EVERY MAN A GOD
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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 nobody 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 had
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 conservation-ist, 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 foof suspended by the makeshift lasso.
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Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg
“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.
“Mem?” shrieked his prisoner. “Do you not recognize a god when you have captured one?”
Huey Long looked at Beethoven and thought, Oh, you sly bastard. 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, clamoring 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.
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