GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

“Even bigger money for a nigger,” Tom said. “Nineteen thirty-five, you say?”

“I’ll ask the Computer if it’s got a book titled They All Played Ragtime,” Frigate said. “You’ll like to read it. Lots about you. It’ll make you proud.”

“I don’t need no book for that, but I’ll get it.”

The day after the Computer told him that his Jumpin’ Planet was finished, Tom Turpin entered it. It was ten in the morning; the sky was blue except for a few high-seeming, thin, cotton-white clouds. Tom went down the steps leading into it and found, as he had ordered, his chauffeur and his pink 1920 convertible Mercedes-Benz waiting for him. The android chauffeur was six feet three inches tall, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and yellow-haired. He also was the ugliest white man Tom had ever seen, because his face had been designed by Tom himself. He wore a typical chauffeur’s uniform except it was pink. “To go with the car,” Tom had told the others.

He got in the back seat and said, “Home, James.” The beauty started up fine, its motor purring, and they began the long winding drive through the tunnel formed by trees with interlocking branches.

“Shouldn’t of made the road so narrow,” Tom muttered. “But, what the hell, there won’t be any oncoming traffic.”

After a while the woods thinned out, and they passed along the edge of a lake. Its surface was brilliantly colored with ducks and geese and herons and cranes in the shallows dipping to catch fish. It was also noisy with honks and screeches and weird loon cries.

The road took them away from Turpinville near the edge of the vast chamber. “Wouldn’t know it if I didn’t know it,” Tom said. “Looks like more forest and hills there. I ain’t gonna touch the wall. I want to keep the illusion.”

From the entrance, a straight path to Turpinville was only two and seven-tenths miles. The road designed by Turpin took up almost ten miles, however, to the town, and he could have taken a branch road and made the trip twenty-two miles. Now and then he glimpsed the roof of his town, and his heart surged with pride. “Mine, all mine.”

When they drove from the dark forest into Turpinville, he wished that he had arranged for a big band and a crowd to greet him. The place was so empty, so silent. “A ghost town before its time,” he said. “Well, it’ll be leaping with sound and people before long.”

The car pulled up in front of the Rosebud, and Tom got out.

He walked across the town square to the central fountain, took a silver cup from a hook on the fountain, dipped it into the strong-smelling liquid, and drank.

“Man, that’s the best! But I need the old crowd, the music, the smoke, the laughs, the … friends. No fun drinking by yourself, talking to yourself.”

He went into the Rosebud, took the ornate elevator to the third floor, entered his suite, went into the room where a huge console stood, and began the search.

Three weeks later, he had not just the forty or so people he had intended, but two thousand.

“It’s nigger heaven,” he told his former companions during one of the rare times he attended their soirees. “It’s like a flea circus. Everybody’s jumping.”

Tom was amused when Frigate winced at “nigger heaven.” Frigate was a liberal who found such terms repulsive. Tom would not tolerate these from others, unless they were black, but he had no hesitation using them himself. When Frigate asked him why he did so, Tom replied that it was just his way. He hadn’t been able to break his old Earth habit.

“You’ve lived long enough on the Riverworld to get over that,” Nur said.

“It takes away the hurt.”

“Whipping yourself is a curious method of salving wounds,” Frigate said.

There seemed to be no answer to that. Aphra said, “When are we going to see your world?”

“How about next Friday?” Tom said. “You’ll be all right. You’ll have a good time. I told my friends about you, and they don’t mind you coming.” He laughed. “Long as you know your place.”