The Gods of Riverworld Read online

  Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot: Born 1782 in France, died there in 1854. Like Nur, small in stature but very strong and swift. He served very bravely under Napoleon and was wounded many times. His Memoirs of His Life and Campaigns so fascinated A. Conan Doyle that he modeled his stories of Brigadier Gerard, the dashing French soldier, on de Marbot’s exploits.

  Tom Million Turpin: Black American born in 1871 in Savannah, Georgia; died in 1922 in St. Louis. Turpin was a piano player and composer of considerable talent; his Harlem Rag, published in 1897, was the first published ragtime piece by a black composer. He was also the boss of the Tenderloin red-light district in St. Louis.

  Li Po: Born in 710 of Turkish-Chinese lineage in an outlying district of ancient China; died in 762 in China. Considered by many to be China’s greatest poet, he was also a famous swordsman, drunkard, lover, and wanderer. In The Magic Labyrinth, his pseudonym was Tai-Peng.

  Star Spoon: A female contemporary of Li Po, who suffered much both in China and on the Riverworld.

  PREFACE

  Those who have not read the previous volumes of the Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, and The Magic Labyrinth, should go to the outline at the back of this book. There the reader can acquaint himself or herself with some events and items only referred to en passant in the book at hand. I have written the outline to avoid lengthy recapitulation. Those familiar with the series so far might also want to read the outline to refresh their memories about certain matters.

  I stated in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, that it would be the final book in the series. I had intended it to be so, but I did leave myself a tiny escape hatch in the final paragraph. My unconscious knew better than my conscious, and it made me (the devil!) install that little door. Some time after the fourth volume appeared, I got to thinking about the vast powers possessed by the people who had entered the tower and how tempting the powers would be.

  Also, as I knew and some readers pointed out, the truths revealed in the fourth volume might not be the final truths after all.

  The opinions and conclusions about economics, ideology, politics, sexuality, and other matters re Homo sapiens vary according to the characters’ knowledge or biases. They are not necessarily my own. I am convinced that all races have an equal mental potential and that the same spectrum of stupidity, mediocre intelligence, and genius runs through every race. All races, I’m convinced, have an equal potential for good or evil, love or hate, and saintliness or sin. I’m also convinced from sixty years of wide reading and close observation that human life has always been savage and comically absurd but that we are not a totally unredeemable species.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Lovers

  Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life

  Lord Tyger

  Strange Relations

  Tarzan Alive

  Time’s Last Gift

  Traitor to the Living

  The Stone God Awakens

  Flesh

  Behind the Walls of Terra

  The Image of the Beast

  Blown

  A Feast Unknown

  The Gates of Creation

  The Maker of Universes

  Night of Light

  A Private Cosmos

  The Wind Whales of Ishmael

  The Lavalite World

  Jesus on Mars

  Dark Is the Sun

  The Unreasoning Mask

  Inside, Outside

  The Alley God

  The Book of Philip José Farmer

  Dayworld

  Dayworld Rebel

  THE RIVERWORLD SERIES

  To Your Scattered Bodies Go

  The Fabulous Riverboat

  The Dark Design

  The Magic Labyrinth

  Gods of Riverworld

  Riverworld and Other Stories

  Red Orc’s Rage

  The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

  RIVERWORLD

  “[Farmer is] an excellent science fiction writer.”

  —Isaac Asimov

  “Riverworld is a venue where anyone can have adventures with anyone else.… The Riverworld books [are] interested in the play of character and ideas, free from the constraints of realism, place, or time. Or, to put it another way, they’re a venue for Farmer to talk about interesting stuff.”

  —Locus

  The Magic Labyrinth

  “A wide-screen adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse, and educate … His imagination is of the first rank … his velocity breathtaking.… Charts a territory somewhere between Gulliver’s Travels and The Lord of the Rings.”

  —Time

  “This book, like the series as a whole, offers delight to the sense of wonder and storytelling flow as irresistible as the River itself.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  To Your Scattered Bodies Go

  “One of the most imaginative worlds in science fiction!”

  —Booklist

  “From the beginning, To Your Scattered Bodies Go gripped me in a way few books have been able to match.”

  —SF Site

  The Dark Design

  “Its publication is an event with a capital E!”

  —Parade of Books

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  GODS OF RIVERWORLD

  Copyright © 1983 by the Estate of Philip José Farmer

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor® eBook

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Farmer, Philip José.

  Gods of riverworld / Philip José Farmer.—1st Tor trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.—(Riverworld series)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2656-0 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3556.A72G6 2011

  813' .54—dc22

  2010036531

  First Tor Trade Paperback Edition: February 2011

  eISBN 978-1-4299-9352-4

  First Tor eBook Edition: February 2011