About an hour before noon, Hacking’s boat docked. It was a large, two-masted, fore-and-aft rigged boat, about a hundred feet long. Hacking’s bodyguard, all tall wellmuscled blacks holding steel battle axes (but with Mark I pistols in big holsters) marched down the gangplank. Their kilts were pure black, and their leather helmets and cuirasses and boots were of black fishskin leather. They formed in ranks of six on each side of the gangplank, and then Hacking himself came down the gangplank.
He was a tall, well-built man with a dark-brown skin, somewhat slanting eyes, a broad pug nose, thick lips, and a prominent chin. His hair was in the style called “natural.” Sam had not yet gotten used to this explosion of kinky hair on top of black men’s heads. There was something indefinably indecent in it; a Negro’s hair should be cut very close to the head. He still felt this way even after Firebrass had explained that the black American of the late-twentieth-century felt that “natural” hair was a symbol of his struggle for freedom. To them, close-cut hair symbolized castration of the black by the white.
Hacking wore a black towel as a cloak and a black kilt and leather sandals. His only weapon was a rapier in a sheath at his broad leather belt
Sam gave the signal, and a cannon boomed twenty-one times. This was set on top of a hill at the edge of the plain. It was intended not only to honor Hacking but to impress him. Only Parolando had artillery, even if it consisted of only one .75 millimeter cannon.
The introductions took place. Hacking did not offer to shake hands nor did Sam and John. They had been warned by Firebrass that Hacking did not care to shake hands with a man unless he regarded him as a proven friend.
There was some small talk after that while the grails of Hacking’s people were set on the nearest grailstone. After the discharge of energy at high noon, the grails were removed, and the chiefs of state, accompanied by their bodyguards and guards of honor, walked to John’s palace. John had insisted that the first meeting be held in his place, doubtless to impress Hacking with John’s primacy. Sam did not argue this time. Hacking probably knew, from Firebrass, just how things stood between Clemens and Lackland.
Later, Sam got some grim amusement from John’s discomfiture at being bearded in his own house. During lunch, Hacking seized the floor and held it with a longwinded vitriolic speech about the evils the white man had inflicted on the black. The trouble was, Hacking’s indictments were valid. Everything he said was true. Sam had to admit that. Hell, he had seen slavery and what it meant and had seen the aftermath of the Civil War. He had been born and raised in it. And that was long before Hacking was born. Hell, he had written Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson and A Connecticut Yankee.
It did no good to try to tell Hacking that. Hacking paid him no attention. That high-pitched voice went on and on, mixing
bscenities with facts, exaggerations with facts, lurid tales of miseries, beatings, murders, starvation, humiliations, and on and on.
Sam felt guilty and ashamed and, at the same time, angry. Why attack him? Why this blanket indictment?
“You are all guilty!” Hacking shouted. “Every white man is guilty!”
“I never saw more than a dozen blacks before I died,” John said. “What can I have to do with your tale of injustices?”
“If you had been born five hundred years later, you would have been the biggest honky of them all!” Hacking said. “I know all about you, Your Majesty!”
Sam suddenly stood up and shouted, “Did you come here to tell us about what happened on Earth? We know that! But that is past! Earth is dead! It’s what’s taking place now that counts!”
“Yeah,” Hacking said. “And what’s taking place now is what took place on good old Earth! Things haven’t changed one shitty little bit! I look around here, and who do I see is head of this country? Two honkies! Where’s the black men! Your black population is about one-tenth of your population, and so you ought to have at least one black on a ten-man Council! Do I see one? Just one?” “There’s Cawber,” Sam said.