R.W. V - Gods of Riverworld

The only one of the all- male prisoners, one in each room, whom he recognized was Dunaway, the man who had raped Star Spoon in Turpinville. The others were three Chinese, two Caucasians, an Amerindian, two Negroes, and a Neanderthal. Li Po knew one of the Chinese.

  "He is Wang Chih Mao, a minor official of the emperor. I met him once. Star Spoon later told me about him. He is the man who raped her when she was ten years old."

  Four of them were gibbering insane. Two seemed to be close to going crazy. Dunaway was one of the two who had retreated into catatonia. The ninth was hiding under the bed and would not come out when Burton called him via the screen.

  Burton watched the past- displays on the ceilings, floors, and walls of all the rooms. Over and over again, as seen through Star Spoon's eyes, the rapings were shown on large screens, in living color, and at high volume. The men could escape these only by sleep, which would not have come easily, by madness, or by death. Suicide was almost impossible. They were naked and so could not make nooses from their clothes. Their converters gave them only bread, boneless meat, and vegetables. Except for the beds, which consisted only of frame and mattress, there was no furniture. The bathrooms had a seatless toilet and a faucet for cold water above a small bowl. No soap, no towels and no toilet paper.

  Alice shuddered. "She got her revenge. Horrible!"

  "Poetic justice," Frigate said. "Gotten with the aid of science."

  "There's nothing we can do for them," Burton said, "unless we can shut off the converter power and let them starve to death."

  Questioned, the Computer said that it could not do that without Star Spoon's authorization.

  Finding nothing revealing in the main room or Star Spoon's bedroom, they began working the areas that the Computer refused to scan for them. Though they came across twelve such, they could not get into the rooms that they knew were behind locked doors or blank walls. At the end of three weeks they quit. There was still another place to investigate, the vast deep underground preresurrection chamber in which Burton had awakened so many years ago. But they could not get into this.

  "Neither could Star Spoon," Burton said.

  Now that the immediate major problem was out of the way, they had to consider their future. They could not get out of the tower, and they could bring in no lovers or companions. They were three men and one woman who would have only each other.

  The years ahead of them, Burton thought, were not just bleak. The future was a psychic Siberia, an emotional Ice Age. It was true that the four of them had known one another intimately for many years and had gone through many hardships together and had worked as an excellent team — none better — for their goal. They were getting along now without suffering the abrasions that usually wore people out with one another's too- close and too- often contact, but, eventually, they would grow sick of one another. They must have more than a community of four. They would need lovers and good friends and the occasional new person to meet.

  "Man does not live by bread alone," a wise man had once said. He could also have said that no one lives, truly lives, without others to talk to, many others.

  By the time that the Gardenworlders came, the four would be twisted, cranky, eccentric. Strange. Odd hermits. Stir-crazy.

  There was also the problem of sexual release. Alice would not take all three as lovers, or even one. Alice firmly believed that to be a lover, you had to be in love.

  One evening, the men sat on chairs on a balcony of the castle in Burton's world, where all were living for that month. The artificial sun was ten degrees above the artificial west horizon, and they were having their drinks while they waited for Alice to join them. Li Po had said that the longer time went on, the less repulsive was the idea of making beautiful female androids programmed to be bedpartners.

  "You'd know that they were not truly human, that they'd be submorons," Frigate said. "You couldn't talk to them as you would to a real woman. You'd know that their passion was simulated, mechanical and unconscious. OK, so you'd get sexual relief. But that's not enough."

  "True," Li Po said, "but they'd be better than nothing."

  "Would they?" Burton said.

  Alice came onto the balcony then. The men dropped the subject, not because Alice would have been embarrassed by its nature but because she would have felt bad that she could do nothing to help them. They talked about what they had achieved during their studies that day, Burton with his investigations into the dialects that had formed the Urmother of the Semitic languages, Li Po in his studies of English and French, so that he could read their poetry, Frigate in his study of every motion picture that had been made (or at least preserved by the Ethicals), and Alice with her newfound passion of painting with oils.

  At dinner, served by androids, they talked about the yet- to- be- solved mystery of Loga's murder and the identity of the woman whom Nur had killed.

  Burton pushed his chair away from the table, pulled a cigar from his shirtpocket, lit it, and said, "I'd devote most of my time to sleuthing those enigmas if I thought it would do any good. I'm convinced, however, that the Computer won't — can't — permit us to even get a foot in the door, as it were. We will never know until the Gardenworlders come and perhaps not then."

  "You won't have to wait that long."

  Alice screamed. Burton gasped, shoved his chair back, and rose to face the man who had spoken.

  Loga, smiling, stood in the entrance to the dining room.

  37

  * * *

  Loga had lost his fat-turkey look. His clothes, a sky-blue kilt, open yellow robe with blue dragons, and blue sandals, showed a stocky and powerfully muscled body without an ounce of excess weight.

  He was unarmed.

  Loga held his hand up. "Please. If you'll quiet down, I'll explain all. First, though, my apologies for startling you."

  Burton had recovered enough from his shock to say, "You always did like the dramatic."

  "True."

  Li Po said, "How did you get in here?"

  "I'll tell you all in due time. However, I had no trouble overriding the codeword. After all, I control the tower."

  He went to the sideboard by the door and poured himself a goblet of cognac. Alice, a hand on her breast, sat down. The men exchanged glances the meaning of which they understood from long intimacy. If he makes the slightest move that seems dangerous to us, we'll all jump him at the same time.

  Loga, however, was very much at ease, almost hail- fellow- well- met. That meant nothing. He was a superb actor. On the other hand, Burton thought, why should he have anything bad in mind for us?

  "Am I right in assuming that your melting . . . your death . . . was a trick, a simulation by the Computer?" Burton said. "And that you've been watching us since you disappeared?"

  Loga faced them, his thick legs braced as if he were on the foredeck of a sailing ship. He smiled and said, "Yes. I know that that was one of the possibilities you considered."

  "So you were spying on us, eavesdropping!" Burton said angrily.

  "Everywhere except in those rooms you painted. That was a clever idea, but then I've always known that you were intelligent and imaginative. That, of course, is one of the reasons why I chose you as my agents. It's not true, though, that you completely blocked my monitoring. When you used the auxiliary computers, I tapped in on those."

  He sipped on the cognac while regarding them over the rim. When he moved the goblet away, he said, "It's good to have someone to talk to. Not just anyone; you are special. I feel very close to you. Though I imagine that, at this moment, you're rather furious with me. I don't blame you, but I'm sure that after you've heard my story, you'll forgive me."

  "I don't think so," Alice said, her dark eyes narrowed, her lips stretched back. "I don't know what sort of game you've been playing, but you're responsible for dooming —" She stopped as if something had just occurred to her. Her cheeks became even more red.

  "I repeat, I'm sorry to have had to put you through an emotional mincer. But you survived, and you
would have survived even if you hadn't, in a manner of speaking.

  "What I had to do was to insure that you would be capable of operating the tower and could be trusted not to be corrupted by the great power in your hands. I believed that you could pass the test, but my thinking, my wishing, didn't make it so. I had to give you the practice of power. It's not what a person says but what he does that reveals his true character.

  "You did fail in some things. You should have resurrected your comrades who died during the expedition to the tower. I'm sure that, if events hadn't stopped you, you would have done so soon. I was disappointed, however, because I wanted to put them through the test too."

  "Most of them would have done what we did," Burton said.

  "I know, but I wanted them to prove themselves in the field."

  "They proved themselves along the way," Burton said. "Just as we did."

  "To a point," Loga said. "But the ultimate test was how they would behave in the tower. Turpin, for instance, was not selective enough in resurrecting his friends. Nor were you, Li Po. You erred grievously in resurrecting Star Spoon."

  Li Po shrugged. "How was I to know?"

  "Have you learned your lesson?"

  "I am even quicker at learning than I am to take offense," the Chinese said. "If I could do it over again, I would make sure that the Computer would give those we brought in no powers that could be used against me."

  "Very good. But would you also make sure that you had no powers that you could use against others? They're a danger to you as well as to the others. Your powers might be seized by others despite all your precautions."

  "Somebody has to be in charge," Li Po said. "Somebody has to possess the powers, somebody who can be trusted with them."

  "The point is," Burton said, "are we to be trusted now?"

  "What if you resurrected somebody who seemed to be trustworthy but proved not to be? That person might take away your powers and use them for purposes that you would reject because they would be bad."

  He sipped again and then began pacing back and forth as he talked.

  "You're thinking that my disappearing was criminal because it resulted in the erasure of the body-recordings and, so, the loss of immortality for almost all of the resurrected. That is not so, and I'm disappointed that you could believe that I would permit such a horrible thing. What really happened is —"

  "You had the Computer make a duplicate of itself or a duplicate already existed," Burton said. "The duplicate has the records. Or there is only one Computer, but it gave us false reports."

  Loga stopped pacing and looked at Burton with amazement, then burst out laughing.

  "When did you think of that?"

  "A minute ago."

  "I did have a backup Computer made before I disappeared."

  "Then it was no test for us when we first entered the tower and prevented the Computer from dying? Göring's sacrifice was in vain?"

  "No, that was for real. It frightened me so much that I at once had the backup made. Actually, the backup has become the primary since I let you use the first one as your toy."

  "It seems to me," Frigate said, "that it would have been standard engineering procedure to install the backup from the very beginning of this project."

  "We thought that the Computer could not malfunction, not to any dangerous extent, anyway. We thought that it was invulnerable."

  "Yes, and the Titanic was declared unsinkable."

  "What about the Mongolian woman whom Nur killed?" Alice said.

  "Ah, her! She was part of the plot to confuse and mystify you. Someone had to be held responsible for my death, and she was placed so that you would think that she was responsible. You would then have to try to find out who and what she was, but there was no way that you could do that."

  "She was an android?" Frigate said.

  "Of course."

  "Some of us thought that Nur killed her rather too easily," Frigate said.

  Burton blew out smoke, hoping that he looked more cool than he felt. He said, "I thank you for the explanation. I won't thank you for the stress, the anxiety and the bloodshed. But, as you say, we had to learn the hard way, and no doubt your intentions were good. However, as you yourself said, it's not what one thinks, what one's intentions are, but one's actions that reveal the true character. Be that as it may, I have a question, perhaps the most important of all!"

  He paused, then said, "Do we stay in the tower? Or must we go back to The Valley?"

  Loga grinned and said, "What would you like to do?"

  "I can't speak for the others, but I would prefer to stay here."

  The others said they would also like to remain.

  "Why?" Loga said.

  "For two reasons," Burton said. "One, life is much more enjoyable for me here — despite the events you caused. It affords me an opportunity to study, to gain knowledge, which I would have given my soul on Earth to have, if I'd thought I had a soul and if someone had made me an offer. It's also much more luxurious, about as close to Heaven, a physical Heaven, as one could imagine. Two, I think that I am worthy of being here. I have come as close to Going On as I ever will. Sending me back to The Valley would only impoverish and frustrate me and would not raise my ethical level one bit. In fact, it might lower it."

  Loga asked the others if they had similar or different reasons. Their answers were much like Burton's.

  "First, before I tell you what you so evidently are desperate to know, I'll tell you something else. Burton, when you said that you were as close to Going On as you would ever be, you unconsciously spoke the truth. Your saying that makes me curious. Is there more behind that remark than appears on the surface? Have you some inklings, some suspicions, that . . . ?"

  He smiled and took another sip of the cognac. Burton felt that Loga expected him to expand on his statement. If he did, he was going to be disappointed. Burton had no idea what Loga was hinting at.

  "You'll have to continue," Burton said. "You were saying . . .?"

  "Very well. You've been told by me and by the Church of Second Chance that, when you've attained a certain high level of character and morality, become compassionate and empathetic and free of psychosis and neurosis to a certain degree, then you'll be ready to Go On. When you die, you won't be resurrected on the Riverworld again. Your wathan will disappear; it can no longer be caught or detected by our instruments. You have been told that your wathan, or soul, if you prefer that term, goes to God or is absorbed in the Godhead. That, of course, is an explanation that covers ignorance. It was the only explanation that seemed to fit. But . . ."

  He sipped again. His gaze moved over them as if he were anticipating their reaction to his next words. He looked delighted.

  "The sad truth is — though I don't really know if it's so sad — the sad truth is that no wathans ever disappear, ever Go On! Not as long as the bodies they've partnered continue to be resurrected!"

  Burton was not as surprised as he should have been. Once, long ago, he had considered that possibility but had rejected it. Alice was shocked; she looked as if she could never again believe anybody. Li Po smiled and stroked his moustache. Frigate's face was impassive.

  Burton thought about the Computer report that such people as Buddha and Jesus Christ had Gone On. Obviously, they had not. The Computer had given false data. Why? Because Loga had ordered it to do so to further the deception.

  Burton sighed, and he said, "What is the truth? You will tell the truth this time, won't you? You'll pardon me if I'm skeptical. You've lied so many times."

  Alice's voice trembled as she said, "The wathans? You told us that they were artificial. If it had not been for that ancient race that made them, we'd all be soulless. Is that true, God's own truth?"

  "Who knows what God's truth is?" Loga said. "God's truth is that What Is Is. But yes, it is a fact that those ancients did make wathans, and we who have inherited their work have made sure that every human being conceived on Earth had a wathan. What is not true is that the wa
thans go to God or are absorbed into the Godhead. Perhaps they will be some day. I don't know; no one does.

  "The truth is that you can be immortal, relatively so, anyway. You won't last beyond the death of the universe and probably not nearly as long as the universe does. But you have the potentiality for living a million years, two, perhaps three or more. As long as you can find a Terrestrial-type planet with a hot core and have resurrection machinery available.

  "Unfortunately, not all can be permitted to possess immortality. Too many would make immortality miserable or hellish for the rest, and they would try to control others through their control of the resurrection machinery. Even so, everybody, without exception, is given a hundred years after his Earthly death to prove that he or she can live peacefully and in harmony with himself and others, within the tolerable limits of human imperfections. Those who can do this will be immortal after the two projects are completed."

  "Then," Burton said slowly, "the standards, the ethical goals, are not so extremely high, so demanding, as we have been led to believe?"

  "They are high, though not impossibly high for forty percent of the resurrectees."

  "The other sixty percent?" Alice said.

  "Their body- records will be destroyed."

  "That seems hard."

  "It is. But it's absolutely necessary."

  "And then?" Frigate said. He looked anxious.

  "The survivors will be carried, as body- records in the form of the yellow sphere, to Earth."

  "Earth?" Burton said. He had never been told so, but he had had the feeling that Earth had been destroyed.

  "Yes. Most of life on Earth was killed by radiation in the hydrogen and neutron bomb war. But the Gardenworlders have cleaned it up — it took them one hundred and sixty years — and have been restocking it with plant and animal life. Earth will be ready for you, but you won't be the kind of people who will abuse it and slowly kill it by pollution. And —"

  "Then we won't be permitted to have children?" Alice said.

  "Not on Earth. It won't have room, though there will be plenty of living room, I think you call it elbow space, for you. However, there are millions of planets without sentient life in this universe, and you can go there if you want children."