Riverworld Anthology - Tales of Riverworld Part 7

I had hoped you might join us, but I see now that's impossible. All I ask now is that you receive my testimony, and understand why we've done what we shall do, why I've led them here....

John reached out and picked up the dragonfish knife, sliding it out of its scabbard. As he did so, a dim, reddish glow was reflected off its sharp, polished-white surface.

Rock must die, John....

He looked around; through the open tent-flaps, he saw a sudden blaze of firelight from the amphitheatre.

You must accept this....

Then he had vanished into the deeper shadows of the night.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l I will," John whispered to the fire. Clutching the knife in his fist; he strode out of the tent.

Already there was shouting from the campsites: cries of surprise, anger, shock, desperation. He could see people emerging from their tents, staring in disbelief at the bonfire that was erupting from the stage area. Now there were new, smaller blazes being set; the backstage shed, the speaker stacks, the sound board, all in turn were being set ablaze by distant cloaked figures who had scaled the stockade walls and were now committing arson on the amphitheatre. Everything was made of wood; once set afire, it would all go up in minutes.

There was a wash of heat against his skin. He could hear Elvis bellowing in rage. Through the trees, he glimpsed audience members moving toward the besieged stage. From somewhere not far off, there was a harsh scream of mortal pain, suddenly cut short as another knife found the pa.s.sive throat of a Second Chancer. "John?" Mary called from somewhere behind him. "John, what's going on?"

John ignored her. Somewhere in the heart of the furnace, Jim was waiting for him, capering with a torch in hand, igniting precious sound-equipment and acoustic baffles and his own crude yet irreplaceable piano. The technology of music, deemed the root of all evil by a group of religious fanatics, was being systematically destroyed.

John took a few more steps into the night. It wouldn't be very difficult to find Jim. He must have known that he would die again before he left Graceland; he had all but told John what he intended to do, and John had attempted to escape the blunt reality of the threat by taking home a sweet little hippie-chick. If you smoke enough pot and f.u.c.k long enough, you can avoid coming to grips with anything. h.e.l.l, when it came down to it, he was a world-cla.s.s champion when it came to avoiding responsibility.

No more. Not when something he loved was being torched.

Mary was still calling his name as he took a few more steps into the darkness, the palm of his hand sweating 98.

against the handle of the knife. Find the f.u.c.ker. Grab him by the neck. Slash his G.o.dd.a.m.n throat...

Do you know who you are? the nameless policeman in the ambulance asked again.

He stopped in his tracks. He felt his knees buckle as he sagged to the ground.

He remembered the Cavern Club. He remembered the Royal Albert Hall. He remembered the first American tour and the groupies who sobbed over a patch of ground he had walked across. He remembered going to India while Epstein was dying. He remembered the final rooftop performance in London with the lads before they called it quits. He remembered falling in love with Yoko. He remembered their bed-in demonstration, and all the other countless protests and demonstrations against war and violence. He remembered Julian's birth, then Scan's. He remembered the one and only time he met Morrison, backstage in Toronto when the Plastic Ono Band and the Doors had been the headliners. He remembered writing a song about how it was permissible to give peace a chance....

"Good Lord," he whispered, "what am I doing?"

He didn't remember dropping the knife. In fact, he didn't remember much else until Keith sat down next to him on the dew-soaked ground, lit up a joint, and offered it to him.

99.

"...with a little help from our friends...""Haven't seen anything like this since we played the pubs, eh, mate?" Keith said dryly.

John looked at the joint and shook his head. "Not exactly the proper sound," Keith went on, "but it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. A-hahaha..."

For once, his laughter was forced. John continued to silently stare at the burning amphitheatre. Firelight reflected off the treetops, silhouetting figures rus.h.i.+ng back and forth past die stage; the air smelled of burning wood. The t.i.tanthrops had managed to muster a bucket brigade from various musicians and standbys, but it didn't look as if it was doing much good. Graceland's amphitheatre was well on its way to becoming history; it would take much more man the King's considerable charisma to rebuild the venue. Keith picked up the knife and toyed with it, almost as if he were considering a quick round of mumblety-peg. "You could have stopped him, y'know," he said quietly.

John looked sharply at him. "I mean," Keith continued, "I saw you two out there having a chat, so I suppose you must have known what was going to happen...."

"Not worth killing him, though."

"Hmm, got a point there. But why didn't you at least let on to the rest of us?"

"Didn't really think he meant it. Not until it was too late." John thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. "Not sure if it would have made any difference. Elvis would have thrown 'im off the island, but that wouldn't have been the end of it. Even if we had stopped him this time, he would have just returned later."

His gaze returned to the flames. "This way, the a.r.s.eholes got what they wanted. They won't be back again."

"Right." Keith stuck the knife into the ground between his legs, then sucked another hit off the joint and offered it again to John. John looked at it for a moment, 100.

then pinched it out of the drummer's fingers. "Well, I suppose it makes a daft sort of sense...."

"You're not going to tell anyone, are you now?"

Keith exhaled and scowled at him. "What do I look like, a narco?" He shook his head. "But what makes you think there's going to be a next time?"

John tsked, letting the joint burn between his fingers. "Here, mate. You should know better than that. You can't kill rock 'n' roll that easy." He looked at the joint again, then stubbed it out on the ground. "I mean, you can ban it from school and burn all the Beatles records and get the holy rollers to carry on about how it's the devil's music and so forth, but it's a tough beast to knock off."

He waved a hand at the bonfire. "So they torch a stage. Big hairy deal. We can always build another. Rock 'n' roll will never die."

"If you say so." Keith picked up the joint again, straightened out the bend in the paper, and carefully relit it. From somewhere far off, they heard another harsh scream. John idly wondered if it was Jim....

"Next time, though," Keith muttered, "you wonder if we can get Elvis to sing?,"

John smiled slyly. "Only if he gives me back my gla.s.ses," he said, watching the smokes and flames rising into the first light of dawn over the endless River.

"Yeah," said Keith. "Right. And me gold tooth..."

"Now don't start with that gold tooth s.h.i.+t again...."

EVERY MAN A G.o.d.

Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg

Selous crept silently down the heavily wooded trail, shooting an occasional glance behind him. He wasn't especially worried; the rustle of the dried leaves and branches would alert him if his pursuer was getting too close.

He came to a small stream, stopped to slake his thirst, then waded halfway across it, turned to his left, and began walking down the middle of it. He continued for a quarter of a mile, then finally climbed out.

The bush was denser on the other side, and he had more difficulty pa.s.sing through it. He looked off into the distance with practised eyes, found the crooked tree that he had spotted before entering the wooded depression, and using it as his landmark, made a large semicircle around the worst of the thornbush.

Eventually he reached the tree. Beyond this, he knew, was a gra.s.sy plain, not large enough to be a savannah, but one that he must nonetheless cross, alone and unarmed. He continuously examined the ground for animal sign, but found none.

He broke through the last of the bush and stood at the101.

102.edge of the plain. The silence was almost tangible: no birds, no monkeys, no grazing animals, not even the hum of insects. He estimated that he could trot across the plain to the safety of the forest beyond it in perhaps three minutes, but he hesitated to present any predators with the sight of a running man, so he began to walk slowly, carefully, his every sense alert.

To his surprise, he made it to the trees without seeing any sign, any indication of life, not even so much as a b.u.t.terfly. For a moment he was plagued with self-doubt: could his bushcraft be deserting him on the strange new world? Then he saw the signs, barely visible: the broken twig, the crushed leaf, the human hair snagged on a low-hanging branch, and he knew he was still on the right trail. Burton had pa.s.sed by here.

Of course, Burton couldn't know that Selous was following him; the latter had awakened on the Riverworld less than a day ago. The two men had met only once, for no more than twenty minutes, in Zanzibar. But when Selous had awakened on the Riverworld and started out to hunt for answers, the few people he had met had mentioned that another Englishman, an explorer, had come this way before him, and by putting together bits and pieces of information he had determined that it was Burton, and had immediately begun tracking him. Separately, the two of them had opened up half of Africa; together, they might find some way to solve the mysteries of the Riverworld.

And yet, during the past three hours, he had become aware that while he was tracking Burton, someone else was tracking him. It could be friend, it could be foe-but alone and unarmed as he was, he had no intention of remaining an easy or a stationary target if it was a foe.103.He'd meet his pursuer, but he'd do it under conditions of his own making.

He walked another mile, constantly alert, still unwilling to believe that such a primitive, untouched forest was totally devoid of animal life. Finally he slowed his pace. The trees were thinning out, and if he was going to lay a trap, there was no guarantee that he would find any better place for it up ahead.

He took the rope he had woven, sought out a st.u.r.dy tree with a branch that overhung the trail he was blazing, and slung the rope over it. He manipulated it to the edge of the branch and used his weight to pull the branch down to where he could reach and position it. Next he secured one end of the rope to the bole of the tree, being careful to make it invisible to anyone approaching from the direction he had just come. Then he set the trap, covering the loop with leaves and small sticks.

Not satisfied, he found some large fallen branches and positioned them carefully and naturalistically along the approach, so that the trail narrowed gradually and his prey would have to set one or both feet inside the prescribed circle.

Finally he stood back to examine his handiwork. It would never fool a leopard, that most cautious of animals, but he could think of no other living thing, including a human, that would notice a single twig out of place. He was a hunter, not a trapper, and he missed the heft and feel of his rifle in his hands, but he'd spent too many years in the bush not to take careful notice of how those natives who didn't own rifles, and probably would use them like clubs if they had possessed them, trapped animals for the pot.

For a moment he wished his friend Theodore were104.there with him. Bushcraft got you just so far, and then, even in the midst of the bush, you found that you needed statecraft even more. And n.o.body could charm a crowd, be they Republican, Democrat, British or Maasai, like Roosevelt.

Selous thought back to the last time he had seen him. It had been just eight years ago-or was it eight millennia? -that he had arranged the first professional safari in the history of the continent, and had inadvertently created an enormous new business, when he had hired hunters, trackers, skinners, porters, chefs, and camp boys-five hundred of them in all-for the ex-President's African hunting trip.

Then Roosevelt had gone back to run for the presidency again, and the Great War had started, and though he was in his sixties and had spent most of the past forty years in the bush, he was still British to the core, and had immediately volunteered to put a regiment together to drive the Hun out of Tanganyika.

Yes, it was all coming back to him now. Taking his men across the border, then rafting down the Rufiji River. The battles, the victories. And then, from nowhere, as he sat taking breakfast before his tent, the German bullet slamming home in his throat. He had tried to cry out, but had choked on his own blood.

He had always expected to die in Africa, perhaps beneath the claws of a lion or on the tusks of an elephant, perhaps of some tropical disease, possibly in the midst of battle against the Hun. But to die like this, sitting and sipping his tea...

Now he remembered what he was trying to scream: "Pointless! Pointless!"

For a man's life to mean something, his death also had105.to have meaning, and it was as if the war and the German bullet had conspired to rob his life of its meaning. What mattered the books he had written, what mattered his slow conversion from hunter to ecologist to conservationist, what mattered his service to the Empire, if the ultimate act of his life was to clutch at his throat while spitting out a mouthful of tea and blood? His life read like a book that built to a climax, and then, on the last page, turned into a farce. Maybe this new land, this Riverworld, was created to give him a second chance, and as his hand gingerly sought the wound that no longer existed, he silently resolved not to botch it.

Suddenly he heard the sharp crack! of a small branch being broken, and he was once more the hunter. He melted silently into the bush, waiting as his pursuer walked closer and closer to what he now thought of as the killing ground, then crouched down and waited with the terrible patience of one of the predators he had hunted so often.

The footsteps came closer, and he resisted the urge to peek through the bushes to determine the nature of his pursuer. That would be made clear in less than a minute, unless he did something foolish to give his position away, and he hadn't lived into his seventh decade by being foolish.

Thirty more meters, Selous estimated. Now twenty, now ten, now- "What's going on?" demanded an outraged voice. "Put me down this instant!"

Selous leaped out of his concealment, and found that his trap had netted a blond white man, who now hung upside down, one foot suspended by the makes.h.i.+ft la.s.so.106."Who are you, and why are you following me?" replied Selous.

"Who do I look like, fool?" snarled the man.

"You look like a man who is in no position to make demands," replied Selous.

"Man?" shrieked his prisoner. "Do you not recognise a G.o.d when you have captured one?"

Huey Long looked at Beethoven and thought, Oh, you sly b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You are more cunning than I would have ever thought-but you're closed in here too, aren't you? It's no different for you than for me.

Around them as they slogged their way from the city to me plains, the struggling forms of the rednecks-that was how he thought of them, anyway-seemed to rise and fall in the mud, clamouring at him to get moving, get back, get out of there. Or maybe Huey had made it all up in his head, maybe they were saying nothing at all. Maybe there were no rednecks, and he was hallucinating the whole bunch of them. Maybe this was all just some ghastly dream and he was lying on his back in the capitol building, the judge's slugs in his belly, his blood streaming away, the people weeping as they carried him off. Maybe he would wake up in a white room with tubes running hi and out of his head, and all this would be behind him.

Beethoven seemed real enough, though. Stolid Germanic fellow, five feet six, solid build, pustules all up and down his cheeks.

Huey kept on moving, stretching, rocking, easing back and forth in the mud, making small progress in the pelting rain, the rednecks in the distance cheering him on (or so he would like to think).107.It was a real b.i.t.c.h, a down-home Sat.u.r.day-night fish-fry son of a b.i.t.c.h, slogging through all this mud, with this Beethoven stuck next to him, matching him stride for stride. It's a long way from the capital to here, and a longer way back, he thought.

But nothing could be done about it. It had been Beethoven's idea to quit the city. That made some sense to him: there was certainly no reason to hang around there, fighting for food, fighting even harder for attention, trying to clear some s.p.a.ce among the mottled hordes, all of whom wanted him dead. (That was the conviction that had come over Huey in this place, an insight that he trusted, had relied upon from the immediacy of old experience: there people were so caught up with themselves that they could kill him.) If Beethoven wanted to get out, that was all right with Huey Long. Beethoven had his reasons, Long had others, but the idea was to put distance between themselves and the rest of them.

Oh, he wished he could get rid of this character too, but Beethoven had fixed him with those s.h.i.+ning eyes, those deep, yearning, Boss-obsessed eyes that Huey Long could understand, having seen them at a thousand rallies.

"There is no emperor," Beethoven had said. "I thought he was there, but I was wrong."

Well, that was all right with Huey. There were no emperors in America either, not with every man a king. Every man a king: it had gotten him this far. It would get him farther still.

"The emperor is dead," Beethoven had said again. "Everyone is dead, everything is dead. That must be the only explanation. That is why we are here. In death there108.is nothing but betrayal. Of course, I saw that in the Missa Solemnis, that solemn ma.s.s. By the end, deaf and crazy, I could see through to the bottom of it all. I'm not deaf here, though; I am filled with sound and light, but for no purpose. There is no emperor."

"You're wrong," Huey had lied. "Sometimes there is an emperor."

Anything to pacify, to jolt Beethoven from those strange and sullen rages that would overtake the man. Meanwhile, you kept on going, regardless of the company you kept. The Boss still had his plans. Give him a break, give him an even chance at this fish-fry, and he would find a way to make it work for him. Getting out of the city was a decent enough first step. It wasn't so much a city as an encampment anyway. Beethoven had called it a city, but that was wrong, really, a different terminology from a different time and place.

All right, he said to himself: just keep moving.

"Pfui!" spat Beethoven.

It was strange how Huey could understand some German monosyllables and not others, how Beethoven's language wavered back and forth between foreigner talk and understandable Esperanto. It was yet another thing that was just too complicated for him, something that he didn't need to talk about, didn't want to consider.

"The emperor betrayed me," said Beethoven. "First he, and then the others. All of them. And they left us here to deal with that betrayal."

"You seem to be a little bit wound up, son," said Huey. "You should calm down a little."

"We need a new start," said Beethoven. "That was what they had promised, what I was looking for. But how109.can there be a new start when it is all da capo again and again and no fine!"

"I don't understand you," said Huey, not unkindly. "I can follow some of your talk, but not all of it." He paused, trying to find some common ground. "This is pretty shoddy goods for me too, you know. One moment I'm walking through the capitol building and the next I have a slug in my heart that hurts like an explosion, like a firecracker lifting your b.a.l.l.s to heaven, and I'm looking up at that d.a.m.ned ceiling, and then I wake up here. That isn't too easy, you know. It wasn't easy for you, I know-I was killed, son. I was murdered-a.s.sa.s.sinated. They killed me because they knew I was going to be the next president." He paused for breath. "That's a h.e.l.l of a transition to make, you know, from being maybe the next president to waking up in this stinking place. It is a strange, strange business."

Oh, he could go on if he wanted. The old talent was still there, the line of language that he could unreel, turn out there to fend for itself in that nest of the world. Every man a king, and me their president, he reflected. Even Beethoven seemed awed, seemed to shut up at last, and backed away from him.

Huey smiled a secret smile. Going on and on in the Senate, opening up, filibustering from the Const.i.tution of the United States, his favourite doc.u.ment, the greatest doc.u.ment hi the history of the world, something that could make Huey cry with its coiled language and beauty of intention if he thought about it, going on and on like that with the can strapped to his thigh so that he could p.i.s.s right in the middle of a speech without having to leave the floor, break the filibuster-that was finding a new dimension for the meaning of the word "talk." If he110.considered the truth of it, it was much more difficult and challenging than anything that had happened to him here. This little bit of carrying on he had done on the Riverworld was for nothing, was little more than a practice shot in a small hall. The real stuff had been what he had managed hi the Senate and on the campaign trail. Yes, he had been a wonder in his age, that was for G.o.dd.a.m.ned sure. Then he had gotten gut-shot on the floor of the capitol, and now here he was.

Except now there was no one to listen or give a d.a.m.n. Everyone here, even the pretty women, the models and the fifty-dollar-a-night hookers whom he could tell right away, all of them had troubles, big troubles, and pretty much the same ones at that.

For one thing, they were all dead. They had closed their eyes and given up the ghost gently or in some violent manner, and the next thing they knew they had come to consciousness in this stinking place with a million other troops. That was a h.e.l.l of a trauma, and it seemed to be pretty much the general condition of the place-and you had to understand that, grant everybody a little weight on that basis alone. Apparently the only way you made it here was to die, which was one h.e.l.l of a thing.

"You know I'm right," said Beethoven. He was back to talking again. He produced one of his filmy handkerchiefs from some inner pocket, wiped his streaming forehead in the style of his period, and offered it to Huey in a friendly way.

Huey shook his head disgustedly. Pfui was the word, all right, it pretty well summed it up.

"Forget it," he said. "I don't want it. It's not necessary."

Nothing like this, nothing, never in the history of the111.world, that was what he thought now. He remembered standing on the shoulders of the bayou, battling his fear of alligators while half expecting the beasts to crawl from the swamp and swallow his ankles, all the time trying to keep the crowds at bay. That was one thing-but this, this was infinitely another. It was amazing how you could feel that your experience had prepared you to deal with a whole range of activity, and then it turned out that the experience was of no use whatsoever. In actual point of fact, he was counting on Beethoven more than the composer was relying on him. None of this made it any easier to take when the German seized his elbow, dragged him to a halt, and fixed him with s.h.i.+ning eyes. "Listen!" said Beethoven. "Do you hear them?"

"All right," said Selous, cutting the pale blond man down. "Why have you been following me?"

"I owe you no answer, mortal," said the man, rubbing some life back into his leg.

"What makes you think you're a G.o.d?"