To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (43 page)

Lothar, stinking of gunpowder, caught up with him.

“I should have let him suffer. But old habits are hard to break. I wanted to kill him, so I did. That black devil just smiled at me. Then I spread his smile all over him.”

“Don’t say any more,” Sam replied. “I’m sick enough. I’m about to chuck the whole thing and settle down with a steady job of missionarying. The only ones whose suffering meant anything today were the Second Chancers.”

“You’ll get over that,” Lothar said, and he was right. But it took three years.

The land was again like a shell-pocked battlefield, stinking with fumes and black with smoke. But the great Riverboat was completed. There was nothing to do to it now except to try it out. Even the last touch, the painting of the Riverboat’s name in big black letters on the white hull, had been done. On both sides of the hull, ten feet above the waterline, were the letters NOT FOR HIRE.

“What does that mean, Sam?” he had been asked by many.

“It means just what it says, contrary to most words in print or speech,” Sam said. “The boat is no man’s to hire. It’s a free boat and its crew are free souls. No man’s.”

“And why is the boat’s launch called
Post No Bills?
”

“That comes from a dream I had,” Sam would say. “Somebody was trying to put up advertising on it, and I told him that the launch was
built for no mercenary purpose.
What do you think I am, advance agent for P. T. Barnum?
I said.”

There was more to the dream, but Sam told no one except Joe about this.

“But the man who was pasting up those garish posters, advertising the coming of the greatest Riverboat of them all and the greatest Riverboat show of them all, was I!” Sam said. “I was both men in the dream!”

“I don’t get it, Tham,” Joe said.

Sam gave up on him.

T
he twenty-sixth anniversary of Resurrection Day was the day that the side-wheeler
Not For Hire
first turned its paddles. It was about an hour after the grailstones flamed to charge the breakfast grails. The cables and cap connected to the grailstone had been removed and the cables wound up within the hold through a port in the forward section on the starboard side. The grails had been removed from the stone a mile north and rushed to the big boat in the amphibious, armored, steam-driven launch, the
Post No Bills.
The fabulous Riverboat, gleaming white with red and black and green trimmings, moved out from the canal and into The River behind a huge breakwater on its starboard side. This deflected the current so that the boat would not be swung to the south as it emerged from the canal and so carried into the edge of the canal’s mouth.

Whistles blowing, iron bells clanging, the passengers cheering as they leaned over the railings, the people on the banks shouting, the magnificent paddle wheels churning, the
Not For Hire
moved with stately grace out into The River.

The Riverboat had an overall length of four hundred and forty feet and six inches. The beam over the paddle-wheel guards was ninety-three feet. The mean draft loaded was twelve feet. The giant electric motors driving the paddle wheels delivered ten thousand shaft horsepower and enough power left to take care of all the boat’s electrical needs, which were many. Top speed, theoretically, was forty-five miles an hour in still water. Going upstream against the fifteen-mile-an-hour current, it would be thirty. Going downstream, it would be sixty. The boat would be going up The River most of the time and cruising at fifteen miles an hour relative to the ground.

There were four decks: the so-called boiler deck, the main deck, the hurricane deck, and the landing deck. The pilothouse was at the fore
edge of the hurricane deck, and the long texas, containing the captain’s and chief officers’ quarters, was behind the pilothouse. However, the pilothouse was itself double-decked. It was set forward of the two tall but thin smokestacks which rose thirty feet high. Firebrass had advised against the stacks, because the smoke from the big boilers (used only to heat water and to drive the machine guns) could be piped out on the side. But Sam had snorted and said, “What do I care about air resistance? I want beauty! And beauty is what we’ll get! Whoever heard of a Riverboat without tall, graceful, impressive smokestacks! Have you no soul, brother?”

There were sixty-five cabins, each about twelve by twelve with snap-up beds and tables and folding chairs. Each cabin had a toilet and a washbasin with hot and cold running water, and there was a shower for every six cabins.

There were three big lounges, one in the texas, one on the hurricane deck, and one on the main deck. These held pool tables, dart games, gymnastic equipment, card tables, a movie screen, and a stage for dramas or musicals, and the main deck lounge held a podium for the orchestra.

The upper deck of the pilothouse was luxuriously furnished with carved oaken chairs and tables covered with red and white and black Riverdragon-fish leather. The pilot sat in a large and comfortable swivel chair before the instrument board. On this was a bank of small closed-circuit TV screens, giving him views of the control center of the boat. Before him was a microphone which enabled him to speak to anybody on the boat. He controlled the boat with two levers on a small movable board before him. The left stick controlled the port wheel; the right, the starboard. A screen before him was a radar indicator used at night. Another screen showed him the depth of the water from the bottom of the boat as measured by sonar. A toggle on the instrument board could switch the piloting to automatic, though the rule was that a pilot had to be on duty at all times.

Sam was dressed in bleached fish-leather sandals, a white kilt, a white cape, and a white officer’s cap of plastic and leather. He wore a bleached leather belt with a bleached holster containing a ponderous Mark II .69 four-shooter pistol and a bleached sheath with a ten-inch knife.

He paced back and forth, a big green cigar in his mouth, his hands held straight down except when he removed the cigar. He watched the
pilot, Robert Styles, steering the boat for the first time. Styles was an old Mississippi pilot, a handsome youth, no liar, though given to inflating facts. When he had appeared about two years before, Sam had been overcome with joy. For one of the few times in his life, he had wept. He had known Rob Styles when they were both Mississippi pilots.

Styles was nervous, as anybody would be the first time, even the steel-nerved Captain Isaiah Sellers of ancient Mississippi fame. There was nothing to piloting the boat. A one-eyed Sunday school teacher with a hangover could do it, his six-year-old child could do it, once he got the hang of the two sticks. Push forward for increased speed, put in the middle position to stop the wheels, pull back to reverse the wheels. To steer the boat to port, pull back a little on the port stick and forward a little on the starboard stick. To steer to starboard, do the reverse.

But it took some practice before the proper coordination was achieved.

Luckily, there was no memory work involved in piloting a boat on this River. There were no islands, no sandbars, and there would be few logs with snags. If the boat got too close to shallow water, sonar activated an alarm bell. If a boat was ahead at night, or a log hidden in the water, the radar or sonar would indicate it and a red light would flash.

Sam watched Styles for half an hour while the banks floated by and the thousands of people on them waved and cheered. Or cursed, since many were disappointed because they had been eliminated from the crew by the lottery. But he couldn’t hear the curses.

Then Sam took over the piloting, and, after another half hour, asked John if he would like to try. John was dressed entirely in black, as if he were determined to do just the opposite of whatever Sam did. But he took the sticks and did well for an ex-king who had never done a lick of work in his life and had always let inferiors do whatever steering was necessary.

The boat sailed up past the dead Iyeyasu’s kingdom, now split into three states again, and then Sam ordered the vessel turned back. Rob Styles got fancy and pivoted her “on a dime,” as he said, demonstrating her maneuverability. While the port wheel backed, the starboard raced at full speed and the boat rotated as if stuck on a pin. Then she headed downstream. With the current and wind behind her, and the paddle wheels turning at maximum speed, the
Not For Hire
raced along at sixty miles an hour. But not for too long. Sam had Styles bring her in
close to the shore, where the sonar indicated about one foot of clearance between hull and bottom on the port side. Even above the slapping of the wheels and the splashing of water and the whistling and clanging of bells, they could hear the crowds. The faces whizzed by as if in a dream.

Sam opened the fore ports of the pilothouse so they could feel the wind and increase their impression of speed.

The
Not For Hire
raced all the way downstream to Selinujo, and then it turned again. Sam wished, almost, that there was another boat that he could race against. But it was being in heaven to have the only metal, electrically powered Riverboat in existence. A man couldn’t have everything, not even in the after-Earthlife.

During the return trip, the huge hatch in the stern was lowered, and the launch slipped out through the entrance into The River. It cut back and forth at top speed and raced ahead of the mother boat. Its steam machine guns traced lines along the water, and the thirty steam guns on the
Not For Hire
shot back, though not at the launch.

The big three-place amphibian monoplane came out of the opening in the stern, too, and its wings were straightened out and locked, and then it took off. Firebrass was at the controls with his woman and Gwenafra as passengers.

A moment later, the tiny, one-seater open-cockpit scout-fighter was shot off the top of the texas by a steam catapult. Lothar von Richtofen took it up, the wood-alcohol-burning motor buzzing, and raced ahead until he was out of sight. Then he returned, climbed, and entertained with the first aerial acrobatics that the Riverworld had ever seen—to the best of Sam’s knowledge.

Lothar concluded with a dive at the end of which he fired four rockets into the water and then the twin machine guns. These were .80 caliber and shot aluminum bullets from aluminum cartridges. There were one hundred thousand of these stored on the boat, and when they were all gone, they would not be replaced.

Lothar landed the tiny monoplane on the landing deck, the top of the texas, and the devices caught the hook trailed out by the plane. Even so, the whirling propeller stopped only ten feet from the smokestacks. Lothar took the plane up again and again landed. Then Firebrass returned in the amphibian, and he later took the wheeled plane up for one flight.

Sam looked down through the port front at the marines drilling on the fore part of the broad boiler deck. Under the midnoon sun, which heated the air to an estimated eighty degrees Fahrenheit, they marched back and forth and performed intricate maneuvers under Cyrano’s orders. Their silvery duralumin plumed helmets were like those of the ancient Romans. They wore gray-and-red-striped chainmail shirts which fell halfway down their thighs. Their legs were cased in leather boots. They carried rapiers and long knives and the Mark II pistols. They were the pistoleers only, however. The main part of the marines were watching the show; these were the bowmen and the rocketeers.

Seeing Gwenafra’s honey-colored head in the crowd on the main deck made him happy.

He saw Livy’s dark head near her, and he was unhappy.

Gwenafra, after another six months of jealousy-ridden life with von Richthofen, had accepted Sam’s offer and moved in with him. But Sam still could not see Livy without some pain of loss.

If it were not for Livy, and for John’s presence, he would have been as happy as he could be. But she would be with them throughout the possible forty years of the journey. And John, well, John made him uneasy and prowled through his nightmares.

John had been so willing to let Sam be the captain and so unhesitant about accepting the first mate’s position that Sam knew he was up to no good. But when would The Mutiny, as Sam thought of it, take place? It was inevitable that John would try to take over the full command of the Riverboat, and any intelligent man, knowing this, would have dumped him, one way or the other.

But Sam had been too conscience-stricken by his killing of Bloodaxe. He could not commit another assassination, not even if he knew that John would not be permanently dead. A corpse was a corpse, and a double cross was a double cross.

The question was, when would John strike? At the beginning, or much later during the voyage, when Sam’s suspicions had been lulled?

Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate.

A yellow-haired, near-giant entered the pilothouse. His name was Augustus Strubewell, he was John’s aide-de-camp, and he had been picked up by John during his sojourn in Iyeyasujo after Hacking’s invasion. He had been born in 1971 in San Diego, California, had been
an All-American fullback, a captain of the U.S. Marines, decorated for bravery in the Middle East and South America, and had made a career in the movies and TV. He seemed a pleasant enough fellow, except that, like John, he bragged of his conquests among women. Sam did not trust him. Anybody who worked for John Lackland had to have something wrong with him.

Sam shrugged. He might as well enjoy himself for the moment. Why let anything rob him of the joy of the greatest day of his life?

He leaned out of the port and watched the marine drill team and the crowd. The sun sparkled on waves, and the breeze was cooling. If it became too warm, he could shut the ports and turn on the air conditioning. From the tall pole on the bow the flag of the
Not For Hire
flapped in the wind. It was square and bore a scarlet phoenix on a light-blue field. The phoenix symbolized the rebirth of mankind.

He waved at the people massed along the bank and pressed a button which set off a series of steam whistles and clanging of bells.

He drew in smoke from his fine cigar and stuck his chest out and paraded back and forth. Strubewell handed John a glass full of bourbon, and then he offered Sam another. Everybody in the pilothouse—Styles, the six other pilots, Joe Miller, von Richthofen, Firebrass, Publius Crassus, Mozart, Strubewell, and three other of John’s aides—took a glass.

“A toast, gentlemen,” John said in Esperanto. “To a long and happy journey and may we all get what we deserve.”

Joe Miller, standing near Sam, the top of his head almost touching the ceiling, held a glass containing about half a quart of bourbon. He sniffed at the amber liquor with his monstrous proboscis and then tasted it with the tip of his tongue.

Sam was just about to toss the four-ounce drink down when he saw Joe’s apish face grimace.

“What’s the matter, Joe?” he said.

“Thith thtuff hath thomething in it!”

Sam sniffed and could detect nothing but the most excellent of Kentucky’s best.

But when John and Strubewell and the others reached for their weapons, he threw the liquor in John’s face. Yelling, “It’s poison!” he dived for the floor.

Strubewell’s Mark II pistol boomed. The plastic bullet shattered against the bulletproof plastic of the port above Sam’s head.

Joe roared—he sounded like a lion suddenly released from its cage—and he threw his liquor into Strubewell’s face.

The other aides fired once and then they fired again. The Mark II pistols were four-shot revolvers which electrically ignited the powder in the aluminum cartridges. They were even larger and heavier than the Mark I’s, but they could be fired much more swiftly, and cordite, not black gunpowder, propelled the plastic bullets.

The pilothouse became a fury of booming, deafening explosives, the scream of shattered plastic ricocheting, the shouts and screams of men, and the bellowing of Joe.