“No!” Sam said so loudly that Joe stirred and the helmsman growled something in Norse.
He smacked his fist against his open palm, and Joe muttered again.
“God, why do I have to ache now with guilt for anything I’ve done?” Sam cried. “It doesn’t matter now! It’s all been wiped out; we’ve started with clean souls.”
But it did matter. It made no difference that all the dead were once more alive and the sick were healthy and the bad deeds were so remote in time and space that they should be forgiven and forgotten. What a man had been and had thought on Earth, he still was and thought here.
Suddenly, he wished he had a stick of dreamgum. That might remove the clenching remorse and make him wildly happy.
But then it might intensify the anguish. You never knew if a horror so terrifying would come that you wanted to die. The last time he had taken the gum, he had been so menaced by monsters that he had not dared try the gum again. But maybe this tune . . . no!
Little Langdon! He would never see him again, never! His son had been only twenty-eight months old when he had died, and this meant that he had not been resurrected in the Rivervalley. No children who had died on Earth before the age of five had been raised again. At least, not here. It was to be presumed that they were alive somewhere, probably on another planet. But for some reason, whoever was responsible for this had chosen not to place the infant dead here. And so Sam would never find him and make amends.
Nor would he ever find Livy or his daughters, Sarah, Jean, and Clara. Not on a River said to be possibly twenty million miles long with possibly thirty-seven billion people on its banks. Even if a man started at one end and walked up one bank and looked at every person on that side and then, on reaching the end, walked back down the other side and did not miss a person, he would take—how long? A square mile a day would mean a round trip of, say 365 into 40,000,000,—what was that? He wasn’t any good at doing sums in his head, but it must be over 109,000 years.
And even if a man could do this, could walk all those weary miles and make sure he never missed a face, at the end of over 100,000 years he still might not find the face. The longed-for person might have died somewhere ahead of the searcher and been translated back down The River, behind the searcher. Or the searchee may have passed by the searcher during the night, perhaps while the searchee was looking for the searcher. Yet there might be another way to do this. The beings responsible for this Rivervalley and the resurrection might have the power to locate anybody they wished to. They must have a central file or some means of ascertaining the identity and location of the valley dwellers.
Or, if they did not, they could at least be made to pay for what they had done.
Joe Miller’s story was no fantasy. It had some very puzzling aspects, but these hinted at something comforting. That was, that some nameless person—or being—wanted the valley dwellers to know about the tower in the mists of the north polar sea. Why? Sam did not know, and he could not guess. But that hole had been bored through the cliff to enable human beings to find out about the tower. And in that tower must be the light to scatter the darkness of ignorance. Of that Sam was sure. And then there was the widespread story of the Englishman, Burton or Perkin, probably Burton, who had awakened prematurely in the preresurrection phase. Was the awakening any more of an accident than the hole bored through the polar cliff?
And so Samuel Clemens had had his first dream, had nourished it until it had become The Great Dream. To make it real, he needed iron, much iron. It was this that had caused him to talk Erik Bloodaxe into launching the expedition in search of the source of the steel ax. Sam had not really expected that there would be enough of the metal to build the giant boat, but at least the Norse were taking him upRiver, closer to the polar sea.