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Phillip C. Jennings
there were people who thought about him. People he could excite.
No, no pretense. He could excite them. He could reach them. He sat at his table, fired with new ambition. A story? A book! In English, at least the first draft. No more weird mishmashes!
Once Plum immersed himself in his grand enterprise, time whizzed by, with occasional interruptions to tie on the old nosebag. He almost resented these breaks, made worse by the officiousness of the tiffin man, who never failed to collect his tobacco, his marijuana, his liquor, and/or his dreamgum. No altered mental states allowed in Druze-dom!
Hakim visited daily, and then absented himself on a tour of his domains. Plum scribbled on. Now and again he’d walk for exercise, having the sort of strappingly large body that insisted on its own health.
Chapter one took shape. It would remain chapter one. The chapters one of other authors became chapters twelve or chapters seventeen before their books were through, or got distributed in parcels through the work, or ditched entirely. Such was not the way of P.O. Wodehouse.
He launched chapter two. Hakim came back from his royal progress. He collected Plum’s first closely written pages and felt the sting of the Wodehouse wrath. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
“You said this much was done. Maria wants to see it.”
Plum insisted on promises. Hakim scowled, and left.
A guard returned the pages some hours later. Plus a pipe. Plus a pouch of tobacco. He turned and left. Plum danced a caper around his hut, puffed a bowlful, and got back to work.
BLANDINGS ON RIVERWORLD
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He labored until the gilded evening dimmed and took his light away, and then took another walk, nodding cheerfully at Jim the Apache, the Smyrnese haberdasher, and a new arrival, a French Algerian with a smoldering resentment of everything Arabic. The Iraqi prince bowed grandly as Plum swung by, not a nice bow, but an accusation. Plum could not account for it. Jealousy? Word of the gift pipe had gotten around.
No butler shimmered into view at nine-thirty with whiskey-and-soda. Plum went to bed.
He was awakened by a “Shhh!” Someone was in the hut with him. “Please!” she whispered. “Don’t make a sound.”
Plum fumbled, then remembered he didn’t need glasses anymore. He spoke to a scented silhouette. “How did you get here? Who are you?”
“I knew it was you. I had to see.” She spoke English in the accents of the warm south, somewhere between Alps and Ganges. “I loved your story. The pipe was my idea.”
“Oh.” As he gained fuller consciousness, Plum was seized by terror. “This—you have to get back. This is madness! We’ll be killed for it!”
The shadow shook her head. Plum’s bed creaked as she sat at his side. “It does not occur to Hakim that resurrectees are random. He suspects purpose. You are either something dangerous or useful. Me? I’m one of the usefuls. If his alchemists can extract the essence of dreamgum and make his people children again, I will help mold them in ways—of freedom? So he says: freedom and goodness. He says he must put on the grand show of Druze-ism, but in his heart he is against it.
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Phillip C. Jennings
BLAND1NGS ON RTVERWORLD
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Survival! First he must stay alive here, where his position is unique.”
Hers was a tidy synopsis of what Plum already had been told, but it touched too lightly on the one fact that put an edge on the knife. “He’s a bally impostor. He never wrote their scriptures. He’s just muddling along.” “You are always putting impostors in your Blandings Castle,” the woman answered. “I think he wants this. He wants to be written up in allegory; warmly, a well-intentioned man. Your book will appeal to the new people we make. The orthodox will hate it. You will be a rod for their lightnings. Druze-land will be your prison, but your work will sneak out into the greater world.”
“Until, not too guiltily, Hakim has me killed.”
The visitor shook her head. “I don’t see how he can pull it off. Creating a race of ‘summer children’ in the midst of this spiritual winter. He’ll be killed too. And the new ones. But we’ll be resurrected, knowing how to re-create ourselves with concentrated essence of dreamgum. The ratio of summer to winter will edge our way.”
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