To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer

Hair was returning everywhere except on the face.

Burton was bitter about this. He had always taken pride in his long moustachios and forked beard; he claimed that their absence made him feel more naked than the lack of trousers.

Wilfreda had laughed and said, “I’m glad they’re gone. I’ve always hated hair on men’s faces. Kissing a man with a beard was like sticking my face in a bunch of broken bedsprings.”

13

Sixty days had passed. The boat had been pushed across the plain on big bamboo rollers. The day of the launching had arrived. The Hadji was about-forty feet long and essentially consisted of two sharp-prowed bamboo hulls fastened together with a platform, a bowsprit with a balloon sail and a single mast, fore-and-aft rigged, with sails of woven bamboo fibers. It was steered by a great oar of pine, since a rudder and steering wheel were not practicable. Their only material for ropes at this time was the grass, though it would not be long before leather ropes would be made from the tanned skin and entrails of some of the larger riverfish. A dugout fashioned by Kazz from a pine log was tied down to the foredeck.

Before they could get it into the water, Kazz made some difficulties. By now, he could speak a very broken and limited English and some oaths in Arabic, Baluchi, Swahili, and Italian, all learned from Burton.

“Must need .. . wacha call it? … wallah! . .. what it word? … kill somebody before place boat on river … you know … merda . . . need word, Burton-naq . . . you give, Burton-naq . . . word … word … kill man so god, Kabburqanaqruebemss …water god … no sink boat … get angry … drown us … eat us.”

“Sacrifice?” Burton said.

“Many bloody thanks, Burton-naq. Sacrifice! Cut throat . . . put on boat … rub it on wood … then water god not mad at us…”

“We don’t do that,” Burton said.

Kazz argued but finally agreed to get on the boat. His face was long, and he looked very nervous. Burton, to ease him, told him that this was not Earth. It was a different world, as he could see at a quick glance around him and especially at the stars. The gods did not live in this valley. Kazz listened and smiled, but he still looked as if he expected to see the hideous green-bearded face and bulging fishy eyes of Kabburqanaqruebemss rising from the depths.

The plain was crowded around the boat that morning. Everybody was there for many miles around, since anything out of the usual was entertainment. They shouted and laughed or joked. Though some of the comments were derisive, all were in good humor. Before the boat was rolled off the bank into The Rivet, Burton stood up on its “bridge,” a slightly raised platform, and held up his hand for silence. The crowd’s chatter died away, and he spoke in Italian.

“Fellow lazari, friends, dwellers in the valley of the Promised Land! We leave you in a few minutes…”

“If the boat doesn’t capsize!” Frigate muttered.

“. . . to go up The River, against the wind and the current. We take the difficult route because the difficult always yields the greatest reward, if you believe what the moralists on Earth told us, and you know now how much to believe them!” Laughter. With scowls here and there from die-hard religion-ists.

“On Earth, as some of you may know, I once led an expedition into deepest and darkest Africa to find the headwaters of the Nile. I did not find them, though I came close, and I was cheated out of the rewards by a man who owed everything to me, a Mister John Hanning Speke. If I should encounter him on my journey upriver, I will know how to deal with him…”

“Good God!” Frigate said. “Would you have him kill himself again with remorse and shame?”

“. . . but the point is that this River may be one far far greater than any Nile, which as you may or may not know, was the longest river on Earth, despite the erroneous claims of Americans for their Amazon and Missouri-Mississippi completes. Some of you have asked why we should set out for a goal that lies we know not how far away or that might not even exist. I will tell you that we are setting sail because the Unknown exists end we would make it the Known. That’s all! And here, contrary to our sad and frustrating experience on Earth, money is not required to outfit us or to keep us going. King Cash is dead, and good riddance to him! Nor do we have to fill out hundreds of petitions and forms and beg audiences of influential people and minor bureaucrats to get permission to pass up The River. There are no national borders. .