The Mayor stared at him. Cool calculation alone should have been enough to calm Hizzonor’s wrath; the Rhomaioi had him and his delegation at their mercy, if they chose to attack. But Daley’s glance never went to the gathered men of New Constantinople; he watched Alexios alone. And then, to Alexios’s amazement, Hizzonor threw back his head and shouted laughter to the sky. “You son of a bitch, you cheated me,” he said again. The words were as they had been a minute before, but their tone altogether different.
The Mayor slapped the Basileus on the back, hard enough to stagger him. A couple of Alexios’s guards growled and took a step toward Daley, but Alexios waved them back. “Now that you know I can, perhaps we’ll have a better chance of living next to each other in peace,” he told Hizzonor. “One thing I’ve noticed about you opisthanthropoi is that you think anyone from before your own time has to be foolish. Would you have proposed this arrangement of ours to one of your contemporaries? They would have seen through it to your true intentions, and so have I.”
“Most of them wouldn’t, by God,” Daley said. He
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did not mention that his true intentions were murderous, any more than Alexios had. Sometimes that was part of the game. Hizzonor laughed again, even louder than before. “All right, I’m Kaisar and it doesn’t matter worth a damn. I know what I do the first thing I get back to Shy town, though.”
“What’s that?” Alexios asked. “Appoint myself an Associate Mayor—what else?” It was the Basileus’s turn to laugh. “Fair enough. Now we feast.”
Fool’s Paradise
Ed German
I heard the voice but I tried to ignore it. I didn’t want to wake up. I was dreaming of the apartment on Eddy Street in the sunny autumn of 1921, a few weeks after my daughter Mary Jane was born, and of how tender and pretty my wife looked in those days before I betrayed her and ended our marriage.
Then it was more than just a voice, the summoning, it was quick, small hands shaking my shoulder and saying over and over, “Please, Mr. Hammett. Please wake up.”
The first thing I smelled was the rain, the clean chill scent of it on the heavy green foliage along the River, and the dull tamping sound it made on the roof of the jerry-rigged wooden cabin where I lived.
I got one eye open and pulled myself up to one elbow for support and looked at the rabbity little man shaking me.
I hadn’t liked him much back on earth—his work, I
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mean; I obviously hadn’t known him personally—and I didn’t like him any better here on the Riverworld.
All the biographies have him as this tortured, romantic soul, but, like most people unfortunate enough to fit that description, he was a whiner, a schemer, and a tireless narcissist.
“I’m sorry I woke you up, Mr. Hammett.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet you are.”
“I need your help, Mr. Hammett. Need it badly.”
He always called me “Mr. Hammett.” I suppose it was because of the hair. It went silver on me when I was young and no matter how much the ladies insisted it made me look “distinguished,” it also made me look older than my years. Even now, even though like most folks on Riverworld I was only twenty-five, my hair was once again turning white.
I sat up on the blanket. I rubbed my eyes and allowed myself an expansive yawn. And then I punched him. Oh, it wasn’t much of a punch, no teeth broken, no nose flattened, but it stunned him and pushed him back a foot or two, and that was good enough for me.
He touched his mouth tenderly, the tip of his tongue tasting the blood on his lower lip. “Why did you do that, Mr. Hammett?”
I’ve never been especially pleasant in the morning. My father was like that and so was my grandfather. I’m willing to blame it on my genes and not my soul. I’m especially unpleasant when somebody like my uninvited house guest wakes me up just at dawn.