“He sure put that chicken in the pot, didn’t he?” said Huey Long. “Look at the man put that there car in the garage.” He cackled and wondered what Selous would say to that. “Say, there,” he said to Beethoven, who was now softly weeping beneath him, “what do you think the Englishman would say?”
“Muss ess sein,” Beethoven said. “Ess muss sein.”
Magnificent in his duties, triumphant in his discharge, the god Caligula rolled from the inert form that had served him so well—adequately, anyway, enough for the
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time being, though of course there would be better—and looked at his subjects encamped in the distance, fallen to their knees to revere and serve him.
“Oh, yes,” he said quietly. “Oh, yes, reverence and service, they are the same thing.”
He readjusted his garments, stood, pushed the husk of his revenant to one side, and strode to the small place that had been made for him by the servants of the Riverworld, his parapet from which he would speak. He would gather them to him and give them his orders, and then the true and final nature of his reign would begin. In the distance he heard the shrieks of homage, Claudius himself soon to come, to bear witness, to bow down in service. Every man a god, yes—
—But this god, granted the Riverworld, its indulgence, its folly and its treasure… this god a man.
Blandings on Riverworld
Phillip G. Jennings
‘ ‘Has even death become unsure? Are we mockeries of ourselves? Are you the Mocker?”
The Big Cheese’s voice echoed down from the throne. P.G. Wodehouse, Bart., was urged to his knees by the guards at his side, and the Grand Panjandrum—this “al-Hakim” chappie—took wind for another set-to in what Plum had to admit was exceptionally refulgent Arabic.
“To say that God speaks is to suggest he may ever be silent. This—this ‘river world’ is not reality, but a code, and therefore a message and not of God. But it implies a message very like the Druze da’wa, and therefore a thousand times deceitful. What do you know of the Deceiver?”
Hakim’s mighty line of thought seemed almost logical. Some Oxford wallah might grasp how one sentence led to the next, each conclusion grimmer than the one before it. “Well now, dash it! I mean—codes and all!” Saddled with the habits of a myopic lifetime, Plum blinked about, trying to make something of a hall built of cyclopean slabs. His spirits certainly needed fortifying. A casual
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viewer of these mustered ranks hi black robes and white turbans—said viewer might easily hop to the conclusion that he was “in for it.”
It was not a conclusion Plum Wodehouse liked to embrace. Death may have lost much of its sting by the third or fourth inning, but his last incarnation he hadn’t even gotten a chance to eat, and his faith in the better nature of humanity was taking a beating. “If you think I’m the Devil, or that I’ve met him, I have to answer not to my knowledge. No. I mean, I don’t think so.”
“Truth knows what it means.”
“I suppose it does,” Plum conceded. In moments of desperate anxiety his smile widened to the straining point and became almost horrible. “But I can’t vouch for anyone but myself, and I’ve met a lot of strange coves and covesses these last few lives….” His eyes narrowed with sudden cunning. “Besides, didn’t you say we might not be ourselves? Under the circ.s, I don’t know how to prove my bona fides.”
“We tolerate one people here, and one language. Assuredly I’ve never heard Arabic spoken as you do,” al-Hakim thundered from his high and distant seat. “Nevertheless, it is Arabic—of a sort.”
He pondered, and the flanking spear-carriers shifted in waiting, ready to extirpate this infidel at the crook of a finger. “You’ve lived several lives? After the feast, attend us privately in our garden, and we will hear your testimony.”
Plum took this for good news, and breathed again. The four hours of this present existence might become eight, and then sixteen…. Socially inept, yes, but he’d always charmed—well, not everybody. In his last incarnation Hans Horbiger had it in for him, with bells on. Still, al-Hakim
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