I just happen to remember that in 1600 the estimated world population was five hundred million. In 1 a.d. , it was an estimated 138,000,000. So, the conclusion is obvious. There was a hell of a lot of incest, close and remote, going on in the past. Not to mention the present. Probably from the dawn of humankind. So, you and I are related. And, in fact, it may be possible that we're all related, many times over. How many Chinese and black Africans born in 1925 were distant cousins of you and me? Plenty, I'd say.
So, the faces I see on both banks as I sail along are my cousins'. Hello, Hang Chow. Yiya, Bulabula. What's happening, Hiawatha? Hail, Og, Son of Fire! But even if they knew this, they wouldn't feel any more friendly toward me. Or vice versa. The most intense quarreling and the most vicious bloodletting take place in families. Civil wars are the worst wars. But then, since we're all cousins, all wars are civil. Mighty uncivil, at the same time. The paradox of human relations. I'll shoot your ass off, brother.
Mark Twain was right. Did you ever read his Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven ? Old Stormfield was shocked when he got past the Pearly Gates because there were so many dark people. Like all of us pale Caucasians, he had envisioned Heaven as being full of white faces with here and there a few yellow, brown, and black ones. But it wasn't that way. He'd forgotten that the dark-skinned peoples had always outnumbered the whites. In fact, for every white face he saw there were two dark ones. And that's the way it is here. My hat is off to you, Mr. Twain. You told it like it was gonna be.
So, here we are in the Rivervalley, knowing not why and whence. Just like on Eath.
Of course, there are plenty of people who say they know. There are the two dominant churches, the Chancers and the Nichirenites, and a thousand sects of reformed Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and God knows what all. The former Taoists and Confucianists say they don't give a damn; this is a better life, on the whole, than the last one. The totemists are in a bit of a bind, since there are no animals here. But that doesn't mean the totem spirits aren't here. Many's the savage I've run into who sees his totem in dreams or visions. The majority of them, though, have been converted to one of the "higher" religions.
There's also Nur el-Musafir. He's a Sufi. He was just as shocked as anybody to wake up here. He wasn't outraged, however, and he reordered his thinking tout de suite. He says that whatever beings have made this world have done so with only our eventual good in mind. Otherwise, why go to all this great expense and trouble? (In this, he sounds like a barker for a circus. But he's sincere. Which doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about.)
We shouldn't concern ourselves with the Who or the How, he says. Just with the Why. In this respect, he sounds like a Chancer. But I see I'm about to run out of my quota of paper. So, adiau, adios, selah, amen, salaam, shalom, and so long. (The English so long is from selang, the Moslem Malayan's pronunciation of the Arabic salaam.)
Amicably and didactically yours in the bowels of Whomever,
Peter Jairus Frigate
P.S. I still don't know if I'll mail this in toto, censor it, or use it for toilet paper.
41
On the average, the river was 2.4135 kilometers or a mile and a half wide. Sometimes it narrowed into channels always lined by high hills; sometimes it widened into a lake. Whatever its breadth, its depth was everywhere about 305 meters or a trifle over 1000 feet.
Nowhere along The River was there water erosion of the banks. The grass on the plains merged into an aquatic grass at the water level, and the latter flourished on the sides and bottom of the channel. The roots of this fused with the roots of the surface grass to form an interconnected mass. The grass was not separate blades; it was one vast vegetable entity.
The water plants were eaten by a multitude of fish life from surface to bottom. Many species cruised about in the upper stratum, where the sunlight penetrated. Others, paler creatures but no less voracious, swarmed in the middle layer. In the darkness of the bottom many weird forms scuttled, crawled, wriggled, jetted, swam.
Some ate the leprous-white rooted things that looked like flowers or were in turn enfolded and digested by them. Others, large and small, slid steadily along, mouths gaping, collecting the microscopic life that also lived in the fluid strata.
The largest of all, vaster than the blue whale of Earth, was a carnivorous fish called the river dragon. It shared with a much smaller water dweller the ability to roam the bottom or skim the surface without harm from change in pressure.
The other creature had many names, but in English it was generally called "croaker." It was the size of a German police dog, as slow as a sloth, and as undiscriminating in appetite as a hog. The chief sanitation engineer of The River, it ate anything that did not resist it. The greater part of its diet, however, was the human turd.
A lungfish, it also foraged ashore at night. Many a human had been frightened on seeing its huge goggle eyes in the fog or when stumbling over its slimy body as it crawled around seeking garbage and crap. Almost as scary as its appearance was its loud croak, evoking images of monsters and ghosts.
On this day of year 25 a.r.d., one of these vilely stinking scavengers was near a bank. Here the current was weaker than in the middle. Even so, its fin-legs were going at near top speed to keep it from being moved backward. Presently, its nose detected a dead fish floating toward it. It moved out a little and waited for the carcass to drift into its mouth.
Along came the fish and another object immediately behind it. Both went into the croaker's mouth, the fish sliding down the gullet easily, the large object sticking for a moment before a convulsive swallow drew it in.
For five years, the watertight bamboo jar containing Frigate's letter to Rohrig had been carried downstream. Considering the vast numbers of fishers and voyagers, it should have been picked up and opened long before. However, it was ignored by all creatures except for the fish whose primary object had been the delectable rotting chub.
Five days before the container came to journey's end, it had drifted past the area in which its intended recipient lived. But Rohrig was in a hut, surrounded by the stone and wood sculptures he fashioned for trade in booze and cigarettes, snoring off the effects of a big party.
Perhaps it was just coincidence, perhaps some psychic principle was responsible, a vibratory link between the addresser and the addressee. Whatever the cause, Rohrig was dreaming of Frigate that early morning. He was back in 1950 when he had been a graduate student supported by the G.I. Bill and a working wife.
It was a warm, late-May day (Mayday! Mayday!). He was sitting in a small room, facing three Ph.D.s. This was the day of reckoning. After five years of labor and stress in the halls of learning he would gain or lose the prize, a Master of Arts in English literature. If he passed his oral defense of his thesis, he would go out into the world as a teacher of high-school English. If he failed, he would have to study for six months and then try for a second and final chance.
Now the three inquisitors, though smiling, were shooting questions at him as if they were arrows and he was the target-which was the case. Rohrig was not nervous since his thesis was on medieval Welsh poetry, a subject he'd chosen because he believed that the professors knew very little about it.
He was right. But Ella Rutherford, a charming lady of forty-six, though prematurely white haired, had it in for him. Some time ago they'd been lovers, meeting, twice a week in her apartment. Then one afternoon they had gotten into a furious drunken argument about the merits of Byron as a poet. Rohrig wasn't crazy about his verse, but he admired Byron's lifestyle, which he considered to be true poetry. Anyway, he liked to take the opposite side of an argument.