The Fabulous Riverboat

by Philip José Farmer

  Sam was shaken by the sight, but not so much that he did not tell Lothar to remind him of this when it was all over, if either of them was still around.

  "They have to be made more airtight, and we'll have to install a closed-circuit air system, like Firebrass described," he said.

  Johnston appeared as unexpectedly as if he had stepped out of a door in the night, and behind him was Firebrass. The man looked exhausted and as if he were in pain, but he still managed to grin at Sam. He was, however, trembling.

  "Hacking was told that I was betraying him," Firebrass said. "And he believed his informant. Who was, by the way, our esteemed and always reliable King John. John told him that I was selling him down The River, that I had revealed everything to you so I could become chief of your air force. Hacking would not believe that I was dickering with you just to string you along. I can't blame him too much. I should have sent word through our spies what I was doing. That I didn't convince him that I wasn't double-crossing him didn't surprise me." "Were you?" Sam said.

  Firebrass grinned. "No, I wasn't, though I was mightily tempted. But why should I betray him when I'd been promised I could be head flier after Hacking took over the boat? The truth is, Hacking was eager to believe John.

  He doesn't like me because I'm not his idea of what a soul brother should be. And I had too easy a life according to him. He resented it because I never lived in a ghetto and I had every advantage he didn't have."

  "The job of chief engineer can still be yours," Sam said. "I'll admit that I'm relieved about not having to promise you the captaincy of the air force. But you can still fly, if you want to."

  "That's the best offer I've had since I died," Firebrass said. "I'll take it."

  He moved closer to Sam and whispered in his ear. "You would have had to "take me along in some capacity anyway. I'm one of The Twelve!"

  Chapter 27

  * * *

  Sam felt as if a cold rod had been plunged through him from the top of his head down. "The Ethical? The Stranger?" "Yes. He said you called him the Mysterious Stranger." "Then you were betraying Hacking?"

  "That little speech I just made was for public consumption," Firebrass said. "Yes, I did betray Hacking, if you insist on using that word. But I regard myself as an espionage agent for a higher authority. I have no intention of worrying about all-black or all-white states on The River, when I can find out how and why we, the whole human race, were put here. I want answers to my questions, as Karamazov once said. All this white-black turmoil is trivial on this planet, no matter how important it was on Earth. Hacking must have sensed that I thought that, though I tried to conceal it."

  Sam did not recover from the shock for some time. Meanwhile, the battle raged on the plain with the Soul Citizens getting the worst of it. Though they cost the invaders three men for one, they were pushed back within a half an hour. Sam decided that it was time for them to act, and they trotted off toward the stockade where the Parolando prisoners were kept. Lothar fired two rockets into the gates of the stockade, and before the smoke had cleared, the fifteen charged through the blasted gates. Cyrano and Johnston did most of the work in killing the fifteen guards. Cyrano was a demon with lightning for a sword, and Johnston downed four men with thrown tomahawks and three with thrown knives. He broke two legs and a chest with a foot like iron. The prisoners were directed to the armory, where bows and arrows and swords were still in supply.

  Sam sent two men each to the north and the south to go over the walls and try to contact the Parolandanoj there.

  Then he led the rest back up into the hills. They would camp by the dam until they saw how the battle was going. Sam did not have the slightest idea of what they should do. He told Cyrano he would have to play it by ear. He had to repress the impulse to remark that he was doing this even though Cyrano was tone deaf.

  Afterward, Sam thanked whoever there was to thank that he had not camped on top of the dam itself. Instead, he had sat down on a knoll above and to the left side of the dam, facing outward. He had a better view of the hills and the plains, where the rockets were still exploding but were not as numerous as in the beginning. The starlight glimmered on the waters of the big lake behind the dam as if all was peace and quiet in the world.

  Suddenly, Johnston leaped up and said, "Looky there! Yonder! Atop a the dam!"

  Three dark figures had emerged from the water onto the dam. They ran toward the land. Sam told the others to withdraw behind the great trunk of the irontree. Joe Miller and Johnston seized the three as they raced up to the tree. One tried to stab Joe, and Joe squeezed the neck and the blood spurted out from broken veins and arteries. The others were knocked out. By the time they regained consciousness, they did not have to tell Sam what they had done. And he guessed that they had done so at the order of King John.

  The earth shook under their feet, and the irontree leaves rattled like dishes in a pantry. The white wall of the dam flew outward with a gigantic cloud of smoke and a roar that pushed in on their eardrums. The enormous chunks of concrete flew through the smoke like white birds above a factory chimney. They tumbled over and over and struck the ground far ahead of the waters. The lake was no longer the peaceful and quiet glimmer of a wonderful world to come. It seemed to hurl itself forward. The roar as it raced down the canyon which Sam's men had dug with so much sweat and time deafened the watchers again.

  The water, hundreds of thousands of tons, funneled by the canyon, rammed through the earthen walls, tearing out great chunks of it. The sudden withdrawal also removed a great amount of earth around the lake's shores, so much so that the watchers had to scramble for even higher ground. And the thousand-foot-high irontree, its two-hundred feet deep roots abruptly exposed, its foundation partly dug away, toppled over. It seemed to take a long time falling, and the explosions of enormous roots breaking and the whistling of air through the huge leaves and the vines covering it terrified the humans. They had thought they were far enough away, but even though the giant tree was falling away from them, they were threatened by eruptions of roots from the earth.

  The tree struck with a crash on the other side of the lake and tore out the overhanging dirt and continued on down into the emptying lake. It slid out entirely from the root anchors on the bank and went on top first into the waters. These were whirling around and around, and, picking up the enormous tree as if it were a toothpick, the waters carried it down the canyon for a half a mile before it became wedged between the two walls of the canyon.

  The waters roared out in a wall at least a hundred feet, high by the time it had hit the plains. Its front must have borne a tangle of half-grown trees and bamboo plants, huts, people, and debris. It flashed across the mile and a half of plain, spreading out but channeled, for a few minutes, by the cyclopean secondary walls that Sam had built to defend the factories and the Riverboat, but which had proved useless in two attacks.

  Everything was picked up and carried on out into The River. The factories crumbled as if they were made of cookies. The gigantic Riverboat was lifted up like a toy boat cast into the ocean surf. It rode out into The River, pitching, and then was sunk in darkness and turmoil. Sam threw himself on the ground and clawed at the grass. His boat was lost! Everything was lost, factories, mines, amphibians, airplanes, smithies, armories, and his crew. But worst of all, the Riverboat was lost. The dream was shattered, the great shining jewel of his dream had been smashed. The grass was cold and wet in his face. His fingers felt as if they were fastened in the flesh of the earth and would never come free again. But Joe's huge hand lifted him up and sat him down, as if he were a dummy. Joe's monstrous hairy body was pressed close to his, warming him. And Joe's grotesque face with the shelving brows and the absurdly long nose was by him.

  "They're all gone!" Joe said. "Jethuth! Vhat a thight! There ain't nothing left, Tham!" The plain was buried under a whirl and toss of waters, but in fifteen minutes the waters had drained off. The River had resumed its normal appearance along the shores of Parolando, though i
t must have been swollen downstream.

  The great buildings and the boat in its scaffoldings were gone. The cyclopean walls on the sides, a mile apart, were gone. There were little lakes here and there where the mines and the basements of the factories had been. The vast weight of water had gouged out part of the plain where it had been dug up. But the roots of the grasses were so deep, so tough, and so thickly intertwined that even the scrape of hundreds of thousands of tons of water had not ripped the earth out. The stone and earth walls along the banks had been swept away as if they were sand.

  The skies paled, and the starlit darkness became gray. The great fleet of the invaders was gone, somewhere far down The River, or under it, broken, smashed, fragments floating or half hulls upside down. The two armies on the plain and the sailors were all dead, crushed by the weight of the water, drowned, rubbed into nothing or squeezed out like toothpaste.

  But Parolando extended for ten miles along The River, and the lake had, after all, only raged across a two-mile-broad area. Its main damage had been in the middle of Parolando, where it had carried everything out that stood within a half-mile-wide area. Those on the edges had been drowned and the buildings smashed or only submerged briefly.

  Dawn brought with it a thousand men in boats or over the walls of Chernsky's Land from the north.

  At their head was King John.

  Sam drew up his men in battle formation with Joe Miller in the center, but King John limped forward, his hand held out in sign of peace. Sam went forward to talk to him. Even after John had explained what he had done, Sam expected to be killed. But later he realized that John needed him and Firebrass and others if he was going to get the boat rebuilt. Also, he would be taking a perverted pleasure in keeping Sam alive while Sam wondered when the dagger in the night would come.

  As it turned out, not everything had to be started from scratch again. The boat, almost entirely undamaged, was found beached on a hill across The River a mile down. It had been deposited as gently as a cat's footstep by the withdrawing waters. The work of getting the great hull back was not easy; but it took much less time than making another one.

  John explained more than once to Sam what he had done, but the deviousnesses and the two times two double crosses were so complicated that Sam could never see the picture as a whole. John had made a deal to betray Sam, knowing full well that Hacking would betray him also. John would have been disappointed if Hacking had not tried to stab him in the back. He would have lost all his faith in human nature.

  John had made a deal with Iyeyasu to help him invade after Hacking's invasion. Iyeyasu liked the idea that Hackrag would weaken his forces while taking Parolando. At the last moment, John had made a deal with Publius Crassus, Tai Fung and Chernsky that they would help him mop up on Iyeyasu's forces, which would be shattered by the waters released by the blown-up dam.

  John had sent the three men to set off the explosives in the dam when the greatest number of invaders and defenders would be concentrated between the tunneling secondary-defense walls. Before that happened, John had fled in his boat, hidden by the fog.

  "Then you weren't in your palace when the cannons opened up on it?" Sam said.

  "No," John replied, smiling his cat's smile. "I was miles to the north, traveling to meet Iyeyasu. You have never thought much of me, Samuel, but you should get down on your knees now and kiss my hand in gratitude. Without me, you would have lost all."

  "If you had told me Hacking was going to invade, I could have kept everything," Sam said. "We could have ambushed Hacking."

  The sun came up and struck the tawniness of John's hair and the peculiar gray-blue of his eyes. "Ah, yes, but Iyeyasu would still have been a formidable problem. Now he's gone, and there is little to keep us from ruling all the land we need, including the bauxite and platinum of SoulCity and the iridium and tungsten of Selinujo. I presume you have no objections to conquering those two states?"

  There was a bonanza in the aftermath. Hacking was taken prisoner, and Gwenafra was found alive. Both had been pushed during the fighting into the hills to the west. Hacking was getting ready to lead a charge back down the hills, when the edge of the waters deluged his part. Gwenafra escaped, though she almost drowned. Hacking had been hurled against a tree. Both his legs and one arm were broken, and he was bleeding internally.

  Sam and John hastened to where Hacking lay under an irontree. Gwenafra cried when she saw them and embraced Sam and Lothar. She seemed to have given Sam a much longer embrace than she did Lothar, which was not entirely unexpected, since she and Lothar had been quarreling violently for the last few months.

  John wanted to finish Hacking off with some refined tortures, preferably as soon after breakfast as possible. Sam objected strongly. He knew that John could have his way if he insisted, since his men outnumbered Sam's by fifty to one. But Sam was past being cautious, at that moment, anyway. And John backed away. He needed Sam and the men whose loyalty he commanded.

  "You had a dream, White Sam," Hacking said in a weak voice. "Well, I had one, too. A land where brothers and sisters could loaf and invite their souls. Where we'd be all black. You wouldn't know what that means. No white devils, no white eyes. Just black soul brothers. It would have been as near heaven as you can get in this hell of a world. Not that we wouldn't have had trouble, no place without trouble, man. But there wouldn't have been any white-man trouble. It'd be all ours. But that isn't to be."

  "You could have had your dream," Sam said. "If you'd waited. After the boat was built, we'd have left the iron to whomever could take it. And then . . ."

  Hacking grimaced. Sweat covered his black skin and his face was tight with pain. "Man, you must be out of your skull! You really think I believed that story about you sailing off on this quest for the Big Grail? I knew you was going to use that big boat to conquer us blacks and lock those chains around us again. An Old South whitey like you . . ."

  He closed his eyes. Sam said, "You are wrong! If you knew me, if you'd taken the trouble to know me instead of stereotyping me . . ."

  Hacking opened his eyes and said, "You'd lie to a nigger even when he was on his deathbed, wouldn't you? Listen! That Nazi, Göring, he really shook me up. I didn't tell them to torture him, just kill him, but those fanatical Arabs, you know them. Anyway, Göring gives me a message. Hail and farewell, soul brother, or something like that. I forgive you, because you know not what you do. Something like that. Ain't that a crock? A message of love from a damn Nazi! But you know, he had changed! And he could be right. Maybe all them Second Chancers are right. Who knows? Sure seems stupid to bring us up from the dead, give us our youth back, just so some can kick and some can hurt all over again. Stupid, isn't it?"

  He stared up at Sam and then said, "Shoot me, will you? Put me out of my pain? I'm really suffering."

  Lothar stepped up beside Sam and said, "After what you did to Gwenafra, I'll be glad to."

  He pointed the muzzle of the big flintlock at Hacking's head.

  Hacking grinned painfully and muttered, "Rape on principle, mother! I swore off that on Earth, but that woman just brought out the devil in me! Besides, so what? What about all those black slave women you white mothers raped?"

  As Sam walked away, the pistol boomed. He jumped, but he kept on walking. It was the kindest thing that Lothar could have done for Hacking. Tomorrow, he would be walking along the banks of The River somewhere far away. He and Sam might even see each other again, although Sam was not looking forward to that. Lothar, stinking of gunpowder, caught up with him.

  "I should have let him suffer. But old habits are hard to break. I wanted to kill him, so I did. That black devil just smiled at me. Then I spread his smile all over him."

  "Don't say any more," Sam replied. "I'm sick enough. I'm about to chuck the whole thing and settle down with a steady job of missionarying. The only one whose suffering meant anything today were the Second Chancers."

  "You'll get over that," Lothar said, and he was right. But it took three years.
>
  The land was again like a shell-pocked battlefield, stinking with fumes and black with smoke. But the great Riverboat was completed. There was nothing to do to it now except to try it out. Even the last touch, the painting on the Riverboat's name in big black letters on the white hull, had been done. On both sides of the hull, ten feet above the water line, were the letters NOT FOR HIRE.

  "What does that mean, Sam?" he had been asked by many.

  "It means just what it says, contrary to most words in print or speech," Sam said. "The boat is no man's to hire. It's a free boat and its crew are free souls. No man's." "And why is the boat's launch called Post No Bills?"

  "That comes from a dream I had," Sam would say. "Somebody was trying to put up advertising on it, and I told him that the launch was built for no mercenary purpose. What do you think I am, advance agent for P. T. Barnum? I said."

  There was more to the dream, but Sam told no one except Joe about this.

  "But the man who was pasting up those garish posters, advertising the coming of the greatest Riverboat of them all and the greatest Riverboat show of them all was I!" Sam said. "I was both men in the dream!" "I don't get it, Tham," Joe said. Sam gave up on him.

  Chapter 28

  * * *

  The twenty-sixth anniversary of Resurrection Day was the day that the side-wheeler Not for Hire first turned its paddles. It was about an hour after the grailstones flamed to charge the breakfast grails. The cables and cap connected to the grailstone had been removed and the cables wound up within the hold through a port in the forward section on the starboard side. The grails had been removed from the stone a mile north and rushed to the big boat in the amphibious, armored, steam-driven launch, the Post no Bills. The fabulous Riverboat, gleaming white with red and black and green trimmings, moved out from the canal and into The River behind a huge breakwater on its starboard side. This deflected the current so that the boat would not be swung to the south as it emerged from the canal and so carried into the edge of the canal's mouth.