Farmer, Philip Jose – Riverworld 06 – ( Shorts) Tales of Riverworld

“Why have we stopped?” demanded Caligula. Selous squatted down, staring at the ground. “Someone passed this way not too long ago.”

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“Doubtless it was your friend Burton.”

“He’s not exactly my friend,” said Selous. “And it wasn’t him. I lost his trail miles ago. This was someone who came by in a hurry, at kind of a half-run. Also, whoever it was has never worn shoes. The toes are all straight, not bunched together at the edge.”

“What is that to us?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then why are we pausing?”

“There may be people ahead of us, and they may not be friendly.”

“They will fall to their knees and worship me, and perhaps, in my magnanimity, I will let some of them live,” said Caligula, striding confidently past Selous.

For a moment the Englishman was tempted to grab his arm and hold him back. Then he shrugged. What the hell, if someone was going to take the first shot or the first arrow, far better this madman than himself.

He fell into stride behind the blond god.

Beethoven had turned to Huey Long in the first flush of their acquaintance, a few days earlier, and said, “They lied to us. From the beginning, from the very start, we were lied to.”

“Lying is what it’s all about,” the politician had said. “Without lies, son, there woudn’t be any politicos at all. There would just be a bunch of people hitting each other with clubs to see who came out on top. It’s the lies that bring structure to the whole mess, you understand what I mean?”

“No,” Beethoven had replied, “I don’t understand what you mean.” Everything seemed so clear in his mind until he started talking, and then it drifted away, simply

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left him. It was an embarrassment, a disgrace of sorts to be out-talked and out-thought by this fool of an American. “How could I understand?” he continued bitterly. “But surely you see they are not telling the truth about this place. It is not like something we have seen before, but is something else.”

“That’s true, son,” Huey agreed. “Everything is something else, which is why we must apply our higher reasoning powers to the situation.”

“But the situation is not as you think,” Beethoven said, and wanted to continue in a long speech to the politician about the nature of thought and the different kinds of liars with whom he had had to struggle all his life, but a shocking C Minor triad directly out of the first movement of the C Minor Symphony, the loudest he had heard since the deafness had been stripped from him in this place, came thundering through with the force of light and left him surprised and numb.

“C Minor, C Minor!” he said wildly. “That’s all of life, don’t you understand, tonic to dominant C and back again!” He remembered how it had been in the last years • before the deafness struck, when the music had seemed so absolute in its purity and force that even the Hammerklavier had seemed to be only a preparation for what he might do. And then to lose hearing, lose patience, lost all of the fawning, miserable dilettantes who had made ease possible, all of the time understanding that he was sinking slowly beneath his own shame.

“Enough!” he shouted suddenly. “Enough!” He heard the triad shift to the major, now a clashing C major triad signaling the opening of the final movement after the crawl through the bassi.

“I can’t understand how this happened,” he said to

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Huey Long. “Of this destiny there was not any indication at all. Not a hint of prayer or light. Even when I tore the curtain aside in the Missa Solemnis, it was nothing like this, it was acres and acres of the graveyard, the encased dead, the unwrapped dead, rising, singing, ascending slowly….”

“Oh, son,” said Long, not unkindly, “you’re really gonna have to stop with this nonsense. You’re just tearing yourself up with the anxiety, and you ain’t getting nowhere at all.”