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

Plum made out the features of a comely face—though taxed by care, and less so than it might have been. She bent and kissed him. “You are purest summer—unless you have hidden depths.”

Plum stammered. “No, no depth at all. I stay away from depth.”

She smiled. “Yes, you are heroically shallow. Can you write your book? The book of the good impostor Hakim?”

Plum lurched clumsily, the better to pat his seductress’s ankle. “He sent you. Your feet are dry. There’s no way to get here dry-shod. There’s a pool in the way. Except Hakim does it all the time. He’s got a secret route.”

The woman looked side to side. “I’ve never been on this half before. I wanted to come. It was made possible. I bring out the summer side of Hakim. Besides, I’m safe with you. I told Hakim you are not an ardent man. Anyone educated in an English boy’s school and fond of wrestling and boxing—I told him you were assuredly a closet homosexual, or maybe a pedophile.”

“Oh, I say—.'”

She put a finger to his protesting lips. “That will make it easier. I must be your editor, you see.”

“Are you—Maria?”

“Maria Montessori. World’s foremost expert on the education of children!” She went on in bitter amusement. “If you were useless in Riverworld without paper, imagine me with no young minds to guide.”

Wodehouse felt the warmth of her body. The hand he’d used to check her feet slid upward to take stock of her dimensions. This bed wasn’t very big after all, even with him pressed against the wall in a semi-aroused state of anxiety. “Ahh,” he said. “Ann.”

She went tilt. For a while there was confusion: knees and elbows being what they were. “Why Lenin?” Plum blurted after a first passionate clinch. “Why all this natter about Lenin and Hitler?”

“They stole my ideas about the plasticity of young minds. The New Communist Man. The Hitler youth. Get children early enough, and you make them anything!”

A kiss, and more lecture. “Of course their directions were wrong, but the concept! The tabula rasa! Did communism prove it, or not? If we make adults children again, and convert them into— You invented the words. Summer people. That’s what we want.”

“And you’re sure about Hakim? You trust him?”

162

Phillip C. Jennings

BLANDINGS ON RIVERWORLD

163

Maria laughed. “I can out-trick him any day. I’m here, aren’t I? And he knows it. Let him kill me. I’d pop back with all my knowledge somewhere else, and start my own regime. So I’m not worried. Come now. Let’s not talk about this. Goodness, you’re a long-distance head-to-toe! And such baby-soft hair!”

Next day Plum zoomed through chapter two, and took a walk. The Iraqi prince stepped into his path. “Ah, the aristocrat’s lapdog.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m told you write about dukes and earls. The upper crust. Ordinary people not good enough for you.”

“My dukes and earls are very ordinary,” Wodehouse answered. “Really, I’m one with the masses. The masses who buy the Saturday Evening Post, anyhow.”

“The despised masses. Hakim despises them. Don’t you suppose he’s told me? He only does bad things because they demand it. I’ve heard politicians whimper that sort of thing all my several lives. Have any of them had the courage to expect the best of their subjects? Or do they pander to the worst?”

“Some of each, I suppose,” Plum muttered.

“Yes. And you know which kind of man Hakim is, and you write for him anyhow.”

Plum colored. “I write what I write. Anybody who puts meaning into it is an idiot. You’d know if you’d ever read my stuff.”

“And you spoke on Nazi radio in World War Two. Unfair of people to put meaning into that, right?”

Plum’s blush deepened. “It was a mistake. I was isolated and naive. I didn’t want people to worry about me. I didn’t know my chipper bleat would give pain to Londoners who’d gotten blitzed.”

“Stop pushing him around,” Jim the Apache said from behind.

The princeling sneered. “I hear the voice of Hakim’s Indian scout. The one who runs free, and tracks skulkers by their broken twigs. Your Arabic has improved.”