Put me down, Joe," Sam said. "I'm all right, except for my shame. And that's all right, too, I ought to feel ashamed."
His shock was fading, and a sense of relative calm flowed in to fill the vacuum. The appearance of the massive titanthrop had steadied him. Good old Joe—he might be a dumb subhuman and sick at the moment, but he was still worth a battalion.
Joe had put on his suit of leather armor. In one hand was the haft of an enormous double-headed ax of steel.
"Who are they?" he rumbled. "They from Thoul Thity?"
"I don't know," Sam said. "Do you feel up to fighting? How's the head?"
"It hurtth. Yeah, I can fight okay. Vere do ve go from here?"
Sam led him downhill toward the men collecting around John. He heard his name called and turned to see the tall lanky figure of de Bergerac, Livy by his side. She carried a small round shield of leather-covered oak and a steeltipped spear. Cyrano held a long, dully shining blade. Sam's eyes widened. It was a rapier.
Cyrano said, "Morbleu!" He switched to Esperanto. "Your smith gave this to me just after supper—he said there was no sense in waiting."
Cyrano whipped the rapier, cutting the air with a sharp sound. "I've come alive again. Steel—sharp steel!"
A nearby explosion made them all dive for the ground. Sam waited until he was sure that another rocket was not coming and then looked at his pilothouse. It had received a direct hit; its front was blown open; a fire was racing through it and would soon be in the texas. His diary was gone, but he could retrieve his grail later. It was indestructible.
In the next few minutes the wooden missiles, tails flaming, arched out, wobbling, from wooden bazookas held on the shoulders of the Parolandoj rocketeers. The missiles landed near and sometimes among the enemy and exploded with gouts of fire and much black smoke, quickly carried away by the wind.
Three runners reported. The attack had been launched from three places, all from The River. The main body was concentrated here, apparently to seize the Parolandoj leaders, the larger factories and the amphibian. The other two armies were about a mile away on each side. The invaders were composed of men from New Brittany and Kleomanujo and the Ulmaks from across The River. The Ulmaks were savages who had lived in Siberia circa 30,000 B.C. and whose descendants had migrated across the Bering Straits to become Amerinds.
So much for King John's spy service, Sam thought. Unless—unless he is in on the attack. But if he were he wouldn't be standing out here where he's likely to get killed any moment . . .
Anyway, Arthur of New Brittany would never make a deal with the uncle who had murdered him.
The rockets continued to arc down from both sides, the five-pound warheads with their rock-fragment shrapnel taking a toll. The Parolandoj had the advantage; they could lie flat while their rockets exploded among upright targets. The invaders had to keep moving, otherwise they might just as well go home.
Nevertheless, it was frightening to lie on the ground and wait for the next noisy blast and hope that it would not come closer than the last one. There were screams from the wounded that were not, however, as heartrending as they would have been if Sam had not been so deafened that he could barely hear them and if he also had not been too worried about himself to think of others. Then, suddenly, the rockets had quit blowing up the world. A huge hand shook Sam's shoulder. He looked up to see that many around him were getting to their feet. The sergeants were yelling into the stunned ears of their men to form a battle array. The enemy was so close now that neither side was using the missiles or else they had all been launched.
Ahead was a dark body, a sea of screaming whooping fiends. They ran up the hill and the first, second and third ranks fell, pierced by arrows. But those behind did not break. They leaped over the fallen and kept on coming. Suddenly, the archers were being hammered down or thrust through or clubbed.
Sam kept close behind Joe Miller, who moved ahead slowly, his ax rising and falling. And then the giant was down, and the enemy were struggling on top of him like a pack of jackals on a lion, Sam tried to get to him; his ax smashed through a shield and a head and an uplifted arm and then he felt a burning pain along his ribs. He was pushed back and back, while he slashed away with the ax and then it was gone, wedged in a skull. He stumbled over a pile of wood. Above him was the burning floor of his smashed house, still held up by three burning pylons.
He turned on his side, and there was the handgun, the Mark I, that he had left by his bedside. Near it lay three packages of powder with the nitrate-soaked twists and a number of the plastic bullets. The explosion had hurled them out of the house.
Two men whirled by him in a dance, their hands gripping each other, straining, grunting with the strain, glaring into each other's bloody faces. They stopped, and Sam recognized King John—his opponent was taller but not as thickly built. He had lost bis helmet, and he, too, had tawny hair and eyes that were blue in the light of the flames overhead.
Sam broke open the pistol, put in the bullet and the charge as he had done that morning up in the hills, locked the barrel and rose to his feet. The two men still struggled, one slipping back a little, then the other, trying to throw each other. John held a steel knife in his right hand; the other man, a steel ax; each was grasping the weapon hand of the other.
Sam looked around. No one was coming at him. He stepped forward and extended the muzzle of the big pistol, holding it steady with both hands. He pulled the trigger, the click sounded, the gun was jarred to one side by the heavy hammer, there was a flash, he had the gun back in line, a boom, a cloud of smoke, and John's assailant fell to one side, the entire right side of his skull blown away.
John fell gasping onto the ground. Then he raised himself, looking at Sam, who was reloading the gun. "Many thanks, partner! That man was my nephew, Arthur!"
Sam did not reply. If he had been thinking more coolly he would have waited until Arthur had killed John and then blown Arthur's head off. It was ironic that he, Sam, who had much to gain by John's death, should be responsible for saving him. Moreover, he could not expect gratitude from John. The man had no such thing in his soul.
Sam completed reloading the pistol and strode away, looking for Joe Miller. But he saw Livy reeling backward as a big Ulmak, whose left arm dangled bloodily, drove her back with blows of a stone ax on her shield. Her spear had been broken and in a few seconds he would have beaten her to her knees or shattered the shield. Sam reversed the pistol and broke the Ulmak's skull from behind with the butt of his gun. Livy fell exhausted and weeping on the ground. He would have gotten down to comfort her, but she seemed all right and he did not know where Joe Miller was. He plunged into the embattled mass and saw Joe on his feet again, demolishing heads, trunks and arms with sweeps of his great ax.
Sam stopped a few paces from a man who was coming up from behind Joe, a large ax in both hands. Sam fired, and the bullet took part of the man's chest off.
A minute later, the invaders were running for their lives. The sky was graying. By its light it was evident that Parolandoj were coming in from north and south. The other two columns, had been shattered, and the reinforcements were outnumbering the invaders. Moreover, they brought rockets which blew up the boats and canoes waiting for the defeated.
Sam felt too exhilarated to be depressed by the losses and the damage. For the first time he came out of the blue funk that always seized him during a fight. He actually enjoyed the battle during the last ten minutes.
A moment later his pleasure was gone. A wild-eyed and naked Hermann Goring, his scalp caked with blood, appeared on the battleground. His arms were raised straight up, and he was shouting, "Oh, brothers and sisters! Shame! Shame! You have killed, you have hated, you have lusted for the blood and the ecstasy of murder! Why did you not throw down your arms and take in your enemies with love? Let them do with you what they would? You wauld have died and suffered but final victory would have been yours! The enemy would have felt your love—and the next time he might have hesitated before again waging war. And the time after that and the next time he might have asked himself, 'What am I doing? Why am I doing this? What good is this? I have gained nothing—' and your love would have seeped through the stone over his heart and—"
John, coming up behind Goring, struck him on the back of the head with the hilt of his knife. Goring fell forward and lay on his face without moving.
"So much for traitors!" John shouted. He stared around wildly and then yelled, "Where are Trimalchio and Mordaunt, my ambassadors?"
Sam said, "They wouldn't be stupid enough to hang around here. You'll never catch them. They'll know you know they sold out to Arthur."
John's striking of Goring was illegal, since free speech was every one's right in Parolando. But Sam did not think that arresting John would be the right course at that moment. He, too, had felt like hitting Goring.
Livy, still weeping, staggered past. Sam followed her to where Cyrano sat on a pile of corpses. The Frenchman was wounded in a dozen places, though not seriously, and his rapier was bloody from tip to guard. He had given a splendid account of himself.
Livy threw herself on Cyrano. Sam turned away. She had not even thanked him for having saved her life.
There was a crash behind him. He turned. The rest of his house had fallen in, bringing the pylons with it.
He felt drained of strength, but there would be little rest for him today. The casualties and the damage had to be assessed. The dead had to be taken to the rendering factory up in the hills, since their fat was used to make glycerin. The practice was gruesome but necessary, and the owners of the bodies did not mind. Tomorrow they would be alive and well again somewhere far away along The River.
In addition, the entire population would have to be kept ready for a call to arms and the work of erecting the walls along the Riveredge would have to be speeded up. Scouts and messengers would have to be sent out to determine just what the military situation was. The Ulmaks and the Kleomenujoj and the New Bretons might launch a fullscale attack.
A captain reported that Kleomenes, the leader of Kleomenujo, had been found dead near the Riveredge, where a piece of rock shrapnel had entered his skull. So ended the half-brother of the great Spartan, Leonidas, who defended the pass of Thermopylae. Or so he ended in this area, at least.
Sam appointed some men to leave by boat immediately for the two countries. They were to inform them that Parolando did not intend to take vengeance if the new leaders would guarantee friendship to Parolando. John complained that he should have been consulted, and there was a short but savage argument. Sam finally agreed that John was right in principle, but there was no time to discuss certain matters. John informed him that, under the law, Sam had to take the time. Any decision had to be agreed upon by both of them.
Sam hated to agree, but John was right. They couldn't be giving contradictory orders.
They went together to inspect the factories. These were not badly damaged. The invaders had not, of course, wanted to wreck them since they had intended to use them. The amphibian, the Firedragon 1, was untouched. Sam shuddered when he thought of what might have happened if it had been completed and had fallen into the hands of the enemy. With it, they could have crushed the Parolandoj in the center and dug in to fight on the perimeter until reinforcements came. He would set up a large special guard around the vehicle.
He fell asleep after lunch in a Councilman's hut. It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when he was shaken awake. Joe was standing over him, breathing bourbon fumes from his tremendous proboscis. "The delegathyon from Thou! Thity jutht landed."
"Firebrass!" Sam said, standing up from the chair. "I forgot all about him! What a time for him to show up!"
He walked down to The River, where a catamaran was beached near the grailstone. John was already there, greeting the delegation, which consisted of six blacks, two Arabs, and two Asiatic Indians. Firebrass was a short, bronze-skinned, curly-haired man with big brown eyes flecked with green. His huge forehead and shoulders and thickly muscled arms contrasted with his skinny legs, making him look all top. He spoke in Esperanto at first but later used English. It was a very strange English, full of terms and slang that Sam did not understand. But there was a warmth and openness about Firebrass that made Sam feel good just to have him around.
"We better go back to Esperanto," Sam said, smiling and pouring three more slugs of scotch into Firebrass' cup. "Is that spaceman's lingo or Soul City dialect?"
"Marsman's," Firebrass said. "Soul City English is pretty wild, but the official language, of course, is Esperanto, though Hacking was considering Arabic. But he isn't too happy about his Arabs anymore," he added in a lower voice, looking at Abd ar-Rahman and AM Fazghuli, the Arab members of his delegation.
"As you can see," Sam said, "we are in no condition to have a long, leisurely conference. Not now. We have to clean up, get information about what's going on outside Parolando and set up our defenses. But you are welcome, of course, and we'll get around to business within a few days."
"I don't mind," Firebrass said. "I'd like to look around, if you don't mind."
"I don't, but my co-Consul has to give his consent, too."
John, smiling as if it hurt his teeth to be exposed to the air—and it probably did this time—said that Firebrass was welcome. But he would have to be accompanied by a guard of honor every time he left the quarters that would be assigned to him. Firebrass thanked him, but another delegate, Abdullah X, protested loudly and occasionally obscenely. Firebrass said nothing for a minute and then told Abdullah to be polite, since they were guests. Sam was grateful, though he wondered if the speech and Fire-brass' command had not been prearranged.
It had not been easy to sit there and listen, though the vitriolics had been hurled at the white race in general and no one in particular. It troubled him, but Sam had to agree with Abdullah. He was right about conditions as they had been. But old Earth was dead; they were living in a new world.
Sam personally conducted the delegates to three huts, side by side, owned by men and women who had been killed last night. Then he moved into a hut near the delegation.
Drums boomed by the grailstone. After a minute, drums from across. The River thundered back an answer. The new chief of the Ulmaks wanted peace. The old chief, Shrubgrain, had been put to death, and his head would be delivered within the hour by canoe if peace could be arranged. Shrubgrain had failed his people by leading them to defeat.
Sam gave orders to transmit a request for a conference with the new chief, Threelburm.
Drums from Chernsky's Land said that Iyeyasu, who ruled a twelve-mile stretch of land between New Brittany and Kleomenujo, had invaded New Brittany. The news meant that the New Bretons would not be bothering Parolando, but it also worried Sam. Iyeyasu was a very ambitious man. Once he had consolidated his state with New Brittany he "might decide he was strong enough to take Parolando.
More drums. Publius Crassus sent his congratulations and wannest regards, and he would be visiting tomorrow to see what he could do to aid Parolando.
And also to see how hard we've been hit and if we'd be easy pickings, Sam thought. So far, Publius had been cooperative, but a man who had served under Julius Caesar could have his own brand of Caesarism.
Goring, his head wrapped in a bloody towel, staggered by, supported by two of his followers. Sam hoped he would take the hint and leave Parolando, but he didn't have much faith in the German's perceptiveness. He went to sleep that night while torches burned
verywhere over the land and guards peered into the shadows and the mists. His sleep was troubled, despite his intense fatigue. He tossed and rolled and once he awoke, his heart beating, his skin cold, certain that there was a third person in the hut. He fully expected to see the shadowy figure of the Mysterious Stranger crouched by his bed. But nobody was there except the monstrous form of Joe stretched out on the huge bamboo bed near him.
The next morning he arose unrefreshed in a refreshed world. The three-o'clock rain had washed away the blood and the stink of gunpowder. The bodies were gone, and the sky was clear and blue. Business as usual was resumed but without about four hundred and fifty men and women. Half of these were in the rendering factory; the rest, in the hospital. Those who wanted to be put out of their misery were given their wish. Time had been when an ax was the only euthanasiast but now, thanks to Parolando's technology, the work was done with a potassium cyanide pill.
Some decided to stick it out. In time their limbs or eyes would grow back in. Those who could not take the pain boarded The Suicide Express, and the bodies they left behind went to the rendering factory.
Sam's secretary had been killed. Sam asked Gwenafra if she would like to take Millie's place. Gwenafra seemed very pleased. The new position gave her a high status, and she had made no secret of the fact that she liked to be near Sam. Lothar von Richthofen, however, did not seem pleased.
"Why shouldn't she be my secretary, regardless of her relationship to you?" Sam said.
"There is no reason," Lothar said, "except that I might have a very good chance with her if she isn't around you much." "Let the best man win."
"My sentiments, too, but I don't like your wasting her time or leading her on. You know that you won't take another hutmate as long as Livy is here."
"Livy has nothing to say about what I do," Sam said. "And don't forget that." Lothar smiled slightly and said, "Sure, Sam."
Gwenafra tagged along with him, taking notes, sending messages, receiving them, arranging schedules and appointments. Though he was very busy, he found moments when he could talk and joke with her and he felt a warmth every time he looked at her. Gwenafra seemed to adore him.
Two days passed. The twenty-four-hour shift on the amphibian was showing results. The machine would be completed in another two days. The Soul City delegation strolled around with two of King John's men watching them. Joe Miller, who had gone back to his bed after the battle, said he was well again. Now Sam had both Gwenafra and the titanthrop with him, and his world seemed much more comfortable, though it was a long way from being Utopia. Word came via the drum telegraph that Odysseus had loaded his ships with flints and would be back in a month. He had gone as commander of a ten-boat fleet to barter with the chieftainess of Selinujo. On Earth she had been Countess Huntingdon, Selina Hastings, born 1707, died 1791. She was now a member of the Church of the Second Chance and traded her flint with Parolando only because Parolando permitted Goring's missionaries to preach at will in its territory. In return for the flint, she had been promised a small metal steamboat in which she proposed to go up and down The River and preach. Sam thought she was fooling herself. The first place she put into she was liable to have her throat cut for the sake of the boat. But that was her business.
The Councilmen met with the Soul City delegation at a round table in the largest room in John's palace. Sam would have liked to put it off, since John was in a mood even uglier than usual. One of his women had tried to kill him, or so he claimed. He had been stabbed in the side before he broke her jaw and knocked her head against the corner of a table. The woman had died an hour later still unconscious, and John's word that she had attacked him first had to be accepted. Sam would have liked to have collected some neutral eyewitness account, but that was impossible.
John was in pain from the stab wound, half drunk with bourbon as an anesthetic, and smarting because the woman had dared to defy him. He slumped in a large, high-backed, ornately carved oak chair covered with red hornfish leather. One hand was around a clay vessel full of whiskey, a cigarette dangled from his lips, and he glowered at everybody. Firebrass was talking.
"Hacking once believed in total segregation of whites and nonwhites. He believed, fiercely believed, that whites could never accept, not soul-accept, nonwhite peoplesthat is, the blacks, Mongolians, Polynesians, and Amerindians. The only way nonwhites could live with dignity, feel beautiful, be a people with its own personality and pride, was to follow the way of segregation. Equal but separate.
"Then his leader, Malcolm X, quit the Black Muslims. Malcolm X saw that he was wrong. Not all whites were devils, racist fiends, any more than all blacks had flat noses. Hacking fled the states to live in Algeria and there he found that it was the attitude that made racism, not the color of the skin."
Hardly an original or surprising discovery, Sam thought. But he had told himself that he would not interrupt.
"And then the young whites of the Untied States, many of them, anyway, rejected their parents' prejudices, and they supported the blacks in their struggles. They got out on the streets and demonstrated, rioted, laid down their lives for the blacks. They genuinely seemed to like blacks, not because they thought they ought to, but because blacks were human beings and human beings can be liked or even loved.
"Hacking, however, wasn't ever really at ease with an American white, try though he did to think of them as human beings. He was ruined, just as most whites, most older whites, were ruined. But he tried to like those whites who were on his side and he respected those young whites that told their parents, their white racists society, to go to hell.
"Then he died, as everybody did, black or white. He found himself among ancient Chinese, and he wasn't very happy with them because they regarded all peoples except the Chinese as inferior."
Sam remembered the Chinese of Nevada and California in the early '60's, the hard-working, thrifty, quiet, meek, cheery little brown men and women. They had taken abuse that most people would not give a mule, been spat upon, cursed, tortured, stoned, robbed, raped, suffered about every indignity and crime that a people could suffer. They had had no rights whatsoever, no protector or protection. And they had never murmured, never revolted, they just endured. What thoughts had those masklike faces hidden? Had they, too, believed in the superiority of any Chinese to any white devil? If so, why had they not struck back, not once? They would have been massacred if they had, but they would have stood up like men for a few moments.
But the Chinese believed in time; time was the Chinese ally. If time did not raise a father to fortune, time would raise his son. Or his grandson.
Firebrass said, "So Hacking left in a dugout, floated downRiver, and after many thousands of miles settled down among some blacks of seventeenth-century A.D. Africa. Ancestors of the Zulus before they migrated to southern Africa. After a while he left them. Their customs were too repulsive, and they were too bloody-minded for him.
"Then he lived in an area where the people were a mixture of Dark Age Huns and dark whites of the New Stone Age. They accepted him well enough, but he missed his own people, the American blacks. So he took off again and was captured by ancient Moabites and enslaved, escaped, was captured by ancient Hebrews and put into grail slavery, escaped again, found a little community of blacks who'd been pre-Civil War slaves and was happy for a while. But their Uncle Tom attitudes and their superstitions got on his nerves and he took off, sailed downRiver, and lived with several other peoples. Then, one day, some big blond whites, Germans of some kind, raided the people he was with and he fought and was killed.
"He was resurrected here. Hacking became convinced that the only happy states on The River were going to be made up of people with similar colors, similar tastes, and of the same terrestrial period. Anything else just won't work. People here aren't going to change. Back on Earth he could believe in progress, because the young were flexible-minded. The old ones would die off, and then the children of the young whites would be even more free of racial prejudice. But here that just isn't going to take place. Every man's set in his ways. So, unless Hacking just happened to find a community of late-twentieth-century whites, he would find no whites without racial hatreds or prejudices. Of course, the ancient whites didn't have any against blacks, but they're too strange for a civilized man."
Sam asked, "What's all this leading up to, Sinjoro Firebrass?"
"We want a homogeneous nation. We can't get all latetwentieth-century blacks, but we can get as black a nation as possible. Now, we know that you have approximately three thousand blacks in Parolando. We would like to exchange our Dravidians, Arabs, any nonblacks, for your blacks. Hacking is making similar proposals to your neighbors, but he doesn't have any lever with them."
King John sat up and said, loudly. "You mean he doesn't have anything they want?"
Firebrass looked coolly at John and said, "That's about it. But we'll have a lever some day."
"Do you mean when you have enough steel weapons?" Sam said. Firebrass shrugged.
John crashed his empty cup down on the table. "Well, we don't want your Arabs or your Dravidians or any of your Soul City dregs!" he shouted. "But I'll tell you what we will do! For every ton of bauxite or cryolite or ounce of platinum, we will give you one of our black citizens! You can keep your Saracen infidels or send them packing downRiver or drown them for all we care."
"Wait a minute," Sam said. "We can't give our citizens away. If they want to volunteer, fine. But we don't just give anybody away. This is a democracy." Firebrass' expression had darkened at John's outburst.
I wasn't suggesting that you give anybody away," he said. "We're not slave dealers, you know. What we want is a one-per-one voluntary exchange. The Wahhabi Arabs, whom ar-Rahman and Fazghuli represent, feel they're unwelcome at Soul City and they would like to go where they could congregate in their own community, form a sort of Kasbah, you might say."
Sam thought this sounded fishy. Why couldn't they do that just as well in Soul City? Or why didn't they just get up and leave? One of the beauties of this world was that ties or property or dependence on income did not exist. A man could carry everything he owned on his back—and building another house was easy in a world where new bamboo grew at a rate of two inches a day.
It was possible that Hacking wanted to get his people into Parolando so that they could spy or revolt when Hacking invaded.
Sam said, "We'll put your proposition about the exchange to each individual. That's all we can do. Now, does Sinjoro Hacking plan to keep on supplying us with the minerals and with wood?"
"As long as you keep on sending us raw ore and steel weapons," Firebrass said. "But Hacking is thinking of upping the price."
John's fist smashed into the tabletop again. "We will not be robbed!" he shouted. "We are paying too much now! Don't push us, Sinjoro Firebrass, or you may find yourselves with nothing! Nothing at all—not even your lives!"
"Take it easy, Your Majesty," Sam said quietly. To Firebrass he said, "John isn't feeling well. Please forgive him. However, he does have a point. We can be pushed only so far."
Abdullah X, a very big and very black man, jumped up and pointed a big finger at Sam. In English, he said, "You honkies had better quit badmouthing us. We won't take any crap from you, Mister Whitey! None! Especially from a man that wrote a book like you did about Nigger Jim! We don't like white racists and we only deal with them because there's nothing else we can do just now."
"Take it easy, Abdullah," Firebrass said. He was smiling and Sam wondered if Abdullah's speech was the second part of a well-prepared program. Probably, Firebrass was similarly wondering if John's explosions had been rehearsed. Actors didn't have to be politicians, but politicians had to be actors.
Sam groaned and said, "Did you read Huckleberry Finn, Sinjoro X?" Abdullah, sneering, said, "I don't read trash."
"Then you don't know what you're talking about, do you?" Abdullah's face darkened. Firebrass grinned.
"I don't have to read that racist crap, man!" Abdullah shouted. "Hacking told me all about it and what he says is good enough for me!"
"You read it and then come back and we'll discuss it," Sam said.
"You crazy?" Abdullah said. "You know there aren't any books on this world."
"Then you lost out, didn't you?" Sam said. He was trembling a little; he wasn't used to being talked to like this by a black man. "Anyway," Sam said, "this isn't a literary tea-and-discussion group. Let's stick to the issue."
But Abdullah would not stop shouting about the books that Sam had written. And John, losing his temper, leaped up and screamed, "Silentu, negraco!"
John had taken the Esperanto word for "black" or "negro" and infixed the disparaging "-ac-" particle. He had gotten his point over quite well.
There was a moment of shock and silence. Abdullah X's mouth was open, then it closed, and he looked triumphant, almost happy. Firebrass bit his lip. John leaned on the table on his fists and scowled. Sam puffed on his cigar. He knew that John's contempt for all humanity had made him invent the term. John had no racial prejudice; he had never seen more than a half dozen blacks during his lifetime on Earth. But he certainly knew how to insult a person; the knowledge was second nature to him. "I'm walking out!" Abdullah X said. "I may be going
ome—and if I do you can bet your whiteass that you'll pay hell getting any more aluminum or platinum, Mister Charlie."
Sam rose to his feet and said, "Just a minute. If you want an apology, I extend it on behalf of all Parolando."
Abdullah looked at Firebrass, who looked away. Abdullah said, "I want an apology from him, now!" He pointed at King John.
Sam leaned close to John and said softly, "There's too much at stake to play the proud monarch, Your Majesty! And you may be playing into their hands with your little fit. They are up to something, you can bet on that. Apologize."
John straightened up and said, "I apologize to no man, especially not to a commoner who is also an infidel dog!"
Sam snorted and gestured with his cigar. "Can't you get it through your thick Plantagenet head that there isn't any such thing as royal blood or divine right of kings anymore, that we're all commoners? Or all kings?"
John did not reply. He walked out. Abdullah looked at Firebrass, who nodded. Abdullah walked out.
Sam said. "Well, Sinjoro Firebrass, what next? Do you people go home?"
Firebrass shook his head, "No, I don't believe in hasty decisions. But the conference is suspended as far as the Soul City delegation is concerned. Until John Lackland apologizes, I'll give you until noon tomorrow to decide what to do."
Firebrass turned to leave. Sam said, "I'll talk to John, but he's as hardheaded as a Missouri mule."
"I'd hate to see our negotiations fold because one man can't keep his insults to himself," Firebrass said. "And I'd also hate to see our trade stop, because that would mean no Riverboat for you."
Sam said, "Don't get me wrong, Sinjoro Firebrass. I'm making no threats. But I won't be stopped. I'll get the aluminum if I have to kick John out of the country myself. Or, alternatively, if I have to go down to Soul City and get the aluminum myself."
"I understand you," Firebrass said. "But what you don't understand is that Hacking isn't out for power. He only wants to have a well-protected state so that his citizens can enjoy life. And they will enjoy their life because they'll all have similar tastes and similar goals. In other words, they'll all be black."
Sam grunted and then said, "Very well." He fell silent but just before Firebrass left he called, "One minute. Have you read Huckleberry Finn!"
Firebrass turned back. "Sure. I thought it was a great book when I was a kid. I read it again when I was in college, and I could see its flaws then, but I enjoyed it even more as an adult, despite its flaws."
"Were you disturbed because Jim was called Nigger Jim?"
"You have to remember that I was born in 1975 on a farm near Syracuse, New York. Things had changed a lot by then, and the farm had originally been owned by my great-great-great grandfather, who came up from Georgia to Canada via the underground railway and then purchased the farm after the Civil War. No, I wasn't offended by your use of the word. Negroes were called niggers openly in the time you wrote about and nobody thought anything of it. Sure, the word was an insult. But you were portraying people as they actually talked, and the ethical basis of your novel, the struggle between Huck's duty as a citizen and his feeling for Jim as a human being and the victory of the human feeling in Huck—I was moved. The whole book was an indictment of slavery, of the semifeudal society of the Mississippi, of superstition—of everything stupid of that time. So why should I be offended by it?" "Then why—"
"Abdullah—whose original name was George Robert Lee—was born in 1925 and Hacking was born in 1938. Blacks were niggers then to a lot of whites, though not to all. They found out the hard way that violence—or the threat of it, the same thing that the whites had used to keep them down—was the only way to get their rights as citizens of the United States. You died in 1910, right? But you must have been told by any number of people what happened after that?"
Sam nodded. "It's hard to believe. Not the violence of the riots. Plenty of that happened in my lifetime and nothing, I understand, ever equaled the Draft Act riots in New York City during the Civil War. I mean, what's hard to visualize is the licentiousness of the late twentieth century."
Firebrass laughed and said, "Yet you're living in a society that is far more free and licentious—from the viewpoint of the nineteenth century—than any society in the twentieth. You've adapted."
"I suppose so," Sam replied. "But the two weeks of absolute nudity during the first days after resurrection ensured that mankind would never again be the same. Not as regards nudity, anyway. And the undeniable fact of the resurrection shattered many fixed ideas and attitudes. Though the diehard is still with us, as witness your Wahhabi Moslem."
"Tell me, Sinjoro Clemens," Firebrass said. "You were an early liberal, far ahead of your times in many things. You spoke up against slavery and were for equality. And when you wrote the Magna Carta for Parolando you insisted that there should be political equality for all species, races and both sexes. I notice that a black man and a white woman live almost next door to you. Be honest, doesn't it disturb you to see that?"
Sam drew in smoke, blew it out and said, "To be honest, yes, it did disturb me. Well, to tell the truth, it almost killed me! What my mind told me and what my reflexes told me were two different things. I hated it. But I stuck to my guns, I said nothing, I became acquainted with that couple and I learned to like them. And now, after a year, it bothers me only a very little. And that will go away in time."
"The difference between you—representing the white liberal—and the youth of Hacking's day and mine was that we were not bothered. We accepted it." "Don't I get any credit for lifting myself by my mental bootstraps?" Sam asked. "Yawblaw," Firebrass said, lapsing into English—of a sort. "Two degrees off is better than ninety. Pin it."
He went out. Sam was left alone. He sat for a long while, then stood up and went outside. The first person he saw was Hermann Goring. His head was still wrapped in a towel, but his skin was less pale, and his eyes did not look odd. Sam said, "How's your head?"
"It still hurts. But I can walk without driving hot spikes in it every time I take a step."
"I don't like to see a man suffer," Sam said. "So I suggest that you could avoid more suffering, if not downright pain, by leaving Parolando." "Are you threatening me?"
"Not with any action from me. But there are plenty who may get so riled up they'll run you out on a rail. Or take you down to The River and drown you. You're upsetting everybody with your preachings. This state was founded with one main goal, the building of the Riverboat. Now, a man may say anything he wants to and not run foul of the law here. But there are those who sometimes ignore the law, and I wouldn't want to have to punish them because you tempted them. I suggest that you do your Christian duty and remove yourself from the premises. That way, you won't be tempting good men and women to commit violence." "I'm not a Christian," Goring said.
"I admire a man who can admit that. I don't think I ever met a preacher who came out and said so, in so many words."
"Sinjoro Clemens," Goring said, "I read your books when I was a young man in Germany, first in German and then in English. But levity or mild irony aren't going to get us any place. I am not a Christian, though I try to practice the better Christian virtues. I am a missionary for the Church of the Second Chance. All Terrestrial religions have been discredited, even if some won't admit it. The Church is the first religion to rise on the new world, the only one which has any chance to survive. It—"
"Spare me the lecture," Sam said. "I've heard enough from your predecessors and from you. What I'm saying, in utter friendliness and a desire to save you from harm and also, to be honest, to get you but of my craw, is that you should take off. Right now. Or you'll be killed."
"Then I'll rise at dawn tomorrow somewhere else and preach The Truth there, wherever I find myself. You see, here, as on Earth, the blood of the martyr is the seed of the Church. The man who kills one of us only ensures that The Truth, the chance for eternal salvation, will be heard by more people. Murder has spread our faith up and down The River far faster than any conventional means of travel."
"Congratulations," Sam said exasperatedly, dropping into English, as he often did when angry. "But tell me, doesn't the repeated killing of your missionaries bother you? Aren't you afraid of running out of body?" "What do you mean?" "Tenets, anyone?"
Sam got no reaction except a puzzled look. Sam resumed in Esperanto. "One of your major tenets, if I remember correctly, is that Man wasn't resurrected so he could enjoy life here forever. He is given only a limited time, though it may look like a long time to most, especially if they don't happen to be enjoying life here. You postulate something analogous to a soul, something you call a psychomorph, right? Or sometimes a ka. You have to, otherwise you can't claim a continuity of identity in a man. Without it a man who dies is dead, even if his body is reproduced exactly and made alive again. That second body is only a reproduction. The lazarus has the mind and the memories of the men who died, so he thinks he's the man who died. But he isn't. He's just a living duplicate. Death terminated the first man. He's through.
"But you solve this problem by postulating a soul—or a psychomorph or a ka—call it what you will. This is an entity which is born with the body, accompanies it, registers and records everything the body does and, indeed, must be an incorporeal incorporation of the body, if you'll excuse that contradiction. So that, when the flesh dies, the ka still exists. It exists in some fourth dimension or in some polarization which protoplasmic eyes can't see or mechanical devices can't detect. Is that correct?"
"You're close enough," Goring said. "Crudely put but satisfactory."
"So far," Sam said, expelling a big cloud of green smoke, "we have—you have, not I—the postulated soul of the Christians and the Moslems and others ad nauseam. But you claim that the soul does not go to a hell or a heaven. It flits around in some sort of fourth-dimensional limbo. It would do so forever if it were not for the interference of other beings. These are extra-Terrestrials who came into existence long before humanity did. These superbeings came to Earth when mankind did not yet exist—in fact, they visited every planet in the universe that might have sentient life some day."
"You're not phrasing it exactly as we do," Goring said. "We maintain that every Galaxy has one—or perhaps many—ancient species inhabiting certain planets. These beings may have arisen in our Galaxy or they may have originated in an earlier, now dead, Galaxy or universe. In any event, they are wise and knew long ago that sentient life would arise on Earth, and they set up devices which started recording these sentients from the moment they appeared. These devices are undetectable by the sentients.
"At some time which these Ancients, as we call them, have determined, the recordings are sent to a special place. There the dead are fleshed out from the recordings by energy-matter converters, made whole and young again and then recordings are made of these bodies—which are destroyed and the dead are raised on a new world, such as this, again through e-m conversion.
"The psychomorphs, or kas, have an affinity to their protoplasmic twins. The moment a duplicate of the dead body is made, the ka attaches itself and begins recording.
So that, if the body is killed and duplicated a hundred times, the ka still retains the identity, the mind, and the memories of all the bodies. So that it is not just one duplicate after another being created. It is a matter of preservation of the pristine individual with a recording of everything that ever occurred in the immediate environment of all the protoplasmic bodies of the ka.
"But!" Sam said, waving his cigar and then stabbing its glowing end close to Goring's cheek. "But! You maintain that a man cannot be killed an indefinite number of times. You say that, after a couple of hundred times, death does have a final effect. Continued dying weakens the link between body and ka and eventually the duplication of the body does not cause the ka to merge with it. The ka wanders off, haunts the spooky corridors of the fourth dimension, or whatever. It becomes, in effect, a ghost, a lost soul. It is done for."
"That is the essence of our faith," Goring said. "Or I should say our knowledge, since we know this to be true." Sam raised his bushy eyebrows. "Indeed? Know?"
"Yes. Our founder heard The Truth a year after Resurrection, a year to the day after all of humanity rose from the dead. A man came to him at night as he prayed for a revelation on a high ledge up in the mountains. This man told him certain things, showed him certain things, that no terrestrial mortal could tell or show. This man was an agent of The Ancients and he revealed The Truth, and he told our founder to go out and preach the doctrine of the Second Chance.
"Actually, the term Second Chance is a misnomer. It is really our First Chance, because we never had a chance for salvation and eternal life while we were on Earth. But life on Earth was a necessary prelude to this Riverworld. The Creator made the universe and then The Ancients preserved humankind—indeed, all sentients throughout the universe. They preserved! But salvation is up to mankind only!
"It is up to each man to save himself, now that he has been given the chance!"
"Through the Church of the Second Chance and that only, I suppose," Sam said. He did not want to sneer but he could not help himself. "That is what we believe," Goring said.
"What were the credentials of this mysterious stranger?" Sam said. He thought of his Mysterious Stranger, and he felt panic. Could the two be the same? Or could both be from the same beings who called themselves the Ethicals? His Stranger, tie man who sent the nickeliron meteorite here and who had enabled Joe Miller to see the Tower in the far-off misty North Polar Sea, was a renegade of the Ethicals. If he were to be believed. "Credentials?" Goring said. "Papers from God?" He laughed.
"The founder knew that his visitor could not be just a man because he knew things that only a god, or a superior being, could know about him. And he showed him some things that he had to believe. And he told him how we were brought back to life and why. He did not tell him everything. Some things will be revealed later. Some things we must find out for ourselves."
"What is the name of this founder?" Sam said. "Or don't you know? Is that one of the hidden things?"
"No one knows," Goring said. "It is not necessary to know. What is a name? He only called himself Viro. That is, in Esperanto, a man. From the Latin vir. We call him La Fondinto, The Founder, or La Viro, The Man." "Did you ever meet him?"
"No, but I have met two who knew him well. One was there when La Viro preached the first time, seven days after the Stranger had talked to him." "La Viro is definitely male? Not a woman?" "Oh, yes!"
Sam sighed deeply and said, "That's a great weight off my mind. If the founder had turned out to be Mary Baker Eddy, I would have curled up and died." "What?"
"Never mind," Sam said, grinning. "I wrote a book about her once. I wouldn't want to meet her; she'd scalp me alive. But some of the wild mystical things you told me reminded me of her."
"Except for the ka, everything in our explanation is based on the physical. And the ka is physical, but at right angles, you might say, to our reality. We believe that it is science, the science of The Ancients, which has given us a physical resurrection. There's nothing supernatural about anything, except our belief in The Creator, of course. The rest is all science." "Like Mary Baker Eddy's religion?" Sam asked. "I do not know of her." "So how do we attain this salvation?"
"By becoming love. And that implies, of course, that we do not offer violence, even in self-defence. We believe that we can become love only by attaining a certain transcendent state and that comes through self-knowledge. So far most of mankind has not learned how to use dreamgum; man has abused the drug, just as he abuses everything."
"And you think you have become love, whatever that phrase means?" "Not yet. But I am on the way." "Through dreamgum?"
"Not just with it. It helps. But you have to act, too, you have to preach and suffer for your belief. And learn not to hate. Learn to love."
"So that is why you oppose my Riverboat? You think that we are wasting our time by building it?"
"It's a goal that will bring no one any good. So far it has resulted in the devastation of the land, in greed and pain and bloodshed, in anxiety and treachery. In hate, hate, hate! And for what? So you can have what nobody else has, a giant boat of metal propelled by electricity, the apex of the technology this planet offers, a ship of fools. So you can journey to the headwaters of The River. When you get there, then what? You should be journeying to the headwaters of the soul!"
"There are some things you don't know," Sam said. His smugness was soured by a vision. There was a devil, crouching in the darkness, whispering in his ear. But someone had crouched in the darkness and whispered in the ear of the founder of the Church, too. Was the Church's Stranger the devil? The being who had come to Samuel Clemens had said that the others were the devils and he wanted to save mankind. The devil would say something like that, of course.
"Don't my words touch your heart at all?" Goring said.
Sam rapped his chest with his fist and said, "Yes, I do believe I have a touch of indigestion." Goring made a fist and clamped Ms lips.
"Watch out, you'll lose your love," Sam said and walked away. But he did not feel particularly triumphant. It was a fact that he did have a little stomach upset. Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it.
The afternoon of the next day arrived. Sam Clemens and John Lackland had been arguing all morning. Finally Sam, exasperated past caution and reasonableness, said, "We can't afford to have the bauxite cut off by Hacking! We can't afford anything that will put a stop to building the Riverboat! Maybe you're doing this to force a war between us and Soul City! It isn't going to work, Your Majesty!"
Sam had been walking back and forth, waving a panatela as he spoke. John sprawled before the oaken round table in Sam's pilothouse. Joe Miller sat in a corner on a big chair specially built for him. The massive paleolithic Mongolian, Zaksksromb, stood behind John.
Suddenly, Sam whirled and planked both fists on the table. Leaning on the table, his cigar in one corner of his mouth, the reddish tangle of his eyebrows drawn down, he snarled at John.
"You gave in once, at Runnymede, when you signed the Magna Carta. It was about the only decent thing you ever did during your reign—and there are some who say you had your fingers crossed then. Well, this is another showdown, John, Your Majesty. You apologize to Abdullah, who has a right to an apology—or I'll call a special session of the Council and we'll determine your fitness to continue as co-Consul!"
John glowered at him for a full minute at the least. Then he said, "Your threats don't scare me. But it's evident that you would sooner plunge our land into civil war than go to war with Soul City. I do not understand this madness, but then a rational man always has trouble understanding irrationality. So I will apologize. Why not? A king can afford to be gracious to a commoner. It costs him nothing and enhances his graciousness."
John rose and swaggered out, his huge bodyguard behind him.
Ten minutes later, Sam heard that John had appeared at the state guest house and offered his apology. Abdullah X accepted it, though sullenly. It was evident that he had been ordered to do so.
Just before the factory whistles announced the end of lunch hour, Cawber entered. He sat down without waiting for Sam to invite him. Sam raised his eyebrows, because this was the first time that this had happened. There was something indefinable in Cawber's attitude. Sam, watching him carefully, listening to every inflection of his voice, decided that his attitude was that of a slave who has decided to be a slave no more.
Cawber knew that he would be the emissary to Soul City. He sat leaning forward, huge black arms resting on the oak, his hands spread out. He spoke in Esperanto and, Like many people, mostly in the present tense, using an adverb of time to indicate future or past if he wanted to clarify.
Cawber's team had talked to every one of the approximately three thousand undoubted Negroes (there was some confusion of classification about some of the prehistorics). A third of these was willing, though not eager, to go to Soul City in exchange for Hacking's unwanted citizens. Most were late-twentieth-century blacks. The others maintained that they had work that gave them prestige, that they Like being on an equal footing with the whites, and that they did not want to give up their chance to be on the Riverboat.
The latter was probably the biggest determinant, Sara thought. He was not the only one who dreamed of the Riverboat. It drove through the minds of many during sleep, gleaming Like a jewel with a firefly trapped inside it.
Firebrass and his people were requested to come to the conference room. Firebrass was late because he had been inspecting the airplane. He was laughing about its quaintness, fragility and slowness, and yet he was envious that von Richthofen would be the one to fly it.
"You'll certainly get a chance to fly it, too," Sam said. "Provided that you are still here, of course, when—"
Firebrass became serious. "What is your decision, gentlemen, regarding my government's proposal?"
Sam looked at John, who gestured that Sam had the floor. John intended that any possible ill feelings should first be directed at Sam.
"This is a democracy," Sam said. "And we can't tell our citizens to get out unless they've been guilty of illegal behavior. So, as I see it—as we see it—any citizen of Parolando may go to Soul City if he wishes. I think we actually reached .basic agreement on this when we last met. It will be up to your government to negotiate with each citizen. As for taking in your Arabs and Dravidians and so forth—we'll give them a chance to come with us if they want to. But we reserve the right to get rid of them if they don't work out. Where they'll go then is up to them."
"Well," Firebrass said, "I don't suppose Hacking wants anybody who isn't willing to live in Soul City, no matter how black that person is."
"What about the shipments of minerals?" Sam said. "Will those be discontinued during the negotiations?"
"I really couldn't say," Firebrass replied. "I doubt it, but I'd have to confer with Hacking. Of course, you'll have to keep up your present rate of ore and weapons to us before the price is raised." "I notice you said is, not might be," Sam said.
"Anything I say is subject to confirmation or negation from Soul City," Firebrass said, smiling.
It was then agreed that Cawber would go to Soul City as Parolando's ambassador of the Carta could be changed to arrange it. Everything else was still up in the air. Sam Clemens received the impression that Firebrass did not intend to speed things up. Quite the contrary. He was willing to let things drag on or even to put his own foot on the brake if things showed signs of accelerating. He wanted to remain in Parolando, and Sam could only think that he wished to do so in order to spy. Perhaps, he also wanted to stir up trouble.
Later, he discussed the meeting with John. John agreed that Firebrass was a spy, but he could not see why Firebrass would stir up trouble.
"He would want the boat to be built as swiftly as possible. The sooner it's completed, the sooner Hacking will try to seize it. Do you think for one moment that Hacking doesn't intend to get the boat? Do you think for one moment that we have a single neighbor who doesn't intend to try for the boat? Arthur made the abortive attempt to take us over because of his hatred for me. He should have waited until the boat was nearly completed and then, with Kleomenes and the Ulmaks, launched all the force they could mount in an all-out attack. As things worked out, he and Kleomenes were killed and Iyeyasu has invaded their countries while their successors are fighting among themselves." "According to our spies, he's winning, too," Sam said.
"If he consolidates his state with the other two, then he'll be a very formidable enemy."
And so will you be John Lackland, Sam thought. Of all the people I'll have to watch after the boat is built, you'll bear the closest watching ...
Firebrass announced that he and his delegation would remain as Soul City's embassy while the negotiations went on.
"It's nice to have you," Sam said. "But Soul City has its own industries. I know it's been using our ore to make weapons and several things our spies can't find out about."
Firebrass looked surprised and then he laughed uproariously. "You twist my stick, stymate!" he said in English. Then, in Esperanto, "Well, why shouldn't we be frank? I like that. Yes, we know you have spies among us—just as you know we have ours here. Who doesn't have his spies in his neighbors' lands? But what are you getting at?"
"You're the most technically trained man Hacking has. You're a PhD. You're in charge of the factories and of research and development. So why does Hacking send you here when he needs you there?" "I've set everything up to run smoothly. Soul City
oesn't need me right now, and I was bored. I wanted to come here, where it's at."
"So you can see what we've got, like our Mark I handguns and our airplane and the amphibian and its steam cannon?"
Firebrass grinned and nodded. "Yes. Why not? If I don't see these things, someone else will."
Sam relaxed. He said, "Have a cigar. You can look all you want. We're not doing anything you wouldn't have figured out for yourself, except for the steam cannon maybe. That, by the way, is my invention. Come along with me. I'm very proud of it and want you to see it. It's almost finished."
Firedragon I rested inside its supporting framework of timbers. It was silvery gray and shaped like a flatbottomed boat but had seven huge metal wheels with plastic tires on each side. Twin screws protected by a screen protruded from its rear. Its length was thirty feet, its beam was ten feet, and its height was twelve feet. Three turrets stuck out from the upper deck. One held the pilot, captain and radio operator, though at the moment Parolando had no radios. The center turret was higher than the others, and the barrel of a short stubby weapon encased in wood projected from it. The rear turret was designed for gunners who would be armed with Mark I handguns and perhaps rifles.
"The amphibian burns wood alcohol to generate steam," Sam said. "Let's go inside, through this hatch in the side here. You'll notice that the boiler takes up about a third of the interior. There's a good reason for that, as you'll see."
They climbed up a ladder into the interior of the center turret, which was lit by a single light bulb. Firebrass exclaimed at this. It was the only electric light bulb he had ever seen on The River. Sam explained that it was powered by a fuel cell.
"And here is the Superdooper Steam Machine Cannon," he said. He pointed at the cylinder sticking out of the gray bulkhead of the turret. Underneath it were a pistollike butt and a trigger. Firebrass got behind it, put his finger on the trigger and looked out through the opening above the barrel. He raised and lowered the weapon.
"There'll be a chair for the operator to sit in," Sam said. "He'll be able to rotate the turret any way he wants by pushing pedals. He can depress the gun about twenty degrees up or down. The steam from the boiler is the motive power for the eighty-caliber plastic bullets. The gun is fired from an open breech—that is, there's no bullet in the barrel when the trigger is pulled. Pulling the trigger releases a catch which permits the breech block to move forward, impelled by a spring. During its forward travel, the breech block picks up a plastic bullet from the clip and pushes it into the breech. Just before the block reaches the breech, the camming lugs on either side engage in their slots and turn the breech block a quarter turn to the right, thus locking the breech. You follow me?" Firebrass nodded.
"Good. As soon as the quarter turn is completed, the inlet channel in the breech block comes into line with the feed channel from the high-pressure steam line. This allows hot, say approximately four-hundred-degree F., steam to enter the chamber in the breech block. The plastic cartridge is forced through the barrel by the expansion of steam. At the same time the steam pressure, acting against the rear of the chamber, begins to force the breech block back. Because of the greater weight of the block, however, the block doesn't begin to move until the bullet has already cleared the muzzle of the rifle.
"As the block begins to move backward, the camming lugs move in the camming slots and turn the bolt a quarter turn to the left, thus shutting off the steam. Then the breech block returns to its original position. If the trigger is still held back, the operation is repeated indefinitely."
Firebrass said, "I'm impressed, but won't the gun operate most efficiently if its temperature is the same as the incoming high-pressure steam? That way, less of the steam's energy would be used to heat the gun and this means more steam to propel the bullet. Ah, I see! You do have a hollow jacket around the barrel. The steam travels through that before it enters the weapon itself, right?"
"Yes. There's an insulating jacket of plaster encased in wood. Note that bleeder valve. It permits the gun to be heated up before use—a few seconds before it's fired. If that isn't done, the gun might jam. And since the gun's maximum temperature is the same as the steam in the boiler, there's no danger of burning up the barrel. You can use the gun like a fire hose. In fact, that'll be about the only way it'll be effective. The accuracy of a light plastic bullet with such comparatively low muzzle velocity isn't high."
Firebrass was far from being depressed because of the military superiority the amphibian would give Parolando. This probably was because he was planning on building one for Soul City. Or, if Parolando had one, then perhaps he might build two. In which case, Parolando would have to build three.
Soul City could not outbuild Parolando. But Parolando could not cut the supplies off, because then Soul City would cut off the bauxite, cryolite, platinum and indium.
The exhilaration from showing off his deadly invention whistled out almost audibly from Sam. The only solution to the problem, if Soul City did start a weapons race, would be to smash Soul City and take direct control of the minerals. This meant putting off the building of the Riverboat. And it also meant offending the two states, Publiujo and Tifonujo, that lay between Parolando and Soul City. And if those two states got together, they would be formidable, what with the weapons that Parolando had to give them in exchange for their wood.
Sam had thought that that potentiality was bad enough. But a few days later Iyeyasu completed his conquest of his neighboring states and sent a mission to Parolando. He made no demands that could not be met. In fact, in one way his proposals were helpful. He said that his nation had lost enough trees, and he would like to give them a chance to grow again—but for an increase in the number of weapons from Parolando, he was willing to provide a large quantity of wood and of excrement for their gunpowder industry. He would invade the territories across The River and take their wood from them.
What it amounted to was that Parolando would be paying Iyeyasu to collect the wood forcibly from its neighbors. It would be cheaper and also a lot less painful for Parolandoj, who would not have to do their own killing, enslaving or raiding.
And Sam Clemens would have one more thing to rob him of sleep.
John Lackland thought the proposal excellent. "Our factories are turning out weapons efficiently," he said. "We can afford to export more. And we must build a fleet of Firedragons so that the swords we give these people will be easily overpowered by our machines."
"When are we going to start building the Riverboat?" Sam asked.
No one gave him an answer, but the next day Van Boom, Velitsky, and O'Brien, his chief engineers, brought him the first rough overall sketches. They were drawn in black on white plastic boards with a pencil connected to a fuel cell. The magnetic field at the tip of the pencil rearranged the loose and very thin covering of particles within its range. The lines remained polarized until a reverse field was passed over them. Thus, the demand for paper for drawings was greatly cut down, and the plans could be changed as desired.
Firebrass said he would like to help build the boat. Permission was given, though John objected at first. Sam replied that the more help they had, the faster the work would move. And he did not see how any amount of knowledge on Firebrass' part would enable him to steal the boat. Though Sam did not tell John, he had an idea about Firebrass. That was to get him so involved, so "het up" about the boat that he would take an offer of a berth on the vessel.
The machinery necessary to roll out the first plates for the hull was almost finished. The dam had been finished a week ago, and the water from the cataract was filling it up. The aluminum wires of the generators, which would be turned by the waterfall from the dam, were being wound. The prototype batacitor, which would be four stories high, would be finished in a month, if enough materials were available.
Five hundred missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance asked for sanctuary in Parolando a few days later, Iyeyasu had kicked them out of his new state, promising various exquisite tortures if they tried to sneak back. Sam did not hear about them immediately because he was up at the dam.
The Chancers refused to go when John sent word to them to leave immediately. John Lackland, hearing this, smiled grimly, tugged at his lion-colored hair, and swore his favorite oath, "By the teeth of God!"
Sam was at the dam to supervise the installation of tons of dynamite inside the hollow walls. This was to be one more trick up his sleeve, a last-ditch operation—and perhaps a suicidal one—if ever an enemy were about to make a successful invasion.
Von Richthofen, red-faced and blowing hard from his run up the hill, told him of the arrival of the Chancers and their refusal to move. He did not mention John.
Sam told Lothar to tell the Chancers that he would be down in the evening. They could wait for him but were not to move outside a radius of twenty yards from the grailstone near which they had landed. For a moment, he considered ordering them to leave at once and telling the soldiers that they could pound them a little with the flats of their swords if they wished. He was hot and sweating and covered with cement dust, and he felt an especial animosity toward the Chancers. Here was a world blessed by the absence of flies and mosquitoes—and humans, the Chancers, were trying to fill the gap.
The rumbling and splash of giant mortars pouring out concrete, the yells of the straw bosses and the scraping of shovels and clatter of iron wooden-wheeled barrows kept Sam from hearing the explosions that came a half hour later. He knew nothing of what had happened until von Richthofen came running toward him again. Sam felt as if he would come loose at the joints and
lump into a puddle. John had tested out the new guns on the Chancers. A hundred Mark I flintlocks had killed almost five hundred men and women in three minutes. John himself had fired and loaded ten times, using the last five bullets to finish off the wounded.
About thirty women, the most beautiful, had been spared. These had been taken to John's palace.
Long before he reached the water's edge, Sam saw the big crowd gathered around the grailstone. He sent Lothar ahead of him to clear the way. The crowd parted before them, like the Red Sea before Moses, he thought, but the Red Sea was before him after he got through the parting. The bodies were piled against each other, covered with blood, their flesh torn, bones shattered by the big-caliber bullets. In his ninety-seven years of life Sam had never grown accustomed to the silence of the dead. It seemed to hang over them like an invisible and chilling cloud. The mouth that would not speak again, the brain that could not think . . .
It did no good to remember that tomorrow these same people, in fresh and healthy bodies, would be up and doing somewhere along the banks. The effect of death could not be diluted with intellectualizing.
John was issuing orders about the disposal of the bodies to the soap and skin factories. He grinned at Sam like a bad boy caught pulling the cat's tail.
"This is a massacre!" Sam shouted. "A massacre! Unjustified! Unforgivable! There was no reason for it, you bloody-minded, killing beast! That's all you ever have been, you murdering dog, all you ever will be! Swine! Swine! Swine!"
John lost his smile and took a step back as Sam, his hands clenched, moved close to him. The huge massiveboned Zaksksromb, holding a big club of oak with steel spikes set in its end, started toward Sam.
Lothar von Richthofen shouted, "None of that—leave him alone or I call Joe Miller! And I'll shoot the first man who makes a move toward Sam." Sam looked behind him. Lothar was holding a big pistol
n his hands, and it was pointed at John.
John's dark skin paled, and his eyes opened wide. Even the light-blue irises seemed to become paler.
Later Sam wished that he had told Lothar to fire. Even though the hundred pistoleers were John's men, they might have hesitated if John had been killed at the first shot. They were surrounded by armed men and women, most of whom were not fond of John and almost all of whom were shocked by the slaughter. They might have withheld their fire. Even if they had not, Sam could have thrown himself down to the ground and the first shots might have missed. After that, who knew what would have happened?
But it was no good fantasizing. He had not given the order.
Nevertheless, he had to take some strong and immediate action. If he let John get away with this, he would lose everybody's respect, not to mention his own. And he might as well resign his Consulship. In which case, he would lose the Riverboat.
He turned his head slightly, though not so much that he could not keep an eye on John. He saw Livy's white face and big dark eyes; she looked as if she were going to vomit. He ignored her and called to Cyrano de Bergerac, who was standing on the edge of the inner circle, his long rapier in his hand.
"Captain de Bergerac!" Sam pointed at John. "Arrest the co-Consul."
John was holding a pistol in one hand, but he did not bring up its muzzle.
He said in a mild voice, "I protest. I told them to get out at once and they refused to go. I warned them and they still refused—so I ordered them shot. What difference does it make, really? They will be alive tomorrow."
Cyrano marched straight to John, stopped, saluted, and said, "Your weapons, sire." Zaksksromb growled and lifted his spiked club.
"No, Zak," John Lackland said. "According to the Carta, one Consul can arrest the other if he thinks the other is acting contrary to the Carta. I won't be under arrest long."
He handed Cyrano his gun, butt first, unbuckled his belt, and gave it to Cyrano. Its sheaths held a long knife and short sword.
"I will return to my palace while you and the Council decide my fate," he said. "According to the Carta, you must convene within an hour after the arrest and have a decision in two hours, as long as no national emergency interferes."
He walked away, Cyrano behind him. John's men hesitated a moment and then, at the thundered orders of Zaksksromb, followed John to the palace. Sam stared after them. He had expected more resistance. And then it occurred to him that John knew very well that Sam Clemens had to do just what he did or lose face. And John knew Sam well enough to know that Sam might want to avoid a decision that could lead to civil war, but he would not if he thought his Riverboat endangered.
So John had gone along with him. John did not want to force a showdown. Not now. He had satisfied his bloodlust for the moment. The Councilmen would meet and find that, legally, John was within his rights. Morally, he was not. But then his supporters would argue that even there he was justified. After all, the dead would be alive again and the lesson to the Second Chancers would be invaluable. They would steer clear of Parolando for a long time. And surely Sam Clemens would have to admit that this was desirable. If the Chancers continued to make converts, the Riverboat would never be built. Moreover, other states, less weakened with the Chancer philosophy, would invade Parolando.
And he, Sam Clemens, would say that next John's supporters would be claiming that it was all right to torture people. After all, the pain could last only so long, and any injury would be healed just by killing the victim. Then rape would be justified, because, after all, the woman wasn't going to be made pregnant or diseased—and if she got hurt, too bad. Kill her and she'd be all right in the morning. Never mind the mental damage. A little dreamgum would cure that.
No, Sam would say, it's a question, not of murder, but of rights. If you killed a man, you removed him without his consent to a place so far away he could walk a thousand years along the Riverbank and never get back. You took him away from his love, his friends, his home. Force was force and it was always ... Oh, oh! He'd better watch himself! "Sam!" a lovely voice said.
He turned. Livy was still pale, but her eyes looked as if they were normal, "Sam! What about the women he carried off?"
"Where's my head?" he said aloud. "Come on, Lothar!" Seeing the ten-foot-high Miller halfway across the plain, he waved at him and the titanthrop turned to intercept them. Lothar ordered a hundred archers who had just arrived to follow them.
Near the great log building, he slowed down. John knew that his co-Consul had forgotten about the abducted women, but that he would soon remember them. And John might be prepared to submit himself to the Council's judgment of the massacre, because, legally, he was within his rights. But surrendering the women to Sam might be just a little too much for John. His infamous temper might betray him, and then civil war would explode in Parolando.
Sam saw thirty or so women walking out through the open gates, and he knew that John had decided to rectify his mistake. Even so, he could be accused of kidnapping, a graver crime than murder in this topsyturvy world. But if the women were unharmed, it would be too much trouble to push the charge.
He stopped, and this time he thought his heart would stop. Gwenafra was with the women!
Lothar, crying her name, ran to her. She ran to him with her arms out, and they embraced.
After a minute of hugging, kissing and sobbing, she pulled herself away and went to Sam. He cursed himself because there, was no one else he could reasonably blame. If he had shown that he wanted her when she had made it plain that he could have her, then she might not have turned to von Richthofen. Why hadn't he taken her, then? Why had he clung to the idea that Livy would eventually come back and that, if he took another woman now, Livy would resent it so much she would never have anything to do with him?
His thinking wasn't logical. But whatever the philosophers claimed, the main use of logic was to justify your emotions.
Gwenafra had kissed him while her tears ran down his bare chest. Now she left his arms and went back to Lothar, and Sam Clemens was left with the problem of what to do with—or to—John Lackland.
He strode through the gates with Joe Miller lumbering behind him. A moment later, von Richthofen had caught up with him. He was swearing and muttering in German, "I'll kill him!"
Sam stopped. "You get out of here! I'm mad enough, but I can control myself! You're in the lion's den now, and if you try anything, he can have you killed and claim self-defense. He'd love that. In fact, he may have done all this just to set up our murder." Lothar said, "But you're here with only Joe!" "I wouldn't ever call Joe an only! Anyway, if you hadn't been so busy mugging with Gwen, you would have heard me order the troops to storm the palace and kill everybody in it if I'm not out in fifteen minutes."
Lothar stared at Sam. "You've certainly gotten much more aggressive!"
"The more trouble I have and the longer the building of the Riverboat takes, the meaner I get," Sam said. There was no point in telling him that his anger at him and Gwenafra was turned onto John, who already had so much directed at him that he should have curled up and crisped away. And would have if there were any justice in the world.
He entered the largest building inside the stockade of tall lodgepole-pine logs and he brushed past Sharkey. The slope-shouldered thug started to block his way, but Sam did not break his stride. A cavernous growl came from the vast hairy figure behind Sam. Sharkey snarled soundlessly and made the mistake of not moving to one side far enough. A huge reddish-haired hip sent the two-hundredand-thirty-pound man staggering back as if he were a hollow dummy. "I'll kill you one of these days!" Sharkey said in English.
Joe turned his head slowly as if it were a turret on a battleship and the tremendous proboscis were a cannon. "Yeth? You and vhat army?"
"You're getting pretty snappy with the comeback, Joe," Sam muttered. "My influence, no doubt." "I'm not ath dumb ath motht people think," Joe said. "That wouldn't be possible."
His rage had become a dull red now. Even with Joe as his bodyguard, he was far from being safe. But he was banking that John would go only so far with him, because he wanted that boat, too.
John was sitting at the big round oaken table with a dozen of his thugs. The giant Zaksksromb was standing behind him. All held clay steins. The room reeked of tobacco and liquor. John's eyes were red, but then they usually were. Light came in through the windows but the direct sunlight was blocked off by the stockade poles. Some pine torches burned smokily. Sam stopped, took a cigar out of the little box in the bag hanging from his belt and lit it. It angered him that his hand shook so much, and that increased his anger at John. He said, "All right, Your Majesty! It was bad enough that you took those alien women for your own vile purposes! But to take Gwenafra? She's a citizen of this state! You really put your neck in the noose, John, and I'm not just using figurative language!"
John downed the whiskey in the stein and gently put it down on the table. Softly, he said, "I had those women removed for their own safety. The crowd was very ugly; they wanted to kill the missionaries. And Gwenafra was taken along through a mistake. I will ascertain who is responsible for that and punish him."
"John," Sam said, "I ought to arrest your assertions for vagrancy. They certainly are without any visible support. But I got to hand it to you. You just dispossessed the devil. You are now the father of lies and grand master, past, present and future, of deceit. If being barefaced is the criterion of the greatest liar, all other liars are whiskered like Santa Claus."
John's face turned red. Zaksksromb sneered and lifted his club chest-high. Joe growled.
John blew out a deep breath and said, smiling, "You are upset over a little blood. You will get over it. You cannot disprove anything I have said, isn't that right? By the way, have you called a meeting of the Council yet? The law of the land requires you to do so, you know."
The horrible thing was that John would get away with it. Everybody, including his supporters, would know he was lying. But there was nothing to do about it unless they wanted to start a civil war, and that would mean that the wolves—Iyeyasu, Hacking, maybe the supposed neutrals, Publius Crassus, Chernsky, Tai Fung, and the savages across The River—would invade. Sam snorted and walked out. Two hours later, his ex-
ectations were realities. The Councilmen voted an official reprimand against John for his mishandling of the situation and his hastiness. He was directed to confer with his co-Consul in any such future situations.
No doubt John would laugh uproariously when he was told of the decision and he would call for more liquor, tobacco, marihuana and women to celebrate.
However, he did not have a complete victory. Every Parolando knew how Sam Clemens had stood up to John, stormed his palace with only one supporter, released the women and insulted John to his face. John knew that; his triumph was standing on shaky legs.
Sam asked the Council to exile every Second Chancer La Parolando for their own protection. But several Councillors pointed out that this would be illegal. The Carta would have to be changed. Besides, it was unlikely that John would take any more action against them after the warning he had received.
They knew as well as Sam why he was taking advantage of the emotional climate to oust the Second Chancers. But there were some stubborn men on the Council. Perhaps they felt angry because they had not been able to do anything about John, and at least they could make a stand for principle in this case.
Sam would have bet that the survivors of the massacre would want to leave immediately. But they insisted on staying. The slaughter had done nothing except to convince them that Parolando needed them very much. Goring was building several large huts for them. Sam sent word down that this should stop. Parolando was already short of wood. Goring sent word back that he and his male comrades would move out and sleep under the grailstones. Sam swore and blew smoke in the face of the Chancer messenger and said that it was too bad pneumonia did not exist. Afterward, he felt ashamed, but he did not. relent. He wasn't going to scant his furnaces so that people he did not even want could sleep under a roof.
He felt upset enough, but that evening he got two messages which opened the earth under him. One was that Odysseus had disappeared at night from his boat while on the way back to Parolando. Nobody knew what had happened to him. He was just gone. The second message informed him that William Grevel, the man who'd been spying on John, had been found under a ledge at the base of the mountain, his skull smashed in.
Somehow, John had found him out and executed him. And John would be laughing because Sam could not prove that or, for that matter, even admit that Grevel had been working for him.
Sam called in von Richthofen and de Bergerac and others whom he considered to be his people. It was true that de Bergerac and he were hostile because of Livy, but de Bergerac preferred Clemens to John, with whom he had had some hot words.
"Maybe Odysseus' disappearance from the boat is only a coincidence," Sam said. "But that, plus Grevel's death, makes me wonder if John isn't striking at me through my friends. He may be planning on cutting you down, one by one, under circumstances where he can't be accused. He's crafty. He probably won't do anything now for some time. But Odysseus was gotten rid of in a place where an investigation will probably reveal nothing. And I can't accuse John about Grevel without exposing what I've been doing. So, watch out for situations where accidents could happen. And be careful when you are alone."'
"Morbleu! de Bergerac said. "If it wasn't for this ridiculous law against dueling, I could challenge John and run nun through. You, Sinjoro Clemens, were responsible for that law!"
"I was raised in a country where duels were common," Sam said. "The whole idea sickens me. If you'd seen the tragedies . . . well, never mind. I guess you did see, and it doesn't seem to have affected you. Anyway, do you think for one moment that John would ever let you live long enough to meet him for a duel? No, you'd disappear or have an accident, you can bet on that." "Vhy can't Chohn have an acthident?" Joe Miller said.
"How would you get past the living wall of his bodyguards?" Sam said. "No, if John has an accident, it'll have to be a genuine one."
He dismissed them with the exception of de Bergerac and of Joe, who never left him unless he was sick or Sam wanted privacy..
"The Stranger said that he'd picked out twelve humans for the final onslaught against the Misty Tower," Sam said. "Joe, you, Richard Francis Burton, Odysseus and me make five. But none of us know who the other seven are. Now Odysseus is gone, and God knows if we'll ever see him again. The Stranger implied that all of the twelve would join the others on the Riverboat somewhere along the line. But if Odysseus was resurrected somewhere to the south, downRiver, so far away he can't get back up here before the Riverboat is built, then he is out of luck."
Cyrano shrugged and rubbed his long nose. "Why worry? Or is that your nature? For all we know, Odysseus is not dead. He may have been contacted by this Mysterious Stranger—who, by the way, Odysseus claims is a woman and so his Stranger is not the one that you and I met—mordioux!—I digress! As I said, Odysseus may have been called away suddenly by this so-mysterious person and we will find out in time what did happen! Let that shadowy angel—or fiend—take care of the matter. We must concentrate on getting this fabulous boat constructed and skewering anybody who gets in our way."
"That maketh thenthe," Joe said. "If Tham had a hair for every time he vorried, he'd look like a porcupine. Vhich, now that I come to think of it. . ."
"Out of the mouths of babes . . . and of tailless monkeys," Sam said. "Or is it the other end? Anyway, if everything goes well—and so far it hasn't—we'll start bonding the magnalium plates for the hull in thirty days. That'll be my happiest day, until we actually launch the boat. I'll be happier even than when Livy said yes ..."
He could have cut himself off sooner, but he wanted to antagonize Cyrano. The Frenchman, however, did not react. Why should he? He had Livy; she was saying yes to him all the time.
"Me, I do not like the idea," Cyrano said, "since I am a peaceful man. I would like to have the leisure to indulge myself with the good things of Life. I would like to have an end to wars, and if there is to be any bloodshed, let it be between gentlemen who know how to wield their swords. But we cannot build the boat without interference, because those who do not have iron desire it and will not stop until they get it. So, me, I think that John Lackland may be right in one particular. Perhaps we should wage an all-out war as soon as we have enough weapons, and clear The River, on both sides, of all opposition for thirty miles both ways. We can then have unlimited access to the wood and the bauxite and platinum . . ."
"But if you did that, if you killed all the inhabitants, within a day your countries would be filled' up," Sam said. "You know how resurrection works. Look at how swiftly this area was reinhabited after the meteorite had killed everybody in it."
Cyrano held up a long—and dirty—finger. Sam wondered if Livy was losing her battle to keep him clean.
"Ah!" Cyrano said. "But these people will remain unorganized, and we, being on the spot, will organize them, take them in as citizens of the expanded Parolando. We will include them in the lottery for the crew of the boat. In the long run, it would be faster to stop the boat building now and do as I suggest."
And I will send you forth in the lead, Sam thought. And it will be David and Bathsheba and Uriah all over again. Except that David probably didn't have a conscience, never lost a wink of sleep over what he'd done.
"I don't think so," Sam said. "In the first place, our citizens will fight like hell to defend themselves, because they're involved in the boat. But they're not going to engage in a war of conquest, especially after they figure out that bringing new citizens into the lottery is going to reduce their chances enormously. Besides, it isn't right."
De Bergerac stood up, his hand on the hilt of his rapier. "Perhaps you are right. But the day that you made an agreement with John Lackland and then murdered Erik Bloodaxe, that day was the day that you launched your boat on blood and treachery and cruelty. I do not reproach you, my friend. What you did was unavoidable, if you wanted the boat. But you cannot start thus and then shy away from similar, or even worse, acts. Not if you want your boat. Good night, my friend."
He bowed and left. Sam puffed on his cigar and then said, "I hate that man! He tells the truth!"
Joe stood up, and the floor creaked under his eight hundred pounds. "I'm going to bed. My head hurtth. Thith whole thing ith giving me a pain in my athth. Either you do or you don't. It'th that thimple."
"If I had my brainth in my athth, I'd thay the thame thing!" Sam snarled. "Joe, I love you! You're beautiful! The world is so uncomplex! Problems make you sleepy, and so you sleep! But I ..."
"Good night, Tham!" Joe said and walked into the texas. Sam made sure that the door was barred and that the guards he'd posted around the building were alert. Then he went to bed, too.
He dreamed about Erik Bloodaxe, who chased him through the decks and into the hold of the Riverboat, and he awoke yelling. Joe was looming over him, shaking him. The rain was pounding the roof, and thunder was booming somewhere up along the face of the mountain.
Joe stayed awhile after making some coffee. He put a spoonful of dried crystals into cold water, and the coffee crystals heated the mixture in three seconds. They sipped their coffee and Sam smoked a cigarette while they talked about the days when they had voyaged down The River with Bloodaxe and his Vikings in search of iron.
"At leatht, ve uthed to have fun now and then," Joe said. "But not anymore. There'th too much vork to do and too many people out to thkin our hideth. And your voman vould thyow up vith that big-nothed Thyrano."
Sam chuckled and said, "Thanks for the first laugh I've had in days, Joe. Big-nosed! Ye Gods!"
"Thometimeth I'm too thubtle for even you, Tham," Joe said. He rose up from the table and walked back to his room.
There was little sleep thereafter. Sam had always liked to stay in bed even after a full night's sleep. Now he got less than five hours each night, though he did take a siesta sometimes. There always seemed to be someone who had to have a question answered or wanted to thrash out an issue. His chief engineers were far from agreeing on everything, and this alone disturbed Sam. He had thought engineering was a cut-and-dried thing. You had a problem, and you solved it the best way. But Van Boom, Velitsky and O'Brien seemed to be living in worlds that did not quite dovetail. Finally, to spare himself the aggravating and often wasted hours of wrangling, he delegated the final word to Van Boom. They were not to worry him about anything unless they needed his authorization.
It was amazing the number of things which he would have considered to be only in the engineering province which needed his authorization.
Iyeyasu conquered not only the Bushman-Hottentot area across The River from him but nine miles of the Ulmak territory. Then he sent a fleet down to the three-milelong area below the Ulmaks, where seventeenth-century A.D. Sac and Fox Indians lived. This area was conquered with resultant slaughter of half the inhabitants. Iyeyasu then began dickering with Parolando for a higher price for his wood. Also, he wanted an amphibian just like the Firedragon I. By then the second Firedragon was almost done.
At this time over five hundred blacks from Parolando had been exchanged for an equal number of Dravidians. Sam had steadfastly refused to accept the Wahhabi Arabs, or at least had insisted that the Asiatic Indians come first. Hacking apparently did not like this, but nothing had been said in the agreement about which group had priority.
Hacking, having heard from his spies about Iyeyasu's demands, sent a message. He wanted a Firedragon, too, and he was willing to exchange a great amount of minerals for it.
Publius Crassus and Tai Fung allied to invade the area across The River from them. This was occupied by Stone Age peoples from everywhere and every time and stretched for fourteen miles along the left bank. With their superior steel weapons and numbers, the invaders killed half the population and enslaved the rest. And they upped their price for the wood but kept it below Iyeyasu's.
Spies reported that Chernsky, who ruled the fourteenmile-long nation just north of Parolando, had made a visit to Soul City. What happened there was anybody's guess, since Hacking had set up a security system that seemed to be one hundred percent effective. Sam had gotten in eight blacks to spy for him, and he knew that John had sent in at least a dozen. The heads of all were tossed from boats in the mists late at night onto the top of the wall along the bank of Parolando.
Van Boom came to Sam late one night and said that Firebrass had cautiously approached him.
"He offered me the position of chief engineer on the boat," Van Boom said.
"He offered it to you?" Sam said, his cigar almost dropping.
"Yes. He didn't say so in so many words, but I got the idea. The Riverboat will be taken over by the Soul Citizens, and I will be chief engineer."
"And what did you say about his fine offer? After all, you can't lose, either way."
"I told him not to etch a pseudocircuit. Come out and say it. He wouldn't, though he grinned, and I told him I hadn't sworn any oath of loyalty to you, but I had accepted your offer and that was as good. I wasn't going to betray you, and if Soul City invaded Parolando, I'd defend it to the death."
"That's fine, superb!" Sam said. "Here, have a snort of bourbon! And a cigar! I'm proud of you and proud of myself, to command such loyalty. But I wish ... I wish ..." Van Boom looked over the cup. "Yes?"
"I wish you'd strung him along. We could have found out a lot with you feeding us information."
Van Boom put the cup down and stood up. His handsome brown features were ugly. "I am not a dirty spy!"
"Come back!" Sam said, but Van Boom ignored him. Sam buried his head in his arms for a minute and then picked up Van Boom's cup. Never let it be said that Samuel Langhorne Clemens wasted good whiskey. Or even bad, for that matter. Although the grail never yielded any but the best.
The man's lack of realism irritated him. At the same time, he had a counterfeeling of warm pleasure. It was good to know that incorruptible men existed. At least, Sam did not have to worry about Van Boom.