Riverworld and Other Stories by Philip José Farmer
“You’re what you breathe, too,” Red said. “That makes us sewer workers half crap.”
“That man’s crazy,” Ringo muttered.
“He got caught when they came swarming out,” Red said. “He had to run ahead of them. Hell, even he wouldn’t tackle that many rats.”
“I don’t want him jumping out of the dark and scaring me,” Bleek said. He edged toward the cat, which looked as if it were going to erupt again. He was a Vesuvius of a cat, and his Pompeii would be Inspector Bleek.
“He don’t pay any attention to us workers,” Red said. “Hell, he and I’ve passed each other a dozen times; we just nod and go our own ways. He’s a valuable animal; he kills more rats than a dozen poisoners. And he doesn’t ask for overtime either.”
“We could take him in,” a cop said. Red thought he saw him reaching for his handcuffs but decided it was his imagination.
“Let him go,” Red said.
“I’m your boss!”
“If you kill that cat, I quit.”
Bleek scowled, and then, after a struggle, he put his knife in its sheath under his jacket. The smile came slowly, as if some little man inside him was working away at the ratchets connected to the corners of his lips. Finally, the big Halloween-pumpkin grin encased in plastic, he put his arm around Red.
“You love that cat, don’t you?”
“He’s like me, ugly and better off down here in the darkness.”
Bleek laughed and squeezed Red’s shoulder.
“You ain’t ugly, man! You’re beautiful!”
“I got a mirror.”
Bleek laughed and let loose of Red’s shoulder and slapped him on the ass. The cat darted by them, running as if he were glad to see the last of them. He’d had enough of rats for a long time, too.
6.
The order came down from the Commissioner of Public Works that no sewer worker was ever to be alone while working. They must always have a buddy in sight. Red and Ringo observed this rule, if not religiously at least devoutly. But as two weeks passed, they occasionally found themselves alone. Old habits, unlike old clothes, don’t wear out easily. However, as soon as one became aware that the other had gone on ahead around a curve of a tunnel or had dropped back, one started calling and didn’t quit until he’d seen the other. During this time, Red had nightmares. It was always the rats. He’d see them leaping around, and then, while he stood unable to run away, they’d scurry toward him, and after a while he’d feel one run up his leg. It would stop just below his buttocks and start sniffing and he knew what it was going to do and he tightened up but those chisel teeth were going to gnaw and gnaw.
He always woke then with the rats gone, but the horror took time to melt, like a suppository that’d just come from the refrigerator.
“Nibble, nibble, nibble,” he said to Bleek. “A man doesn’t have to die by big bites.”
“Dreams can’t kill you.”
“They’ve killed more people than automobiles ever did. Napoleon and Hitler were dreamers. Come to think of it, it was dreamers that invented the automobile.”
“Who invented dreams?” Bleek said.
That surprised Red, and he forgot what he was going to say next. Bleek seemed like a hail-fellow-well-met guy, smart enough for his job but no bargain in the intellect shop. Yet, every once in a while, he came out with a remark like this. There were a few trout among his mental carp.
Bleek looked at his wristwatch. Red said, “Yes, I know. We got to get going.”
Ringo had started down the manhole. While waiting for him, Red looked around. The sky was, or seemed to be, the deepest blue he’d ever seen. The tall buildings along this street were like mountains themselves, banking the street, keeping it in shady trust. The manhole, however, was in a spot where the sunshine ran between two buildings, like Indians coming through a pass, Red thought. Or the Golden Horde invading the land of shadows. The patina of unreality that raw sunshine always laid on Golden Gate City was the thickest he’d ever seen. The shadows fought it, battling to keep their hold on reality, but they were retreating.
Bleek was standing near him, obviously trying to think of something to say before he got in his car and drove off. A car passed by with a young couple in it, and the girl, a lovely creature, pointed at Red and said something to the driver, a handsome fellow. He took a quick look at Red and then at Bleek, and his lips formed words. “Oh, my God!”
“Doubled in ugliness,” the girl’s lips shaped.
Red gave her the finger. The girl, her head turned to look behind her, was startled at first, but she laughed and turned to the boy and said something. Red thought for a minute that the boy might back up the car and come storming out, but after slowing down, the car speeded up. The two had thrown their heads back as if they were laughing.
Red shrugged. He’d seen this reaction many times before. People were always shocked when they uncovered the conspiracy of his genes to overthrow the human face. Then they laughed.
He started down the ladder below the manhole. Bleek said, “How’s your poem coming?”
Red wondered why he was asking him that, but he answered, “I’ve given up on The Queen of Darkness. No, that’s wrong. She’s given up on me. Anyway, she was never serious. All she ever did was flirt with me. She isn’t going to kiss me, like she does real poets.”
“You’re a little strange,” Bleek said. “But then I got a lot of strange ones among my boys. Sewer work seems to attrack them, but of course this is California. So you ain’t going to write poetry any more?”
“I’ve had it,” Red said. “All I’ve wanted for the past two years is to write four perfect lines. To hell with epics, especially epics about sewers. All I wanted was four lines that would make me remembered forever, and I’d have settled for two. Two lines to blaze in the eyes of the world so it wouldn’t see the face of the man behind them. That wasn’t much to ask, but it was too much. She’s kissed me off for good. She doesn’t come in my dreams any more. It’s just the rats that come now.”
Bleek looked distressed. However, he often looked that way. The planes of his face naturally formed themselves into a roadmap of grief.
“You saying this is the end of the line for you?”
“As a poet, yes. And since I’m half poet, though a bad one, only half a man is going to survive.”
Bleek didn’t seem to know what to say.
Red said, “See you,” and he climbed on down the ladder. He and Ringo picked up their tools and lunchbuckets and walked toward their work. Somewhere ahead of them something had clogged up the stream, and they had to find it and remove it.
They passed through areas where permanent lights blazed overhead and then through dark places where the only light was their headlamps. Like a chess board, Red thought, where the only players were pawns.
Their lamps beamed on a big pile of something indeterminable. The mass was like a dam, at least a foot higher than the water backing up behind it.
Ringo, a few feet ahead of Red, stopped on the walkway and looked down at the pile. Red started to say something, and then Ringo screamed.
The mass had come alive. It was heaving up from the channel, and two pseudopods had encircled Ringo’s feet and waist.
Red was paralyzed. The tunnel had become a cannon barrel down which unreality was shooting.
Ringo fought the tentacles, tearing off big pieces of soft brown stuff. Bones wired together at the joints fell out of the stuff that struck the concrete walkway, but other pseudopods grew out of the mass and seized Ringo around the throat and between his legs. They extended, slid around and around Ringo while Red stared. His beam lit up Ringo’s open mouth, the white teeth, the whites of the eyes. It also reflected on the single bulging eye on top of a bump on the side near Ringo.
Suddenly, Ringo’s jaw dropped, and his eyes started to glaze like the monster’s eye. Either he had fainted or he had had a heart attack. Whichever it was, he had fallen onto the mass, a little distance from the eye, and he was sinking f
Red wanted to run away, but he couldn’t leave Ringo to be drawn into that sickening mass. Suddenly, as if a switch had been slammed shut inside him, he leaped forward. At the edge of the walkway he leaned down and grabbed Ringo’s left ankle. A tentacle, soft, slimy, stinking, came up over the edge of the Concrete and coiled around his own leg. He screamed but he did not let loose of the ankle. Ringo was being pulled out slowly, and Red knew that if he could hang on to him, he could probably get him away. He had to free him soon because Ringo, if he wasn’t dead, was going to suffocate in a short time.
Before he could drop the ankle and get away, he was up to his waist in the mass. It had oozed up onto the walkway, enfolded him, and was sucking him into it.
The glass eye was in front of his face; it was on the end of a pod, swaying back and forth before him.
Red, still screaming, took off his helmet and batted at the eye. It struck it, tore it loose, and then he was in darkness. The helmet had been snatched away and was sinking into the vast body. For a second the light glowed redly inside and then was gone.
Red forgot about Ringo. He thrashed and struck out and suddenly he was free. Sobbing, he crawled away until he came against the wall. He didn’t know which way was upstream, but he hoped he was going in the right direction. The thing couldn’t make much headway against the waters. It had pulled part of its body away from the channel to get up on the walkway, and the waters had come rushing down the opened way. They made a strong current just now, one against which the thing surely could not swim very swiftly.
Also, with its eye gone, it was as blind as he. Could it hear? Smell?
Maybe I’ve flipped, Red thought. That thing can’t exist. I must be in delirium, imagining it. Maybe I’m really in a straitjacket someplace. I hope they can give me something, a miracle drug, a shock treatment, to get me out of here. What if I were locked in this nightmare forever?
He heard a shout behind him, a human voice. He quit crawling and turned around. The beam of a headlamp shone about fifty yards from him. He couldn’t see the figure under it, but it must be about six feet two or three inches high. Anybody he knew?
The beam danced around, lit on him once, then went back to point up and down the stream. The water level had gone down though it was still higher than it should be. The thing had gone with the current, Ringo inside it.
The beam left the channel and played on the walkway as the man walked toward him. Red sat down with his back against the wall, unable to hear the approaching footsteps because of his loud breathing and his heart booming in his eardrums. The man stopped just before him, the beam on his helmet glaring into Red’s eyes so he couldn’t see the face beneath.
“Listen,” Red said. Something struck the top of his head, and when he awoke the light was out. He had a sharp pain in his head, but he had no time to think about that. His clothes had been removed, and he was on his back, and his hands were under him and taped together at the wrists. His ankles were also taped.
Red groaned and said, “What are you doing? Who is it?”
There was a sound as of a suddenly sucked-in breath.
“For God’s sake,” Red said. “Let me loose. Don’t you know what happened? Ringo was killed. It’s true, so help me God, he was swallowed by a thing you wouldn’t believe. It’s waiting out there. A man alone won’t get by him. Together we might make it.”
He jumped as a hand touched his ankle above the tapes. He trembled as the hand began moving up his leg. He jumped again when something cold and hard touched the other leg for a moment.
“Who are you?” he yelled. “Who are you?”
He heard only a heavy breathing. The hand and the knife had stopped, but now they were sliding upward along his flesh.
“Who are you?”
The hand and the knife stopped. A voice, thick as honey, said, “I’m not worried about the thing. It’s my buddy.”
“Bleek?”
“Up there I’m Bleek. In more ways than one.
“Down here, I’m the phantom of the sewer, lover.”
Red knew it was no use to scream. But he did.
Up The Bright River
1
Andrew Paxton Davis leaned into the fifteen-mile-an-hour wind. But not too far. He was standing at the end of a fifty-foot-long yew wood gangplank. It was three inches deep and four and a half inches wide. Thirty feet of it was supported by a single forty-five-degree angled beam, the other end of which was attached to the tower structure. Beyond that, the remaining twenty feet formed a sort of diving board. Davis, having ventured out to its end, felt it bend under him.
The ground was three hundred feet below him, but he could clearly hear the roar and screams of the crowd and sometimes fragments of words from an individual. The upturned faces were mostly eager or malicious. Some expressed fear or sympathy for him.
Beyond the end of the board was a twelve-foot gap. Then the projecting end of another gangplank, equally long and narrow, began. But his weight bent the end of the plank he stood on and made it five inches lower than the other.
If he could leap from one gangplank to the next he was free. The Emperor had promised that any “criminals” who could do so would be allowed to depart unharmed from the state. Attempting such a feat or refusing to do it was not, however, a choice. All major criminals were sentenced to the ordeal.
The people below were rooting for him or hoping he would fall. Their attitude depended upon which way they had bet.
Behind him, standing on the platform of the tower, the other prisoners shouted encouragement. Davis did not know two of them or what their crimes were. The others were his companions, if you could call them that, who had traveled far together and had been captured by the people of the Western Sun Kingdom. They were the Viking, Ivar the Boneless, the mad Frenchman, Faustroll, and Davis’s bane, the beautiful but sluttish Ann Pullen.
Davis had been chosen by the Emperor Pachacuti to jump first. He would just as soon be the last in line. If he refused to leap, he would be thrown off the tower by the guards.
Ivar shouted in Old Norse. Though the wind hurled his words away from his lips, they came from the chest of a giant. Davis heard them as if they were far away.
“Show them you are not afraid! Run bravely and without fear! Run with the fleetness of Hugi, the giant whose name means Thought! Then fly as if you wear the birdskin of Loki! Pray to your god that you will not bring shame to him by hesitating! Nor to us!”
Faustroll’s voice was shrill but pierced the wind. He spoke in English.
“It does not matter if you fail and fall, my Philistine friend! One moment of terror, quite cathartic for you and for us, and you will awake tomorrow as whole as ever! Which, if you will pardon my frankness, is not saying much!”
Ann Pullen either said nothing or her voice was snatched away by the wind.
What Faustroll said about him was, excluding the insults, true. He would die today; he would be resurrected at dawn. But he might be far down the River and have to start his journey all over again. That prospect made him quail almost as much as what he must do within the next twenty seconds. He had been given only two minutes to make the attempt.
“Ten feet, Andrew the Red!” Ivar had said when the Emperor pronounced sentence on him. “Ten feet! It is nothing! I will run on the board like a deer and will soar off its end like a hawk and land upon the other board like a lynx pouncing upon its prey!”
Brave words. Though Ivar was six feet six inches tall and was enormously powerful, he weighed over two hundred and thirty pounds. That was a lot of muscle and bone to lift. The heavier the runner, the more the wood would bend down. Not only would he have to leap across, he would have to leap up to attain the end of the other board.
Davis had an advantage in being only five feet six inches high and in weighing only one hundred and forty pounds. But the jumper’s degree of courage made a difference. He had seen men and women who might have crossed the gap if fear had not slowed them down.
No hesitation, he told himself. Do it! Get it over with! Give it all you have! But his stomach hurt, and he was quivering.
He prayed to God as he trotted back to the tower and as he turned around to face the gangplank. Fifty feet was not long enough for a good runway. In that distance, he could not reach maximum speed. But that was how it was. No evading it; no excuses. Still praying, he bent down in the starting crouch and then sprang outward with all his strength. The sickness and the quivering were gone, or he was unaware of them. He felt as he had when, in 1845, he was ten years old and competing in a jump across a creek with other farm boys near Bowling Green, Clay County, Indiana. The glory of his healthy young body and intimations of immortality had blazed then.
Now, his spirit and body had become one as they had been one when he had made that winning jump on Earth. He was an arrow aimed at the end of the board beyond the void. The shouts of his companions, the roar of the crowd, and the captain of the guards counting off the seconds remaining became one voice. His bare feet slapped on the wood as they had slapped on the dirt when he had won the contest with his schoolmates. But, then, he had faced only getting wet if he fell short.
The end of the gangplank was coming far more swiftly than he thought possible. Beyond it was the space he had to travel, a short distance in reality, a long, long one in his mind. And the beam was dipping. Only a few inches, but the slight deviation from the horizontal might defeat him.
He came down hard with his right foot and rose up, up, up. The void was below him. He thought, Oh, God, to whom I have been always faithful, deliver me from this evil! But a rapture, completely unexpected, shot through him. It was as if the hand of God were not only lifting him but enveloping him in the ecstasy few besides the saints knew.
It was worth the price of horror and of death.
2
Yesterday, Andrew Paxton Davis had also been high above earth. But he was not under any sentence and was not afraid of dying immediately. He was clinging to the railing of a bamboo platform, the crow’s nest as it were, while it swayed in the strong wind. He was seasick, though there were no seas on this world.