All were dressed in silvery or purple blouses with short flaring sleeves and ruffled collars, slender luminescent belts, kilts, and sandals. Both men and women had painted fingernails and toenails, earrings, and eye makeup.
Above the head of each, almost touching the hair, spun a many-colored globe about a foot across. These whirled and flashed and changed color, running through every hue in the spectrum. From time to time, the globes thrust out long hexagonal arms of green, of blue, of black, or of gleaming white. Then the arms would collapse, only to be succeeded by other hexagons.
Burton looked down. He was clad only in a black towel secured at his waist.
“I’ll forestall your first question by telling you we won’t give you any information on where you are.”
The speaker was the red-haired man. He grinned at Burton, showing unhumanly white teeth.
“Very well,” Burton said. “What questions will you answer, Whoever you are? For instance, how did you find me?”
“My name is Loga,” the red-haired man said. “We found you through a combination of detective work and luck. It was a complicated procedure, but I’ll simplify it for you. We had a number of agents looking for you, a pitifully small number, considering the thirty-six billion, six million, nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven candidates that live along The River.”
Candidates? Burton thought. Candidates for what? For eternal life? Had Spruce told the truth about the purpose behind the Resurrection?
Loga said, “We had no idea that you were escaping us by suicide. Even when you were detected in areas so widely separated that you could not possibly have gotten to them except through resurrection, we did not suspect. We thought that you had been killed and then translated. The years went by. We had no idea where you were. There were other things for us to do, so we pulled all agents from the Burton Case, as we called it, except for some stationed at both ends of The River. Somehow, you had knowledge of the polar tower. Later we found out how. Your friends Göring and Collop were very helpful, although they did not know they were talking to Ethicals, of course.”
“Who notified you that I was near The River’s end?” Burton said.
Loga smiled and said, “There’s no need for you to know. However, we would have caught you anyway. You see, every space in the restoration bubble—the place where you unaccountably awakened during the preresurrection phase—has an automatic counter. They were installed for statistical and research purposes. We like to keep records of what’s going on. For instance, any candidate who has a higher than average number of deaths sooner or later is a subject for study. Usually later, since we’re short-handed.
“It was not until your 777th death that we got around to looking at some of the higher frequency resurrections. Yours had the highest count. You may be congratulated on this, I suppose.”
“There are others, as well?”
“They’re not being pursued, if that’s what you mean. And, relatively speaking, they’re not many. We had no idea that it was you who had racked up this staggering number. Your space in the PR bubble was empty when we looked at it during our statistical investigation. The two technicians who had seen you when you woke up in the PR chamber identified you by your…photograph.
“We set the resurrector so that the next time your body was to be re-created, an alarm would notify us, and we would bring you here to this place.”
“Suppose I hadn’t died again?” Burton said.
“You were destined to die! You planned on trying to enter the polar sea via The River’s mouth, right? That is impossible. The last hundred miles of The River go through an underground tunnel. Any boat would be torn to pieces. Like others who have dared the journey, you would have died.”
Burton said, “My photograph—the one I took from Agneau. That was obviously taken on Earth when I was an officer for John Company in India. How was that gotten?”
“Research, Mr. Burton,” Loga said, still smiling.
Burton wanted to smash the look of superiority on his face. He did not seem to be restrained by anything; he could, seemingly, walk over to Loga and strike him. But he knew that the Ethicals were not likely to sit in the same room with him without safeguards. They would as soon have given a rabid hyena its freedom.
“Did you ever find out what made me awaken before my time?” he asked. “Or what made those others gain consciousness, too?”
Loga gave a start. Several of the men and women gasped.
Loga rallied first. He said, “We’ve made a thorough examination of your body. You have no idea how thorough. We have also screened every component of your…psychomorph, I think you could call it. Or aura, whichever word you prefer.” He gestured at the sphere above his head. “We found no clues whatsoever.”
Burton threw back his head and laughed loudly and long.
“So you bastards don’t know everything!”
Loga smiled tightly. “No. We never will. Only One is omnipotent.”
He touched his forehead, lips, heart, and genitals with the three longest fingers of his right hand. The others did the same.
“However, I’ll tell you that you frightened us—if that’ll make you feel any better. You still do. You see, we are fairly sure that you may be one of the men of whom we were warned.”
“Warned against? By whom?”
“By a…sort of giant computer, a living one. And by its operator.” Again, he made the curious sign with his fingers. “That’s all I care to tell you—even though you won’t remember a thing that occurs down here after we send you back to the Rivervalley.”
Burton’s mind was clouded with anger, but not so much that he missed the “down here.” Did that mean that the resurrection machinery and the hideout of the Ethicals were below the surface of the Riverworld?
Loga continued, “The data indicates you may have the potentiality to wreck our plans. Why you should or how you might, we do not know. But we respect our source of information, how highly you can’t imagine.”
“If you believe that,” Burton said, “why don’t you just put me in cold storage? Suspend me between those two bars. Leave me floating in space, turning around and around forever, like a roast on a spit, until your plans are completed?”
Loga said, “We couldn’t do that! That act alone would ruin everything! How would you attain your salvation? Besides, that would mean an unforgivable violence on our part! It’s unthinkable!”
“You were being violent when you forced me to run and hide from you,” Burton said. “You are being violent now by holding me here against my will. And you will violate me when you destroy my memory of this little tête-à-tête with you.”
Loga almost wrung his hands. If he was the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical, he was a great actor. In a grieved tone, Loga said, “That is only partly true. We had to take certain measures to protect ourselves. If the man had been anyone but you, we would have left you strictly alone. It is true we violated our own code of ethics by making you run from us and by examining you. That had to be, however. And, believe me, we are paying for this in mental agony.”
“You could make up for some of it by telling me why I, why all the human beings that ever lived, have been resurrected. And how you did it.”
Loga talked, with occasional interruptions from some of the others. The yellow-haired woman broke in most often, and after a while Burton deduced from her attitude and Loga’s that she was either his wife or she held a high position.
Another man interrupted at times. When he did, there was a concentration and respect from the others that led Burton to believe he was the head of this group. Once he turned his head so that the light sparkled off one eye. Burton stared, because he had not noticed before that the left eye was a jewel.
Burton thought that it probably was a device which gave him a sense, or senses, of perception denied the others. From then on, Burton felt uncomfortable whenever the faceted and gleaming eye was turned on him. What did that many-angled prism see?
At the end of the explanation, Burton did not know much more than he had before. The Ethicals could see back into the past with a sort of chronoscope; with this they had been able to record whatever physical beings they wished to. Using these records as models, they had then performed the resurrection with energy-matter converters.
“What,” Burton said, “would happen if you re-created two bodies of an individual at the same time?”
Loga smiled wryly and said that the experiment had been performed. Only one body had life.
Burton smiled like a cat that has just eaten a mouse. He said, “I think you’re lying to me. Or telling me half-truths. There is a fallacy in all this. If human beings can attain such a rarefiedly high ethical state that they ‘go on,’ why are you Ethicals, supposedly superior beings, still here? Why haven’t you, too, ‘gone on’?”
The faces of all but Loga and the jewel-eyed man became rigid. Loga laughed and said, “Very shrewd. An excellent point. I can only answer that some of us do go on. But more is demanded of us, ethically speaking, than of you resurrectees.”
“I still think you’re lying,” Burton said. “However, there’s nothing I can do about it.” He grinned and said, “Not just now, anyway.”
“If you persist in that attitude, you will never Go On,” Loga said. “But we felt that we owed it to you to explain what we are doing—as best we could. When we catch those others who have been tampered with, we’ll do the same for them.”
“There’s a Judas among you,” Burton said, enjoying the effect of his words.
But the jewel-eyed man said, “Why don’t you tell him the truth, Loga? It’ll wipe off that sickening smirk and put him in his proper place.”
Loga hesitated, then said, “Very well, Thanabur. Burton, you will have to be very careful from now on. You must not commit suicide and you must fight as hard to stay alive as you did on Earth, when you thought you had only one life. There is a limit to the number of times a man may be resurrected. After a certain amount—it varies and there’s no way to predict the individual allotment—the psychomorph seems unable to reattach itself to the body. Every death weakens the attraction between body and psychomorph. Eventually, the psychomorph comes to the point of no return. It becomes a—well, to use an unscientific term—a ‘lost soul.’ It wanders bodiless through the universe; we can detect these unattached psychomorphs with instruments, unlike those of the—how shall I put it?—the ‘saved,’ which disappear entirely from our ken.
“So you see, you must give up this form of travel by death. This is why continued suicide by those poor unfortunates who cannot face life is, if not the unforgivable sin, the irrevocable.”
The jewel-eyed man said, “The traitor, the filthy unknown who claims to be aiding you, was actually using you for his own purposes. He did not tell you that you were expending your chance for eternal life by carrying out his—and your—designs. He, or she, whoever the traitor is, is evil. Evil, evil!
“Therefore, you must be careful from now on. You may have a residue of a dozen or so deaths left to you. Or your next death may be your last!”
Burton stood up and shouted, “You don’t want me to get to the end of The River? Why? Why?”
Loga said, “Au revoir. Forgive us for this violence.”
Burton did not see any of the twelve persons point an instrument at him. But consciousness sprang from him as swiftly as an arrow from the bow, and he awoke.…
30
The first person to greet him was Peter Frigate. Frigate lost his customary reserve; he wept. Burton cried a little himself and had difficulty for a while in answering Frigate’s piled-one-on-the-other questions. First, Burton had to find out what Frigate, Loghu, and Alice had done after he had disappeared. Frigate replied that the three had looked for him, then had sailed back up The River to Theleme.
“Where have you been?” Frigate said.
“From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it,” Burton said. “However, unlike Satan, I found at least several perfect and upright men, fearing God and eschewing evil. Damn few, though. Most men and women are still the selfish, ignorant, superstitious, self-blinding; hypocritical, cowardly wretches they were on Earth. And in most, the old red-eyed killer ape struggles with its keeper, society, and would break out and bloody its hands.”
Frigate chattered away as the two walked toward the huge stockade a mile away, the council building which housed the administration of the state of Theleme. Burton half listened. He was shaking and his heart was beating hard, but not because of his homecoming.
He remembered!
Contrary to what Loga had promised, he remembered both his wakening in the preresurrection bubble, so many years ago, and the inquisition with the twelve Ethicals.
There was only one explanation. One of the twelve must have prevented the blocking of his memory and done so without the others knowing it.
One of the twelve was the Mysterious Stranger, the Renegade.
Which one? At present, there was no way of determining. But someday he would find out. Meanwhile, he had a friend in court, a man who might be using Burton for his own ends. And the time would come when Burton would use him.
There were the other human beings with whom the Stranger had also tampered. Perhaps he would find them; together they would assault the Tower.
Odysseus had his Athena. Usually Odysseus had had to get out of perilous situations through his own wits and courage. But every now and then, when the goddess had been able, she had given Odysseus a helping hand.
Odysseus had his Athena; Burton, his Mysterious Stranger.
Frigate said, “What do you plan on doing, Dick?”
“I’m going to build a boat and sail up The River. All the way! Want to come along?”
For the unholy trinity of Bobs:
Bloch, Heinlein, and Traurig—
may I meet them on
the banks of The River,
where we’ll board the
fabulous Riverboat
1
Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows,” Sam Clemens said. “I can’t say that the sleeping is very restful.”
Telescope under one arm, he puffed on a long, green cigar while he paced back and forth on the poop deck of the Dreyrugr (Bloodstained). Ari Grimolfsson, the helmsman, not understanding English, looked bleakly at Clemens. Clemens translated for him in wretched Old Norse. The helmsman still looked bleak.
Clemens loudly cursed him in English for a dunderheaded barbarian. For three years, Clemens had been practicing tenth-century Norse night and day. And he was still only half intelligible to most of the men and women aboard the Dreyrugr.
“A ninety-five-year-old Huck Finn, give or take a few thousand years,” Clemens said. “I start out down The River on a raft. Now I’m on this idiot Viking ship, going upRiver. What next? When will I realize my dream?”
Keeping the upper part of his right arm close to his body so he would not drop the precious telescope, he pounded his right fist into his open left palm.
“Iron! I need iron! But where on this people-rich, metal-poor planet is iron? There has to be some! Otherwise, where did Erik’s ax come from? And how much is there? Enough? Probably not. Probably there’s just a very small meteorite. But maybe there’s enough for what I want. But where? My God, The River may be twenty million miles long! The iron, if any, may be at the other end.
“No, that can’t be! It has to be somewhere not too far away, within one hundred thousand miles of here. But we may be going in the wrong direction. Ignorance, the mother of hysteria, or is it vice versa?”
He looked through the telescope at the right bank and cursed again. Despite his pleas to bring the ship in so that he could scan the faces at a closer range, he had been refused. The king of the Norseman fleet, Erik Bloodaxe, said that this was hostile territory. Until the fleet was out of it, the fleet would stay close to the middle of The River.
The Dreyrugr was the flagship of three, all alike
. It was eighty feet long, built largely of bamboo, and resembled a Viking dragon boat. It had a long, low hull, an oak figurehead carved into a dragon’s head, and a curled-tail stern. But it also had a raised foredeck and poop deck, the sides of both extending out over the water. The two bamboo masts were fore-and-aft rigged. The sails were a very thin but tough and flexible membrane made from the stomach of the deep-dwelling Riverdragon fish. There was also a rudder controlled by a wheel on the poop deck.
The round leather-and-oak shields of the crew hung over the sides; the great oars were piled on racks. The Dreyrugr was sailing against the wind, tacking back and forth, a maneuver unknown to the Norsemen when they had lived on Earth.
The men and women of the crew not handling the ropes sat on the oarsmen benches and talked and threw dice and played poker. From below the poop deck came cries of exultation or curses and an occasional faint click. Bloodaxe and his bodyguard were shooting pool, and their doing so at this time made Clemens very nervous. Bloodaxe knew that enemy ships three miles up The River were putting out to intercept them, and ships from both banks behind them were putting out to trail them. Yet the king was pretending to be very cool. Maybe he was actually as undisturbed as Drake had supposedly been just before the battle of the Great Armada.
“But the conditions are different here,” Clemens muttered. “There’s not much room to maneuver on a river only a mile and a half wide. And no storm is going to help us out.”
He swept the bank with the telescope as he had been doing ever since the fleet set out three years ago. He was of medium height and had a big head that made his none-too-broad shoulders look even more narrow. His eyes were blue; his eyebrows, shaggy; his nose, Roman. His hair was long and reddish brown. His face was innocent of the mustache that had been so well known during his terrestrial life. (Men had been resurrected without face hair.) His chest was a sea of brown-red curly hair that lapped at the hollow of his throat. He wore only a knee-length white towel secured at the waist, a leather belt for holding weapons and the sheath for his telescope, and leather slippers. His skin was bronzed by the equatorial sun.