The Gods of Riverworld Page 3

  Loga had said that there just was not enough time to do that. Even if a thousand Agents were assigned to asking a thousand people per hour whether or not they wished to be endowed with synthetic souls, the project would take thirty-five million hours. If fifty thousand Agents conducted the interviews, it would take half a million hours. If the interviews could be conducted on a twenty-four-hour basis, and they couldn’t, it would take somewhat over fifty-seven years to question every person.

  What would have been accomplished at the end of that time? Very little. Perhaps ten or twelve million might decide not to keep on living. Even a man like Sam Clemens, who insisted that he wanted the eternal peace and quiet of death, would opt for life if he was given a chance for it. He would at least want to try the life offered, one with conditions different from those on Earth. A hundred considerations would make him change his mind. The same would apply to those others who felt, for various reasons, that life on Earth had been miserable, wretched, painful, and altogether not worthwhile.

  “The resurrectees have to be dealt with en masse,” Loga had said. “There is no other way to handle them. We have, however, made a few exceptions. You were one, because I secretly arranged to have you awaken in the resurrection area so many years ago. You became a special case. The Canadian, La Viro, was visited by one of us, and certain ideas were given him so that he would found the Church of the Second Chance. Their missionaries spread teachings that contained some of the truths about this situation. They stressed the ethical reasons for the lazari being here; they stressed that each person must advance himself ethically.”

  “Why couldn’t everybody have been told the truth at the outset?” Burton had said. And then, before Loga could reply, Burton had answered himself.

  “I see. For the same reason that every person could not be asked if he wished to have another life and another chance at it.”

  “Yes. And even if we Ethicals had appeared in The Valley and told the truth to all, only a certain percentage would have believed us. And our teachings would have been perverted, changed, and denied by many.

  “Believe me, our way is the best, even if it has its disadvantages and limits. We know because of what our predecessors told us about their projects in resurrecting other sentients. Besides, when Earthpeople were all raised on that day, there were one hundred thousand languages spoken by them. We would not have been understood by many. All the people could not hear the message until the Church of the Second Chance had spread a common language, Esperanto, throughout the Riverworld.”

  Burton had then said, “In the previous projects, uh, I’m almost afraid to ask, how many, what percentage, Passed On?”

  “Three-quarters of those raised on the Gardenworlds did,” Loga had said. “The remaining one-fourth … their recordings were dissolved when they died after their grace period was up.”

  “Died or were killed?” Burton had said.

  “Most of them killed each other or committed suicide.”

  “Most?”

  Loga had ignored this.

  “One-sixteenth of the people resurrected as adults or juveniles in previous projects passed the test, Went On. Each of these projects had at least two phases. Here, after the phase with those who died before or during A.D. 1983 is done, then those who died after that will be raised for the second stage. The final one.”

  “But the first stage is going to take longer than planned because of your interference,” Burton had said.

  “Yes. I believe … I know … that the percentage of those Going On could have been higher, much higher, if the lazari had been given more time. I could not endure the thought of so many being doomed, so I became a renegade. I betrayed my fellow Ethicals. I … I may have condemned myself to … not Going On. But I don’t believe that. I did it for my love of humanity.”

  The Christians and the Muslims on Earth had believed in a physical resurrection. And so it had been. But the ultimate goal of the Ethicals was Buddhistic, absorption of the soul into the All-Being.

  As if reading his mind, Loga had said, “Tell me, Dick, do you really believe, believe in the innermost and deepest part of your mind, where it counts, that you will Go On?”

  Burton had stared at Loga for a moment. Then, slowly, he had said, “No. Not in the sense you mean. I just cannot believe it. There is no evidence that such a thing as Going On occurs.”

  “Yes, there is! Our instruments cannot perceive the wathan, what you call the soul, when its owner has died after attaining a certain stage of … let’s call it goodness instead of ethical advancement.”

  “Which only means that the instruments can’t detect it,” Burton had said. “You have no knowledge of what really happens to the wathan at that point.”

  Loga had smiled and said, “In the end, we have to fall back on faith, don’t we?”

  “From what I’ve seen of its manifestations on Earth, I have no faith in faith,” Burton had said. “How do you know but what the wathan, as you call it, has simply worn out? It’s an artificial thing, but its life may end naturally, just as all synthetic things … and natural, too … end. The wathan is not a material entity, as we know material things, but that’s the point. We don’t really know if it’s material or not. It may be a form of matter unknown to us. Or a thing of pure energy. If so, a form of energy unknown to us. But how do you know that it may not change into another form, which your instruments cannot detect?”

  “It does! It does!” Loga had said. “Into the Undetectible! How else could you explain that the wathan only passes beyond the instrument range when the owner has reached a certain stage of ethical advancement? Those who don’t reach this stage may die again and again, but always, always, the wathans return to their resurrected bodies!”

  “There may be an explanation you haven’t thought of.”

  “Hundreds of thousands of minds greater than yours have tried to find another explanation, and they have failed.”

  “But one may yet come along who won’t fail.”

  “You’re depending upon faith now,” Loga had said.

  “No. Upon history, logic, and probability.”

  Loga had been upset, not because he was beginning to doubt his beliefs but because he feared that Burton would not Go On.

  As it had turned out, Loga was not going to Go On. His body-record had been destroyed, and he would no longer have the opportunity to attain that final goal. Yet … it was Loga’s own fault that he did not have that chance now. If he had not set the project on a different course, he would still be alive, and his body-record would insure that he could keep striving for that mysterious event known as Going On.

  Was the unknown who had committed Loga to oblivion an Ethical who had somehow survived Loga’s mass slaughter of his fellows? If he was, why didn’t he show himself? Was he afraid of the eight lazari? Was he biding his time until he could kill them and raise them in The Valley where they could no longer interfere with the original design?

  Anyone who knew how to input override commands in the computer should not be afraid of the eight. But then perhaps the unknown knew something that the eight did not know yet but might find out. If that were so, the unknown would try to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

  However, it was possible that one—or more—of the eight might have made Loga vanish.

  Burton was thinking of this when Nur’s head appeared on a wall-screen. “I’d like to speak to you.”

  Burton gave the codeword that allowed Nur to see him.

  “What is it?”

  Nur was wearing a green turban, indicating that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The choice of color was probably accidental, though, since the little Moor was not one to set store by such things. His long, straight black hair fell from under the cloth onto skinny brown shoulders. His narrow face was intense.

  “The inhibit input against resurrecting Monat and all the Ethicals and their agents still holds. I expected that. But something even more momentous has occurred!”

 
He paused.

  Burton said, “Well?”

  “You know that Loga told us three weeks ago that he’d told the Computer to start resurrecting the eighteen billion in the records. We all assumed that it had been done. But it’s not so! Apparently, Loga changed his mind for some reason. Perhaps he intended to wait until we were out of the tower. Anyway, not a single person has been resurrected since then.”

  The shock silenced Burton for a moment.

  When he recovered, he said, “How many bodies are on hold now?”

  “As of now, eighteen billion, one million, three hundred and thirty-seven thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine. No. Now … two hundred and seven.”

  “I suppose you…?” Burton said.

  Nur, anticipating him, which he did with annoying frequency, said, “Yes. I ascertained that the Computer now has a reinforcing override from the unknown. The hold is still on.”

  “Just think,” Burton said, “only three weeks ago we thought that our long hard struggle was over. That all the big issues were dissolved and our only problems from then on would be personal.”

  Nur did not reply.

  “Very well. What we must do first is to subject each of us to a truth test. We can’t proceed on the assumption that there is an unknown until we’ve eliminated all of our group.”

  “They won’t like it,” Nur said.

  “But it’s logical that we do it.”

  “Humans don’t like logic when it’s inconvenient or dangerous for them,” Nur said. “However, they’ll submit to the test. They have to to avoid suspicion.”

  4

  If not telling a lie was the same as telling the truth, the results of the test were positive. If telling a lie could result in an indication that the truth was being told, the results were negative.

  Whether the indications were true or not, the eight seemed to be innocent.

  Each sat in turn inside a closed transparent cubicle and answered questions from Burton or Nur. The field generated inside the cubicle showed the wathan floating just above the head of the questionee and attached to it by a thread of bright scarlet light. The wathan was a sphere that swelled and shrank, whirled or seemed to whirl, and flashed a spectrum of glowing colors. This was the invisible thing that accompanied every person from the moment of conception and did not leave him or her until that person was dead. It contained all that was a person, duplicating the contents of the mind and nervous system and also giving him or her self-consciousness.

  Burton had taken the first test, and Nur had asked him several questions to which he had to give an answer he believed to be true.

  “Were you born in Torquay, England, on March 19, 1821?”

  “Yes,” Burton said, and the Computer photographed his wathan at that second.

  “When and where did you die the first time?”

  “On Sunday, October 19, 1890, in my house in Trieste, that part of Italy then belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

  The Computer took another photograph and compared the two. It then compared these two to others that had been taken many years ago when Burton had been questioned by the Council of Twelve.

  Nur looked at the flashing display on a screen and said, “The truth. As you know it.”

  That was one of the deficiencies of the test. If a person believed that he was telling the truth, the wathan indicated that he was.

  “That is the truth,” Frigate said. “I read those dates many times when I was on Earth.”

  “Have you ever lied?” Nur said.

  Burton, grinning, said, “No.”

  A narrow black zigzag shot over the surface of the wathan.

  “The subject lies,” Nur told the Computer.

  On the screen appeared: PREVIOUSLY VERIFIED.

  “Have you ever lied?” Nur said again.

  “Yes.”

  The black lightning streak disappeared.

  “Did you make Loga vanish?”

  “No.”

  “Were you implicated with anyone in Loga’s destruction?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “That’s the truth, as far as you know it,” Nur said after glancing at the screen. “Do you have any knowledge about anyone who might have made Loga vanish?”

  “No.”

  “Are you glad that Loga did vanish?”

  Burton said, “What the hell?”

  He could see the image of his wathan on a screen. It was glowing with orange overlaying the other shifting colors.

  “You shouldn’t have asked that!” Aphra Behn said.

  “Yes, you devil, you had no right!” Burton said. “Nur, you’re a scoundrel, like all Sufis!”

  “You were glad,” Nur said calmly. “I suspected so. I also suspect that most of us were. I was not, but I will allow the same question to be put to me. It may be that I, too, was glad, though deep in my animal mind.”

  “The subconscious,” Frigate murmured.

  “Whatever it is called, it is the same. The animal mind.”

  “Why should anyone be glad?” Alice said.

  “Don’t you really know?” Burton shouted.

  Alice recoiled at the violence.

  Having been cleared, for the moment, anyway, Burton left the cubicle and interrogated Nur. When the Moor appeared to be innocent, Alice seated herself. Burton forbore asking her if Loga’s death had given her any joy. He doubted that it had. But when she had time to consider what she might do with the powers here, she might understand why some of the others had felt, to their shame, elated.

  One by one, the others showed their innocence.

  “But Loga could have passed the test while lying like a diplomat,” Nur said. “It is possible that one of us has had access to his wathan distorter.”

  “I don’t think so,” Turpin said. “Ain’t none of us got the smarts to operate one of those. We ain’t smart enough to override Loga’s commands either. I think we’re wasting time, besides insulting all of us.”

  “If I interpret you correctly,” Nur said, “you’re saying that we’re not intelligent enough. That’s not true. We are. But we don’t have the knowledge we need.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant. We just don’t know enough.”

  “Three weeks is long enough for a diligent person to get the knowledge from the Computer,” Burton said.

  “No. The Computer ain’t going to tell anyone how to override Loga,” Turpin said. “I just don’t believe that that could be done.”

  “We could do a memory-strip of the past three weeks,” Frigate said. “It’ll take time, but it might be worth it.”

  “No!” Alice said vehemently. “No! I’d feel violated! It would be worse than rape! I won’t do it!”

  “I understand your feelings,” Nur said. “But…”

  The Computer could unreel their memories back to conception and display them on a screen. The process had its limits, since it could not reproduce nonvisual and nonauditory thoughts except as electronic displays, the interpretation of which was still uncertain. It was capable of transmitting tactile, olfactory and pressure memories. But, memory was selective and apparently erased many events that the individual considered unimportant. However, it did show clearly what the subject had seen, heard and spoken. On demand, emotion-pain fields could be projected.

  “I won’t want you seeing me when I went to the toilet,” Alice said.

  “None of us want that, for you or for ourselves,” Burton said, and he laughed. It sounded like a stone skipping across water. “All of us fart and belch and most have probably masturbated and picked our noses, and Marcelin and Aphra, I’m sure, would not care to have us see them in bed. But it’s not necessary to show everything. The Computer can be ordered to be selective, to display only the events we’re interested in. Everything else will be irrelevant and so will not be shown.”

  “It’s a waste of time,” Frigate said. “Anyone clever enough to do what the unknown did wouldn’t overlook the possibility of a memory-strip.”


  “I agree with you,” Burton said, “though I seldom do. But it is one of those routine things that have to be done. What if the guilty person—if there is one—had anticipated that we would think a memory-search was useless?”

  “He wouldn’t take such a chance,” Li Po said.

  “Nevertheless, I insist that we do it,” Burton said. “If we don’t, we’ll all be wondering about one another.”

  “We’ll still be wondering when it’s all done,” Frigate said sourly. “But if it must be.”

  The search could have been run simultaneously with each one in a separate cubicle, but who then would supervise each subject to make sure that he or she did not order the Computer to cancel the relevant events? Burton went first, and, after three hours, the time it took the Computer to strip three weeks of memory, he emerged. The screen had been blank during the entire strip.

  It was, as expected, empty while the others underwent the search.

  Twenty-five hours passed before the last one, Li Po, stepped out of the cubicle. Long before then, others had drifted off to bed one by one. Burton and Nur saw the work through from beginning to end. Some were getting up when the two decided they should sleep. First, though, Burton wanted to make sure that no one could enter the suite.

  “The unknown could override the codeword locking the door.”

  “How do you suggest that we block the door?” Frigate said, and he yawned. “Do we shove a bed against it? Pile more furniture on top of that?”

  “The door swings inward, so that’s not a bad idea. What I’m going to do, however, is to order the Computer to make a burglar alarm.”

  Burton did just that. Five minutes later, he pulled out from an energy-matter converter cabinet a dozen pieces of equipment. He taped two boxes to the wall on each side of the door and secured several other boxes to these. Then he adjusted a dial on one of the large boxes.