To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer

26

And light was full in his eyes, from the just-risen sun. He had time for one quick look around, saw his grail, his pile of neatly folded towels – and Hermann Goring.

Then Burton and the German were seized by small dark men with large heads and bandy legs. These carried spears and flint headed axes. They wore towels but only as capes secured around their thick short necks. Strips of leather, undoubtedly human skin, ran across their disproportionately large foreheads and around their heads to bind their long, coarse black hair. They looked semi Mongolian and spoke a tongue unknown to him An empty grail was placed upside down over his head; his hands were tied behind him with a leather thong. Blind and helpless, stonetipped spears digging into his back, he was urged across the plain. Somewhere near, drums thundered, and female voices wailed a chant.

He had walked three hundred paces when he was halted. The drums quit beating, and the women stopped their singsong. He could hear nothing except for the blood beating in his ears. What the hell was going on? Was he part of a religious ceremony which required that the victim be blinded? Why not? There had been many cultures on Earth, which did not want the ritually slain to view those who shed his blood. The dead man’s ghost might want to take revenge on his killers.

But these people must know by now that there were no such things as ghosts. Or did they regard lazari as just that, as ghosts that could be dispatched back to their land of origin by simply killing them again? Goring! He, too, had been translated here. At the same grailstone. The first time could have been coincidence, although the probabilities against it were high. But three times in succession? No, it was . . .

The first blow drove the side of the grail against his head, made him half-unconscious, sent a vast ringing through him, sparks of light before his eyes, and knocked him to his knees. He never felt the second blow, and so awoke once more in another place…

27

And with him was Hermann Goring.

“You and I must be twin souls,” Goring said. “We seem to be yoked together by Whoever is responsible for all this!’

“The ox and the ass plow together,” Burton said, leaving it to the German to decide which he was. Then the two were busy introducing themselves, or attempting to do so, to the people among whom they had arrived. These, as he later found out, were Sumerians of the Old or Classical period; that is, they had lived in Mesopotamia between 2500 and 2300 B.C. The men shaved their heads (no easy custom with flint razors), and the women were bare to the waist. They had a tendency to short squat bodies, pop-eyes, and (to Burton) ugly faces.

But if the index of beauty was not high among them, the pre Columbian Samoans who made up 30 percent of the population were more than attractive. And, of course, there was the ubiquitous 10 percent of people from anywhere-everyplace, twentieth-centurians being the most numerous. This was understandable, since the total number of these constituted a fourth of humanity. Burton had no scientific statistical data, of course, but his travels had convinced him that the twentieth-centurians had been deliberately scattered along The River in a proportion to the other peoples even greater than was to be expected. This was another facet of the Riverworld setup, which he did not understand. What did the Ethicals intend to gain by this dissemination? There were too many questions. He needed time to think, and he could not get it if he spent himself with one trip after another on The Suicide Express. This area, unlike most of the others he would visit, offered some peace and quiet for analysis. So he would stay here for a while.

And then there was Hermann Goring. Burton wanted to observe his strange form of pilgrim’s progress. One of the many things that he had not been able to ask the Mysterious Stranger (Burton tended to think in capitals) was about the dreamgum Where did it fit into the picture? Another part of the Great Experiment?