The Gods of Riverworld Read online

  This conversation would take place when Jesus was trying to raise Lazarus. The problem was complicated by the other bodies that had been put in Lazarus’ tomb, before his interment. After lying three days in a hole in a cliff in this hot climate, Lazarus was pretty much decayed and fallen apart, hence the confusion. Hence, also, the gas masks that Jesus and his assistants, Judas and Peter, wore over their surgical masks.

  Near them were giant retorts with bubbling liquids and a static generator shooting twisting electrical currents from node to node and other impressive-looking Hollywoodish laboratory equipment. These came, not from the Frankenstein motion picture, which did not appear until 1931, but from a silent movie serial Frigate saw when he was six.

  Judas, the treasurer of Dr. Christ’s organization, which depended entirely upon voluntary contributions, was nervous about the expense. “This operation will wipe us out,” he said hoarsely to the great scientist.

  “Yes, but think of the publicity. When the millionaire, Joseph of Arimathea, hears of this, he’ll kick in with plenty of shekels. Besides, it’s deductible on his income tax.”

  In later years, when thinking of this scene, Frigate was sure that he had not known about such things as publicity and income tax deductions. He must be reconstructing his childhood imagination. But imagination works backward as well as forward, better in fact.

  Perhaps it was this version of Christ as scientist that veered young Frigate toward the reading of science fiction. Though reading heavily in Swift, Twain, Doyle, London, Dumas, Baum, and Homer, he also read the Bible, and an edition of John Bunyan illustrated by Doré. Somewhere, deep in the boiling muddy depths of his unconscious, his religious impulses were mixed with his worship of science as savior of mankind. The early science-fiction magazines and books he read were based on the premise that rationality, logic, and science would get Homo sapiens out of the mess it had made during the past hundred thousand years. He had not learned then that, though he lived in a high-technology civilization, the Old Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, the New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Dark Ages were in every newborn infant. Baggage that went with every person throughout his or her life. Few there were who would rid themselves of this impedimenta, and no one would ever shuck all of it.

  Well, Nur might be an exception.

  “There are certain things about those ages that are desirable,” Nur had said. “I have not rid myself of them, I am sure.”

  When Frigate was eleven, his parents slid into religious apathy. They stopped going, for a while, to the First Church of Christ Scientist on Hamilton Boulevard in Peoria. But though they did not want their eldest son to stop attending church, they did not want to transport him every morning to the Christ Scientist Church. So they enrolled him in the Sunday school of the Arcadia Avenue Presbyterian Church, which was within walking distance.

  It was here that he ran head-on and at full theological speed into predestination. He had not as yet recovered from the concussion of soul and philosophical trauma resulting from the collision.

  “The whole world became for me a convalescent ward after that,” Frigate had once told Burton. “Of course, I’m exaggerating somewhat.”

  Until then, Frigate had been convinced that you were rewarded with Heaven if you lived a life full of good deeds and thoughts and of unshaken doubt in the existence of God and the validity of the Bible.

  “The Presbyterians maintained that it did not make any difference whether you thought you were full of grace and were an exemplary Christian. God had decreed thousands of years before you were born, before the making of the universe, in fact, that this unborn person would be saved and that unborn person would be damned. Their belief was like Twain’s theory of predeterminism. From the moment that the first primal atom bumped into the second created atom, a chain of motion was set up the directions of which were fixed by whether the primal atom collided with the second at this angle or that angle and the velocity it was traveling at when it bumped the other. If the angle and velocity had been different, everything that happened from then on would have been different. Your course through life was set. Nothing you did could change it. Everything you did was predetermined. To use twentieth-century computerese, preprogrammed.”

  The catch was that you could not then say to yourself, “What the hell?” and live a dissolute godless life. You had to behave as if you were a complete Christian. What was worse, you had to be one. You had to truly believe; you could not be a hypocrite.

  But you would not know until after you’d died whether God had chosen you to fly up to Paradise or to fall into the eternal flames of Hell.

  “Actually, if the Presbyterians were right, you could be a wicked person all your life. But if God had marked you as one of the saved, you would repent at the last moment and rise up to eternal bliss. Who, however, was going to take the chance that that would happen?

  “I should have told my parents about my spiritual agonies over this. They would have straightened me out by telling me that there was no such thing as predestination and a literal Hell. At least, they would have tried to ease my mind. But I said nothing to them—which gives you an idea of my communicativeness—and I suffered. They, of course, had no idea what I was being taught there in that church within walking distance. A short walk to Despair, Doubt, and Hell.”

  “Did you really suffer that much?” Burton had said.

  “Not all the time. Just now and then, here and there. After all, I was an active healthy boy. And I observed that, if the adults in the church really believed in predestination, they did not behave as if they did. They certainly weren’t obsessed with doubts and griefs about their strange doctrine. They paid it lip service in church and forgot about it as soon as they walked out. Maybe sooner.

  “Also, reading about Twain’s life, I saw that he did not believe in his godless and strictly mechanical universe. He acted as if he had free will even though he talked a lot about its absence from human beings.”

  At the age of twelve, Frigate became an atheist.

  “Rather, I should say, a devout believer in science as our savior. Science as used by rational people. However, I had forgotten that Swift had said, implied, anyway, that most people were Yahoos.”

  He had hastened to amend and modify his statement. Most people were only Yahooish; only a minority were genuine, dyed-in-the-wool Yahoos. Too big a minority, though.

  “Science could only be our savior in a limited sense and then only if not abused. But everything is abused and misused. I did not really learn that I was until thirty-five, though. Midway in my life, like Dante, I was just outside the Gates of Hell.”

  “It took him a long time to realize that people are irrational most of the time and usually more than that,” Nur had said. “What an astounding revelation!”

  “Not only the Paleolithic Age but also the bipedal ape lives in us,” Burton had said. “I’m not sure, though, that that is not an insult to the apes.”

  Frigate had maintained for many years that there was no such thing as a soul. But it came to him that if God had not given Homo sapiens a soul, then it must make its own soul. He wrote a story based on the idea of artificial souls that insured people the immortality that God, if there was one, had neglected to create.

  As far as he knew, no one had ever thought of this, and it made a very good premise for a science-fiction novel. It also made him conscious that, somewhere in him, he still believed that only humanity could save itself. There was no savior to come from Heaven or another planet and redeem humankind.

  “I was wrong, yet right,” Frigate had said. “Our salvation was the synthetic soul, but it was invented by an extra-Terrestrial species.”

  “That soul, the wathan, is not our salvation,” Nur had said. “It is only a means to an end. Salvation must still come from ourselves.”

  Science and the religious impulse had combined to make the Riverworld and the wathan, but these could carry you only so far. At that point, science faded away l
ike a sunset and metaphysics took over.

  In the meantime, you had to live one second after the other, move with the flow of time. Like it or not, you had to sleep and eat and excrete and, as Burton said, cultivate your self with due regard to others. You might ask questions, but if you did not get answers just now, you could hope that you would someday.

  Frigate was introduced to Star Spoon and talked with her for a while, though he had some difficulty understanding her. She spoke Esperanto, but since she had lived in an area occupied mainly by eighth-century A.D. Chinese and Italic Sabines of the fifth century B.C., her Esperanto had many unfamiliar loan words. After a while, he excused himself and went to his apartment. Like Burton, he was troubled because Li Po had not consulted his companions about Star Spoon. The group did need new members; eight was not enough to give the variety and freshness needed. They were close because of the hardships suffered while struggling to reach their goal, but this very intimacy had made them a family, and like most families, they got on one another’s nerves at times and quarreled about trivialities. Nur excepted.

  Frigate thought it was both right and necessary to raise others. But these should be carefully considered before being admitted. They did not need troublemakers.

  Li Po had opened the floodgates. The rest of the group would want to raise their own dead, and there was, as yet, no limit on the numbers that could be brought in or any qualifications for them.

  Burton felt as Frigate and, doubtless, most of the group did. Yet he was helpless, so far, to control these individualists. He was brave, strong, and dashing, but he was not a good leader except in situations that called for immediate and violent action. He just was not a peacetime administrator.

  Nur el-Musafir should be the one whom the group should follow and obey now, but he had not volunteered for the office and probably would not. Of them all, he was the most foresighted. He knew that no one could control the inevitable movement to anarchy.

  15

  Burton saw how shocked Star Spoon was when a screen displayed her birth. He had expected that she would be, but he was surprised that she showed so much emotion about it. Like most Westerners, he regarded the Chinese as a sternly self-controlled nation, the “inscrutable Oriental.” Li Po was uninhibited, close to manic, but then he was the exception that tested the rule. In an aside to Li Po, Burton spoke of this. The Chinese laughed loudly and said, “It may be that the Chinese of your time were inexpressive—when around strangers or in threatening situations. But Star Spoon and I are of what you call the seventh century. Do you think that we are the same as the Chinese of your time, any more than Englishmen of the seventh century were like those of your time?”

  “I am sufficiently rebuked and chastened,” Burton said.

  Nur said, “She may be disturbed not so much by what she sees now as by what she knows she is going to see.”

  It was impossible to be at ease when their pasts were being shown. Burton proposed that they choose an empty apartment for their communal meals from now on. They would paint its walls so that the screens could not be seen. They agreed that that was an excellent idea, after which Burton returned to his apartment. He ordered two androids, protein robots, from the Computer, gave the specifications, then waited exactly thirteen seconds for them to appear in the converters. It had amused him to give one the face of Colonel Henry Corsellis, late of the Native Eighteenth Bombay Infantry, and the other the face of Sir James Outram, late hero of the Indian Mutiny and Her Majesty’s Resident at Aden. Corsellis had become Burton’s enemy when, during officer’s mess, Burton had been improvising poems rhyming with his fellows’ names. He had ignored Corsellis’ because he knew how hot-tempered and sensitive his commander was. But, when the colonel had demanded that Burton made a couplet based on his name, Burton had recited:

  Here lieth the body of Colonel Corsellis;

  The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.

  As expected, the colonel had become angry, and they had quarreled. From then on, Corsellis did Burton every disservice that he could.

  “Which I should have anticipated. Perhaps I did.”

  Burton had come into disfavor with Outram, then a general in the Indian army, when Sir Charles Napier, whom Burton greatly admired, got into a long and bitter feud with Outram. Burton had defended Napier with articles and letters for the Karachee Advertiser, a private publication devoted to Napier’s defense. Outram had resented these and marked Burton down for attack if he ever had an opportunity. Years later, when Burton, then a captain in the Indian army, had requested permission to explore Somalia in Africa, Outram had refused his request. Though overriden by his superiors, Outram had then limited Burton’s plans for exploration.

  Now the androids, whom he called Corsellis and Outram, stood before him. The former was in the uniform of a colonel; the latter, in civilian clothes. Their faces were expressionless; they would smile only at request and then only if they had been programmed to do so.

  “You two arseholes will, as required, paint the rooms with the materials you’ll find in that converter there,” he said, pointing.

  The androids did not follow his gesture, so he said, “Look over there. Where my finger is pointing. That cabinet is the converter I mean. The paint’s in sprayers. You know how to use those. The ladders are also in there. You know how to put the sections together and how to use them.”

  Burton had thought of programming them to kiss his ass before they started the job, but he had rejected the childish and essentially meaningless act. If he resurrected the real Outram and Corsellis and got them to kiss his ass, that would be different. But they would refuse, of course. Besides, he could not just bring them to life for a while, even if he would have liked them to do menial labor for him. They were human beings, and he could not have them disintegrated when he was through with them.

  Nevertheless, he did get some satisfaction, even chuckled, when he saw the two walk to the converter. If only he could arrange it so that the real men, the models, could at least see his androids. They would be outraged, furiously indignant.

  He sighed. That form of revenge was petty, and he knew it. If Nur could see this, he would say, “It is beneath you. You have become no better than they.”

  “I should turn the other cheek?” Burton muttered, continuing aloud the imaginary conversation. “I am not a Christian. Moreover, I never met a Christian who turned the other cheek when slapped.”

  He would have to keep the identity of the simulacra to himself and that deprived him of the pleasure he had in this. Alice could get away with giving her androids the faces of Gladstone and Disraeli because she had no animus toward them. It was, to her, merely amusing to be waited on by two prime ministers.

  He left his apartment for a while, though he was not sure that he should leave the androids unattended. If they had a problem that a sentient painter could have solved, they would either ignore it and go on or stop and wait for orders. He, however, was angered by the events on the past-display screen, not yet covered over. Its sequence was not in proper chronology; it had jumped to when he was three years old and being whipped savagely by his tutor. “All I did was tell him that he had a breath like a sick dog’s,” Burton said. “And that he farted overmuch. That’s all.”

  Burton could not read at that age, but the tutor had started to teach him to speak Latin. At the age of ten, Burton would know far more Latin than his tutor and speak it fluently.

  “But that was in spite of him, not because of him. I had a natal love for languages that no brutal pedant could scourge from me. Unfortunately, most boys hated the subject as much as they hated their teachers’ rods. In their minds, one was the other.”

  The screen displaying his past appeared on the wall beside the door after it had been shut. Burton sat down in the flying chair parked by the door and turned it so that his back was to the wall. Immediately, the screen appeared on the wall opposite him. Burton put soundproof devices over his ears and a long eyeshade on his head. While he kept hi
s eyes lowered, he could not see the screen. Apparently, the Computer had not had orders to shift the screen to the floor. Thus, Burton could read the book he held close to his chest without seeing or hearing the display.

  The book was the Roman emperor Claudius’ grammar of the Etruscan language, located and reproduced for Burton by the Computer. It had been lost sometime during the Dark Ages of Earth, but an Ethical agent had photographed a copy of it shortly after Claudius had finished it. While Earth linguists were bemoaning its loss, it had been sitting in the records of the Ethicals for a thousand years.

  Despite his absorption in the book, he could not keep from glancing at the screen. Now he, as the child, had been swung around to face the red angry features of McClanahan, the tutor. Though Burton could not hear the man, he could read the writhing lips. And he suddenly remembered other occasions when McClanahan had hurled invective and accusations at him, and the prophecy that he would go to Hell when he died—if not sooner.

  Burton could not see his own lips, but he was screaming, “I’ll meet you there!” His view shifted. He was facing the other way, and the tutor was thrashing him again. He would not be crying or yelling; he kept his lips stubbornly locked so that the tutor would not have the satisfaction of knowing how much he was hurting him. That only made McClanahan angrier, and he increased the severity of his strokes. But he was afraid to whip him as much as he would have liked to. Though Burton’s father approved of instilling love of learning and obedience with the rod, he would not have stood for a whipping near to death. The tutor knew that the child would not scream until he was almost dead, and perhaps not then.

  Burton turned his head away and focused his intentness into a sword, the tip of which raked across the words of the grammar. He finished two pages, then closed his eyes and projected the pages, as if they had been a film, on the screen of his mind. After which, he opened his eyes to check his accuracy. He smiled. His memory had been one hundred percent perfect.