The Fabulous Riverboat by Phillip Jose Farmer

Clemens got to his feet and swayed for a minute. Then he called, in a louder voice, “Joe! Joe Miller!”

2

A voice from below the poopdeck muttered. It was so deep that it made the hairs on the backs of men’s necks rise even after hearing it for the thousandth time.

The stout bamboo ladder creaked beneath a weight, creaked so loudly it could be heard above the song of wind through leather ropes, flapping of membranous sails, grind of wooden joints, shouts of crew, hiss of water against the hull.

The head that rose above the edge of the deck was even more frightening than the inhumanly deep voice. It was as large as a half pony of beer and was all bars and arches and shelves and flying buttresses of bone beneath a pinkish and loose skin. Bone circled the eyes, smallseeming and dark blue. The nose was inappropriate to the rest of his features, since it should have been flat-bridged and flaring-nostriled. Instead, it was the monstrous and comical travesty of the human nose that the proboscis monkey shows to a laughing world. In its lengthy shadow was a long upper lip, like a chimpanzee’s or comic-strip Irishman’s. The lips were thin and protruded, shoved out by the convex jaws beneath.

His shoulders made Erik Bloodaxe’s look like pretzels. Ahead of him he pushed a great paunch, a balloon trying to rise from the body to which it was anchored. His legs and arms seemed short, they were so out of proportion to the long trunk. The juncture of thigh and body was level with Sam Clemens’ chin, and his arms, extended, could hold, and had held, Clemens out at arm’s length in the air for an hour without a tremor.

He wore no clothes nor did he need them for modesty’s sake, though he had not known modesty until taught by Homo sapiens. Long rusty-red hair, thicker than a man’s, less dense than a chimpanzee’s, was plastered to the body by his sweat. The skin beneath the hairs was the dirty-pink of a blond Nordic.

He ran a hand the size of an unabridged dictionary through the wavy, rusty-red hair that began an inch above the eyes and slanted back rapidly. He yawned and showed huge human-seeming teeth.

“I vath thleeping,” he rumbled, “I vath dreaming of Earth, of klravulthithmengbhabajving—vhat you call mammothth. Thothe vere the good old dayth.”

He shuffled forward, then stopped. “Tham! Vhat happened! You’re bleeding! You look thick!”

Bellowing for his guards, Erik Bloodaxe stepped backwards from the titanthrop. “Your friend went mad! He thought he’d seen his wife—for the thousandth time—and he attacked me because I wouldn’t take him in to the bank to her. Tyr’s testicles, Joe! You know how many times he’s thought he saw that woman, and how many times we stopped, and how many tunes it always turned out to be a woman who looked something like his woman but wasn’t!

“This tune, I said no! Even if it had been his woman, I would have said no! We’d be putting our heads in the wolfs mouth!”

Erik crouched, ax lifted, ready to swing at the giant. Shouts came from middeck, and a big redhead with a flint ax ran up the ladder. The helmsman gestured for him to leave. The redhead, seeing Joe Miller so belligerent, did not hesitate to retreat.

“Vhat you thay, Tham?” Miller said. “Thyould I tear him apart?”

Clemens held his head in both hands and said, “No. He’s right, I suppose. I don’t really know if she was Livy. Probably just a German hausfrau. I don’t know!” He groaned. “I don’t know! Maybe it was her!”

Fishbone horns blared, and a huge drum on the middeck thundered. Sam Clemens said, “Forget about this, Joe, until we get through the straits—if we do get through! If we’re to survive, we’ll have to fight together. Later . . .”

“You alvayth thay later, Tham, but there never ith a later. Vhy?”

“If you can’t figure that out, Joe, you’re as dumb as you look!” Clemens snapped.

Tearshields glinted in Joe’s eyes, and his bulging cheeks became wet.

“Every time you get thcared, you call me dumb,” he said. “Vhy take it out on me? Vhy not on the people that thcare you the thyit outa you, vhy not on Bloodakthe?”