GODS OF RIVERWORLD Read online

  "Which it would, I must admit, if this mysterious stranger had told it to do so," Burton said. "If that's happened ... well, by God, we are in trouble 1"

  He asked for a rerun of the scene they had witnessed through their viewers. There was none. Loga had not directed the Computer to record it.

  "I thought everything was going to be clear, unmysterious, straightforward from now on," Frigate said. "I should have known better. It never is."

  He paused, then said softly, "He cracked open like Humpty Dumpty, except that Humpty Dumpty broke after he fell, not before. And then he turned to water like the Wicked Witch of the West."

  Burton, who had died in 1890, did not understand the last reference. He made a mental note to ask the American about it when there was time.

  Burton was going to ask the Computer to send in a robot to clean up the liquid. He decided, after some thought, to leave the room as it had been found. He would lock the door to the apartment with a codeword that only he knew. And then, if someone unlocked it ...

  What could he do?

  Nothing. But he would at least know that there was an intruder.

  Nur said, "We've been assuming that what we thought we saw take place here actually did take place."

  "You think that what we saw was computer-simulation?" Frigate said.

  "It's possible."

  "But what about the liquid?" Burton said. "That's not simulated."

  "It could be synthetic, a false clue. Loga's voice could have been reproduced to deceive and confuse us."

  Alice said, "Wouldn't it be more logical just to abduct Loga? We might have thought that Loga had just gone away for some reason or another."

  "Why in the world would he do that, Alice?" Burton said.

  "We were to return to The Valley day after tomorrow," Li Po said. "If Loga wanted to get rid of us, he'd have it done in two days. No, that liquid ... the whole thing ... there's someone else in the tower."

  "That makes ten in the tower then," Nur said.

  "Ten?" Burton said.

  "The eight of us. Plus the unknown who did away with Loga, though more than one might have done that. Plus Fear. That makes at least ten."

  "In a sense, we're gods," Frigate said.

  "Gods in a gaol," Burton said.

  If they felt godlike, their faces did not show the vast assurance and happiness that must distinguish gods from humanity. The first area they had gone to from Loga's apartment was the highest story in the tower. Here, in a huge chamber, was the hangar of the Ethicals. There were two hundred aerial and spacecraft of various kinds there, in any of which they could have flown to any place in The Valley. However, the hangar hatches had to be opened, and that the Computer refused to do. Nor could they operate the hatch mechanisms manually.

  The unknown who had liquefied Loga had inserted an override command in the Computer. Only he—or she—or they— had the power to raise the hangar hatches.

  They stood close together in a corner of the immense room. The floor, walls, and ceilings were a monotonous, overpowering gray, the color of prison cells. Their means of escape, the saucer-shaped, sausage-shaped and insect-shaped machines, seemed to brood in the silence. They were waiting to be used. But by whom?

  At the opposite wall, a thousand feet away, was a fat cigar-shaped vessel, the largest of the spaceships. It was five hundred feet long and had a maximum diameter of two hundred feet. This could be used to travel to the Gardenworld, wherever that planet was. Loga had said that it would take a hundred years, Earthtime, to arrive at its destination. Loga had also said that the ship was so computerized-automatic that a person of average intelligence and little knowledge of science could operate it.

  Burton's voice broke the silence.

  "We have some immediate pressing problems. We must find out who did that horrible thing to Loga. And we must find a way to cancel the override inhibits in the Computer."

  "True," Nur said. "But before we can do that, we must determine just how much control of the Computer we have. What our limits are. When you fight, you must know your strengths and your weaknesses as well as you know your face in the mirror. Only thus can we determine how to overcome the strengths and weaknesses of our enemy."

  "If he is our enemy," Frigate said.

  The others looked at him with surprise.

  "That's very good," Nur said. "Don't think in old categories. You're learning."

  "What else could he be?" Aphra Behn said.

  "I don't know," Frigate said. "We've been so manipulated by Loga that I'm not one hundred percent convinced that he is on our side or that he is right in what he's done. This unknown ... he may be doing this for the right reason. Still ..."

  "If Loga was his only obstacle, the unknown's removed it," Burton said. "Why doesn't he come forward now? What could we do to oppose him? We're like children, really. We don't know how to use all the powers available. We don't even know what they are."

  "Not yet," Nur said. "Pete has proposed another way of looking at events. But, for the time being, it's not useful. We have to assume that the unknown is our enemy until we find out otherwise. Does anyone disagree?"

  It was evident that no one did.

  Tom Turpin said, "What you say is OK. But I think that the very first thing we got to do is protect ourselves. We got to set up some kind of defense so what happened to Loga don't happen to us."

  "I agree," Burton said. "But if this unknown can override any of our commands ..."

  "We should stick together!" Alice said. "Keep together, don't let anyone out of our sight!"

  Burton said, "You may be right, and we should confer about that. First, though, I propose that we get out of this gloomy, oppressive place. Let's go back to my apartment."

  The interior door to the hangar opened, and they rode their chairs down the corridor to the nearest vertical shaft. The next level was five hundred feet down, which caused Burton to wonder what was between the hangar level and the second one. He would ask the Computer what it contained.

  Inside his quarters, with the entrance door shut by his codeword, he began to act as host. A wall section slid back, revealing a very large table standing on end. This moved out from the recess, turned until the tabletop was horizontal, floated to the center of the room, extended its legs, which had been folded against the underside, and settled on the floor. The eight arranged chairs around it and sat down. By then they had gotten their drinks from the energy-matter converter cabinets along one wall. The table was round, and Burton sat in what would have been King Arthur's chair if the room had been Camelot.

  He took a sip of black coffee and said, "Alice has a good idea. It means, however, that we must all live in one apartment. This one isn't quite large enough. I propose we move into one down the hall near the elevator shaft. It has ten bedrooms, a laboratory, a control room, and a large dining-sitting room. We can work together and keep an eye on each other."

  "And get on each other's nerves," Frigate said.

  "I need a woman," Li Po said.

  "So do all of us, except Marcelin, and maybe Nur," Turpin said. "Man, it's been a long, hard time!"

  "What about Alice?" Aphra Behn said. "She needs a man."

  "Don't speak for me," Alice said sharply.

  Burton slammed the tabletop with a fist. "First things first!" he bellowed. Then, more softly, "We must have a common front, band together, no matter what the inconvenience. We can work out the other matters, trifling, if I may say so, at this moment. We've been through a lot together, and we can cooperate. We make a good team, despite some differences that have caused some abrasion recently. We must work together, be together, or we may be cut down one at a time. Is there anyone who won't cooperate?"

  Nur said, "If anyone insists on living apart, that one is under suspicion."

  There was an uproar then, stilled when Burton hit the table again.

  "This bottling-up will be scratchsome, no doubt of that. But we've been ridden gallsore by worse things, and the better we work toge
ther, the sooner we'll be free to pursue our own interests."

  Alice was frowning, and he knew what she was thinking. Since their final breakup, she had avoided him as much as possible. Now ...

  "If we're in jail, we're in the best one in two worlds," Frigate said.

  "No jail's any good," Turpin said. "You ever been in the slammer, Pete?"

  "Only the one that I made for myself all my life," Frigate said. "But it was portable."

  That was not true, Burton thought. Frigate has been a prisoner several times on the Riverworld, including being one of Hermann Goring's slaves. But he spoke metaphorically. A most metaphorical man, Frigate. Shifty, a verbal trickster, ambiguous, which he would cheerfully admit, quoting Emily Dickinson to justify himself.

  "Success in circuit lies."

  Quoting himself, he would say, "The literal man litters reality"

  "Well, Captain, what do we do next?" Frigate said.

  The first priority was to go to their individual apartments and bring their few possessions to the large apartment down the hall. They went in a body, since it would not do to go alone, and then they picked out their bedrooms. Alice took one as far from Burton's as possible. Peter Frigate chose the apartment next to hers. Burton smiled ferociously on noting this. It was an acknowledged but mostly unspoken fact that the American was "in love" with Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves. He had been ever since, in 1964, he had seen the photographs of her at the ages of ten and eighteen in a biography of Lewis Carroll. He had written a mystery story, The Knave of Hearts, in which thirty-year-old Alice had played the amateur detective. In 1983, he had organized a public subscription drive to erect a monument to her on her unmarked grave in the Hargreaves family plot at Lyndhurst. Times were hard, however, and little money had been given. Then Frigate had died, and he still had not learned if his project had been completed. If it had, above Alice's body there was now a carved marble monument of Alice at the tea table with the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat's head above and behind her.

  Meeting her had not lessened his love for her, as a cynic might expect, but had heated it. The literary attractions had become fleshly. Yet he had never said a word to her or Burton about his passion. He loved, or had loved, Burton too much to make what he would have called a dishonorable move toward her. Alice had never shown the slightest sign of feeling toward him as he did toward her. That did not necessarily mean anything. Alice was a master at concealing her feelings in certain situations. There was the public Alice, and there was the private Alice. There might also be an Alice whom even Alice did not know. Whom she would not at all want to know.

  4

  Two hours before lunchtime, they were settled in, though still unsettled by the morning's events. Burton had chosen not to use the control console, which could be slid from a wall recess. Instead, he had asked the Computer to simulate the screen and the keyboard on the wall. This could have been reproduced in light on the ceiling or the floor if required. The floor, however, was covered with a thick rug, which the unlearned would have thought was a very expensive Persian. Its model had, in fact, been woven on the Gardenworld, a recording of it had been brought to the tower, and the Computer had reproduced the original by energy-mass conversion.

  Burton stood before the wall, the simulation at head level. If he chose to walk back and forth, the simulation would keep pace with him.

  Burton gave Loga's name and ID code and asked the Computer, in English, where Loga's living body was.

  The reply was that it could not be located.

  "He's dead then!" Alice murmured.

  "Where is Loga's body-recording?" Burton said.

  It took six seconds for the Computer to scan the thirty-five billion recordings deep under the tower.

  "It cannot be located."

  "Oh, my God! Erased!" Frigate said.

  "Not necessarily," Nur said. "There may be an override command to give such an answer."

  Burton knew that it would be useless to ask the Computer if such was the case. Nevertheless, he had to.

  "Has anyone commanded you not to obey an override command?" Burton 'said quickly.

  Nur laughed. Frigate said, "Oh, boy!"

  NO.

  "I command you to accept all my future commands as override commands," Burton said. "These supersede all previous override commands."

  RKJKCTKD. NOT FUNCTIONAL.

  "Who has the authority to command overrides?" Burton said.

  LOGA. KHK-12W-373-N.

  "Loga is dead," Burton said.

  There was no reply.

  "Is Loga dead?" Burton said.

  NOT IN IXJMAIN OF KNOWLKDGK.

  "If Loga is dead, who commands you?"

  The names of the eight, followed by their code-IDs, flashed on the screen. Below them, flashing: limitku authority.

  "How limited?"

  No reply.

  Burton rephrased.

  "Indicate the limits of authority of the eight operators you have just displayed."

  The screen went blank for about six seconds. Then it filled with a sequence of orders that the Computer would accept from them. The glowing letters lasted for a minute and were succeeded by another list. In another minute, a third list appeared. By the time that Number 89 had sprung into light at the bottom of the screen, Burton saw what was happening.

  "It could go on for hours," he said. "It's giving us a detailed list of what we can do."

  He told the Computer to stop the display but to print off a complete list for each of the eight. "I don't dare ask it for a list of don'ts. The list would never end."

  Burton asked for a scan of the 35,793 rooms in the tower and got what he expected. All were empty of any living sentients. Or dead ones.

  "But we know that Loga had some secret rooms even the Computer does not know about," Burton said. "Or at least it won't tell us where they are. We know where one is. Where are the others?"

  "You think that the unknown might be in one of those?" Nur said.

  "I don't know. It's possible. We must try to find them."

  "We could compare the tower dimensions with the circuitry," Frigate said. "But, my God, that would take us many months! And the rooms might still be so cleverly concealed that we would not find them."

  "That sounds as interesting as cleaning spittoons," Turpin said. He went to a grand piano, sat down, and began playing "Ragtime Nightmare."

  Burton followed him and stood by him.

  "We'd all love to hear you play," he said—he wouldn't, he had no liking for music of any kind—"but we're in conference, a very important one, vital, you know, in the full sense of the word, and this is no time to divert or distract us. We need everyone's wits in this. Otherwise, we may all die because one didn't do his share."

  Smiling, his fingers running spiderlike on the keys, Turpin looked up at Burton. The long, exhausting and dangerous trip to the tower had thinned him to one hundred and seventy-five pounds. But since he had been in the tower, he had stuffed himself with food and liquor, and his face was waxing into full moonness. His large teeth were very white against his dark skin—not as dark as Burton's—and his dark brown hair was wavy, not kinky. He could have passed for white, but he had chosen to stay in the black world on Earth.

  "Nigger is how you was raised, how you think," he would sometimes say. "As the Good Book says, it don't do no good to kick against the pricks." He would laugh softly then, not caring whether or not his hearer understood that by "pricks" he meant "whites."

  "I thought I'd give you thinkers some background music. I'm no good at this kind of thing."

  "You've a good mind," Burton said, "and we need it. Besides, we have to act as a team, as soldiers in a small army. If everybody does what he wants, ignores this crisis, we become just a disorganized mob."

  "And you's the captain, the man," Turpin said. "OK."

  He brought his hands down, the chords crashed, and he stood up.

  "Lead on, MacDuff."

  Th
ough he was furious, Burton showed no sign of it. He strode back to the table, Turpin following him too closely, and he stood by his chair. Turpin, still smiling, took his seat.

  "I suggest that we wait until we have mastered the contents of those," Burton said, waving a hand at the mechanism that was piling, sorting, and collating the papers flying from a slot in the wall. "Once we thoroughly understand what we can and cannot do, we may make our plans."

  "That'll take some time," de Marbot said. "It'll be like reading a library, not one book."

  "It must be done."

  "You talk of limits," Nur said, "and that is necessary and good. But within what we call limits we have such power as the greatest kings on Earth never dreamed of. That power will be our strength, but it will also be our weakness. Rather, I should say, the power will tempt us to misuse it. I pray to God that we will be strong enough to overcome our weaknesses—if we have them."

  "We are, in a sense, gods," Burton said. "But humans with godlike power. Half-gods."

  "Half-assed gods," Frigate said.

  Burton smiled and said, "We've been through much on The River. It's scourged us, winnowed out the chaff. I hope. We shall see."

  "The greatest enemy is not the unknown," Nur said. He did not need to explain what he meant.

  An ancient Greek philosopher, Herakleitos, once said, "Character determines destiny."

  Burton was thinking of this as he paced back and forth in his bedroom. What Herakleitos said was only partly true. Everyone had a unique character. However, that character was influenced by environment. And every environment was unique. Every place was not exactly like every other place. In addition, a person's character was part of the environment he traveled in. How a person acted depended not only upon his character but also on the peculiar opportunities and constraints of the environment, which included the person's self. The self carried about in it all the environments that the person had lived in. These were, in a sense, ghosts, some of thicker ectoplasm than the others, and thus powerful haunters of the mobile home, the person.

  Another ancient sage, Hebrew, not Greek, had said, "There is nothing new under the sun."