The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

So, here we are in the Rivervalley, knowing not why and whence. Just like on Eath.

Of course, there are plenty of people who say they know. There are the two dominant churches, the Chancers and the Nichirenites, and a thousand sects of reformed Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and God knows what all. The former Taoists and Confucianists say they don’t give a damn; this is a better life, on the whole, than the last one. The totemists are in a bit of a bind, since there are no animals here. But that doesn’t mean the totem spirits aren’t here. Many’s the savage I’ve run into who sees his totem in dreams or visions. The majority of them, though, have been converted to one of the “higher” religions.

There’s also Nur el-Musafir. He’s a Sufi. He was just as shocked as anybody to wake up here. He wasn’t outraged, however, and he reordered his thinking tout de suite. He says that whatever beings have made this world have done so with only our eventual good in mind. Otherwise, why go to all this great expense and trouble? (In this, he sounds like a barker for a circus. But he’s sincere. Which doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about.)

We shouldn’t concern ourselves with the Who or the How, he says. Just with the Why. In this respect, he sounds like a Chancer. But I see I’m about to run out of my quota of paper. So, adiau, adios, selah, amen, salaam, shalom, and so long. (The English so long is from selang, the Moslem Malayan’s pronunciation of the Arabic salaam.)

Amicably and didactically yours in the bowels of Whomever,

Peter Jairus Frigate

P.S. I still don’t know if I’ll mail this in toto, censor it, or use it for toilet paper.

41

On the average, the river was 2.4135 kilometers or a mile and a half wide. Sometimes it narrowed into channels always lined by high hills; sometimes it widened into a lake. Whatever its breadth, its depth was everywhere about 305 meters or a trifle over 1000 feet.

Nowhere along The River was there water erosion of the banks. The grass on the plains merged into an aquatic grass at the water level, and the latter flourished on the sides and bottom of the channel. The roots of this fused with the roots of the surface grass to form an interconnected mass. The grass was not separate blades; it was one vast vegetable entity.

The water plants were eaten by a multitude of fish life from surface to bottom. Many species cruised about in the upper stratum, where the sunlight penetrated. Others, paler creatures but no less voracious, swarmed in the middle layer. In the darkness of the bottom many weird forms scuttled, crawled, wriggled, jetted, swam.

Some ate the leprous-white rooted things that looked like flowers or were in turn enfolded and digested by them. Others, large and small, slid steadily along, mouths gaping, collecting the microscop­ic life that also lived in the fluid strata.

The largest of all, vaster than the blue whale of Earth, was a carnivorous fish called the river dragon. It shared with a much smaller water dweller the ability to roam the bottom or skim the surface without harm from change in pressure.

The other creature had many names, but in English it was gener­ally called “croaker.” It was the size of a German police dog, as slow as a sloth, and as undiscriminating in appetite as a hog. The chief sanitation engineer of The River, it ate anything that did not resist it. The greater part of its diet, however, was the human turd.

A lungfish, it also foraged ashore at night. Many a human had been frightened on seeing its huge goggle eyes in the fog or when stumbling over its slimy body as it crawled around seeking garbage and crap. Almost as scary as its appearance was its loud croak, evoking images of monsters and ghosts.

On this day of year 25 a.r.d., one of these vilely stinking scavengers was near a bank. Here the current was weaker than in the middle. Even so, its fin-legs were going at near top speed to keep it from being moved backward. Presently, its nose detected a dead fish floating toward it. It moved out a little and waited for the carcass to drift into its mouth.