The Fabulous Riverboat (14 page)

But Arthur had sent emissaries demanding that John be given up to him. These demands had been rejected, of course, though only Sam's sense of honor and his fear of John kept him from agreeing to Arthur's demands.

Now John had sent four men to assassinate Arthur. Two had been killed; the others had escaped with minor wounds. This would mean invasion. Arthur not only had wanted revenge on John, he would like to get possession of the meteorite iron.

Between Parolando and New Brittany, a fourteen-mile stretch of the right bank of The River was known as Chernsky's Land, or in Esperanto, Cernskujo. Chernsky, a sixteenth-century Ukrainian cavalry colonel, had refused an alliance with Arthur. But the nation immediately to New Brittany's north was governed by Iyeyasu. He was a powerful and ambitious person, the man who had established the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600 with its capital at Yedo, later called Tokyo. Sam's spies said that the Japanese and the Breton had met six times in a war conference.

Moreover, just to the north of Iyeyasujo was Kleomanujo. This was governed by Cleomenes, a king of Sparta and half-brother to that Leonidas who held the pass at Thermoplyae. Cleomenes had met three times with Iyeyasu and Arthur.

Just south of Parolando was an eleven-mile stretch called Publia, after its king, Publius Crassus. Publius had been an officer in Caesar's cavalry during the Gallic campaigns. He was inclined to be friendly, although he extracted a big price for letting Sam cut down his timber.

South of Publia was Tifonujo, ruled by Tai Fung, one of Kublai Khan's captains, killed on Earth when he fell drunk off a horse.

And south of Tifonujo was Soul City, headed by Elwood Hacking and Milton Firebrass.

Sam stopped and glared from under bushy brows at Grevel. "The hell of it, Bill, is there isn't much I can do. If I tell John I know about his trying to murder Arthur, who may deserve murder, for all I know, then John knows that I've got spies inside the house. And he'll just deny everything, ask that I bring his accusers forth—and you know what would happen to them, to you." Grevel paled.

Sam said, "Start your blood running again, I won't do it. No. The only thing to do is to keep quiet and watch for developments. But I'm choking up to here with keeping quiet. That man is the most despicable I ever met—and if you knew my vast range of acquaintances, including publishers, you would feel the depth of my words."

"John could be a tax-collector," Grevel said, as if he had plumbed the depths of insult. And he had, for him.

"It was a bad day when I had to agree to take John on as a partner," Sam muttered, blowing out smoke as he turned toward Grevel. "But if I hadn't taken him in, I'd have been robbed of my chance at the iron."

He dismissed Grevel after thanking him. The skies just above the mountains across The River were red. Soon the entire vault would be rosy on the edges and blue above, but it would be some tune before the sun cleared the mountain. Before then, the grailstones would be discharging

He washed his face in a basin, combed his thick bush of reddish hair straight back, applied the toothpaste with the tip of his finger to his teeth and gums, and spat. Then he fastened a belt with four sheaths and a bag dangling from a strap and put it around his waist. He placed a long towel around his shoulders as a cape, picked up a cane of oak shod with iron and, with the other hand, picked up the grail. He went down the stairs. The grass was still wet. It rained every night at three o'clock for a half hour, and the valley did not dry until after the sun came up. If it were not for the absence of disease germs and viruses, half the valley's humans would have died of pneumonia and flu long ago.

Sam was young and vigorous again, but he still did not like to exercise. As he walked, he thought of the little railway he would like to build from his house to the edge of The River. But that would be too restrictive. Why not build an automobile with a motor that burned wood alcohol?

People began joining him: he was kept busy with "Saluton!" and "Bonan Matenon!" At the end of his walk, he gave his grail to a man to put on a depression on the top of the gray granite mushrooms-shaped rock. About six hundred of the gray cylinders were placed in the depression, and the crowd retreated to a respectful distance. Fifteen minutes later, the rock erupted with a roar. Blue flames soared twenty-five feet high and thunder echoed from the mountain. The appointed grail keepers for the day got onto the rock and passed the cylinders around. Sam took his back to the pilothouse, wondering on the way why he did not delegate someone to carry his grail down for him. The truth was, a man was so dependent on the grail, he just could not trust it out of his sight.

Back in the house, he opened the lid. In six containers in snapdown racks were breakfast and various goodies.

The grail had a false bottom in which was concealed an energy-matter converter and programmed menus. This morning he got bacon and eggs, toast with butter and jam, a glass of milk, a slice of cantaloupe, ten cigarettes, a marihuana stick, a cube of dreamgum, a cigar, and a cup of some delicious liqueur.

He settled down to eat with gusto and got, instead, a. bad taste. Looking out through the starboard port (so he wouldn't see into Cyrano's door), he saw a youth on his knees before his hut. The fellow was praying, his eyes closed, his hands church-steepled. He wore only a kilt and a spiral bone from a Riverfish suspended by a leather string around his neck. His hair was dark blond, his face was broad, and his body was muscular. But his ribs were beginning to show. The praying man was Hermann Goring.

Sam swore and reared up from his chair, knocking it backward, picked it up and moved his breakfast from his desk to the big round table in the center of the room. The fellow had spoiled his appetite more than once. If there was one thing Sam could not stand, it was an ex-sinner, and Hermann Goring had sinned more than most and was now, by way of compensation, holier than most. Or so it seemed to Sam, though Goring claimed that he was the lowliest of the low—in a sense.

Take your damned arrogant humility away, Sam had said. Or at least take it downwind...

If it had not been for the Magna Carta which Sam had drawn up (over King John's protests, thus repeating history), Sam would have kicked Goring and his followers out long ago. Well, at least a week ago. But the Carta, the constitution of the state of Parolando, the most democratic constitution in the history of mankind, gave total religious freedom and total freedom of speech. Almost total, anyway. There had to be some limitations.

But his own document forbade Sam to stop the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chances from preaching.

Yet if Goring continued to protest, to make speeches, to convert more to his doctrine of pacifist resistance, Sam Clemens would never get his Riverboat. Hermann Goring had made a symbol of the boat; he said that it represented man's vanity, greed, lust for violence, and disregard of the Creator's designs for the world of man.

Man should not build riverboats. He should build more stately mansions of the soul. All man needed now was a roof over his head to keep off the rain and thin walls for a little privacy now and then. Man no longer had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. His food and drink were given to him with nothing expected in return, not even gratitude. Man had tune to determine his destiny. But man must not transgress on others, not rob them of their possessions, their love or their dignity. He must respect others and himself. But he could not do this through thievery, robbery, violence, contempt. He must...

Sam turned away. Goring had some fine sentiments to which Sam subscribed. But Goring was wrong if he thought that licking the boots of the people who had put them here was going to lead to any Utopia or salvation for their souls. Humanity had been tricked again; it was being used, misused and abused. Everything, the resurrection, the rejuvenation, freedom from disease, free food and liquor and smokes, freedom from hard work or economic necessity, everything was an illusion, a candy bar to lead baby-mankind into some dark alley where... Where? Sam did not know. But the Mysterious Stranger had said that mankind was being tricked in the cruelest hoax of all, even crueler than the first hoax, that of life on Earth. Man had been resurrected and put on this planet as the subject of a tremendous scholarly study. That was all. And when the studies were completed, Man would go down into darkness and oblivion once more. Cheated again.

But what did the Stranger have to gain by telling this to certain selected men? Why had he chosen a small number to help him defeat his fellow Ethicals? What was the Stranger really after? Was he lying to Sam and Cyrano and Odysseus and the others whom Sam had not yet met?

Sam Clemens did not know. He was as much in The Great Dark as he had been on Earth. But he did know one thing for certain. He wanted that Riverboat.

The mists had cleared away; breakfast time was over. He checked the water clock and rang the big bell on the pilothouse. As soon as it had ceased tolling, the wooden whistles of the sergeants began shrilling. Up and down the ten-mile stretch of the Rivervalley known as Parolando the whistles shrilled. Then the drums began to beat, and Parolando went to work.

There were 1,000 people in Parolando, but the Riverboat would be taking only one hundred and twenty. Twenty of these already knew for sure they would be going. Sam and Joe Miller, Lothar von Richthofen, Van Boom, de Bergerac, Odysseus, three engineers, King John, and their hutmates had been promised. The rest would know whether or not they had worked for nothing a few days before the boat sailed. At that time, the names would be written on slips of paper and placed inside a big wire cage. The cage would be whirled around and around, and then Sam would stop it, and, blindfolded, would reach in and pull out, one after the other, one hundred names. And these lucky ones would be the crew of the Not For Hire.

The Not For Hire had about 5,000,000 miles to travel, if the Stranger could be believed. Averaging about 335 miles every twenty-four hours, it would take over fortyone years to reach the end of The River. But it would not average that much, of course. The crew would have to put into shore for extensive vacations on land and repairs would have to be made. In fact, the Riverboat might wear out, although Sam planned on taking many spare parts. Once the boat was on its way it could not put back for parts or pick them up anywhere else. There would be no metal of any consequence from this place on.

It was strange to think that he would be about one hundred and forty years old when he got to the headwaters of The River.

But what was that when he had thousands of years of youth to go?

He looked through the bow ports. The plain was full of people streaming down from the hills to the factories. Behind him the hills would be alive with others on their way to the factories in the hills. A small army would be working on the big dam to the northwest, near the base of the mountains. A concrete wall was being constructed between two steep hills to dam up the water flowing from a spring near the top of the mountain. When the lake behind the dam was full, its overflow would drive electrical generators to power the mills.

At present, the electrical energy needed came from a grailstone. A giant stepdown transformer of aluminum took the energy three times a day, sent it through brobdingnagian aluminum wires to a two-story device known as the batacitor. This was a late-twentieth-century electronic discovery that could accept hundreds of kilovolts in a hundredth of a microsecond and could discharge it at any rate from a tenth of a volt to one hundred kilovolts. It was the prototype of the batacitor that would be put on the Riverboat. At present the energy was chiefly used in a cutting device made by van Boom that sliced through the pieces of nickel-iron dug up on the plain. The energy could also be moderated to melt the metal. The aluminum for the wires and the batacitor had been laboriously and expensively made from aluminum silicate derived from the clay under the grass along the base of the mountains. But that supply had run out and now the only economically feasible source was in Soul City.

Sam sat down at his desk, pulled out a drawer and removed a tall book bound in fish-bladder leather and with pages of bamboo-fiber paper. It was his diary, The Memoirs of a Lazarus. For the time being he was using ink made of water and tannic acid from oak bark and of carbon from finely ground charcoal-in-suspension to write down day-by-day happenings and his reflections. When the technology of Parolando was improved enough, he would use the electronic recorder that van Boom had promised him.

He had no sooner started writing than the drums began beating. The big bass drums represented dashes; the small soprano drums, dots. The code was Morse; the language, Esperanto. Von Richthofen would be landing in a few minutes.

Sam stood up to look out again. A half a mile away was the bamboo catamaran on which Lothar von Richthofen had sailed downRiver only ten days ago. Through the starboard ports Sam saw a squat figure with tawny hair coming out of the gateway of King John's log palace. Behind him came bodyguards and sycophants.

King John was making sure that von Richthofen did not give Sam Clemens any secret messages from Elwood Hacking.

The ex-monarch of England, present coruler of Parolando, wore a kilt with red and black checks, a poncholike arrangement of towels, and knee-length, redleather Riverdragon boots. Around his thick waist was a wide belt with a number of sheaths containing steel daggers, a short sword, and a steel ax. One hand held a steel rod coronet, one of many sources of contention between Sam and King John. Sam did not want to waste metal on such useless anachronisms, but John had insisted and Sam had given in.

Sam found some satisfaction now in thinking about the name of his little nation. Parolando in Esperanto meant pair land and was so called because two men governed it. But Sam had not mentioned to John that another translation could be Twain Land.