The Fabulous Riverboat by Phillip Jose Farmer

“The founder knew that his visitor could not be just a man because he knew things that only a god, or a superior being, could know about him. And he showed him some things that he had to believe. And he told him how we were brought back to life and why. He did not tell him everything. Some things will be revealed later. Some things we must find out for ourselves.”

“What is the name of this founder?” Sam said. “Or don’t you know? Is that one of the hidden things?”

“No one knows,” Goring said. “It is not necessary to know. What is a name? He only called himself Viro. That is, in Esperanto, a man. From the Latin vir. We call him La Fondinto, The Founder, or La Viro, The Man.” “Did you ever meet him?”

“No, but I have met two who knew him well. One was there when La Viro preached the first time, seven days after the Stranger had talked to him.” “La Viro is definitely male? Not a woman?” “Oh, yes!”

Sam sighed deeply and said, “That’s a great weight off my mind. If the founder had turned out to be Mary Baker Eddy, I would have curled up and died.” “What?”

“Never mind,” Sam said, grinning. “I wrote a book about her once. I wouldn’t want to meet her; she’d scalp me alive. But some of the wild mystical things you told me reminded me of her.”

“Except for the ka, everything in our explanation is based on the physical. And the ka is physical, but at right angles, you might say, to our reality. We believe that it is science, the science of The Ancients, which has given us a physical resurrection. There’s nothing supernatural about anything, except our belief in The Creator, of course. The rest is all science.” “Like Mary Baker Eddy’s religion?” Sam asked. “I do not know of her.” “So how do we attain this salvation?”

“By becoming love. And that implies, of course, that we do not offer violence, even in self-defence. We believe that we can become love only by attaining a certain transcendent state and that comes through self-knowledge. So far most of mankind has not learned how to use dreamgum; man has abused the drug, just as he abuses everything.”

“And you think you have become love, whatever that phrase means?” “Not yet. But I am on the way.” “Through dreamgum?”

“Not just with it. It helps. But you have to act, too, you have to preach and suffer for your belief. And learn not to hate. Learn to love.”

“So that is why you oppose my Riverboat? You think that we are wasting our time by building it?”

“It’s a goal that will bring no one any good. So far it has resulted in the devastation of the land, in greed and pain and bloodshed, in anxiety and treachery. In hate, hate, hate! And for what? So you can have what nobody else has, a giant boat of metal propelled by electricity, the apex of the technology this planet offers, a ship of fools. So you can journey to the headwaters of The River. When you get there, then what? You should be journeying to the headwaters of the soul!”

“There are some things you don’t know,” Sam said. His smugness was soured by a vision. There was a devil, crouching in the darkness, whispering in his ear. But someone had crouched in the darkness and whispered in the ear of the founder of the Church, too. Was the Church’s Stranger the devil? The being who had come to Samuel Clemens had said that the others were the devils and he wanted to save mankind. The devil would say something like that, of course.

“Don’t my words touch your heart at all?” Goring said.

Sam rapped his chest with his fist and said, “Yes, I do believe I have a touch of indigestion.” Goring made a fist and clamped Ms lips.

“Watch out, you’ll lose your love,” Sam said and walked away. But he did not feel particularly triumphant. It was a fact that he did have a little stomach upset. Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it.