To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip José Farmer
“What happened?” Burton said. “Did the world end in a crack of thunder and a stroke of lightning? You’re still here, I see, and you’ve not renounced the delights of sin in the person of this woman.”
“We found a grailstone near the mountains. About a mile west of here. We got lost, wandered around, cold, wet, jumping every time the lightning struck nearby. Then we found the grailstone. It was jammed with people, but they were exceptionally friendly, and there were so many bodies it was very warm, even if some rain did leak down through the grass. We finally went to sleep, long after the rain quit. When I woke up, I searched through the grass until I found Loghu. She got lost during the night, somehow. She seemed pleased to see me, though, and I like her. There’s an affinity between us. Maybe I’ll find out why when she learns to speak English. I tried that and French and German and tags of Russian, Lithuanian, Gaelic, all the Scandinavian tongues, including Finnish, classical Nahuatl, Arabic, Hebrew, Onondaga Iroquois, Ojibway, Italian, Spanish, Latin, modern and Homeric Greek, and a dozen others. Result: a blank look.”
“You must be quite a linguist,” Burton said.
“I’m not fluent in any of those,” Frigate said. “I can read most of them but can speak only everyday phrases. Unlike you, I am not master of thirty-nine languages—including pornography.”
The fellow seemed to know much about himself, Burton thought. He would find out just how much at a later time.
“I’ll be frank with you, Peter,” Burton said. “Your account of your aggressiveness amazed me. I had not thought you capable of attacking and beating that many men. Your queasiness….”
“It was the gum, of course. It opened the door of the cage.”
Frigate squatted down by Loghu and rubbed his shoulder against hers. She looked at him out of slightly slanted eyes. The woman would be beautiful once her hair grew out.
Frigate continued, “I’m so timorous and queasy because I am afraid of the anger, the desire to do violence, that lies not too deeply within me. I fear violence because I am violent. I fear what will happen if I am not afraid. Hell, I’ve known that for forty years. Much good the knowledge has done me!”
He looked at Alice and said, “Good morning!”
Alice replied cheerily enough, and she even smiled at Loghu when she was introduced. She would look at Burton, and she would answer his direct questions. But she would not chat with him or give him anything but a stern face.
Monat, Kazz, and the little girl, all yawning, came to the fireside. Burton prowled around the edges of the camp and found that the Triestans were gone. Some had left their grails behind. He cursed them for their carelessness and thought about leaving the grails in the grass to teach them a lesson. But he eventually placed the cylinders in depressions on the grailstone.
If their owners did not return, they would go hungry unless someone shared their food with them. In the meantime, the food in their grails would have to be untouched. He would be unable to open them. They had discovered yesterday that only the owner of a grail could open it. Experimentation with a long stick had determined also that the owner had to touch the grail with his fingers or some part of his body before the lid would open. It was Frigate’s theory that a mechanism in the grail was keyed to the peculiar configuration of skin voltage of the owner. Or perhaps the grail contained a very sensitive detector of the individual’s brain waves.
The sky had become bright by then. The sun was still on the other side of the 20,000-foot-high eastern mountain. Approximately a half hour later, the grailrock spurted blue flame with a roll of thunder. Thunder from the stones along the river echoed against the mountain.
The grails yielded bacon and eggs, ham, toast, butter, jam, milk, a quarter of a cantaloupe, cigarettes, and a cupful of dark brown crystals which Frigate said was instant coffee. He drank the milk in one cup, rinsed it out in water in a bamboo container, filled the cup with water, and set it by the fire. When the water was boiling, he put a teaspoonful of the crystals into the water and stirred it. The coffee was delicious, and there were enough crystals to provide six cups. Then Alice put the crystals into the water before heating it over the fire and found that it was not necessary to use the fire. The water boiled within three seconds after the crystals were placed into the cold water.
After eating, they washed out the containers and replaced them in the grails. Burton strapped his grail onto his waist. He intended to explore, and he certainly was not going to leave the grail on the stone. Though it could do no one but himself any good, vicious people might take it just for the pleasure of seeing him starve.
Burton started his language lessons with the little girl and Kazz, and Frigate got Loghu to sit in on them. Frigate suggested that a universal language should be adopted because of the many many languages and dialects, perhaps fifty to sixty thousand, that mankind had used in his several million years of existence and which he was using along the river. That is, provided that all of mankind had been resurrected. After all, all he knew about was the few square miles he had seen. But it would be a good idea to start propagating Esperanto, the synthetic language invented by the Polish oculist, Doctor Zamenhof, in 1887. Its grammar was very simple and absolutely regular, and its sound combinations, though not as easy for everybody to pronounce as claimed, were still relatively easy. And the basis of the vocabulary was Latin with many words from English and German and other West European languages.
“I had heard about it before I died,” Burton said. “But I never saw any samples of it. Perhaps it may become useful. But, in the meantime, I’ll teach these two English.”
“But most of the people here speak Italian or Slovenian!” Frigate said.
“That may be true, though we haven’t any survey as yet. However, I don’t intend to stay here, you can be sure of that.”
“I could have predicted that,” Frigate muttered. “You always did get restless; you had to move on.”
Burton glared at Frigate and then started the lessons. For about fifteen minutes, he drilled them in the identification and pronunciation of nineteen nouns and a few verbs: fire, bamboo, grail, man, woman, girl, hand, feet, eye, teeth, eat, walk, run, talk, danger, I, you, they, us. He intended that he should learn as much from them as they from him. In time, he would be able to speak their tongues, whatever they were.
The sun cleared the top of the eastern range. The air became warmer, and they let the fire die. They were well into the second day of resurrection. And they knew almost nothing about this world or what their eventual fate was supposed to be or Who was determining their fate.
Lev Ruach stuck his big-nosed face through the grass and said, “May I join you?”
Burton nodded, and Frigate said, “Sure, why not?”
Ruach stepped out of the grass. A short pale-skinned woman with great brown eyes and lovely delicate features followed him. Ruach introduced her as Tanya Kauwitz. He had met her last night, and they had stayed together, since they had a number of things in common. She was of Russian-Jewish descent, was born in 1958 in the Bronx, New York City, had become an English schoolteacher, married a businessman who made a million and dropped dead when she was forty-five, leaving her free to marry a wonderful man with whom she had been in love for fifteen years. Six months later, she was dead of cancer. Tanya, not Lev, gave this information and in one sentence.
“It was hell down on the plains last night,” Lev said. “Tanya and I had to run for our lives into the woods. So I decided that I would find you and ask if we could stay with you. I apologize for my hasty remarks of yesterday, Mr. Burton. I think that my observations were valid, but the attitudes I was speaking of should be considered in the context of your other attitudes.”
“We’ll go into that some other time,” Burton said. “At the time I wrote that book, I was suffering from the vile and malicious lies of the moneylenders of Damascus, and they….”
“Certainly, Mr. Burton,” Ruach said. “As you say, later. I just wanted to make the point that I consider you to be
Burton did not like to be interrupted. He scowled and said, “Please permit me to explain myself. I….”
Frigate stood up and said, “Here come the others. Wonder where they’ve been?”
Only four of the original nine had come back, however. Maria Tucci explained that they had wandered away together after chewing the gum, and eventually ended up by one of the big bonfires on the plains. Then many things had happened; there had been fights and attacks by men on women, men on men, women on men, women on women, and even attacks on children. The group had split up in the chaos. She had met the other three only an hour ago while she was searching in the hills for the grailstone.
Lev added some details. The results of chewing the narcotic gum had been tragic, amusing, or gratifying, depending, apparently, upon individual reaction. The gum had had an aphrodisiac effect upon many, but it also had many other effects. Consider the husband and wife who had died in Opcina, a suburb of Trieste, in 1899. They had been resurrected within six feet of each other. They had wept with joy at being reunited when so many couples had not been. They thanked God for their good luck, though they also had made some loud comments that this world was not what they had been promised. But they had had fifty years of married bliss and now looked forward to being together for eternity.
Only a few minutes after both had chewed the gum, the man had strangled his wife, heaved her body into the river, picked up another woman in his arms, and run off into the darkness of the woods with her.
Another man had leaped upon a grailstone and delivered a speech that lasted all night, even through the rain. To the few who could hear, and the even fewer who listened, he had demonstrated the principles of a perfect society and how these could be carried out in practice. By dawn, he was so hoarse he could only croak a few words. On Earth, he had seldom bothered to vote.
A man and a woman, outraged at the public display of carnality, had forcefully tried to separate couples. The results: bruises, bloody noses, split lips, and two concussions, all theirs. Some men and women had spent the night on their knees praying and confessing their sins.
Some children had been badly beaten, raped, or murdered, or all three. But not everybody had succumbed to the madness. A number of adults had protected the children or tried to.
Ruach described the despair and disgust of a Croat Moslem and an Austrian Jew because their grails contained pork. A Hindu screamed obscenities because his grail offered him meat.
A fourth man, crying out that they were in the hands of devils, had hurled his cigarettes into the river.
Several had said to him, “Why didn’t you give us the cigarettes if you didn’t want them?”
“Tobacco is the invention of the devil; it was the weed created by Satan in the Garden of Eden!”
A man said, “At least you could have shared the cigarettes with us. It wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I would like to throw all the evil stuff into the river!” he had shouted.
“You’re an insufferable bigot and crazy to boot,” another had replied, and struck him in the mouth. Before the tobacco-hater could get up off the ground, he was hit and kicked by four others.
Later, the tobacco-hater had staggered up and, weeping with rage, cried, “What have I done to deserve this, O Lord, my God! I have always been a good man. I gave thousands of pounds to charities, I worshipped in Thy temple three times a week, I waged a lifelong war against sin and corruption, I….”
“I know you!” a woman had shouted. She was a tall blue-eyed girl with a handsome face and well-curved figure. “I know you! Sir Robert Smithson!”
He had stopped talking and had blinked at her. “I don’t know you!”
“You wouldn’t! But you should! I’m one of the thousands of girls who had to work sixteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, so you could live in your big house on the hill and dress in fine clothes and so your horses and dogs could eat far better than I could! I was one of your factory girls! My father slaved for you, my mother slaved for you, my brothers and sisters, those who weren’t too sick or who didn’t die because of too little or too bad food, dirty beds, drafty windows, and rat bites, slaved for you. My father lost a hand in one of your machines, and you kicked him out without a penny. My mother died of the white plague. I was coughing out my life, too, my fine baronet, while you stuffed yourself with rich foods and sat in easy chairs and dozed off in your big expensive church pew and gave thousands to feed the poor unfortunates in Asia and to send missionaries to convert the poor heathens in Africa. I coughed out my lungs, and I had to go a-whoring to make enough money to feed my kid sisters and brothers. And I caught syphilis, you bloody pious bastard, because you wanted to wring out every drop of sweat and blood I had and those poor devils like me had! I died in prison because you told the police they should deal harshly with prostitution. You…you…!”
Smithson had gone red at first, then pale. Then he had drawn himself up straight, scowling at the woman, and said, “You whores always have somebody to blame for your unbridled lusts, your evil ways. God knows that I followed His ways.”
He had turned and had walked off, but the woman ran after him and swung her grail at him. It came around swiftly; somebody shouted; he spun and ducked. The grail almost grazed the top of his head.
Smithson ran past the woman before she could recover and quickly lost himself in the crowd. Unfortunately, Ruach said, very few understood what was going on because they couldn’t speak English.
“Sir Robert Smithson,” Burton said. “If I remember correctly, he owned cotton mills and steelworks in Manchester. He was noted for his philanthropies and his good works among the heathens. Died in 1870 or thereabouts at the age of eighty.”
“And probably convinced that he would be rewarded in Heaven,” Lev Ruach said. “Of course, it would never have occurred to him that he was a murderer many times over.”
“If he hadn’t exploited the poor, someone else would have done so.”
“That is an excuse used by many throughout men’s history,” Lev said. “Besides, there were industrialists in your country who saw to it that wages and conditions in their factories were improved. Robert Owen was one, I believe.”
10
I don’t see much sense in arguing about what went on in the past,” Frigate said. “I think we should do something about our present situation.”
Burton stood up. “You’re right, Yank! We need roofs over our heads, tools, God knows what else! But first, I think we should take a look at the cities of the plains and see what the citizens are doing there.”
At that moment, Alice came through the trees on the hill above them. Frigate saw her first. He burst out laughing. “The latest in ladies’ wear!”
She had cut lengths of the grass with her scissors and plaited them into a two-piece garment. One was a sort of poncho which covered her breasts and the other a skirt which fell to her calves.
The effect was strange, though one that she should have expected. When she was naked, the hairless head still did not detract too much from her femaleness and her beauty. But with the green, bulky, and shapeless garments, her face suddenly became masculine and ugly.
The other women crowded around her and examined the weaving of the grass lengths and the grass belt that secured the skirt.
“It’s very itchy, very uncomfortable,” Alice said. “But it’s decent. That’s all I can say for it.”
“Apparently you did not mean what you said about your unconcern with nudity in a land where all are nude,” Burton said.
Alice stared coolly and said, “I expect that everybody will be wearing these. Every decent man and woman, that is.”
“I supposed that Mrs. Grundy would rear her ugly head here,” Burton replied.
“It was a shock to be among so many naked people,” Frigate said. “Even though nudit
Burton swung around and spoke to the other women. “What about you ladies? Are you going to wear these ugly and scratchy haycocks because one of your sex suddenly decides that she has private parts again? Can something that has been so public become private?”
Loghu, Tanya, and Alice did not understand him because he spoke in Italian. He repeated in English for the benefit of the last two.
Alice flushed and said, “What I wear is my business. If anybody else cares to go naked when I’m decently covered, well…!”
Loghu had not understood a word, but she understood what was going on. She laughed and turned away. The other women seemed to be trying to guess what each one intended to do. The ugliness and the uncomfortableness of the clothing were not the issues.
“While you females are trying to make up your minds,” Burton said, “it would be nice if you would take a bamboo pail and go with us to the river. We can bathe, fill the pails with water, find out the situation in the plains, and then return here. We may be able to build several houses—or temporary shelters—before nightfall.”
They started down the hills, pushing through the grass and carrying their grails, chert weapons, bamboo spears, and buckets. They had not gone far before they encountered a number of people. Apparently, many plains dwellers had decided to move out. Not only that, some had also found chert and had made tools and weapons. These had learned the technique of working with stone from somebody, possibly from other primitives in the area. So far, Burton had seen only two specimens of non-Homo sapiens, and these were with him. But wherever the techniques had been learned, they had been put to good use. They passed two half-completed bamboo huts. These were round, one-roomed, and would have conical roofs thatched with the huge triangular leaves from the irontrees and with the long hill grass. One man, using a chert adze and axe, was building a short-legged bamboo bed.