“I warned the government two years before it happened, the Sepoy Mutiny, and they laughed at me! Me, the only man in India who knew the Hindu, the Moslem!”
He paused on the top landing of the grand staircase. Light blazed out, and the sound of revelry tore through the mists without moving them. No curtain there to be moved by a breath.
“Arrgh! Damn them! They laugh and flirt, and doom waits for them. The world is falling apart. The rider on the black camel waits for them around the next bend of The River. Fools! And I, a fool also.
“And on this Narrboot, this great vessel of fools, men and women sleep who in their waking hours plot against me, plot against all natives of Earth. No. We’re all native to this universe. Citizens of the cosmos. I spit over the railing. Into the mists. The River flows below. It receives that part of me which will never return except in another form of water. H2O. Hell doubled over. That’s a strange thought. But aren’t all thoughts strangers? Don’t they drift along like bottles enclosing messages cast away by that Great Castaway into the sea. And if they chance to lodge in the mind, my mind, I think that I originated them. Or is there a magnetism between certain souls and certain thoughts, and only those with the peculiar field of the thinkers are drawn to the thinkers? And then the individual reshapes them to fit his own character and thinks proudly—if he thinks at all in any sense more than a cow does—that he originated them? Flotsam and jetsam, my thoughts, and I the reef.
“Podebrad! What are you dreaming of? That tower? Your home? Or are you a secret one or just a Czech engineer? Or both?
“Fourteen years I’ve been on this riverboat, and the boat has been driving its paddlewheels up-River for thirty-three. Now I’m captain of the marines of that exalted bastard and regal asshole, King John. Living proof that I can govern my temper.
“Another year and we arrive at Virolando. There the Rex stops for a while, and we talk to La Viro, La Fondinto, the pope of the poopery of the Church of the Second Chance. Second chance, my sainted aunt’s arse! Those who gave it to us don’t have a chance now. Caught in their own trap! Hoisted by their own petard, which is French for ‘little fart.’ As Mix says, we don’t have the chance of a fart in a windstorm.
“Out there on the banks. The sleeping billions. Where is Edward, my beloved brother? A brilliant man, and that gang of thugs beat his brains in, and he never spoke another word for forty years. You shouldn’t have gone tiger hunting that day, Edward. The tiger was the Hindu who saw his chance to beat and rob a hated Englishman. Though they’d been doing it to their own people, too.
“But does it matter now, Edward? You’ve had your terrible injury healed, and you’ve been talking as of yore. Perhaps not now, though. Lazarus! Your body rots. No Jesus for you. No ‘Arise!’
“And mother! Where is she! The silly woman who talked my grandfather into willing her vicious brother, his son, a good part of his fortune. Grandpa changed his mind and was on his way to see his solicitor to arrange that I get that money. And he dropped dead before he got to the solicitor, and my uncle threw the fortune away in French gambling halls. And so I could not buy myself a decent commission in the regular army, and I could not finance my explorations as they should have been and so I never became what I should have been.
“Speke! The unspeakable Speke! You cheated me out of finding the true source of the Nile, you incompetent sneak, you piece of dung from a sick camel! You sneaked back to England after promising you’d not announce our discoveries until I got there, and you lied about me. You paid; you put a bullet into yourself. Your conscience finally got to you. How I wept. I loved you Speke, .though I hated you. How I wept!