The Fabulous Riverboat by Phillip Jose Farmer

“He impressed me very much,” von Richthofen said. “He was born in 1974 in Syracuse, New York. His father was black, and his mother was half Irish and half Iroquois Indian. He was in the second party to land on Mars and the first to orbit Jupiter—”

Sam was thinking, Men really did that! Landed on the Moon and then Mars. Right out of Jules Verne and Frank Reade, Jr. Fantastic, yet no more fantastic than this world. Or, indeed, than the mundane world of 1910. None of it could be explained in a manner to satisfy any reasonable man. It was all incredible. “We’ll put it up to the Council today, John,” Sam said,

if you have no objection. We’ll have a general election on the pro tem Councilman. I personally favor Uzziah Cawber.”

“Cawber was a slave, wasn’t he?” Lothar said. “I don’t know. Hacking said he didn’t want any Uncle Toms.”

Once a slave, always a slave, Sam thought. Even when a slave revolts, kills, and is killed as a protest against his slavery—resurrected, he still does not think of himself as a free man. He was born and raised in a world soaked with the rotten essence of slavedom and every thought he thinks, every move he makes is stained with slavery, subtly altered with slavery. Cawber was born in 1841 in Montgomery, Alabama, he was taught to read and write, he served in the house of his master as his secretary, he killed his master’s son in 1863, escaped, and went West and became a cowboy, of all things, and then a miner. He was killed with a Sioux spear in 1876; the ex-slave killed by a man about to become a slave. Cawber is delighted with this world—-or claims to be—because no man can enslave him here or keep him enslaved. But he is the slave of his own mind and of the reaction of his nerves. Even when he holds his head high, he will jump if somebody cracks a whip, and his head will bow before he can stop it . . .

Why, oh, why had man been brought back to life? Men and women were rained by what had happened on Earth, and they would never be able to undo the damage. The Second Chancers claimed a man could change, entirely change. But the Second Chancers were a pack of dreamgummers.

“If Hacking calls Cawber an Uncle Tom, Cawber will kill him,” Sam said. “I say, let’s send him.”

John’s tawny eyebrows rose. Sam knew what he was thinking. Perhaps he could use Cawber, one way or another.

Sam looked at the waterclock. “Time for the inspection tour. Care to come along, John? I’ll be with you in a minute,” and he sat down at his desk to make a few more entries in his diary. That gave John the chance to leave first, as befitted the ex-King of England and of a good part of France. Sam thought it was ridiculous to worry about who preceded whom, yet he disliked John so much he could not bear to let him gain even this minor victory. Rather than argue about it, or just walk out ahead of Mm, and so cause John to throw a fit, he pretended he had work to do.

Sam caught up with the group, which included the six Councilman, just outside the nitric-acid factory. They went through the factories swiftly. The stinks emanating from the nitric and sulfuric acids; from the destructive distillation of wood to make alcohol, acetone, creosote, turpentine and acetic acid; the formaldehyde vats and the treatment of human excrement and lichen scraped off the mountains to extract potassium nitrate—these, combined, were enough to make a hyena lose its breakfast. The Councillors were roasted and deafened in the steel mill and the grinding mills and the forges and blacksmith shops. They were covered with a white dust in the limestone mills and magnesium factory. In the aluminum factory they were again roasted, deafened, and stunk out.

The gunsmith shop up in the hills was not operating at the moment. Except for distant noises, it was quiet. But it was not beautiful. The earth had been dug up, the trees cut down, and smoke from the factories up The River was black and acrid along the mountains.