Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (239 page)

* * * *

Tom Mix began his story. Now and then, Stafford nodded to an officer to give Mix another drink. Occasionally, he stopped Mix because he did not understand a 20th-century word or phrase.

It was evident his hospitality was not all based on good-heartedness. A drunken and tired man, if he were a spy, might slip. But Mix was a long way from having enough to make him loose-tongued, even on a growling belly. Moreover, he had nothing to hide. Well, not much, anyway.

“How far do you want me to go back in my story?” be said.

Stafford laughed. “For the present, leave your Earthly life out.”

“Well, ever since All Souls’ Day”—a term for the general resurrection of at least half of humanity on the planet—“I have been wandering down the river. I was born in 1871 A.D. and died in 1940 A.D. But it was my fate to be raised from the dead in an area occupied by 15th-century Poles. I didn’t hang around them long; I shook the dust off my feet and took off like a stripe-tailed ape. It didn’t take me long to find out there weren’t any horses on this world, or any animals except man, earthworms and fish. So I built me a boat. I wanted to get back to folks of my own times, those I could talk to and who’d heard of me. I had some fame in my time, but I won’t go into that here.

“I figured out that, if people were strung along this valley according to time sequence on Earth—although there were many exceptions—the 20th-centurians ought to be near the river’s mouth. I had about ten men and women with me, and we sailed with the wind and the current for, let’s see close to five years now. Now and then we’d stop to rest or to work.”

“Work?”

“As mercenaries. We picked up extra cigarettes, liquor, good food. In return, we helped out some people that needed helping real bad and had a good cause. Most of my crew were veterans of wars on Earth. One of them had been a general in the American Civil War. I’m a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, and I fought in several wars in my younger days on Earth. The Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer War. You probably don’t know about those.

“A couple of times we were captured by slavers when we landed at some seemingly friendly place to fill our buckets. We always escaped, but the time came when I was the only one left of the original group—the others were all killed, even my lovely little Egyptian. Maybe I’ll run into them again some day. They could just as well be re-resurrected downriver as upriver.”

He paused, then said, “It’s funny. Among all the millions, maybe billions of faces I’ve seen while coming down the river, I’ve not seen one I knew on Earth.”

Stafford said, “I met a 20th-centurian who calculated that there could be at least 25 billion human beings on this world.”

Tom Mix nodded and said, “Yeah. I know. But you’d think that in five years, just one…well, it’s bound to happen some day. So, I built this last boat of mine about 5,000 miles back, a year ago. My new crew and I did pretty well until we put in at one of Kramer’s rocks for a meal. We’d been eating fish and bamboo shoots and acorn-nut bread for some time, and the others were aching for a smoke and a shot of booze. I took a chance and lost. We were brought before Kramer himself, an ugly fat guy from 15th-century Germany.

“Like a lot of nuts, he hasn’t accepted the fact that this world isn’t exactly what he thought the afterlife was going to be. He was a bigshot on Earth. An inquisitor. He had burned a hell of a lot of men, women and children, after torturing them for the greater glory of God.”

* * * *

Yeshua, sitting near Mix, muttered something. Mix fell silent for a moment. He was not sure that he had not gone too far.

Although he had seen no signs of such, it was possible that Stafford and his people might just be as lunatic in their way as Kramer was in his. During their Terrestrial existence, most of the 17th-centurians had had a rockfast conviction in their religious beliefs. Finding themselves here in the strange place neither heaven nor hell, they had suffered a great shock. Some of them had not recovered.

There were those adaptable enough to cast aside their former religion and seek the truth. But too many, like Kramer, had rationalized their environment. Kramer, for instance, maintained that this world was a purgatory. He had been shaken to find that not only Christians but all heathens were here. But he had insisted that the teachings of the Church had been misunderstood on Earth. They had been deliberately perverted in their presentation by Satan-inspired priests. But he clearly saw The Truth now.

However, those who did not see as he did must be shown. Kramer’s method of revelation, as on Earth, was the wheel and the fire.

When Mix had been told this, he had not argued with Kramer’s theory. On the contrary, he was enthusiastic— outwardly—in offering his services. He did not fear death, because he knew that he would be resurrected twenty-four hours later elsewhere along the river. But he did not want to be stretched on the wheel and then burned.

He waited for his chance to escape.

One evening a group had been seized by Kramer as they stepped off a boat. Mix pitied the captives, for he had witnessed Kramer’s means of changing a man’s mind. Yet there was nothing he could do for them. If they were stupid enough to refuse to pretend that they agreed with Kramer, they must suffer.

“But this man Yeshua bothered me,” Mix said. “In the first place, he looked too much like me. Having to see him burn would be like seeing myself in the flames. Moreover, he didn’t get a chance to say yes or no. Kramer asked him if he was Jewish. Yeshua said he had been on Earth, but he now had no religion.

“Kramer said he would have given Yeshua a chance to become a convert, that is, believe as Kramer did. This was a lie, but Kramer is a mealymouthed slob who has to find justification for every rotten thing he does. He said that he gave Christians and all heathens a chance to escape the fire—except Jews. They were the ones who’d crucified Jesus, and they should all pay. Besides, a Jew couldn’t be trusted. He’d lie to save his own skin.

“The whole boatload was condemned because they were all Jews. Kramer asked where they were going, and Yeshua said they were looking for a place where nobody had ever heard of a Jew. Kramer said there wasn’t any such place; God would find them out no matter where they went. Yeshua lost his temper and called Kramer a hypocrite and an anti-Christ. Kramer got madder than hell and told Yeshua he wasn’t going to die as quickly as the others.

* * * *

“About then, I almost got thrown into prison with them. Kramer had noticed how much we looked alike. He asked me if I’d lied to him when I told him I wasn’t a Jew. How come I looked like a Jew if I wasn’t? Of course, this was the first time he thought of me looking like a Jew, which I don’t. If I was darker, I could pass for one of my Cherokee ancestors.

“So I grinned at him, although the sweat was pouring out of my armpits so fast it was trickling down my legs, and I said that he had it backwards. Yeshua looked like a Gentile, that’s why he resembled me. I used one of his own remarks to help me; I reminded him he’s said Jewish women were notoriously adulterous. So maybe Yeshua was half-Gentile and didn’t know it.

“Kramer gave one of those sickening belly laughs of his; he drools until the spit runs down his chin when he’s laughing. And he said I was right. But I knew my days were numbered. He’d get to thinking about my looks later, and he’d decide that I was lying. To hell with that, I thought, I’m getting out tonight.

“But I couldn’t get Yeshua off my mind. I decided that I wasn’t just going to run like a cur with its tail between its legs. I was going to make Kramer so sick with my memory his pig’s belly would ache like a boil every time he thought of me. That night, just as it began to rain, I killed the two guards with my axe and opened the stockade gates. But somebody was awake and gave the alarm. We ran for my boat, had to fight our way to it, and only Yeshua, the woman Bithniah and I got away. Kramer must have given orders that the men who went after us had better not return without our heads. They weren’t about to give up.”

Stafford said, “God was good enough to give us eternal youth in this beautiful world. We are free from want, hunger, hard labor and disease. Yet men like Kramer want to turn this Garden of Eden into hell. Why? I do not know. He is a madman. One of these days, hell be marching on us, as he has on the people to the north of his original area. If you would like to help us fight him, welcome!”

“I hate the murdering devil!” Mix said. “I could tell you things…never mind, you must know them.”

“To my everlasting shame,” Stafford replied, “I must confess that I witnessed many cruelties and injustices on Earth, and I not only did not protest, I encouraged them. I thought that law and order and religion, to be maintained, needed torture and persecution. Yet I was often sickened. So when I found myself in a new world, I determined to start anew. What had been right and necessary on Earth did not have to be so here.”

“You’re an extraordinary man,” Mix said. “Most people have continued to think exactly what they thought on Earth.”

Ill

By then, he was beginning to feel heady. Fortunately, the copias were brought in, and they were allowed to eat. Mix opened the tall gray cylinder and removed the containers from their snap-up racks. These held a thick cubical boneless steak, two slices of bread with butter, a lettuce salad, a baked potato with butter and sour cream, a chocolate bar, a 3-ounce shot of whiskey, a pack of cigarettes, two cigars and a stick of dreamgum.

Normally, Mix used tobacco for barter, since he did not smoke, but he thought it politic to pass it around to Stafford and his councilmen.

Yeshua, on opening his cylinder, looked disgusted. Instead of satisfying his hunger, which must have been as ravenous as Mix’s, he stared gloomily at the ceiling. Mix asked him what was wrong. Bithniah, who was eating greedily, laughed and said, “Even though he has renounced his religion with his mind, his stomach can’t forget the laws of Moses. There is a big tender piece of ham in his copia, and it has sickened him.”

“Aren’t you a Hebrew, too?” Mix asked.

“Yes, but I don’t let it bother me. When I am hungry, I will eat anything. I learned that on Earth when I was a young girl and we were roaming in the desert. I never allowed the others to see me eating unclean food, of course, else I’d have been killed. But then I did many things that Yahweh was supposed to frown upon.”

Mix said, “Yeshua, I’ll trade my steak for your ham.”

“I’m not sure that the animal was slaughtered correctly,” Yeshua said.

“I don’t think there’s any slaughter involved,” Mix replied, “I’ve been told that the buckets must convert energy into matter. Somehow the power that the stones give off three times a day is transformed by a mechanism in the false bottom of the bucket. There must also be a kind of program in the mechanism, because the buckets have different food every day. I’ve kept watch on it and noticed that I always get steak on certain days, a cake of soap every third day and so on.

“The scientist that explained it to me said—though he admitted he was only guessing—that there are matrices in the bucket that contain models for certain kinds of matter. They put together the atoms and molecules of the energy to form steak, cigars, or what have you. So, there’s no slaughter.”

“I’ll take the steak and with thanks,” Yeshua said.

* * * *

Stafford, who had been listening with interest, spoke. “The first general resurrection, and the resurrection of those killed here since that day, must operate on the same principles. But who is doing all this for us and why?”

Mix shrugged and said, “Who knows? I’ve heard a lot of wild theories. But I did run into a man who knew a 19th-century Englishman named Burton. He said Burton had told him that he had accidentally awakened before Resurrection Day. He was in a very strange place, a titanic room where there were millions of bodies. Some were in the process of being restored to wholeness and youth. He tried to escape, but two men caught him and made him unconscious again, and he woke up with the rest of us on That Day, naked as a jaybird and with his bucket in his hand.

“Burton thought that some beings, maybe Earthmen of the post-20th-century, had found a way to record events in time. They’d taken records of every human being that existed, formed matter that re-created the original beings, restored the being to health and youth, made new recordings and transformed them in this rivervalley.

“This valley, by the way, must also be their work. A river that’s at least ten million miles long and flows uphill at places, has to have been built by sentient beings, not by Nature.”

“What you say seems reasonable,” Stafford replied. “However, what appears to be reasonable may not conform to the facts. I am inclined to agree with you. But I still do not know what purpose there is in our being here.”

Mix yawned and stretched. “I don’t either, but I intend to make the best of what I do have while I have it. I know we’ll have to pay for this one way or the other. You get nothing free. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to hit the hay. First, though, I’d like to take a bath.”

Stafford smiled. “You 20th-centurians are as enamored of bathing as the ancient Romans were reputed to be. I say reputed, because the few I’ve met were, to put it charitably, unwashed. Yet the river is only a few steps away. Perhaps it was the decadent ruling class of the Romans that was so clean?”

Mix grinned, but he felt angry. Something in Stafford’s tone indicated he felt that Mix and his kind had a ridiculous obsession, maybe a somewhat immoral attitude. Mix swallowed the comment he wanted to make, that the council hall stank like a congress of baboons. But he was in no position to insult his host, nor should he. The man was only expressing the attitude of his time.

Stafford told Mix that there were several unoccupied cottages nearby. Those who had been killed by Kramer’s men on the river had lived in them. The cottage automatically reverted to the state, which usually sold them to newcomers or rented them for tobacco, liquor or services rendered.

* * * *

Mix, Yeshua and Bithniah followed a Sergeant Channing, who held a torch, although it was not needed. The night sky, ablaze with giant stars and luminous sheets of gasclouds, cast a brighter light than the Earth’s full moon. The river sparkled beneath it. The four went to its bank, and the three newcomers walked into the water up to their hips. Yeshua and Bithniah kept their kilts on, so Mix did the same. When with a group that bathed in the nude, a common practice along the river, he undressed. When Mix was with those who retained their modesty, he observed their custom.