The Gods of Riverworld

by Philip José Farmer

  Peter Frigate was sitting on the verandah in a rocking chair listening to Handel’s Water Music, drinking a mint julep and surrounded by three dogs. He held a Siamese seal point cat on his lap. The dogs, real dogs, not therioids, leaped barking off the verandah and ran to Burton. They bounded about and wiggled their hindquarters and whined as he petted them. One was a huge Rottweiler; one, a German shepherd; one, a Shetland sheepdog. Frigate rose, the cat jumping off his disappearing lap, and greeted them. He wore a white linen vest with embroidered Egyptian hieroglyphics and a knee-length white linen kilt.

  “Welcome to Frigateland!” he said, smiling. “Sit down.” He pointed to two rocking chairs. “What’ll you have to drink?” He clapped his hands once, and two androids appeared from the front doorway. They wore butler’s uniforms.

  “You wouldn’t recognize them,” he said. “They look exactly like two U.S. presidents I had no love for. I call them Tricky Dicky and Ronnie. The sneaky-looking one is Dicky.” He paused. “The lady of the house will be down in a minute.”

  Burton raised his eyebrows. “Ah, you finally decided on a housemate.”

  “Yes. The dogs and cats are splendid companions, don’t talk back to or at you. But I got lonely for conversation and other things.”

  The servants brought the drinks, Scotch for Burton and wine for Star Spoon. Burton took a fine Havana from his pocket, and Dicky leaped forward, produced a lighter, and held the flame steady for him. Ronnie did the same for Star Spoon’s cigarette.

  “This is the life,” Frigate said. “I fly around and observe my dinosaurs, really enjoy them. I keep the tyrannosaurs from eating all the brontosaurs by giving them meat at a feeding station at the bottom of my monolith. Even so, it’s hard maintaining the balance of prey and predator. I’ll get tired of this someday. When I do, I’ll erase the Jurassic period and replace it with the Cretaceous. I plan to go through all the evolutionary eras in their various stages to the Pleistocene Epoch. When I get there, I’ll stop. I’ve always been very fond of the mammoth and the sabertooth.”

  25

  Burton waved a fly away. “Did you have to be so authentic?”

  “There are mosquitoes, too. I have to retreat into my stately mansion at dusk because of them. I don’t want life here to be an air-conditioned vermin-free paradise. There was a time when I cursed flies, mosquitoes, and ants and wondered why God put them on Earth to bedevil us. Now I know. They are a source of pleasure. When they’ve been bugging the hell out of you—no pun intended—and you get away from them, get to some place where they can’t reach you, you find the zero of their presence to be a plus-one pleasure. I put up with them so I can enjoy their absence.”

  Star Spoon looked at him as if she found him strange. Burton, however, understood him. To know full pleasure you had also to know unpleasure. The existence of evil could be justified. Without it, how would you know that good was good? Perhaps, though, that was not necessary. If it were, why had the Ethicals worked so hard to eliminate evil?

  At that moment, a woman came out of the house. She was gorgeous, auburn-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned, long-legged, full-breasted, tiny-waisted. Her face was irregular, the nose a trifle too long, the upper lip a trifle too short, and her eyes perhaps too deep-sunk. Nevertheless, their integration gave her a beautiful and not easily forgotten strong face. She was about five feet seven inches tall and wore a white gown of some shimmering white stuff, low-cut and slit to the upper thigh on the left side. Her high-heeled shoes were open and white. She wore no jewelry or pearls, but a silver band was around her right wrist.

  Frigate, smiling, introduced her. “Sophie Lefkowitz. I met her at a science-fiction convention in 1955. We corresponded and met occasionally at conventions after that. She died in 1979 of cancer. Her grandparents came over from Russia to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1900, and her father married a woman descended from Sephardic Jews who came to New Amsterdam in 1652. The funny thing is that I once met the original immigrant, Abraham Lopez. We didn’t get along; he was a raving bigot. She was a housewife, but she was active in a lot of organizations, including the National Organization for Women. She also made a pile of money writing children’s books under the byline of Begonia West.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” said Burton, who meant it. “But you warned against resurrecting writers, remember?”

  “They’re not all rotten.”

  Sophie was sprightly and intelligent, though too fond of puns. She also seemed very grateful to Frigate for raising her from the dead, and he seemed delighted with her.

  “Of course, we’re going to resurrect others. We’d get on each other’s nerves if we didn’t have other companions. That takes a lot of time judging the candidates, though.”

  “He’s looking for perfection, and he isn’t going to get it,” Sophie said. “The perfect ones have Gone On. I say, pick those who seem reasonably compatible, and if they don’t work out, they can always move out.”

  “The way things are going,” Star Spoon said, “the tower is going to bulge with people. Everybody who’s resurrected starts resurrecting others.”

  “It can house over two million people quite comfortably.” Sophie said.

  “But if everybody who’s resurrected brings in four more, it wouldn’t take long at an exponential rate for the tower to fill,” Burton said.

  “Not only that,” Frigate said, “but it may get worse. I was talking to Tom Turpin the other day. He said that two couples in his world are trying to have children. They’ve had the Computer eliminate from their diet the contraceptive chemicals that make them sterile. Tom was angry. He told them that if the women did get pregnant, they’d have to leave Turpinland. But they said they didn’t care.”

  They were silent for a while, aghast at the news. The Ethicals had insured that no children would be born, because there was not enough room on the Riverworld for an expanding population. Moreover, the stage, as it were, had to become empty so that those born on Earth after A.D. 1983 could be resurrected.

  “The whole project is going to the dogs,” Frigate said.

  “To utter hell and damnation,” Burton said. “If it’s not already there.”

  Sophie said, smiling, “This doesn’t look like Hell to me.” She waved a hand to indicate their private world. From nearby came the songs of birds, anachronistic notes, since there were no birds in the Mesozoic, and the chirping of some raccoons, also out of their era. From over the edge of the monolith came the deep gurgling cries of brontosaurs and the express-train rumbling of a tyrannosaur, like the beginning of a snow avalanche. Pteranodons with thirty-foot wingspreads sounded like giant crows with asthma.

  “It’s only temporary,” Burton said.

  The androids, Ronnie and Dicky, brought more drinks. Frigate and Burton, perhaps inspired by the presence of the androids, began talking about free will versus determinism, a favorite subject. Frigate insisted that free will played a larger part in human lives than mechanical, chemical, or neural elements. Burton was equally insistent that most people’s choices were fixed by their body chemistry and early conditioning.

  “But some people do change their characters for the better,” Frigate said. “They do it consciously and with effort. Their will manages to overcome their conditioning and even their basic temperament.”

  “I’ll admit that free will sometimes plays a part in some people,” Burton said. “However, only a few do use their free will effectively, and they often fail. Even so, most people are, in a sense, robots. The nonrobots, the lucky few, might be able to exercise their free will only because their genes allow them to. Thus, even free will depends upon genetic determinism.”

  “I may as well tell you now, perhaps I should have told you sooner,” Frigate said, “but I’ve asked the Computer if the Ethicals had done any work on free will and determinism. Not in a philosophical but in a scientific sense. The Computer told me that it had an enormous amount of data because the first Ethicals, the people preceding Monat’s, had worked on that subject as h
ad Monat’s people and their successors, the Earthchildren raised on the Gardenworld. I didn’t have time to review all the data or even a small part of it, and I probably wouldn’t have understood it if I did have time. I asked for a summary of the conclusions. The Computer said that the project was still going, but it could give me the results as of now.

  “The Ethicals long ago charted all chromosomes, fixed their exact function, and analyzed the interrelationships of the genes. Charted their individual and interacting fields. Which is why, when they resurrected us, our malfunctioning genes had been replaced with healthy ones. We were raised in perfect physical, chemical, and electrical condition. Any faults from then on were psychological. Of course, our psychic and social conditioning were not removed. If we were to get rid of these, it was strictly up to the individual. He or she had to use free will, if he or she had any or wished to use it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Burton said.

  “Don’t get angry. I just wanted you to express your opinion and then show you the truth.”

  “You wanted me to go out on a limb so you could cut it off!”

  “Why not?” Frigate said, smiling. “You’re such an overpowering talker and so opinionated, so dogmatic, so self-righteous, that … well, I thought that for once I could make you listen instead of trying to dominate the conversation.”

  “If it helps you get rid of your resentment,” Burton said, also smiling. “There was a time when I would have been very angry at you. But, I, too, have changed.”

  “Yes, but you’ll make me pay for this sometime.”

  “No, I won’t,” Burton said. “I’ll use my free will to learn this lesson. I’ll keep and treasure it.”

  “We’ll see. Anyway…”

  “The conclusions!”

  “I’ll try to put them into plain English. We are not complete robots, as Sam Clemens and that writer I told you about, Kurt Vonnegut, claimed we are. They said our behavior and thoughts were entirely determined by what had taken place in the past and by the chemicals in our bodies. Clemens’ theory was that everything that happened in the past, everything, determined everything in the present. The speed with which and the angle at which the first atom at the beginning of the universe bumped into the second atom started a chain of events in a particular direction. What we were was the result of that primal collision. If the first atom had bumped into the second at a different velocity and angle, then we would be different. Vonnegut said nothing about that but claimed that we acted and thought the way we did because of what he called ‘bad chemicals.’

  “Both Clemens and Vonnegut railed against evil, but they ignored the fact that their own philosophies removed blame for evil from evildoers. According to them, a person couldn’t help the way he or she acted. So, why should they write so much about evildoers and condemn them when the evildoer was not at all responsible? Could murderers be held responsible, could the rich help themselves if they exploited the poor, could the poor help it if they allowed themselves to be exploited, could the child-beater be blamed for his brutality, the Puritan for his intolerance and narrow and rigid morality, the libertines for their sexual excesses, the judge for his corruption, the Ku Klux Klanner for his racial prejudice, the liberal for his blindness to the openly declared goals and obvious bloody methods of the communists, the fascist and capitalist for using evil means to achieve supposedly good goals, the conservative for his contempt for the common people and his excuses for exploiting them? Could Ivan the Terrible and Gilles de Rais and Stalin and Hitler and Chiang Kaishek and Mao Tse-tung and Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat and Genghis Khan and Simon Bolivar and the IRA terrorist who drops a bomb into a mailbox and blows legs off babies, could any of these be blamed? Not if you accept Clemens’ and Vonnegut’s basic philosophy. The murderer and child-abuser and rapist and racist are no more to blame for their actions than those who do good are to be praised. All behave the way they do because of genes or their chemical or psychosocial conditioning. So why did they bother to write about evils when they themselves could not blame the evildoers?

  “They did so, according to their own philosophy, because they had been determined to do so. Thus, they get no moral credit.”

  Burton had been waiting patiently for the results. Now he said, “Those two said, then, that we are just billiard balls waiting to be struck by other balls and so sent into whatever pocket is determined for them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m well aware of that philosophy. As you know, I wrote a poem about it. However, even those who don’t believe in free will always act as if they had it. It seems to be the nature of the beast. Perhaps our genes determine that. Now, would you mind getting to the point?”

  “There is more than one,” Frigate said. “First, the Ethical studies prove that mental potential is equal among races. All have the same reserves of geniuses, highly intelligent, intelligent, fairly intelligent, and stupid. In 1983, when I died, there was still a lot of controversy about that. Intelligence tests seemed to show that the average Negro intelligence was a few points below that of the Caucasian. The same tests also indicated that the Mongolian IQ was a few points higher than the Caucasian. A lot of people claimed that these tests were not accurate and that they ignored social conditioning, economic opportunity, bias against race, and so forth. These objectors were right. The Ethical tests prove that all races have an equal mental potential.

  “That goes against the grain of your observations on Earth, Dick. You claimed that the Negro was less intelligent than the Caucasian. Oh, you admitted that perhaps the American Negro might be capable of becoming more ‘civilized’ and brighter than the African Negro. But the implication was that, if this was so, it was because the Yankee black had a lot of white blood, that is, Caucasian genes from racial mixing.”

  “I said many things on Earth that I now admit were wrong,” Burton said heatedly. “After sixty-seven years of intimate, though often forced, socializing with every race and every nationality and tribe you could imagine, and some you couldn’t, I have changed my mind about many things. I’m perfectly willing to call Sambo my brother.”

  “I wouldn’t use ‘Sambo’ myself. It shows a lingering trace of bad thinking.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes. I remember a line in your poem, ‘Stone Talk,’ where you criticized the American white because he wouldn’t call … ah, Sambo … his brother. You were in no position to throw stones.”

  “What I was is not what I am. Rubbing elbows with many people causes you to rub in some of their skin. And vice versa.”

  “You did a lot of elbow-rubbing on Earth. Very few people traveled as much as you did and came into contact with all classes, rich and poor.”

  “It wasn’t long enough. Not only are conditions different here, I wasn’t only just rubbed here. I was shaken and knocked about. That does something to the machinery, you know.”

  “Let’s not use mechanistic terms,” Frigate said.

  “Psychic machinery is perfectly appropriate.”

  “The psyche is not an engine but a subtle and complex field of waves. Many fields, in fact, a superfield. Like light, it can be described as being both wave and particle, a psychic wavicle, wavicles forming a hypercomplex.”

  “The results.”

  “All right. Every person is a semirobot. That is, each is subject to the demands of the biological machine, the body. If you hunger, you eat or try to find food. No one can rise above himself enough to go without food and not starve to death. Injuries to the cerebroneural system, cancer, chemical imbalances, these can cause changes in mentality, make you crazy, make your motives and attitudes change. There’s no way the will can suppress the effects of syphilis, poisons, brain damage, and so on. And everyone is born with a set of genes that determine the particular direction his interests take. His tastes, too, I mean in food. Not everybody likes steak or tomatoes or Scotch.

  “Also, some are born with chromosomal complexes that make them mo
re emotionally rigid than others. I mean, they can’t adapt to new things or changes as well as others. They tend to stick to the old and to the cultural elements that affected them when they were young. Others are more adaptable, less rigid. But sometimes reason, logic, can affect the will and the person can overcome his rigidity, defossilize himself, as it were.

  “Take as an example a person who’s been brought up in a fundamental Christian faith. That is, a sect in which he believes that every word of the Bible has to be taken literally. Thus, the world was created in six days, there was a worldwide deluge, a Noah and an ark, God did stop Earth’s rotation so that Joshua and his bloodthirsty genocidal Hebrews could have enough daylight to defeat the bloodthirsty Amorites. Eve was seduced by a snake and in turn got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Jesus did walk on water. And so on. Like others in his sect, he ignores the vast accumulation of data establishing the fact of evolution. He reads the Bible but does not see that, though the Bible nowhere states that the Earth is flat, it clearly implies that the Earth is flat. Nor does he take literally Christ’s injunction to hate your father and mother. He ignores those. Puts them in a separate compartment of his brain. Or erases them as if they were on a tape.

  “But some fundamentalists do come across evidence that they’d like to ignore. Iron strikes flint, and the spark falls on inflammable material. The fire is off to the races, as it were. He reads more of the evidence, perhaps loathes and curses himself for his ‘sinful’ curiosity. But he learns more and more. Finally, his reason convinces him that he’s been wrong. And he becomes a liberal Christian or an atheist or agnostic.