The Fabulous Riverboat by Phillip Jose Farmer

He jumped on the ship, his weight causing it to tilt a little on the port. He swung his grail to show them that if they attacked him, he would bash their skulls in with it. They took the hint and did not come close. The chief gave Joe a cigar, and though Joe coughed a little and found the taste of tobacco strange, he liked it. Moreover, when he had drunk beer for the first time, he was entranced.

So Joe decided to go on the Riversnake’s back up The River with the pygmies. He was put to work on a mighty sweep, and he was called Tehuti. ‘Tehuti?” von Richthofen said.

“The Greek form is Thoth,” Clemens said. “To the Egyptians, he looked something like the long-beaked ibisgod. I suppose he must also have reminded them of the baboon-god, Bast, but that tremendous nose outweighed that consideration. So, Thoth, or Tehuti, he became.”

Days and nights flowed by like The River. Sometimes, Joe became tired and wished to be put ashore. By now, he could speak the pygmies’ language, though haltingly. The chief would agree to do as Joe wished since it was obvious that any denial might result in the slaughter of his entire crew. But he would speak sadly of Tehuti’s education ending there, just when he was doing so well. He had been a brute, though with the face of the god of wisdom, and soon he would be a man. Brute? God? Man? What were they?

The order was not quite right, the chief would say. The correct sequence, ever upward, was brute, man and god. Yet it was true you might see a god disguised as a beast, and man merged insensibly from animal into deity, balanced between the two, and now and then changed into one or the other.

That was beyond the breadloaf-shaped brain of Tehuti. He would squat and scowl at the nearing bank. There would be no more cigars or beer. The people on the bank were his kind, but they were also not his tribe, and they might kill him. Moreover, he was beginning for the first time to experience intellectual stimulation, and that would cease once he was back among the titanthrops.

So he would look at the chief and blink, grin and shake his head and tell him he was going to stay on the ship. He took his turn at the sweep and resumed his study of the most marvelous of all things: a tongue that knew philosophy. He became fluent in their speech and began to grasp the wonderful things the leader told him, although sometimes it was as painful as grasping a handful of thorns. If this or that idea eluded him, he pursued it, caught it, swallowed it, perhaps vomited it up a score of times. Eventually, he digested it and got some nourishment from it.

The River flowed by. They rowed, always staying close to the shore, where the current was weakest. Days and nights, and now the sun did not climb so high in the heavens but was a little lower at its zenith than it had been the week before. And the air grew colder.

Sam said, “Joe and his party were getting close to the north pole. The inclination of this planet’s equator to the plane of the ecliptic is zero. As you know, there are no seasons; day and night are equal in length. But Joe was approaching the point where he would see the sun always half below the horizon and half above. Or would have if it hadn’t been for the mountains.”

“Yeth. It vath alvayth tvilight. I got cold, though not ath cold ath the men. They vere thyivering their atheth off.”

“His big bulk radiates heat slower than our puny bodies,” Clemens said.

“Pleathe, pleathe! Thyould I talk or jutht keep my big mouth thyut?” Lothar and Sam grinned at him.

He continued. The wind grew stronger, and the air became misty. He began to get uneasy. He wanted to turn back, but by now he did not want to lose the respect of the leader. He would go every inch of the way toward their unknown goal with them. “You didn’t know where they were going?” Lothar said. “Not egthactly. They vanted to get to the headvaterth of the River. They thought maybe the godth lived there, and there the godth vould admit them into the true aftervorld. They thaid that thith vorld vathn’t the true vorld. It vath a thtage on the vay to the true vorld. Vhatever that ith.”