Gods of Riverworld: The Fifth Book of the Riverworld Series Read online

  "And so I have worked like a helot with spraying paint, sweated like a slave for nothing," de Marbot said.

  "You did get an unusual ride out of it."

  De Marbot's teeth shone.

  "Yes. It was worth it!"

  Burton was not sure. They had not done well. Moreover, the machine probably had cameras that had shown the Snark the open door to Loga's secret room.

  "What do we do now?" Aphra said. "Slink back to our apartments like bad little puppies who've been whipped?"

  Burton did not answer because of a shout from the right. A flying chair was suspended near the intersection of the corridor, and the voice had come from the opened curtain in an enclosure on the chair. It had been fitted with a frame over which transparent plastic had been arranged. The man in the chair was sitting with his legs drawn up in front of him on the seat.

  "Who's that?" de Marbot said.

  "Frigate," Aphra said, having recognized his voice.

  The chair shot forward and settled on the floor, and Frigate pulled the enclosure, a sort of tiny cabin, from the chair. He got out, looked around, and said, "What happened?"

  Burton explained. Then the American had to tell de Marbot and Behn why he was here and what the purpose of the enclosure was.

  "Dick arranged with me to come here eight hours after you three had left. The contraption — the enclosure — is to prevent my body heat being detected by the Computer."

  De Marbot looked reproachfully at Burton.

  "You said that you'd enlisted just us."

  "I don't tell the truth if it's useful not to do so," Burton said. "I thought that it would be best if I had two follow us but didn't tell you. I didn't want you and Aphra to be saying anything to each other about this."

  "Two?" de Marbot said. "Where is the other?"

  "Nur is supposed to come down the corridors on the other side," Burton said, pointing in the direction in which the machine had gone.

  "Why?" de Marbot said. Then, "You think that perhaps Nur might have tracked the machine to its lair?"

  "We won't know until later."

  Burton turned to Frigate.

  "I assume, since you've reported nothing, you saw nothing."

  "Right."

  "The machine could have gone in any direction in this maze. We'll wait until Nur gets here."

  "If the Snark didn't catch him," Frigate said.

  "You're so optimistic," Aphra said.

  "I just like to consider every possibility," Frigate said somewhat heatedly. "It's not my fault that negative possibilities always outnumber the positive."

  "They don't. You just see the dark chances easier than you see the bright ones."

  Burton looked at his wristwatch. Five minutes had passed since the machine had broken through. He would wait a total of thirty. If Nur did not show by then, they would go back to their apartments. There they might have to wait for a while until Turpin, Alice and Li Po returned from searching for them. If, that is, they had indeed gone out to look for them. Logic might tell them to stay together in one apartment for defense.

  A voice startled them. It was Nur's, speaking from just outside the nearest brick wall.

  "Don't shoot. It's I. Nur. I have good news."

  "Come in," Burton said.

  The little man entered. He stripped off some plastic material from his face and removed his gloves and jacket.

  "Hot."

  Burton stepped outside the doorway. Nur's chair, equipped with an enclosure like Frigate's, was parked by the wall. Burton went inside. Nur was smiling, as well he might.

  "I caught the Snark outside her secret room. I came speeding out of the dark part of the corridor and yelled at her to surrender. She refused; she started to take her beamer from her holster. So I shot her."

  "Her?" Burton said.

  "Yes. We knew that the unknown could be of either sex, but we spoke of her as him so much that we'd fallen into the habit of thinking that she must be a he. The rest of you did, anyway. I did not."

  Nur said that it would be best if he took them to the scene of the discovery and then explained what had happened. They followed him in their chairs through the breach in the wall, went down one corridor, turned, and stopped a hundred feet from the corner. The unknown lay on her back, eyes and mouth open, a thin cauterized wound on her throat showing where Nur's beam had pierced it from front to back. She was short and slim and clothed in scarlet shirt, sky-blue slacks and yellow sandals. A beamer lay near one open hand on the floor.

  "She's Mongolian," Nur said. That he would point out the obvious showed that he was not as calm as he seemed. "I don't know if she's Chinese, Japanese, or of some other Mongolian nationality. Li Po might be able to tell us. But it's irrelevant."

  There was a large circular opening in the wall, the doorwheel having rolled within the wall recess. Beyond would be her apartment, where she had hidden while keeping herself well informed of the movements of the eight. Wall-screens showed all the rooms in their apartments. The beds of Alice, Tom Turpin and Li Po were empty; another screen displayed them at a table, playing cards in Turpin's apartment. If they were alarmed, they did not show it. Apparently, they had decided that their colleagues had disappeared because Burton was carrying out one of his secret plans, or they had stayed together for safety. As it turned out, they had elected to hole up for both reasons.

  Burton would, however, have to endure their reproaches when he returned to the apartment. He could bear them easily because he came with victory in his pocket.

  The night before, Peter Frigate and Nur el-Musafir had gone to their bedrooms. They had hoped that the Snark would be sleeping and that the Computer would awaken the Snark only if it detected someone leaving the suite to enter the corridor. The only detectors on, they hoped, would be the heat devices. They were praying that no video screen would be on the corridor wall facing the suite door.

  The two ordered from their converters a pair of suits and helmets for them and enclosures for the chairs. This could have been reported to the Snark, but they were gambling that the Computer — if it had recorded these actions — would not submit them to the Snark until the Snark awoke.

  Clad in the heat-retaining outfits, carrying the enclosures, Frigate and Nur had left the suite. And the wall sensors had not been activated by them. The unknown, not having made provisions for such deceptions, had slept on. Unlike the Computer, she could have imagined these, but she had not done so.

  "We were very lucky," Burton said. "Events turned out to favor us, and they could just as easily not have done so. In fact, the probabilities that we would succeed were not very high."

  "You think that we were too lucky," Nur said. Burton waited for him to elaborate, but Nur said, "The first thing I thought of when I killed her . . . I only meant to wound her . . . was that she would have arranged for an automatic and immediate resurrection."

  They followed the Moor into the room. At one corner was a converter, and a few feet near it, sprawled face down, was another body of the woman. The auxiliary computer console had been destroyed by beamer fire.

  "I came into this room as soon as I'd killed her," Nur said. "Her body had just formed, and she was running to get a beamer on a table. I told her to stop. She ignored me, and so I shot her. I immediately rayed the computer and so prevented a third resurrection. Unfortunately, the ray also destroyed her body-recording."

  He led Burton to the ruin and pointed at a section that had been cut off. Inside was a blackish, half-melted, cranberry-sized object that had held everything needed to duplicate the body down to the submolecular level.

  "I would be devastated with remorse and grief if I thought I had forever eliminated her chance of being resurrected again. But I'm sure that she must have another recording in the Computer file. I doubt that we can reach it, though. She would have inhibited the Computer from enabling us to find it."

  "We'll see," Burton said. "You're probably right, though."

  "Who the hell was she?" Frigate said. "Wha
t was she doing here? Loga said that all the Ethicals and their Agents were dead. If he was right, then she wasn't one of them. But what else could she be?"

  "One of Loga's enemies, otherwise she wouldn't have eliminated him," Nur said. "But if she wasn't an Ethical or Agent, what reason would she have to do away with him? If she just wanted complete power, why didn't she kill us?"

  Aphra said, slowly, "Perhaps Monat the Operator was more far-seeing than Loga expected. Perhaps Monat made arrangements for an Agent, this woman, to be resurrected if certain events happened. Certain events in general, I mean. Monat could not have anticipated all events in particular."

  Burton requested the Computer to identify the dead woman. It replied that the data was unavailable, and it would not or could not say why.

  Burton asked it if the dead woman's body-recording was in its files.

  The Computer said that it was unavailable.

  "One more mystery," said Frigate, and he groaned.

  Burton asked the Computer for the location of the machine that had broken through the barricade walls. As he had expected, he was told that that information was also unavailable.

  "I've seen all the robots the tower contains," Burton said. "I had the Computer show them on a screen. That machine was not among them."

  The woman might have had it made for her by the Computer just to break down the walls.

  Nur and Frigate dragged the body from the corridor and laid it down by the body near the cabinet. Stretched out, face up, they looked like identical twins.

  "Shall we have them disintegrated in the converter?" Nur said.

  "One of them," Burton said. "I want the Computer to examine the other."

  "So you can see if she has a black ball in her brain?"

  Burton grimaced. Nur always seemed to be able to read his mind.

  "Yes."

  The two dumped one body into a cabinet and ordered the Computer to get rid of it. White light filled the cabinet, and, when they looked through the window in the door, the cabinet-was empty. There were not even ashes in it.

  The other corpse was placed on a table above which was a huge dome-shaped device. Though there was no display of energy, the interior of the body was shown on a screen in a series of images. Burton had the Computer run the images back to the one he wanted. There was a tiny black sphere on the forebrain. This had been surgically implanted and, acting at a subvocalized codeword, would release a poison into the bearer's body, killing it instantly.

  "So . . . she was an Agent."

  "But we still don't know when she came here or what her ultimate intentions were," Frigate said.

  "For the moment," Burton said, "we don't have to. It's enough that we've gotten rid of the Snark. Now we're on our own, free."

  They were, however, free only in some senses. Burton asked the Computer if the overrides installed by the woman were now removed. It replied that they were not.

  "When would they be released?"

  The Computer did not know.

  "We're stymied," Frigate said.

  "Not forever," Burton replied. He was not as confident as he sounded.

  10

  * * *

  On that perhaps forever-lost Earth, so far in distance and time, in A.D. 1880 in the city of London, England, appeared a privately printed book. It was titled The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî, A Lay of the Higher Law. Translated and annotated by His Friend and Pupil F. B. The initials stood for Frank Baker, a nom-de-plume of Captain Richard Francis Burton. "Frank" was from his middle name; "Baker" was his mother's maiden surname. Not until after his death would his true name be appended to a reprint.

  The poem, set in distichs imitating the classical Arab form, was supposed to be the work of a Persian Sufi, Haji Abdu of the city of Yezdi in Persia. Haji was a title borne by any Moslem who had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton himself, having made the pilgrimage, disguised as a Moslem, could call himself a Haji. In this poem, Burton poured out his wisdom, pessimism, vast knowledge, and agnosticism, the Burtonian World-View and World-Pain. As Frank Baker, he had annotated the poem by "Abdu" and written an afterword that expressed a somewhat cynical and laughing view of himself. The laughter was, however, sad.

  The preface summed up his philosophy, formed after fifty-nine years of wandering over the only planet he would ever know — or so he thought at the time.

  TO THE READER

  The Translator has ventured to entitle a "Lay of the Higher Law" the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the "Higher Culture!" The principles which justify the name are as follows: The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.

  (Frigate's comment on this statement was that it could be valid. But if Burton meant that individuals got an equal share of happiness and misery, he was wrong. Some people staggered along under a great burden of misery and had little happiness to lighten their load. Others had far more than their share of happiness. Anyway, Burton had not defined what he meant by happiness and misery. Though, of course, he didn't have to do that for misery. Everybody knew what that was. Happiness, however, what was that? A mere freedom from pain and trouble? Or a positive quality? Was contentment happiness? Or did you have to be joyous to be happy?)

  He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.

  (What about your children? Alice had said. You have to cultivate them more than you do yourself so that they'll be better, happier, and more adjusted than yourself. Every generation should be an improvement on the previous. I'll admit, however, that it seldom happens. Perhaps you're right in that you can't properly cultivate your children if you have not properly cultivated yourself. But you didn't have any children, did you?)

  (Self-cultivation is a major and vital principle, Nur had said. We Sufis stress it, keeping in mind that it demands self-discipline, compassion and intelligence. But most people carry it to the extreme and make self-cultivation self-centeredness. This is not surprising. Mankind always does things to excess. Most people do, that is.)

  He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the "divine gift of Pity" are man's highest enjoyments.

  (A pinch of pity adds savor to the soup of life, Nur said. Too much spoils it. Pity may lead to sentimentality and maudlinism.)

  (Pity breeds a sense of superiority, Frigate had said. It also leads to self-pity. Not that I'm decrying that. There's an exquisite joy in self-pity, if it's indulged in now and then, here and there, and you end up laughing at yourself.)

  (You forgot to include sex, Aphra Behn had said. Though I suppose that sex is part of the affections and sympathies.)

  (Creating something, a painting, a poem, music, a book, a statue, a piece of furniture, childbirth, raising a child properly, these are man's — and woman's — highest enjoyments, Frigate had added. Though there's much to be said for creating pristine sparkling bullshit, too.)

  He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of "Facts, the idlest of superstitions."

  (But there comes a time when you must judge, Nur had said. First, though, you must be sure that you are qualified to judge. Who knows that?)

  (One person's facts are another's superstition, Frigate had said. What does that mean, by the way?)

  (You can believe only in what you see, Li Po had said. And even then you can't be sure. Perhaps you can really believe only in what you have not seen, what you've imagined. Dragons and fairies exist because I believe in them. A rock is a fact, and so is my imagination.)

  Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.

  (Man is the only animal who thinks of the should-be rather than the what-is, Nur had said. Which is why man is the only animal who consciously changes the environment to suit himself. And usually spoils it because of his stupidity and excess. There are exceptions to this rule, of course.)

&n
bsp; (A fine statement, Alice had said. But Dick Burton has always been self-destructive. When, if ever, will he stop destroying himself?)

  For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume. Vienna, Nov., 1880 F. B.

  (Has it occurred to you, Nur had said, that you are nearing the end of that book you call Richard Francis Burton? It's been published in two volumes, Earth-Burton and Riverworld-Burton. This tower may be The End.)

  (It's always been an excellent philosophy to live as if you're going to die in the next hour, Frigate had said. Everybody agrees on that, but the only people who live it are those who know they're going to die soon. And not even then.)

  (That's why I like to go to bed whenever possible, Aphra had said. Marcelin, are you in the mood?)

  (Even the most ardent soldier needs to go to a rest camp now and then, de Marbot said. At the moment, I am an old, weary and saddlesore veteran.)

  11

  * * *

  Burton also felt like a weary, saddlesore veteran. He had been riding himself — and others — too hard for too long. Now that he had crossed the last of hundreds of obstacles that had had to be dealt with at once, he needed rest and recreation. The problems to be solved, those presented by the Computer, could be tackled later.

  Yet, he thought, as he looked into a mirror, I do not look as if I had lived for sixty-nine years on Earth and sixty-seven years here. My face is not that of a 136-year-old man. It is the face I had when I was a youth of twenty-five. Minus the long Satan-black drooping moustache, a hairy crescent moon. The Ethicals had arranged that the resurrected males lack facial hair, an arrangement that Burton had always resented. It was true that men did not have to shave, but what about the feelings — the rights — of those who desired moustaches and beards?

  Now that I am in the tower, he thought, why not change those despotic arrangements? Surely there must be a way to start the hair growing again on my face.

  On Earth, he had been afflicted — perhaps afflicted was too strong a word — marked with a slight strabismus. He had a "wandering eye." In more senses than one. This small fault had been corrected by the Computer when he had been raised from the dead in the Rivervalley.