The Fabulous Riverboat by Phillip Jose Farmer

He killed two and wounded seven and ran the rest of them off. That is God’s truth!”

“I don’t want to get into an argument about the merits of your man,” he said. “Or about anything. Let’s just talk like we used to when we had so much fun—before you got sick.”

She stopped. Her face set grimly. “I always knew you resented my illness, Sam.”

“No, that wasn’t it,” he said. “I think I felt guilty that you were sick, as if somehow I were to blame. But I never hated you for it. I hated myself if I hated anyone.”

“I didn’t say you hated me,” she said. “I said you resented my illness and you showed it in many ways. Oh, you may have thought you were always noble and gentle and loving—and most of the time you were—you really were. But there were enough tunes when you looked, you spoke, you muttered, you gestured—how can I describe exactly how you were? I can’t, but I knew you resented me, sometimes loathed me, because I was sick.”

“I didn’t!” he cried so loudly that a number of people stared.

“Why argue about it? Whether you did or not doesn’t matter now. I loved you then and I still do, in. a way. But not as I did.”

He was silent during the rest of the walk across the plain to the big mushroom-shaped stone. The cigar tasted like burning skunk cabbage.

Cyrano was not present. He was superintending the building of a section of the wall which would eventually guard the shore of The River. Sam was glad. It was difficult enough for him to see Livy alone, but when she was with the Frenchman, he could not endure his thoughts. In silence, he and Livy parted.

A beautiful woman with lovely, honey-colored hair approached him, and he was able to set aside his feelings about Livy for a while. The woman’s name was Gwenafra. She had died at about the age of seven in a country that must have been Cornwall about the tune the Phoenicians came there to exploit the tin mines. She had been resurrected among people of whom none spoke her ancient Celtic language and had been adopted by a group that spoke English. From her description, one of them had been that Sir Richard Francis Burton whom Sam had thought he’d seen on the shore just before the meteorite struck. Burton and his friends had built a small sailboat and set out for the headwaters of The River—as might have been expected of a man who had spent half his life exploring in the wildernesses of Africa and the other continents. On Earth Burton had sought the headwaters of the Nile and had found, instead, Lake Tanganyika. But on this world he had again been seeking the source of a river—the greatest River of them all—undaunted by the prospect that it might be ten million miles long or even twenty.

After little more than a year, his boat had been attacked by evil men, and one had stuck a stone knife into little Gwenafra and thrown her into The River, where she had drowned. She had awakened the next day on the banks somewhere far up in the northern hemisphere. The weather was colder, the sun weaker and the people there said that you did not have to go more than twenty thousand grailstones before you were in an area where the sun was always half above, half below the mountains. And there lived hairy, ape-faced men ten feet tall and weighing seven to eight hundred pounds.

(This was true, Joe Miller had been one of the titanthrops there.)

The people upRiver who adopted her spoke Suomenkielta, which in English meant Finnish. DownRiver a little way were Swedes, twentieth-century people who lived a peaceful life. Gwenafra grew up relatively happy with her loving foster parents. She learned Finnish, Swedish, English, a Chinese dialect of the fourth century B.C., and Esperanto.

She drowned again by accident one day and woke up in this area. She still remembered Burton; she cherished a childhood crush she had had for him. But, being a realist, she was ready to love other men. And she had—and had just split with one, Sam had heard. She wanted a man who would be faithful to her, and these were not easy to find in this world.