He wondered if that was what she had looked like when an infant. What had erased that sweetness, that goodness?
Then she turned her head and said, “What in hell are you staring at, you lascivious lout?”
Davis sighed, relishing the moment when he had pitied her because of her lost innocence. And he said, “Not much.”
“You may think you can talk to me like that because of the situation,” she said. “But I won’t forget this.”
“Your Majesty is like King Louis XIV of France, of whom someone said that he never forgot anything,” he said. He added, under his breath, “And who also said that he never learned anything.”
“What?”
Most un-Christian of me, Davis thought. Why can’t I learn to turn the other cheek? I should have said nothing to her. The silence of the martyrs.
Later, Ivar transferred the four men from the rear boat to his. By late morning, the lead boat in Thorfinn’s fleet was far ahead of the rest of the pack. An hour before high noon, it was within arrow range of Ivar’s craft. Ivar turned his vessel around, picked off seven men with his arrows, rammed the enemy, and then boarded him. Davis and Faustroll sat in the boat while the battle raged. Ann Pullen used her woman’s bow to wound several men. Whatever she may be, Davis thought, she has courage. But I hope she doesn’t turn around and shoot me, too.
Ivar lost six men but killed all of the enemy except those who jumped into the River. Thorfinn’s other boats were still out of sight. Ivar took over the enemy’s vessel and abandoned his own. He and his crew sailed on while they sang merrily.
By the time they got near to Sigurd’s realm, they had passed through at least forty waking nightmares. Or so it seemed to Davis, though the Norse obviously enjoyed it. There was one fight after another and one flight after another. The states for hundreds of miles up-River from Ivar’s ex-kingdom and probably down-River, too, were in a state of bloody flux. The invasions of Ivar’s land seemed to have had a violent wave effect on others, none of which was very stable. Slaves were revolting, and kings and queens were trying to take advantage of the deteriorating situations to attack each other. Davis believed that only this semi-anarchy enabled Ivar’s fleet to get this far. Even so, all but four vessels of the original fleet had been sunk or abandoned. The survivors had lived chiefly on the fish they trolled for while sailing up-River. Now and then, they had been allowed to go ashore and fill their grails. But even when the people seemed peaceful and cooperative, the Vikings were nervous. Behind the smiles of their hosts might be plans to seize the guests as slaves.
“Oh, Lord,” Davis prayed, “I beseech you, stop this killing, torturing, robbing, and raping, the heartbreak and the pain, the hatred and viciousness. How long must this go on?”
As long as men permit themselves to do all the horrible deeds, he thought, God wasn’t going to interfere. But, if He didn’t, then He had a good purpose in His mind.
A few hours past dawn, the fleet arrived at Sigurd’s kingdom. Or what had been his. It was obvious that it, too, had been torn apart by the strife that seemed to have been carried by the wind. Men and women capered drunkenly while waving weapons and severed heads. Most of the bamboo huts and wooden buildings were blazing, and bodies lay everywhere. As the fleet drew near the bank, a horde climbed into boats and began paddling or rowing toward Ivar’s boats.
“Who are they?” Ivar said. Then, “It doesn’t matter. Sail on!”
“What about your brother?” Davis said.
“He may have escaped. I hope so. Whatever happened to him, I can’t save him. We are too few.”
After that, he was silent for many hours, pacing back and forth on the small afterdeck. He frowned much, and, several times, he smote his breast with an open hand. Once, he startled all on his boats when he threw his head back and howled long and mournfully.
Bjorn the Rough-footed, standing near Davis, shivered and made the sign of Thor’s hammer. “The cry of the great wolf Fenris himself comes from his throat,” he said. “Ivar acts as if he’s about to go berserk! Get ready to defend yourself! Better yet, jump into the River!”
But Ivar quit howling, and he stared around as if he had suddenly been transported here from a million miles away. Then he strode to the forward end of the deck, and he called down.
“Osteopath! Clown! Come up here!”
Reluctantly, knowing that the Dane’s actions could never be predicted and were often to be dreaded, Davis went up the short ladder with Faustroll. Both halted several feet away from Ivar. Davis did not know what Faustroll was thinking, but he himself was prepared to follow Bjorn’s advice.
Ivar looked down at them, his face working with some unreadable expression.
“You two are of lowly rank, but I’ve observed that even a slave may have more brains than his master. I’ve heard you speak of your quests, the spirit of which I admit I don’t quite understand. But you’ve intrigued me. Especially when you spoke about the futility and emptiness of always striving to gain more land, more property, and more power. You may be right. I really don’t know. But, a few minutes ago, I was seized by some spirit. Perhaps I was touched by whatever god made us, the unknown and nameless god. Whatever strange thing happened, I suddenly felt emptied, my mind and blood pouring out of me. That terrible feeling was quickly gone, and I saw the sense in your wisdom, I also was overwhelmed, for a moment, with the uselessness of all I had done. I saw the weariness of forever fighting to get power and then fighting to keep it or to get even more power. Glory seems golden. But it’s really leaden.”
He smiled at them, then looked past them toward the north. When he resumed talking, he kept on staring past them. It was as if, Davis thought, Ivar was envisioning something really glorious.
Faustroll murmured softly. “He sees, however dimly, the junction point of zero and infinity.”
Davis did not speak, because Ivar was glaring at him and the Frenchman. When Ivar spoke, he wanted your complete attention, no interruptions. But Davis thought, No, it’s not that, whatever that means. It’s … can’t remember the Greek theological term … it means a sudden and totally unexpected reversal—a flipflop—of spirit. Like the reversal of attitude and of goal that Paul of Tarsus experienced on the road to Damascus … he had been fanatically persecuting the Christians … the great light came even as he was plotting death for all Christians … he fell paralyzed for a while … when he arose, he had become a zealous disciple of Christ. Sudden, unexpected, unpredictable by anyone. Your spirit, hastening you toward the South Pole, turns you around without your will and shoots you toward the North Pole. There were records of similar mystical or psychological reversals of spirit.
He felt awed. It was several seconds before the cold prickling of his skin faded away.
However, he reminded himself, this sudden turnabout was not always for the good. Though it was rare, a flipflop from good to evil occurred. As if Satan, imitating God, also touched a man with his spirit.
“The god did not speak with words,” Ivar said. “But he did not have to do so. He said that I should go up the River until I came to its source, no matter how far away that is. There I will find a Power beyond power.”
“Always power,” Faustroll murmured. He spoke so softly that Davis could barely hear him, and Davis was sure than Ivar could not.
“You, kneader of sore flesh, and you, the mocker of all that men hold to be good sense,” Ivar said, “also have your quests. One wants to find the baby born of a virgin. The other hopes to find the truth that has eluded all men from the birth of mankind.”
He paused, then said, “Though you are no warriors and have some strange attitudes, you may be the kind of companions I need for the long journey. What do you say?”
His tone implied that he was condescending to give the invitation. Yet he intended it as a compliment.
Faustroll said, “King Ubu and his two fools looking for the Holy Grail? Ah, well, I will be pleased to go with you.”
Davis did not hesitate. He said, “
Why not? Perhaps we are all seeking the same thing. Or, if we’re not, we’ll find the same thing.”
Author’s Note:
It’s obvious that the adventures of these three will continue and be concluded in volume 2 of the Riverworld shared-world anthology.
I have a strong sense of historical continuity that was strengthened while I was researching into my genealogy. As of this moment, I have 275 confirmed American ancestors and several thousand European ancestors. So, I thought, why not use some on the Riverworld, where everyone who has lived and died now lives? And I did so.
Thus, every named character in this story, except for Faustroll (Alfred Jarry) and Sharkko, is a direct ancestor of mine. Doctor Andrew P. Davis is my great-great-grandfather (1835–1919). He was an extraordinary man, an eccentric, a quester after the truth, and an innovator. Ann Pullen is my nine-times-great-grandmother. She was, according to the court records, a real hellraiser, spitfire, and liberated woman in an age when it was dangerous for a woman to be so. As for my remote forebears, Ivar the Boneless and the other Viking men and women herein, their living descendants as of 1991 would number many millions. It’s reasonable to assume that at least three-quarters or more of my readers will be descended from them.
The Source of the River
First published in Moebius Trip Library’s SF Echo, Number 22, April 1975 where it was titled “Some Comments.”
Editor’s Note: “The Source of the River” is Philip José Farmer’s response to an article1 pointing out the influence of Sir Richard Burton’s The Kasidah on To Your Scattered Bodies Go, part of the Riverworld series. Farmer’s interest in Sufism can be seen not just in the Riverworld stories but elsewhere in his work as well, and in this essay the author discusses the growth of his respect for and understanding of Sufism as the Riverworld concept evolved.
After 25 years, it’s difficult for me to remember exactly what the genesis of the Riverworld series was. But Mr. Hagarn’s article caused me to probe back to 1952, when I first conceived and wrote the original, Owe for a River (also tentatively titled Owe for the Flesh—Editor). This was 150,000 words long, written in a month to make the deadline for the Shasta Pocket Books Fantasy Award Contest (or something like that). The story of what happened to it is much like that of the novel Frigate wrote for Sharkko’s contest in To Your Scattered Bodies Go.
Actually, though “Sharkko” did not mean to do so, he did me a great favor by ripping me off. I put the novel aside since, in those days, there seemed to be no market for it. Years later, I sent it to Fred Pohl, editor of Galaxy, If, Worlds of Wonder, and he suggested that the theme was too big to put into one book. So I started to rewrite it as a series. I’d changed considerably during the interim, and so the Riverworld concept had also changed somewhat. And the direction it’s been taking has changed while I’ve been rewriting it.
As I remember it, I got the basic idea while reading John Kendrick Bangs’ A Houseboat on the Styx (1895, Harper). This takes place in the afterworld; most of the action occurs on a houseboat in which a number of famous people live: Shakespeare, Homer, Ben Jonson, Sam Johnson, Nero et al. Mark Twain, however, has his own boat, a paddlewheeler. He also has it made. As he travels along, the river is literally created in front of him, so that he has a neverending continuously new Mississippi before him. He can’t run out of river.
Houseboat is sheer fantasy. But the idea sparked a science-fiction novel. I constructed a world on which a ten or twenty million-mile river covered an entire earth-sized planet. Not only that, it supported all of humanity and subhumanity from about 2,000,000 B.C. through A.D. 2008. Or at least, it seemed to do so. I drew a number of maps of the Riverworld, some of which are still in my files.
At this time, I had started reading books about and by Burton (I have a pretty good collection of Burton, though it’s not complete). I’d read the Kasîdah, of course, and this, as I remember it, was my second spark of inspiration. The two, Bangs’ description of Twain and his never-ending river and the Kasîdah, fused together and I was off. Not for long. I was called back to the starting blocks and the gun didn’t sound the signal again until about 1965.
It’s not easy now to separate my own philosophy and Burtons in the writing of the original novel. I may have directly used some of the Kasîdahs concepts and attitudes of mind. Or I may just have found some of my own concepts and attitudes reinforced when I read the poem.
What I do know is that I was far from fully understanding the poem. It’s Sufistic, and at that time I didnt know much about Sufism. Very little, in fact. There wasn’t much available about it, not to me, anyway.
It seemed then like a poem influenced by Fitzgerald’s translation of Khayyam’s Rubiyat And inferior. Of course, I knew that Burton had written it years before Fitzgerald did his translation. But it still sounded like an imitation.
I did not know then that Fitzgerald’s work was a perversion of the original, that he misunderstood completely its esoteric references, that he was far from being fluent in Persian. What he did was to force a 12th-century Iranian mystics poetry into a mid-Victorian agnostic form.
Burton, in addition to being well versed in the Persian language, history, and customs, was also a Sufi. At least, he claimed to be, though I have doubts that he was a genuine Sufi. But, intellectually, he knew the history of the Sufis, what they stood for, what their goals were. And he undoubtedly had come into frequent and intimate contact with many of The Woollen Ones. He may have passed through the early stages on the road to the final stage.
In recent years, many books on Sufism have become available, and I know more about it than I did in 1952. I’ve become very interested in it, though my appreciation of it is mostly intellectual, and that’s far from being enough. I’ve reread the Kasîdah with much more understanding of it. This will be reflected in the third of the series, Alice on the Riverworld. (For those interested, this should come out sometime in 19762.)
To conclude, Randy Hagan has an interesting theory. I can’t remember accurately what the influences of the Kasîdah were; too long a time has passed for me to be able to sift the unconscious from the conscious inspirations. What I do know is that the next Riverworld novel will be based on conscious influences. Or will it?
(If anyone would like to read a good book on Sufism, try The Sufis, Idries Shah, Anchor Books Edition, paperback.)
1By Randy Hagan, in Moebius Trip Library’s SF Echo, Number 22, April 1975.
2 Published as The Dark Design
Acknowledgments
“Riverworld,” copyright © 1979 by Philip José Farmer. Portions of “Riverworld” appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow, January 1966, and in the Philip José Farmer collection DOWN IN THE BLACK GANG, Signet Books, October 1971.
“J.C. on the Dude Ranch,” copyright © 1979 by Philip José Farmer.
“The Volcano,” copyright © 1976 by Philip José Farmer.
“The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol,” copyright © 1977 by Philip José Farmer, first appeared in Playboy magazine.
“The Problem of the Sore Bridge—Among Others,” copyright © 1975 by Philip José Farmer.
“Brass and Gold,” copyright © 1971 by Coronet Communications, appeared in Quark/4.
“The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod,” copyright © 1968 by Philip José Farmer.
“The Voice of the Sonar in My Vermiform Appendix,” copyright© 1971 by Coronet Communications, appeared in Quark/2.
“Monolog,” copyright © 1973 by Philip José Farmer.
“The Leaser of Two Evils,” copyright © 1979 by Philip José Farmer, first appeared in Playboy magazine.
“The Phantom of the Sewers,” copyright © 1978 by Philip José Farmer.
“Crossing the Dark River,” copyright © 1992 by Philip José Farmer.
“Up the Bright River,” copyright © 1993 by Philip José Farmer.
“The Source of the River,” copyright © 1975 by Philip José Farmer.
About the Author
Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) was bor
n in North Terre Haute, Indiana, and grew up in Peoria, Illinois. A voracious reader, Farmer decided in the fourth grade that he wanted to become a writer. For a number of years he worked as a technical writer to pay the bills while writing. Science fiction allowed him to apply his knowledge and passion for history, anthropology, and the other sciences to works of mind-boggling originality and scope.
His early novella “The Lovers,” published in 1952, earned him the Hugo Award as “most promising new writer,” and he won a second Hugo, as well as the Nebula Award, for the 1967 novella “Riders of the Purple Wage,” a prophetic literary satire about a futuristic, cradle-to-grave welfare state. His best-known works include the Riverworld books, the World of Tiers series, the Dayworld trilogy, and literary pastiches of such fictional pulp characters as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. He was one of the first writers to mash-up these characters and their origin stories into wholly new works. His short fiction is also highly regarded.
Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2001, and the Science Fiction Writers of America named him the 19th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in the same year.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1979 by Philip José Farmer
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4609-1
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
Riverworld and Other Stories Page 36
