The Fabulous Riverboat by Phillip Jose Farmer

“If you had told me Hacking was going to invade, I could have kept everything,” Sam said. “We could have ambushed Hacking.”

The sun came up and struck the tawniness of John’s hair and the peculiar gray-blue of his eyes. “Ah, yes, but Iyeyasu would still have been a formidable problem. Now he’s gone, and there is little to keep us from ruling all the land we need, including the bauxite and platinum of Soul City and the iridium and tungsten of Selinujo. I presume you have no objections to conquering those two states?”

There was a bonanza in the aftermath. Hacking was taken prisoner, and Gwenafra was found alive. Both had been pushed during the fighting into the hills to the west. Hacking was getting ready to lead a charge back down the hills, when the edge of the waters deluged his part. Gwenafra escaped, though she almost drowned. Hacking had been hurled against a tree. Both his legs and one arm were broken, and he was bleeding internally.

Sam and John hastened to where Hacking lay under an irontree. Gwenafra cried when she saw them and embraced Sam and Lothar. She seemed to have given Sam a much longer embrace than she did Lothar, which was not entirely unexpected, since she and Lothar had been quarreling violently for the last few months.

John wanted to finish Hacking off with some refined tortures, preferably as soon after breakfast as possible. Sam objected strongly. He knew that John could have his way if he insisted, since his men outnumbered Sam’s by fifty to one. But Sam was past being cautious, at that moment, anyway. And John backed away. He needed Sam and the men whose loyalty he commanded.

“You had a dream, White Sam,” Hacking said in a weak voice. “Well, I had one, too. A land where brothers and sisters could loaf and invite their souls. Where we’d be all black. You wouldn’t know what that means. No white devils, no white eyes. Just black soul brothers. It would have been as near heaven as you can get in this hell of a world. Not that we wouldn’t have had trouble, no place without trouble, man. But there wouldn’t have been any white-man trouble. It’d be all ours. But that isn’t to be.”

“You could have had your dream,” Sam said. “If you’d waited. After the boat was built, we’d have left the iron to whomever could take it. And then . . .”

Hacking grimaced. Sweat covered his black skin and his face was tight with pain. “Man, you must be out of your skull! You really think I believed that story about you sailing off on this quest for the Big Grail? I knew you was going to use that big boat to conquer us blacks and lock those chains around us again. An Old South whitey like you . . .”

He closed his eyes. Sam said, “You are wrong! If you knew me, if you’d taken the trouble to know me instead of stereotyping me . . .”

Hacking opened his eyes and said, “You’d lie to a nigger even when he was on his deathbed, wouldn’t you? Listen! That Nazi, Goring, he really shook me up. I didn’t tell them to torture him, just kill him, but those fanatical Arabs, you know them. Anyway, Goring gives me a message. Hail and farewell, soul brother, or something like that. I forgive you, because you know not what you do. Something like that. Ain’t that a crock? A message of love from a damn Nazi! But you know, he had changed! And he could be right. Maybe all them Second Chancers are right. Who knows? Sure seems stupid to bring us up from the dead, give us our youth back, just so some can kick and some can hurt all over again. Stupid, isn’t it?”

He stared up at Sam and then said, “Shoot me, will you? Put me out of my pain? I’m really suffering.”

Lothar stepped up beside Sam and said, “After what you did to Gwenafra, I’ll be glad to.”

He pointed the muzzle of the big flintlock at Hacking’s head.

Hacking grinned painfully and muttered, “Rape on principle, mother! I swore off that on Earth, but that woman just brought out the devil in me! Besides, so what? What about all those black slave women you white mothers raped?”