Riverworld and Other Stories

by Philip José Farmer

  “What? You’re searching for the woman who’s supposed to have given birth to a baby somewhere along the River? A baby? In this world where all are sterile and no woman has ever gotten pregnant? You believe that’s true? How about buying the Brooklyn Bridge?

  “No? Then how about a splinter from the True Cross? Ho! Ho! Ho! And you believe that this baby reproduced by parthenogenesis is Jesus Christ born again to save us Valleydwellers? And you’ve been traveling up-River to find the infant? Who do you think you are? One of the Three Wise Men? Ho! Ho! Ho!”

  And so Doctor Andrew Paxton Davis had not stayed long any place until he had been detained by Ivar the Boneless. He had wandered up the Valley, seldom pausing, just as, on Earth, he had been the peripatetic’s peripatetic. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, he had traveled to many cities in the United States. There he had lectured on and practiced his new art of healing and sometimes established colleges of osteopathy. Denver, Colorado; Quincy, Missouri; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Ohio; LaFayette and Indianapolis, Indiana; Dallas and Corsicana, Texas; Baker City, Oregon; Los Angeles, California, and many other places.

  Then he had originated Neuropathy, an eclectic discipline of healing. It combined all the best features of osteopathy, chiropracty, magnetism, homeopathy, and other systems of drugless medicine. He had preached that God-inspired gospel throughout the country. And he had written four thick books that were used by osteopaths and ophthalmologists and read by many laymen throughout the United States.

  “From going to and fro in the earth and from walking up and down in it.”

  That was Satan’s answer to God when He said, “Whence comest thou?” That could be said also of Andrew P. Davis. But Davis loathed Satan, and his model was Job, who “was perfect and upright and one that feared God and eschewed evil.”

  Since Davis had awakened on the Riverworld, he had suffered the torments of Job. Yet he had not faltered in his faith any more than had Job. God must have made this world, but the Great Tempter was here too. To realize that, you just had to look around at the inhabitants.

  Riverworlders dreamed most often about lost Earth. The one exception to this was the nightmare about their mass resurrection, the Day of the Great Shout when all the dead had screamed at one time. What a cry that must have been!

  Doctor Andrew Paxton Davis had often awakened moaning, sometimes screaming, from that nightmare. But he had another dream that distressed him even more.

  For instance, on this early and still-dark morning of the fifth anniversary of The Day, he had painfully oozed into wakefulness from a Riverworld-inspired nightmare. Not terror but shame and humiliation had written the script for that sleep-drama.

  He had gotten his M.D. from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1867. But, after many years as a physician in the rural areas of Illinois and Indiana, he had become unhappy with the practice. Always a seeker after truth, he had become convinced that the new science and art of healing devised by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still was a breakthrough. Davis had been in the first class (1893) to complete the courses of the newly established American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri.

  But, ever questioning, ever seeking, he had decided that osteopathy alone was not enough. Hence, his own discipline and his founding of the College of Neuropathy in Los Angeles. When he died at the age of eighty-four of stomach cancer—he also had nightmares about that long agony—he was still the head of a flourishing practice.

  However, medical science had improved considerably from his birth in 1835 to his death in 1919. And, from then on, it had accelerated at an incredible velocity. His late-twentieth-century informants made it sound like one of those scientific romances by H.G. Wells.

  In the first two years on the Riverworld, he had proudly, at first, anyway, told the doctors he met of his knowledge and accomplishments. He had also confided his belief that the Savior had been born again. So many had laughed at him that he became very reserved about telling any M.D. that he had practiced the healing art. He was almost as reticent about revealing his Quest to laymen. But how could he find the Holy Mother and the Holy Infant unless he told people that he was searching for them?

  He had awakened this morning and lain in a sweat not caused by the temperature. After a while, he vaguely remembered a dream preceding the one about the mockery and jeers.

  He was outside the tower on top of the hill and just starting to walk down the hill when he heard the king calling him. He turned and looked up through the twilight that enveloped most of his dreams. Ivar the Boneless was staring down at him from the top of the tower. As usual, the king was half smiling. Beside him, Ann Pullen, the queen not only of Ivar’s land but of all the bitches in the world, was leaning through a space in the top wall. Her bare breasts were hanging over the top of the stone. Then she lifted one and flipped it at him.

  Suddenly, Sharkko the Shyster appeared beside the two. Sharkko, the man who would have been utterly miserable if he could understand how detestable he was. But Sharkko was unable to imagine that anyone could not like him. He had been given solid proof, kicks, slaps, curses, and savage beatings, that he was not loved by all. Yet his mind slid these off and kept his self-image undented and unbreakable.

  These three were the most important beings in Davis’s life in Ivar’s land. He would have liked to have put them in a rocket and fired them off toward the stars. That way, he would keep them from being resurrected somewhere along the River and thus avoid meeting them again. Except in his nightmares, of course.

  Later, a few hours after dawn, Davis was walking up the hill to the tower after fishing in the River. He had caught nothing and so was not in a good mood. That was when he met the lunatic gotten up like a clown.

  “Doctor Faustroll, we presume?”

  The man, who spoke in a strangely even tone, held out an invisible calling card.

  Davis glanced down at the tips of the man’s thumb and first finger as if they really were holding a card.

  “Printed in the letters of fire,” the man said. “But you must have a heart on fire to see them. However, imaginary oblongs are best seen in an imaginary unlighted triangle. The darker the place, the brighter the print. As you may have noticed, it’s late morning, and the sunlight is quite bright, At least, they seem to be so.”

  The fellow, like all other insane on Earth, must have been resurrected with all traces erased of any mental illness he had suffered there. But he was crazy again.

  His forehead was painted with some kind of mathematical formula. The area around his eyes was painted yellow, and his nose was painted black. A green mustache was painted on his upper lip. His mouth was lipsticked bright-red. On his chest, a large question mark was tattooed in blue. A dried fish was suspended on a cord reaching to his belly. His long, thick, and very black hair was shaped into a sort of bird’s nest and held in place by dry gray mud.

  And, when the man bent his neck forward, he exposed the upper part of an egg in the nest. Davis could easily see it because the man was shorter than he. It did not roll with the movement of the head. Thus, it must be fixed with fish glue to the top of his head. The wooden and painted pseudo-egg, Davis assumed, was supposed to represent that laid by a cuckoo. Appropriate enough. The stranger was certainly cuckoo.

  A large green towel, the clown’s only garment, was draped around his hips. The gray cylinder of his grail was near his bare feet. Most people carried a fish-skin bag that held their worldly possessions. This fellow lacked that, and he was not even armed. But he did carry a bamboo fishing pole.

  The man said, “While on Earth, we were King Ubu. Here, we are Doctor Faustroll. It’s a promotion that we richly deserve. Who knows? We may yet work our way to the top and become God or at least occupy His empty throne. At the moment, we are a pataphysician, D.Pa., at your service. That is not a conventional degree in one sense, but in all senses it is a high degree, including Fahrenheit and Kelvin.”

  He started to put his imaginary card in an imaginary pocket of an imaginary
coat.

  Davis said, “I’ll take it,” and he held out his hand. Humoring the pataphysician, whatever that was, might prevent him from becoming violent.

  He moved his hand close to his bare chest to suggest that he was pulling out a card from an inner pocket of his coat. He held it out.

  “Andrew Paxton Davis, M.D., Oph.D., N.D., D.O., D.C.”

  “Where’s the rest of the alphabet?” the man said, still keeping his voice even-toned. But he pretended to take the card, read it, and then put it inside his coat.

  “I made soup of it,” Davis said. His blue eyes seemed to twinkle.

  Doctor Faustroll’s dark-brown eyes seemed to reflect the twinkle, and he smiled. He said, “Now, if you’ll be kind enough to conduct us to the ruler of this place, whatever his or her or its names, we will present ourself or perhaps more than one of our selves and will apply for a position or positions.”

  Davis was startled. He said, “What? You don’t know where you are? The guards did not stop you? How did you get by them?”

  Doctor Faustroll indicated an invisible object by his right foot. “We carried ourself through the border in our suitcase. The guards did not see the case. It was midnight and cloudy. Also, they were drowsy.”

  “It must be a very large case to hold you. All of you?”

  “It’s very small, but there’s enough room for us and our conscience,” Doctor Faustroll said. “We take the conscience out of the case only when we intend to use it, which isn’t often, Or when it needs airing.”

  He picked up his grail with one hand and his fishing pole in the other.

  Davis hitched up the towel Velcroed to his waist and then grasped the handle of his own grail. His good humor had vanished. He was getting impatient with the fellow, and he did not want to be late for his appointment with the king.

  Looking serious, he said, “If I were you, I’d get out of this place as quickly and quietly as possible. If you don’t, you’ll be working with those wretched people down there.”

  He pointed at the riverbank. Faustroll turned around to stare at the swarm of sweating, straining, and shouting men and women. Tiny figures at this distance, they were striving to pull or to push a roughly cube-shaped and bungalow-sized block of granite on log rollers into the River. Its forward edge was on two wooden runners, heavily lubricated with fish fat, that dipped into the water.

  “They’re building a pyramid beneath the surface of the River?” Faustroll said.

  “Must you keep up this nonsense?” Davis said. “And why don’t you ask me why I’m giving you this advice to scoot out of here as fast as your feet can carry you? If, that is, you’re able to do so, which I doubt very much.”

  “There is no such thing as nonsense,” Faustroll said. “In fact, what you call nonsense makes greater sense than what you call sense. Or, perhaps, there is no concrete abstraction that we term sense. But, if there is no sense, then there is also no nonsense. We have spoken. Selah.”

  2

  Davis sighed, and he said, “If you don’t mind risking slavery and perhaps torture, come along with me. Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

  They had been standing at the edge of the grass-carpeted plain. Now they trudged up the slope of the foothills. Davis, a red-haired man of medium height and build but with abnormally large hands, led the way. The madman was slower because he was observing the whole milieu. Though the mountains towering straight up to 20,000 feet, the mile-wide foothills, and the mile-wide plains on either side of the mile-wide River were typical of most of the Rivervalley, the human activity was not. Many men and women were cutting away large blocks of stone in the vertical face of the mountains and were sliding the blocks down the foothills. The grass in the path of the very heavy weights was crushed, and the earth had sunk in. But the grass was so tough that it had not died out.

  Near the lower edge of the foothill were extra oak log rollers for moving the blocks across the plain. Halfway along the plain, several crews were pulling on ropes tied around the blocks while gangs shoved against the rear of the blocks. When these got to the River’s edge, they were placed on runners and slid into the water.

  As in most areas, the River was shallow for several yards beyond the banks, which were only a few inches above the River. Then the level bottom abruptly became a cliff. That plunged straight down at least a mile before reaching the cold and lightless bottom in which was a multitude of strange forms of fish.

  Not only was the bank swarming with people, the River itself was jammed with boats small and large. And two gigantic wooden cranes on the bank were close to being completed.

  The other side of the River showed a similar scene. Even as Faustroll watched, a huge stone block on that side slid on runners into the water and disappeared. A huge bubble formed above the roiling water and burst.

  Suddenly, Faustroll caught up with Davis.

  “We don’t leap to quick conclusions,” he said, “or even walk to them. But it seems to us that those workers are trying to fill the River. They’re not having much success at it.”

  “Building a dam,” Davis said. He quickened his pace. “Ivar and that other fool across the River, King Arpad, plan to dam the stream with all those blocks of stone if it takes them a hundred years. Then they’ll be able to keep any boats from slipping through past the guards at night. They’ll also tax the merchant boats going up and down the River past this point. Also, Ivar thinks that he’ll be able to cut through the mountains to the other side of the Valley. He’ll invade the state on the other side and rule it. And the tunnel will be a conduit for trade from the other side. Ivar also has this dream that the tunneling will reveal large deposits of iron.

  “Pride goeth before a fall. He’ll suffer the fate of the arrogant Nimrod, who built the Tower of Babel thinking that he could conquer the hosts of Heaven.”

  “How can they cut granite with flint tools?” Faustroll said.

  “They can’t. But this area was blessed—or cursed—with underground deposits of copper and tin. The only such for thousands of miles either way from here. Ivar and his army of Vikings and Franks grabbed this land three years ago, and that’s why he has bronze tools and weapons.”

  Going up the hill, they heard a loud explosion as rock was blasted with black gunpowder. When they stopped at the top, they heard a loud clanging. Beyond the shallow valley below them was a higher hill on top of which was a large round tower of granite blocks. Circling it at its base was a moat.

  Below the two in the valley were the smithies, the molds, and great chunks of tin- and copper-bearing ore and the round bamboo huts with cone-shaped and leaf-thatched roofs in which the workers lived. The din, heat, and stench rolled over the two men in a nauseating wave.

  “Men have brought Hell from Earth to this fair place,” Faustroll said. “They should be seeking spiritual progress, not material gain and conquest. That, we believe, is why we were placed in this purgatory. Of course, without the science of pataphysics, they won’t get far in their quest.

  “On the other hand, left or right, we don’t know, it may all be accidental. But accidental doesn’t necessarily mean meaningless.”

  Davis snorted his contempt for this remark.

  “And just what is pataphysics?” he said.

  “Our friend and fellow doctor, let us charge through the breach created by our conversation and assault the definition of pataphysics. It is an almost impossible task since it can’t be explained in nonpataphysical terms.

  “Pataphysics is the science of the realm beyond metaphysics. It lies as far beyond the metaphysics as metaphysics lies beyond physics—in one direction or another, or perhaps still another.

  “Pataphysics is the science of the particular, of laws governing exceptions. You follow us so far?”

  Davis only rolled his eyes.

  “Pataphysics, pay attention, this may be the heart of the matter, pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions. But only imaginary solutions are real.”

  Davis gru
nted as if struck a soft blow in the stomach.

  “For pataphysics, all things are equal,” Faustroll continued. “Pataphysics is, in aspect, imperturbable.

  “And this, too, is the heart of the matter, one of them anyway. That is, all things are pataphysical. Yet few people practice pataphysics.”

  “You expect me to understand that?” Davis said.

  “Not at once. Perhaps never. Now, the last castle to be conquered. Beyond pataphysics lies nothing. It is the ultimate defense.”

  “Which means?”

  Faustroll ignored that question. He said, “It allows each man or woman to live his own life as an exception, proving no law but his own.”

  “Anarchy? You’re an anarchist?”

  “Look about you. This world was made for anarchy. We don’t need any government except self-government. Yet men won’t permit us to be anarchists—so far.”

  “Tell this to Ivar,” Davis said. He laughed, then said, “I’d like to see his face when you tell him that.”

  “Ah, but what about the brain behind that face? If he has a brain?”

  “Oh, he has brains! But his motives, man, his motives!”

  They descended the hill and then climbed to the top of the next hill, much steeper and higher than the previous ones. The tower drawbridge was down, but many soldiers were by its outer end. Most of them were playing board games or casting dice carved from fish bones. Some were watching wrestling matches and mock duels. Their conical bronze helmets were fitted with nose- and cheek-pieces. A few wore chain-mail armor made of bronze or interlocking wooden rings. All were armed with daggers and swords and many had spears. Their leather bronze-ringed shields were stacked close by them. The wooden racks by these held yew bows and quivers full of bronze-tipped arrows. Some spoke in Esperanto; others, in barbaric tongues.

  The sentinels at each end of the drawbridge made no effort to stop the two. Davis said, “I’m the royal osteopath to King Ivar. Since you’re with me, they assume you’re not to be challenged.”