The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

It’s important to Farrington. If it is to Tom, he never shows it.

Anyway, it was a thrill to be with these two. It still is, though familiarity breeds, if not contempt, familiarity.

Tom Rider has been up and down The River for hundreds of thousands of kilometers and has three times been killed. Once he was resurrected near the mouth of The River. By near I mean he was only about 20,000 kilometers distant. This was in the arctic region. The River’s mouth is, like its headwaters, near the North Pole. However, the two seem to be diametrically opposite, the waters issuing from the mountains in one hemisphere and emptying into the mountains in the other hemisphere.

From what I’ve heard, there’s a sea around the North Pole, and it’s walled by a circular mountain which would make Mount Everest look like a wart. The sea pours out of a hole at the base of the mountains, winds back and forth in one hemisphere, finally curving around the South Pole to the other hemisphere. There it wriggles like a snake up and down from the antarctic to the arctic and back again a thousand or so times, and finally empties into the north polar mountains. (Actually, it’s one mountain-like a volcanic cone.)

If I drew a sketch of The River, it’d look like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, a world-girdling snake with its tail in its mouth.

Tom said that the areas near the mouth are populated chiefly by Ice Agers, ancient Siberians, and Eskimos. There’s a scattering of modern Alaskans, upper Canadians, and Russians, though. And some others from everywhere and every time.

Tom, being the adventurer that he is, decided to travel to the mouth. He and six others made some kayaks and paddled down­stream from the land of the living into the wasteland of the fog shrouds. Surprisingly, vegetation grew in the mists and the darkness all the way to the mouth. Also, the grailstones extended for a thousand kilometers into the fog. The expedition had its last grail meal at the last stone and then, laden with dried fish and acorn bread and what they’d saved from the grails, they paddled on, the ever increasing current speeding them toward their goal.

The last hundred kilometers was in a current against which there was no turning back. They couldn’t even try for the shore; sheer canyon walls soared up from the edge of the water . The voyageurs were forced to eat and sleep sitting up in their kayaks.

It looked like curtains, finit, for them, and it was. They plunged into a great cave the ceiling and walls of which were so far away that Tom’s torchlight could not reach them. Then, with a horrible roaring, The River entered a tunnel. By then the ceiling was so low that Tom’s head was knocked against it. That’s all he remembers. Undoubtedly, the kayak was torn to pieces against the ceiling.

Tom woke up the next day somewhere near the south polar region.

39

(Frigate’s letter continued)

“There’s a tower in the middle of a sea surrounded by the polar mountains,” Tom said.

“A tower?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you heard about that? I thought everybody knew about the tower.”

“Nobody ever mentioned it to me.”

“Well,” he said, looking somewhat peculiar, “It is a hell of a long River. I suppose there are plenty of areas where nobody’s heard the tale.”

And he proceeded to tell me that that was just what it was, a tale. No proof. The man who told Tom about it may have been a liar, and God knows there are just as many here as there were on Earth. But this wasn’t an account heard from a man who’d heard it from another who’d heard it from still another and so on and so on. Tom himself had actually talked to a man who claimed to have seen the tower.

Tom had known this man for a long time, but he’d never said a word about it until he got stumbling drunk with Tom one night. After he sobered up, he refused to talk about it. He was too scared.