To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip José Farmer
Book: To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip José Farmer
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Authors: Philip José Farmer
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over his skinny body to take off the drops. Burton got out, too, and sat down beside him. Alice turned her back on him, whether on purpose or not he had no way of knowing, of course.
“It’s not just being young again that delights me,” Lev said in his heavily accented English. “It’s having this leg back.”
He tapped his right knee.
“I lost it in a traffic accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when I was fifty years old.”
He laughed and said, “There was an irony to the situation that some might call fate. I had been captured by Arabs two years before when I was looking for minerals in the desert, in the state of Israel, you understand….”
“You mean Palestine?” Burton said.
“The Jews founded an independent state in 1948,” Lev said. “You wouldn’t know about that, of course. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. Anyway, I was captured and tortured by Arab guerrillas. I won’t go into the details; it makes me sick to recall it. But I escaped that night, though not before bashing in the heads of two with a rock and shooting two more with a rifle. The others fled, and I got away. I was lucky. An army patrol picked me up. However, two years later, when I was in the States, driving down the Turnpike, a truck, a big semi, I’ll describe that later, too, cut in front of me and jackknifed and I crashed into it. I was badly hurt, and my right leg was amputated below the knee. Butthe point of this story is that the truck driver had been born in Syria. So, you see the Arabs were out to get me, and they did, though they did not kill me. That job was done by our friend from Tau Ceti. Though I can’t say he did anything to humanity except hurry up its doom.”
“What do you mean by that?” Burton said.
“There were millions dying from famine, even the States were on a strictly rationed diet, and pollution of our water, land, and air was killing other millions. The scientists said that half of Earth’s oxygen supply would be cut off in ten years because the phytoplankton of the oceans—they furnished half the world’s oxygen, you know—were dying. The oceans were polluted.”
“The oceans ?”
“You don’t believe it? Well, you died in 1890, so you find it hard to credit. But some people were predicting in 1968 exactly what did happen in 2008. I believed them, I was a biochemist. But most of the population, especially those who counted, the masses and the politicians, refused to believe until it was too late. Measures were taken as the situation got worse, but they were always too weak and too late and fought against by groups that stood to lose money, if effective measures were taken. But it’s a long sad story, and if we’re to build houses, we’d best start immediately after lunch.”
Alice came out of the river and ran her hands over her body. The sun and the breeze dried her off quickly. She picked up her grass clothes but did not put them back on. Wilfreda asked her about them. Alice replied that they made her itch too much, but she would keep them to wear at night if it got cold. Alice was polite to Wilfreda but obviously aloof. She had overheard much of the conversation and so knew that Wilfreda had been a factory girl who had become a whore and then had died of syphilis. Or at least Wilfreda thought that the disease had killed her. She did not remember dying. Undoubtedly, as she had said cheerily, she had lost her mind first.
Alice, hearing this, moved even further away. Burton grinned, wondering what she would do if she knew that he had suffered from the same disease, caught from a slave girl in Cairo when he had been disguised as a Moslem during his trip to Mecca in 1853. He had been “cured” and his mind had not been physically affected, though his mental suffering had been intense. But the point was that resurrection had given everybody a fresh, young, and undiseased body, and what aperson had been on Earth should not influence another’s attitude toward them.
Should not
“It’s not just being young again that delights me,” Lev said in his heavily accented English. “It’s having this leg back.”
He tapped his right knee.
“I lost it in a traffic accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when I was fifty years old.”
He laughed and said, “There was an irony to the situation that some might call fate. I had been captured by Arabs two years before when I was looking for minerals in the desert, in the state of Israel, you understand….”
“You mean Palestine?” Burton said.
“The Jews founded an independent state in 1948,” Lev said. “You wouldn’t know about that, of course. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. Anyway, I was captured and tortured by Arab guerrillas. I won’t go into the details; it makes me sick to recall it. But I escaped that night, though not before bashing in the heads of two with a rock and shooting two more with a rifle. The others fled, and I got away. I was lucky. An army patrol picked me up. However, two years later, when I was in the States, driving down the Turnpike, a truck, a big semi, I’ll describe that later, too, cut in front of me and jackknifed and I crashed into it. I was badly hurt, and my right leg was amputated below the knee. Butthe point of this story is that the truck driver had been born in Syria. So, you see the Arabs were out to get me, and they did, though they did not kill me. That job was done by our friend from Tau Ceti. Though I can’t say he did anything to humanity except hurry up its doom.”
“What do you mean by that?” Burton said.
“There were millions dying from famine, even the States were on a strictly rationed diet, and pollution of our water, land, and air was killing other millions. The scientists said that half of Earth’s oxygen supply would be cut off in ten years because the phytoplankton of the oceans—they furnished half the world’s oxygen, you know—were dying. The oceans were polluted.”
“The oceans ?”
“You don’t believe it? Well, you died in 1890, so you find it hard to credit. But some people were predicting in 1968 exactly what did happen in 2008. I believed them, I was a biochemist. But most of the population, especially those who counted, the masses and the politicians, refused to believe until it was too late. Measures were taken as the situation got worse, but they were always too weak and too late and fought against by groups that stood to lose money, if effective measures were taken. But it’s a long sad story, and if we’re to build houses, we’d best start immediately after lunch.”
Alice came out of the river and ran her hands over her body. The sun and the breeze dried her off quickly. She picked up her grass clothes but did not put them back on. Wilfreda asked her about them. Alice replied that they made her itch too much, but she would keep them to wear at night if it got cold. Alice was polite to Wilfreda but obviously aloof. She had overheard much of the conversation and so knew that Wilfreda had been a factory girl who had become a whore and then had died of syphilis. Or at least Wilfreda thought that the disease had killed her. She did not remember dying. Undoubtedly, as she had said cheerily, she had lost her mind first.
Alice, hearing this, moved even further away. Burton grinned, wondering what she would do if she knew that he had suffered from the same disease, caught from a slave girl in Cairo when he had been disguised as a Moslem during his trip to Mecca in 1853. He had been “cured” and his mind had not been physically affected, though his mental suffering had been intense. But the point was that resurrection had given everybody a fresh, young, and undiseased body, and what aperson had been on Earth should not influence another’s attitude toward them.
Should not
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