Riverworld and Other Stories

by Philip José Farmer

  Neinstein touched Barnes’ abdomen, and Barnes winced.

  “Oh, by the way, I got plenty of referents for you linguists,” he said. “I’m seeing what the voice is talking about, if it is a voice. Miss Mbama’s boyfriend jarred something besides my teeth loose. I got a neural connection I didn’t have before.”

  “Sometimes kicking a malfunctioning TV set helps,” Grosstete said.

  Chew and Big Bear stuck electrodes on Barnes’ body and adjusted the dials of several instruments. Peaks, valleys, ditches, arrows, skyrockets shot across the faces of the tubes and then rearranged themselves into the outlines of Egyptian-type hieroglyphs.

  Barnes described the words that coincided with the images.

  “It’s like an archaeologist with scuba gear swimming through the halls of a palace, or, perhaps, a tomb in sunken Atlantis. The beam of light he’s shining on the murals picks out the hieroglyphs one by one. They swim out of darkness and then back into it. They’re figures, abstract or stylized birds and bees and animal-men, and there are strange figures which seem to be purely alphabetical mingled with these.”

  Big Bear and Chew agreed that the so-called voice was actually a series of highly modulated sonar signals. They were registering the differing depths and ridges on the wall of his vermiform appendix as the tiny bloodmarine cruised up and down.

  Hours went by. The linguists sweated over sound and visual referent. Everybody had coffee and sandwiches, except Barnes, who had nothing, and Doctor Grosstete, who drank grain alcohol. Neinstein talked on the phone three times, twice to postpone the operation and once to tell an angry editor he did not know where his reporter was.

  Suddenly, Big Bear shouted, “Eureka!”

  Then, “Champollion!”

  Then, “Ventris!”

  He held up a long piece of paper covered with phonetic symbols, codes for the hieroglyphs, and some exclamation marks.

  “There’s the hieroglyphs for this and for a copula, and there’s one for the definite article and that one, that means secret, every time so far. Let’s see. THIS IS THE SECRET OF THE … UNIVERSE? COSMOS? THE GREAT BEGETTER? THIS IS THE WORD THAT EXPLAINS ALL. READ, O READER, LITTLE MAN, THIS IS THE WORD …”

  “Don’t be afraid, man! Say the word!” Chew said.

  “That’s all there is!” Barnes said, and he groaned. “There’s only a gap, a crack … a corruption. The word is gone. The infection has eaten it up!”

  He bent over, clutching at his abdomen.

  “We must operate!” Neinstein said.

  “McBurney’s incision or the right rectus?” Doctor Grosstete said.

  “Both! This is The Last Appendectomy! We’ll make it a double show! Are all the guests in the amphitheater? Are the TV crews ready? Let us cut, Doctor Grosstete!”

  Two hours later, Barnes awoke. He was in a bed in the laboratory. Mbama and two nurses were standing by.

  The voice and the pingings were gone. The pulses and the visions were fled. Mbama walked by, and she was only a good-looking black girl.

  Neinstein straightened up from the microscope. “The sonar is only a machine. There is no Egyptian queen riding in it. Or on it.”

  Grosstete said, “The tissue slides reveal many microscopic indentations and alto reliefs on the inner walls of the appendix. But nothing that looks like hieroglyphs. Of course, decay has set in so deeply …”

  Barnes groaned and mumbled, “I’ve been carrying the secret of the universe. The key to it, anyway. All knowledge was inside me all my life. If we’d been one day sooner, we would know All.”

  “We shouldn’t have eliminated the appendix from man!” Doctor Grosstete shouted. “God was trying to tell us something!”

  “Tut, tut, Doctor! You’re getting emotional!” Doctor Neinstein said, and he drank a glass of urine from the specimens on Miss Mbama’s table. “Bah! Too much sugar in that coffee, Mbama! Yes, Doctor, no medical man should get upset over anything connected with his ancient and honorable profession—with the possible exception of unpaid bills. Let us use Occam’s razor.”

  Grosstete felt his cheek. “What?”

  “It was coincidence that the irregularities on Barnes’ appendix reflected the sonar pulses in such a manner that the hieroglyphs and a woman’s voice seemed to be reproduced. A highly improbable—but not absolutely impossible—coincidence.”

  Barnes said, “You don’t think that, in the past, appendixes became diseased to indicate that the messages were ripe? And that if only doctors had known enough to look, they would have seen …?”

  “Tut, tut, my dear sir, don’t say it. See The Word? The anesthesia has not worn off yet. After all, life is not a science-fiction story with everything exhaustively, and exhaustingly, explained at the end. Even we medical men have our little mysteries.”

  “Then I was just plain sick, and that was all there was to it?”

  “Occam’s razor, my dear sir. Cut until you have only the simplest explanation left, the bare bone, as it were. Excellent, that! Old Occam had to have been a physician to invent that beautiful philosophical tool.”

  Barnes looked at Miss Mbama as she walked away, swaying.

  “We have two kidneys. Why only one appendix?”

  Monolog

  Foreword

  Here’s a short horror tale about a strange birth. It appeared in 1973 in an anthology titled Demon Kind, the stories of which were about children with very strange talents and inclinations. The title of the book gave me an idea for a short story to be titled Demon Kine. Maybe I’ll write it someday.

  “She’s sick of me being sick.

  “And I am sick. This thing is growing in me, eating me away. I can’t tell her, but she can see it. She looks at its hump, at least, I think it’s a hump. I can’t look down and see if it is or not. But it’s there. I see her looking at it.

  “No pain yet. When does cancer start hurting? And I won’t be able to yell. I can tell her, but the words won’t come out right. And if I try to yell, something happens. My throat closes up. But when the pain hits …

  “How can I be anything but sick? She doesn’t like me when I’m healthy. I grew and grew and was big and strong. I went to school. I got good grades, very good. I was a great football player and trackman. Well, pretty good, anyway. But mother didn’t like that.

  “‘Child, you’re growing too fast, too big. Where’s my baby boy? The little one I nursed with my own breasts. The little one I held in my arms until he went to sleep. The little one who sat on my lap while I sang to him until his little head nodded and he slept the sleep of angels. So sweet, so adorable, so soft-skinned, curly-headed, so sweet and lovable. Where is he?’

  “Well, mother, I look out the window and see the same thing every day except for the coming and going of the seasons. The leaves grow out, Mother, they begin as soft buds, tender to the fingers. But the full-grown leaf is the purpose of the bud, Mother. It can’t stay a bud forever. If it does, it dies. And the leaf conies out, and it does its work, and then summer comes and goes, is gone, and fall conies, and the leaf is its most beautiful when it dies. And then it falls, and it decays and it makes the soil more fertile. Or provides food and a home or a blanket for insects. Or for whatever.

  “Does the tree hate the leaf because it isn’t a bud forever? No, it doesn’t, Mother. So why do you hate me? Yes, you do, though you haven’t got the guts to admit it. You’ve hated me ever since I left you. But I had to leave you because I had to go to school, Mother. I couldn’t be a baby forever, and I had to go to kindergarten, finally, even if you did manage to delay that for a year. And then I knew, in the way that children know, mainly because adults are such lousy liars, that you were beginning to hate me. But it wasn’t until I started first grade that I knew for sure. Your hatred got so terrible, it blazed behind your smile, your kisses, your voice. Always getting harder and harder, your voice, until it broke. It was too brittle to stay in one piece.

  “And it’s, I mean, it was only when I was completely a baby, when I turned m
y back on growing up because—because I knew you loved me only then—it was only then that you loved me. But I couldn’t stay a baby all the time, even to be loved by you. There was a world outside, and I wanted to be the equal of the boys and girls I was going to school with. To do that, Mother, I had to grow along with them. There was no other way to do it.

  “So I grew, and as I got bigger, Mother, you got smaller. In the physical sense, of course. Relatively speaking, of course. In one very large sense, you have never gotten any smaller than you were the day you bore me. No smaller, no change in you or me. Not in one sense. Our relationship, the fact that you are my mother and I’m your baby boy, that hasn’t changed. That has stayed as it was that day, even though it wouldn’t look like it to outsiders and often not to me.

  “But everything does change, Mother. Including that relationship. Even if a thing refuses to grow, it becomes bent, turned in, curved too too much, like a boar’s tusk or a ram’s horn. It turns and it drives into the flesh and then into the same bone from which it grew. The tusk, the horn come home, Mother, come home to die and perhaps, to kill.

  “But I’m not dying, Mother. Yes, I am, in one large sense. But not in another equally large sense. Does that make sense, Mother? And where are you, Mother? Ah, I see you now. You’ve just come out of church. Where, no doubt, as you look at Mother and Son, you pray—somewhere deep inside you—that you and I, too, shall be changeless wood or stone and the babe in your arms never grow larger. You pray that both of us will be motionless and unchanging, like wood or stone.

  “I’m one way, Mother, you already have your wish. I am motionless as wood or stone, except for being able to blink my eyes and try to talk now and then. That’s why you prop me up here by the window so I can see the street, its unchanging changing, and see you as you go to the store or to prayer.

  “Outside, motionless and unchanging. Inside, something happened almost a year ago, but I couldn’t tell you about it. And if I had, what could I have said except call the doctor, Mother?”

  “Things don’t ever stop changing. Things go on and on, Mother, things deep down. Like trolls working away in the dark bowels of the mountain. In the mountain of my brain. No, of my soul. Of my body, also, Mother. What is the difference between my soul and my body? I don’t know. One may be the other. I do know that, when one grows, the other grows. Sometimes.

  “And something in me grows and grows, Mother. I lie here, a living tomb, a coffin of myself. I waste away. I’ve heard you say so yourself. My arms and legs are thinning away. My eyes grow larger as my face sinks away. The bones are beginning to look out through the flesh. I’ve heard you say so yourself, Mother. Not in a hushed voice to a doctor in the next room. To my face as you smile.

  “But my belly grows and grows, and you’ve said so yourself. It’s a tumor, a cancer eating my body as you, my beloved mother who doesn’t love me, have eaten up my soul. It’s only begun to hurt lately. I’ve tried to tell you it does, tried to tell you it hurts me sometimes.

  “When it’s very late at night, and you are not snoring, and the traffic noises have died, I hear it grow, Mother. It makes little noises. It stirs, it rustles, it munches. The cancer is munching away at me, Mother.

  “‘Good!’ you say!

  “You don’t say? But you do say it with everything but words. If you watch this thing grow and don’t call a doctor in, then it’ll be too late when you do have to call him in, when you can’t put it off any longer, can’t blind and deafen yourself to what’s going on in the unchangeable me. Too late.

  “But you’ll be glad, won’t you, Mother? Glad because the big, dirty, whiskery, tobacco-smelling, beer-smelling unchangeable that shouldn’t have changed, but did change, has died. Yet, Mother, I’m not dirty, I don’t smell like cigarettes or beer. Not any more. I can’t smoke unless you hold the cigarette for me, which you won’t do. And I can’t drink beer unless you give it to me, which you won’t. So I’ve gone through the withdrawal pains, Mother, without a word of complaint. Though sometimes, when you looked into my eyes, you must have known. But you didn’t look long, did you, Mother? Those are bloodshot old man’s eyes, not the clear blue-white eyes of a baby.

  “I’m not dirty or whiskery any more, though, am I? You bathe me every day. You don’t neglect me in that way. And you shave me every day, too, and run your fingers over my face, and you smile. You remember when it was even softer, don’t you?

  “You don’t smile long, though. You can close your eyes and imagine I’m the baby boy, but you have to open your eyes, and then you hate me.

  “I hear the door slam downstairs, Mother. And now I hear the steps creak. You’ll be coming up and asking me how I am. Knowing I can’t speak except to babble like a baby. My words, so clear in my mind, come out all mixed up, chopped up, like a big salad bowl of unintelligibility. The babbling of an infant. But disgusting, because an infant babbles because he’s learning to talk, and he will talk. But I babble because I’ve forgotten, and I will never remember.

  “And now I hear the hallboards creaking under your feet. I hear you humming the lullaby you say you used to sing to me when I was a baby. I think I hear it. The door is closed, and you don’t hum loudly. Perhaps I’ve heard it so often that I hear it even when it’s not audible.

  “And now, now, Mother, it moved, it moved! It’s eaten so much of me away that it’s slid into the eaten-away place! It’s moved, Mother!

  “And now, and now, this must be the end. Oh, God, I said I wanted to die! I’ve said it so many years. Since I started to school. I’ve said it. If my mother doesn’t love me, I’ll die. I wished I could die. And now I am dying, and I’m scared.

  “Scared to death! That’s a good one! It’s getting dark, dark. I’m sliding away, too, like that thing that’s sliding from one place to another in me. The cargo of death shifting in the hold as the ship starts to turn over … what am I talking about? I’m slipping down, down. This is really it? Death? Slipping down, down! Getting smaller, smaller?

  “At least … but I was wrong. I was going to say it doesn’t hurt. But it’s beginning to hurt. It’s eating away. Clawing, too. Getting bigger. Or nearer. I’m getting closer, not it. But that’s crazy. When two things approach, both get closer. It hurts. I’m glad I can’t see. I’m glad it’s dark. It’s bad enough to hear it, but to see it …

  “No. I hear Mother. She’s coming down the hall. Now she’s at the door. And I can’t talk, I can’t say what I always wanted to say. Would she listen if I could say it? No. Would she understand if she did listen? Oh, Mother, don’t let me die. Or if you do, please tell me, tell me …

  “There you are, Mother. Mother! You were trying to scream. But you couldn’t. It froze in your throat, like it does in mine. You fell. Here I come, Mother. Down off the bed. Weak but able. Don’t lie on the floor, Mother. Staring. Rigid. I’m the one that had the stroke.

  “No, I didn’t have the stroke, not this I. Mother! Here I come! My other self! I’m getting out all the way! I got out, Mother! I broke open when I clawed my way out, Mother. I was about to die in there, Mother! Darkness and pressure and wetness, Mother! There I was sliding together, hurting inside and outside. Oh, the terrible pain, Mother! And the fear, the fear, doubled-up, couldn’t get out, my stomach ready to explode … What? What am I talking about? Mother! It’s all sliding together, and I’m sliding away at the same time!

  “I didn’t mean to scare you, Mommy. Ain’t my fault I’m all bloody! Mommy! You kin put your loveycums in the tub now! Fwever, muvver. Fwever!

  “Your baby boy’s back! Your little loveydumcum’s here, muvver. Wash the bad old blood off me, muvver!

  “Blood! I can’t help cwying, muvver!

  “There’s a dead man on my beddy-bye, muvver, and things hanging out of him!”

  The Leaser of Two Evils

  Foreword

  Every now and then, a word, a phrase, a picture or image will flash into my mind. I’ll write them down with the hope that some day lean use them. There are s
ome of these fragments that quickly grow to wholes, and I soon write stories based on them. Others may stay in the notebook for years before something pops up out of the unconscious and says, “Here’s what’s been growing in the darkness. Take it and use your conscious and make a story out of it.”

  Of such was “The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol” and of such is “The Leaser of Two Evils.” Both had been just titles that I’d thought of, for no reason that I can determine, and both had been sitting in the darkness in my mind for at least twelve years, brooding, pacing the cell, feeling the walls and floors for a way to get to the light.

  Suddenly, they broke loose from their cell with a hell of a yell, like the young monk in the limerick, and they said, “Let’s get to work!”

  And we did. But though we had the go-ahead, we had to work very hard to get the two stories in just the right shape.

  On the other hand, some of these germinating ideas grew suddenly, full-blown, and all I had to do was to sit down at the machine and write. Well, that’s almost all I had to do.

  There are still many ideas and titles that have been waiting in the notebook even longer and nothing has happened and perhaps never will.

  I still am waiting for something to result from the title, A Flock of Ducts. And nothing has yet come from The Erodynamics Engineer. Or Dwellers in the Pup Tense. Or Rule 42. This last, you’ll remember, is to be found in Alice in Wonderland. Rule 42 states that all persons more than a mile high must leave the courtroom. And then there’s the germ of a story titled Two Blue Einsteins. Though I’ve striven with that a dozen times in the past fifteen years, I’ve been able to do nothing with it.

  But we’ll see.