The Fabulous Riverboat

by Philip José Farmer

  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 home – and if I do you can bet your white ass 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 SoulCity 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 SoulCity 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 semi-feudal 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 Göring. 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," Göring 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," Göring 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 C
hristian 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," Göring 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 super-beings 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," Göring 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 Göring'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," Göring 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," Göring 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 nickel-iron meteorite here and who had enabled Joe Miller to see the Tower in the far-off misty NorthPolarSea, was a renegade of the Ethicals. If he were to be believed. "Credentials?" Göring 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," Göring 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?" Göring said.

  Sam rapped his chest with his fist and said, "Yes, I do believe I have a touch of indigestion." Göring made a fist and clamped his lips.