The Gods of Riverworld

by Philip José Farmer

  “Very well. You’ve been told by me and by the Church of Second Chance that, when you’ve attained a certain high level of character and morality, become compassionate and empathetic and free of psychosis and neurosis to a certain degree, then you’ll be ready to Go On. When you die, you won’t be resurrected on the Riverworld again. Your wathan will disappear; it can no longer be caught or detected by our instruments. You have been told that your wathan, or soul, if you prefer that term, goes to God or is absorbed in the Godhead. That, of course, is an explanation that covers ignorance. It was the only explanation that seemed to fit. But…”

  He sipped again. His gaze moved over them as if he were anticipating their reaction to his next words. He looked delighted.

  “The sad truth is—though I don’t really know if it’s so sad—the sad truth is that no wathans ever disappear, ever Go On! Not as long as the bodies they’ve partnered continue to be resurrected!”

  Burton was not as surprised as he should have been. Once, long ago, he had considered that possibility but had rejected it. Alice was shocked; she looked as if she could never again believe anybody. Li Po smiled and stroked his moustache. Frigate’s face was impassive.

  Burton thought about the Computer report that such people as Buddha and Jesus Christ had Gone On. Obviously, they had not. The Computer had given false data. Why? Because Loga had ordered it to do so to further the deception.

  Burton sighed, and he said, “What is the truth? You will tell the truth this time, won’t you? You’ll pardon me if I’m skeptical. You’ve lied so many times.”

  Alice’s voice trembled as she said, “The wathans? You told us that they were artificial. If it had not been for that ancient race that made them, we’d all be soulless. Is that true, God’s own truth?”

  “Who knows what God’s truth is?” Loga said. “God’s truth is that What Is Is. But yes, it is a fact that those ancients did make wathans, and we who have inherited their work have made sure that every human being conceived on Earth had a wathan. What is not true is that the wathans go to God or are absorbed into the Godhead. Perhaps they will be someday. I don’t know; no one does.

  “The truth is that you can be immortal, relatively so, anyway. You won’t last beyond the death of the universe and probably not nearly as long as the universe does. But you have the potentiality for living a million years, two, perhaps three or more. As long as you can find a Terrestrial-type planet with a hot core and have resurrection machinery available.

  “Unfortunately, not all can be permitted to possess immortality. Too many would make immortality miserable or hellish for the rest, and they would try to control others through their control of the resurrection machinery. Even so, everybody, without exception, is given a hundred years after his Earthly death to prove that he or she can live peacefully and in harmony with himself and others, within the tolerable limits of human imperfections. Those who can do this will be immortal after the two projects are completed.”

  “Then,” Burton said slowly, “the standards, the ethical goals, are not so extremely high, so demanding, as we have been led to believe?”

  “They are high, though not impossibly high for forty percent of the resurrectees.”

  “The other sixty percent?” Alice said.

  “Their body-records will be destroyed.”

  “That seems hard.”

  “It is. But it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “And then?” Frigate said. He looked anxious.

  “The survivors will be carried, as body-records in the form of the yellow sphere, to Earth.”

  “Earth?” Burton said. He had never been told so, but he had had the feeling that Earth had been destroyed.

  “Yes. Most of life on Earth was killed by radiation in the hydrogen and neutron bomb war. But the Gardenworlders have cleaned it up—it took them one hundred and sixty years—and have been restocking it with plant and animal life. Earth will be ready for you, but you won’t be the kind of people who will abuse it and slowly kill it by pollution. And—”

  “Then we won’t be permitted to have children?” Alice said.

  “Not on Earth. It won’t have room, though there will be plenty of living room, I think you call it elbow space, for you. However, there are millions of planets without sentient life in this universe, and you can go there if you want children.”

  “Earth!” Burton said dreamily. His homesickness was so keen that his chest ached. Earth. It would not be the Earth he had left, but surely its topography had not changed. And that it would not be the Earth that had existed when he had died was, he had to admit, for the good.

  “This is quite a shock,” Alice said. “I was a devout member of the Anglican Church and then, when I came here, I lost my faith and became an agnostic until recently, when I was seriously considering joining the Church of the Second Chance. Now…”

  “Loga,” Burton said, “since you are finally telling the truth, tell me this. Why did you turn renegade and pervert the course of events that your fellow Ethicals had decided upon? Is your story that you could not bear that your family, your loved ones, might not Go On, the truth? Go On in the sense you’ve just explained, not the old sense? Did you cause all this blood struggle, this overthrow of your comrades, just to give your parents and siblings and cousins more time?”

  “I swear to you by all that was, is, or might be holy that that is the truth.”

  “Well, then,” Burton said, “I don’t understand how you, who were raised on the Gardenworld from the age of four, could have passed the test. If the Ethical standards have any meaning, any value, how did you escape being eliminated? How could you have become a criminal? A criminal with a conscience, but still a criminal. Or were you truly ethical, and then, somehow, you became crazy? And if you can become crazy, what’s to prevent others who’ve also passed from going insane?”

  38

  Loga paled, turned, set the goblet on a table, and turned again. He was smiling, and his eyes moved from left to right and back again as if he were looking for something beyond the group.

  “I’m not crazy!”

  “Consider all that you’ve done for the sake of a score or so of people,” Burton said.

  “I am not crazy! What I did, I did for love.”

  “Love has its insanities,” Burton said. He leaned back in his chair, blew cigar smoke out, smiled, and said, “It doesn’t, for the moment, matter if you are insane or not. You still haven’t answered us. Must we go back to The Valley or may we stay here?”

  “I had thought you could stay,” Loga said. “I had judged that you had attained the level where you could be trusted and where we could all enjoy each other’s company in love. You could bring in others. I intend to bring in my family and show them what they must do if they would be immortal. Some of them…”

  “You’re doubtful about some of them, then?” Burton said.

  Frigate leaned over the table and, staring hard at Loga, said, “We were told that passing the test, Going On, was an automatic event. It involved no judging by human beings. Now … who judges?”

  Burton was annoyed by the question, though he had wondered about it. The important question was the one he had just put. The others could be answered later.

  “That will be done by the Computer. After that, the people in this project, the Valleydwellers, will eat food that will cause them to fall asleep and die. Their wathans will then be scanned by the Computer. As you know, the wathan displays through its colors and their relative breadths the ethical development of the individual. Those that meet the standards will be reunited on Earth with their bodies. Those that do not will be released and go to wherever they go.”

  “Judging by a machine?” Frigate said.

  “It is infallible.”

  “Unless it’s tampered with,” Burton said.

  “That is not very likely.”

  “Not until you made it likely,” Burton said.

  Loga glared at him. “I won’t be here.”

&nb
sp; “Where will you be?”

  “I will have gone on one of the ships in the hangar to an uninhabited planet.”

  “You could have done that at any time after you got rid of your fellow Ethicals and their Agents,” Frigate said. “Why didn’t you just pick up your family and take them with you?”

  Loga looked at Frigate as if he just could not believe that anybody would say that.

  “No, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?” Burton said. “It seems the logical action to take.”

  “They wouldn’t be ready. They wouldn’t have passed the test; the Computer would reject them. They’d be doomed.”

  “You don’t make sense,” Frigate said. “What do you care about that? You’d be safe on some planet where they wouldn’t find you for a thousand years, maybe never, and you’d have your family.”

  Loga frowned, and sweat oozed on his forehead.

  “You don’t understand. They shouldn’t be living then. They would not have Gone On. I couldn’t take them until they had attained the level that makes immortality bearable for them.”

  The others looked at each other. Unspoken: he is crazy.

  Burton sighed and leaned forward, reached under the table, and withdrew from its shelf a beamer that had been there since the day the castle was built. His finger moved the dial on its side to stun-power. He brought the weapon out swiftly and pressed the sliding tongue that acted as the trigger. The very pale red line struck Loga in the chest, and the Ethical fell backward.

  “I had to do it,” Burton said. “He is hopelessly psychotic and he would have sent us back to The Valley. God knows what he would have done then.”

  At Burton’s orders, Frigate ran to get from a converter a hypodermic syringe containing the needed amount of somnium. Burton stood guard, waiting to stun Loga again if he showed signs of consciousness. The man was immensely powerful; a bolt that would knock most men out might make him only semiconscious.

  Burton paced for a few minutes while he thought of how he could solve the problem of Loga. He had to be kept alive. The moment he was dead, he would undoubtedly be resurrected in a hidden chamber. That would mean finit for the four tenants because Loga had prime control of the Computer. If he were put in a cryogenics cylinder, he would be dead as far as the wathan was concerned, and he would be resurrected in a secret room in the tower. Should he be awake but imprisoned, he could kill himself no matter what security arrangements his captors took. Even if the tiny black ball in his brain, the ball that could release a deadly poison with one mentally projected codeword, were surgically removed, Loga could swallow his tongue and choke to death. The tongue could be cut out, but Burton was not tough enough to do that no matter how desperate he was.

  It was possible to keep Loga drugged. Burton, however, doubted that the Ethical could survive thirty-three years in that state. It was useless to ask the Computer to display Loga’s memory so that Burton could locate Loga’s hidden-body recordings. The Computer would have orders from Loga not to reveal these.

  Burton stopped, and he smiled. There was a way out.

  Working out the plan took two days, since he had to be very careful. One mistake, and Loga might win out after all.

  He ordered the Computer to make a modified android that looked exactly like Loga and had a voice exactly like his. Inside the skin, the android matched Loga except for the brain structure, which was much simpler than Loga’s. If the android had been a one hundred percent duplicate, it would, in many respects, have been the Ethical and would have behaved as he would. The only difference, and it was a great difference, was that the android would have lacked self-consciousness.

  Burton verbally programmed it in the speech of the Ethicals and then had it transmit his orders to the Computer. The Computer matched the voiceprints, electric skin field, face and body shape, skin, hair, and eye color, ear shape, and the chemical composition of the odors of perspiration with Loga’s prints. It also scanned the finger, palm, and foot prints.

  Unfortunately, despite everything else, the Computer refused to obey the android unless the proper codeword was given.

  “That’s very frustrating,” Burton told the others. “One word or perhaps a phrase is all that’s blocking it. It might as well be a million words.”

  No one said anything; all looked gloomy. Even Li Po was silent for once.

  After two minutes, Alice, who had been frowning and biting her lip, said, “I know that none of you believe in feminine intuition. I don’t either, not as it’s usually defined. I think it’s a form of logic that doesn’t follow the rules of logic, Aristotelian or symbolic. I don’t think that feminine intuition, call it that or something else, is confined to women. Oh, what am I talking about?”

  “Yes, what are you talking about?” Burton said.

  “It’s such a silly idea, so wild. I’d be making an utter ass of myself!”

  “Anything will be appreciated,” Burton said. “I promise not to laugh.”

  “None of us will,” Frigate said. “Anyway, what’s the difference if we do?”

  “It’s just that there’s no rhyme or reason to it,” she said. “Well, perhaps there is some reason to it. Loga is such a trickster, and he does like to play games, rather childish, I think, but there it is.”

  “There is what?” Burton said.

  “It’s such an improbability. The odds against it are fantastically high. But … I don’t know. It couldn’t hurt to try. It wouldn’t take much time.”

  “For God’s sake, what?” Burton said.

  “Well, do you remember what Loga cried out just before he cracked? Seemed to crack, I mean.”

  “ ‘I tsab u,’ ” Burton said. “Ethical for ‘Who are you?’ ”

  “Yes. Could Loga have been giving us a clue, the real code-phrase? He would have been very amused doing that because there was no chance that we would ever use it. We just simply could not ever find out that it was the open-sesame, the most important identification. Yet he couldn’t resist saying it. We’d think that he was addressing the person who had killed him, a person we now know didn’t exist. And at the same time…”

  “He’d have to be crazy to play with us like that,” Burton said.

  “Well?”

  “It’s nuts, but it’d only take a minute,” Frigate said. “What do we have to lose? Besides, Alice may be rather quiet, but she does have a keen insight into individual psychology.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said. “I wasn’t very good at reading people’s characters when I came to the Riverworld, but I had to develop that talent to survive.”

  They went into the room where the android was sleeping. Burton awoke it gently and gave it a cup of coffee. Then he slowly and carefully told the android what it must do. Once more, it stood in front of the screen on the wall, and it said, “I tsab u.”

  The screen flashed the characters of the Ethical alphabet.

  “That means ‘ready,’ ” Burton said.

  The android then told the Computer that it was transferring prime control to Burton. But the Computer refused to do that.

  “Now what?” Frigate muttered.

  Burton called the android to him and told him to go into the corridor with him. Though he did not know if that precaution was necessary, he could not afford to take chances. Having instructed the android what to say, he watched from the doorway as it relayed his commands. And the Computer obeyed.

  They cheered and hugged each other, and Li Po did a little dance.

  The android had ordered that all persons in the records, except for certain ones, whose names and record numbers it gave, be resurrected in The Valley. Henceforth, the process of resurrection would continue until the project was closed down.

  The android also said that it wanted its, that is, Loga’s, security measures canceled. Immediately, the Computer replied that it had done so. And it displayed diagrams showing where Loga had hidden his body-records.

  “Very good,” Burton said, smiling. “If we have to deal wi
th the Computer through the android, so be it. I can endure that.”

  It took them an hour to collect the thirty-nine records cached in rooms at different levels.

  “I’d be completely confident now that Loga can’t be resurrected without our knowledge,” Burton said, ‘if he wasn’t so canny. What if he hid some records without telling the Computer where they were?”

  “In that case,” Frigate said, “he couldn’t be resurrected because the Computer would not be connected to it and so could not carry out the operation.”

  “He might have put the record in a converter unconnected to the Computer except for the power source. An auxiliary computer could have performed the process.”

  “Then we’ll tell the Computer to notify us of any power demands that are unusual. Loga’s orders to the Computer to suppress the indications resulting from his use of the power have been nulled.”

  “We’ll have to risk it. We can’t just not act because of the very slight chance that Loga might get loose.”

  The others agreed with Burton that they could start repopulating the tower. They would do this, though, after the three private worlds had been cleaned up. They unanimously supported his suggestion that the Valleydwellers be told the truth, in fact, the whole story from the beginning.

  “The Ethicals thought it necessary to spread half-truths through the Church of the Second Chance because of their belief in the strength of the religious impulse. But I believe that the whole truth, palatable or not, should be given. We’ll resurrect some people in the tower, let them live here for a while, then transport them to The Valley in the aircraft. We’ll give them photographs and powerpack-operated film projectors. That should convince the skeptics. The truth will spread very slowly because of the enormous population and the length of The Valley, but it will get to all eventually. Of course, some will refuse to believe. That’ll be their misfortune.”

  Loga was placed in the cryogenics chamber.

  Li Po resurrected his companions; Alice, Monteith Maglenna, and several others, including her sisters, Edith and Rhoda; Frigate, Sophie Lefkowitz and twenty others; Burton, Loghu the blonde ancient-Tokharian, Cyrano de Bergerac, Joe Miller the titanthrop, Kazz the Neanderthal, Tom Turpin, Jean Marcelin, Baron de Marbot, and many others whom Loga had recruited in his war against the Ethicals.