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new land, this Riverworld, was created to give him a second chance, and as his
hand gingerly sought the wound that no longer existed, he silently resolved not to
botch it.
Suddenly he heard the sharp crack! of a small branch being broken, and he was
once more the hunter. He melted silently into the bush, waiting as his pursuer
walked closer and closer to what he now thought of as the killing ground, then
crouched down and waited with the terrible patience of one of the predators he
had hunted so often.
The footsteps came closer, and he resisted the urge to peek through the bushes to
determine the nature of his pursuer. That would be made clear in less than a
minute, unless he did something foolish to give his position away, and he hadn't
lived into his seventh decade by being foolish.
Thirty more meters, Selous estimated. Now twenty, now ten, now
"What's going on?" demanded an outraged voice. "Put me down this instant!"
Selous leaped out of his concealment, and found that his trap had netted a blond
white man, who now hung upside down, one foof suspended by the makeshift
lasso.
106
Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg
"Who are you, and why are you following me?" replied Selous.
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"Who do I look like, fool?" snarled the man.
"You look like a man who is in no position to make demands," replied Selous.
"Mem?" shrieked his prisoner. "Do you not recognize a god when you have
captured one?"
Huey Long looked at Beethoven and thought, Oh, you sly bastard. You are more
cunning than I would have ever thought but you're closed in here too, aren't
you? It's no different for you than for me.
Around them as they slogged their way from the city to me plains, the struggling
forms of the rednecks that was how he thought of them, anyway seemed to rise
and fall in the mud, clamoring at him to get moving, get back, get out of there. Or
maybe Huey had made it all up in his head, maybe they were saying nothing at
all. Maybe there were no rednecks, and he was hallucinating the whole bunch of
them. Maybe this was all just some ghastly dream and he was lying on his back in
the capitol building, the judge's slugs in his belly, his blood streaming away, the
people weeping as they carried him off. Maybe he would wake up in a white room
with tubes running hi and out of his head, and all this would be behind him.
Beethoven seemed real enough, though. Stolid Germanic fellow, five feet six,
solid build, pustules all up and down his cheeks.
Huey kept on moving, stretching, rocking, easing back and forth in the mud,
making small progress in the pelting rain, the rednecks in the distance cheering
him on (or so he would like to think).
EVERY MAN A GOD
107
It was a real bitch, a down-home Saturday-night fish-fry son of a bitch, slogging
through all this mud, with this Beethoven stuck next to him, matching him stride
for stride. It's a long way from the capital to here, and a longer way back, he
thought.
But nothing could be done about it. It had been Beethoven's idea to quit the city.
That made some sense to him: there was certainly no reason to hang around
there, fighting for food, fighting even harder for attention, trying to clear some
space among the mottled hordes, all of whom wanted him dead. (That was the
conviction that had come over Huey in this place, an insight that he trusted, had
relied upon from the immediacy of old experience: there people were so caught
up with themselves that they could kill him.) If Beethoven wanted to get out, that
was all right with Huey Long. Beethoven had his reasons, Long had others, but
the idea was to put distance between themselves and the rest of them.
Oh, he wished he could get rid of this character too, but Beethoven had fixed him
with those shining eyes, those deep, yearning, Boss-obsessed eyes that Huey Long
could understand, having seen them at a thousand rallies.
"There is no emperor," Beethoven had said. "I thought he was there, but I was
wrong."
Well, that was all right with Huey. There were no emperors in America either, not
with every man a king. Every man a king: it had gotten him this far. It would get
him farther still.
"The emperor is dead," Beethoven had said again. "Everyone is dead, everything
is dead. That must be the only explanation. That is why we are here. In death
there
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Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg
EVERY MAN A GOD
109
is nothing but betrayal. Of course, I saw that in the Missa Solemnis, that solemn
mass. By the end, deaf and crazy, I could see through to the bottom of it all. I'm
not deaf here, though; I am filled with sound and light, but for no purpose. There
is no emperor."
"You're wrong," Huey had lied. "Sometimes there is an emperor."
Anything to pacify, to jolt Beethoven from those strange and sullen rages that
would overtake the man. Meanwhile, you kept on going, regardless of the
company you kept. The Boss still had his plans. Give him a break, give him an
even chance at this fish-fry, and he would find a way to make it work for him.
Getting out of the city was a decent enough first step. It wasn't so much a city as
an encampment anyway. Beethoven had called it a city, but that was wrong,
really, a different terminology from a different time and place.
All right, he said to himself: just keep moving.
"Pfui!" spat Beethoven.
It was strange how Huey could understand some German monosyllables and not
others, how Beethoven's language wavered back and forth between foreigner talk
and understandable Esperanto. It was yet another thing that was just too
complicated for him, something that he didn't need to talk about, didn't want to
consider.
"The emperor betrayed me," said Beethoven. "First he, and then the others. All of
them. And they left us here to deal with that betrayal."
"You seem to be a little bit wound up, son," said Huey. "You should calm down a
little."
"We need a new start," said Beethoven. "That was what they had promised, what
I was looking for. But how
can there be a new start when it is all da capo again and again and no fine!"
"I don't understand you," said Huey, not unkindly. "I can follow some of your
talk, but not all of it." He paused, trying to find some common ground. "This is
pretty shoddy goods for me too, you know. One moment I'm walking through the
capitol building and the next I have a slug in my heart that hurts like an
explosion, like a firecracker lifting your balls to heaven, and I'm looking up at that
damned ceiling, and then I wake up here. That isn't too easy, you know. It wasn't
easy for you, I know I was killed, son. I was murdered assassinated. They killed
me because they knew I was going to be the next president." He paused for
breath. "That's a hell of a transition to make, you know, from being maybe the
next president to waking up in this stinking place. It is a strange, strange
business."
Oh, he could go on if he wanted. The old talent was still there, the line of language
that he could unreel, turn out there to fend for itself in that nest of the world.
Every man a king, and me their president, he reflected. Even Beethoven seemed
awed, seemed to shut up at last, and backed away from him.
Huey smiled a secret smile. Going on and on in the Senate, opening up,
filibustering from the Constitution of the United States, his favorite document,
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