“It managed quite well without you,” answered Selous.
“Who succeeded me? Did Jupiter himself descend to sit on the throne?”
“You were succeeded by Claudius.”
“That crippled old fool?” yelled Caligula. “Now I know you lie! He could barely speak his own name!”
“But he didn’t go to war with a bunch of trees,” noted Selous.
“I always knew he was a coward.” Caligula paused, trying to remember the thread of the conversation. Finally he shrugged. “Well, don’t just stand there. We’ve got a city to find!”
Selous stared at him for a long moment, and decided that he’d probably be better off knowing where this lunatic was every second than having him pop out of the bush at the most inopportune moment. Finally he shrugged.
“Follow me,” he said.
“Do you hear them?” repeated Beethoven.
Huey Long swayed to a halt and looked over Beethoven’s shoulder, far past the composer into the smoke and haze of the fading Riverworld.
“Hear whatT’ he said. “I don’t hear anything. Just
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the gulls, maybe—the bird calls. That’s all. Nothing exceptional.”
“Horses,” said Beethoven. “Napoleon’s troops. They’re coming after us.”
“I don’t hear horses,” said Huey.
“They are sending the troops on horseback with spears and muskets,” said Beethoven with total conviction. “They know where we are. That was their plan all the time. We’re going to be killed here like pigs.” He turned to Huey. “I warned you,” he continued, “we should have gotten out of there days ago. I said, let’s go, let’s leave, but you wanted to stay.”
“Wait a minute, now,” said Huey. “You’re wrong. There are no troops, no horses, no muskets. Just the usual sounds.” Agitato, that was one of Beethoven’s words. Excited, frenzied. That was what was happening before him. “Just stay calm, son,” said Huey Long. “Ain’t nothing happening that we can’t control.”
But Beethoven was a trembling, palsied mess before him now, tears leaking from his astonished eyes, that huge forehead clotted with sweat. The musician gasped, grabbed a big towel that he used as a cloak, then fell gracelessly to the mud and rocked there, grasping his knees.
It’s an epileptic fit of some sort, decided Huey. I should have stumbled off, kept to myself, tried to understand this place before things began to happen. But when I came to myself on the banks of this crazy place, he was the first I saw; he helped me and guided me to some kind of consciousness. How could I have left him?
Still, it was confusing. One moment surrounded by your bodyguards, striding through the lobby of the capi-tol into history, the future and your destiny ahead like a
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dream, the next minute crushed to the ground, astonished, surely dead and quaking with this German musician.
How much could a man take? How much could a man truly understand? It was all too much for him. You did the best you could, after all, and you tried to make sense of the senseless, but this was really too much.
Beethoven began to cough, shudder, and shake.
I should never have done this, thought Huey. I should have stayed at fish fries, stayed in the back woods, aimed for the legislature. All right, maybe that wasn’t enough for me, maybe I had to be governor. But that was enough, surely. I could have taken steamboats up and down the river and played with honeyed tits and taken casual graft forever…. But instead what did I do? I went to Washington and drove FOR crazy and then came back to the capitol to meet the bullet they had prepared for me. Every man a king, but sometimes even kings get killed.
Too late now, he thought, too late. They got me, they just goddamned got me. Hell, maybe those were horses Beethoven heard in the distance, maybe Beethoven was right, maybe the whole goddamned Napoleonic guard is heading toward us.
“Come on, Ludwig,” he said. “Get up! Let’s get the hell away from the city. It was your idea, remember?”
Beethoven finally heaved himself to his feet, mumbling about betrayal and heroes and the brutal blows of fate, and Huey knew that he would be all right. As long as the man sounded like himself, he was himself. That was something you came to understand quickly on the Riverworld.
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