Gods of Riverworld (6 page)

“If you’re thinking of belling the cat,” Alice said, “we don’t even know where the cat is.”

“It may be another mouse who’s buffaloed us into thinking it’s a cat,” Nur said.

“If … if … may be,” Burton said. “No more speculations on ifs. We abandon speculation; we act.”

“Fine. But how?” Nur said. “Everything we’re saying now or will say may be, probably is, overheard. And perhaps seen.”

“I said, ‘No more ifs and may bes!’ ” Burton thundered.

Frigate laughed and said, “We can’t help that, we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. We must be, or we wouldn’t have come here.”

“What are you talking about?” Burton said.

“He’s paraphrasing the conversation between the Cheshire Cat and Alice in Wonderland,” Alice said.

“The mention of the cat reminded me of the Cheshire Cat,” Frigate said. “In a way, the unknown is the grin without a cat.”

Burton threw his hands up.

“I wish I had all of you in the army!” he cried.

There was silence, but Burton knew that it would not last long. Not in this group.

“That,” Frigate said, “may be just what we need.”

“What?”

“An army. We can have the Computer make us an army of robots and androids. We’ll set it up so that the unknown, the Snark, let’s call him, can’t override our commands to the robots. We can set them to looking for the Snark and guarding us. We’ll also order them to seize or kill anyone who is not us. Non-us is the enemy. The robots and androids can do in a short time what would take us years.”

Burton stared at the American, then said, “You wrote that—what do you call it?—science fiction too long. It’s rotted your brain.”

“It’s within the capabilities of the tower,” Frigate said. “If we’re going to win, we have to think big. I know it sounds crazy, but we need an army, and we can get it. I’d say, oh, a force of about one hundred thousand.”

Some burst out laughing. Frigate grinned, but he said, “I’m serious.” He went to a console and punched out some numbers and an operation. Simple multiplication. The screen showed: 107,379.

“Three automaton soldiers to a room makes one hundred seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-nine. We could have a whole army in several days. The soldiers could watch every known room and keep an eye out for a stranger and also probe for hidden rooms.”

Nur, smiling, said, “I admire your creativity but not your lack of restraint or your contempt for realities.”

“What do you mean?” Frigate said. “Restraint is good only in situations that call for it. This doesn’t. As for realities, the army could be easily realized.”

Nur admitted that twice the number proposed could easily be raised. However, androids were not self-conscious and were not at all intelligent. Their actions had to be programmed. The army would have to be separated into small groups acting on their own. This required command levels of noncoms and officers, androids who could act on their own initiative when situations not in their programming arose. The leaders simply would not know what to do. For that matter, they would not even know that they had to do anything.

“Moreover,” Burton said, “there’s still that nagging worry. Can the unknown install in the robots and androids some sort of channel whereby he can override our commands?”

“He’s probably thinking about that right now,” Alice said. “If he’s watching us, he can anticipate anything we do.”

She shuddered.

“My answer to your objection,” Frigate said to Burton, “is that we could make some modifications in the neural systems of the androids. We could make them partly mechanical. By that, I mean that we could install mechanical devices in them. Say, something like a locker or safe combination that would set our commands mechanically but that would then transmit them electrically.

“We would set the combinations after we’d received the basic device from the Computer. That way, neither the Computer nor the Snark could control what we did. And … oh, hell! The Snark could still put a neuron complex in the android that would tell it to override the combination command by radio or whatever.”

“The hard facts,” Nur said, “are that we are in the power of this Snark. He does not have to attack us. All he has to do is shut off our power, and we’ll starve to death. If he intended to do that, he could have done so. He has not done so, therefore, we can assume that he isn’t going to. He has set certain limits to our use of the Computer but allowed us considerable powers. There are certain things he doesn’t want us to have. Otherwise, he just doesn’t care. He’s ignoring us.”

“The question, one of the questions, is why?”

“We can’t answer that. He’ll have to, if he ever does,” Frigate said.

“Right,” Nur said. “Now, while you were all sleeping, I had the Computer locate the secret entrance that Loga arranged long ago. The entrance we used to get into the tower after we’d crossed the mountains and taken that boat to the base of the tower. I tried to get the Computer to open that. It seemed to me that perhaps the unknown might be wanting us to leave the tower and return to The Valley. He did not wish us to use the aircraft for obvious reasons.

“But the secret door would not open when I asked the Computer to do it for me.

“Therefore, the unknown does not wish us to leave the tower.

“There may come a time when he’ll wish us to go, and, if so, he’ll open an exit for us. Until then, we’re prisoners. But this prison is vast and has, in a sense, more treasures to offer than the Earth we lived on or the Rivervalley. The treasures are physical and mental, moral and spiritual. I suggest that we find out what these are and use them. We might as well. We can’t stay caged in this suite.

“Meanwhile, of course, we’ll be trying to think of ways to override the unknown’s overrides. What one person sets up, another may knock down. The unknown is not a god.”

“What you’re suggesting is that we move back into our apartments and live as if there were no unknown?” Burton said.

“I say that we should leave this particular area, which is a small prison, and go out into the larger prison. After all, Earth was a prison. So was the Rivervalley. But if you’re in a large enough space to give you the illusion of freedom, then you don’t think of yourself as a prisoner. The half-free man is one who thinks he is free. The really free man is one who fully knows what he can do in prison and does it.”

“A Sufi’s wisdom,” Burton said, smiling but with a sneer in his voice. “We do look rather ridiculous, don’t we? We run into a hole and then ask ourselves why we ran and decide that we didn’t have to.”

“We were following instinct,” Nur said. “It was wrong to do so. We had to find a place where we could be safe. At least, think we were. Then we had the relative peace of mind to evaluate our situation.”

“Which turned out to be no peace of mind. Well, I do feel better, I won’t feel as much a prisoner. And that pile of furniture irks me. Let’s tear it down.”

Frigate said, “Before we do, I have something to tell you.”

Burton, who had started for the door, stopped and turned around.

“Nur wasn’t the only one who did a little independent investigating,” Frigate said. “As you know, Monat can’t be resurrected because of Loga’s command, which the Snark reaffirmed. Monat’s body-record is still on file. But I asked the Computer to locate his
wathan
in the shaft, and the Computer said that it had been there but was now gone. You know what that means. Monat has Gone On.”

Tears welled from Burton, and with the grief was mixed surprise that he should feel such grief. He had not known until that moment how he really felt about Monat. One of the first people he had encountered during his first resurrection had been the strange-looking, obviously non-Terrestrial Monat. Monat had accompanied him for a long time in The Valley and had impressed Burton with his compassion and wisdom. He had seemed
warm.
Thoroughly human despite his appearance, that is, what humans ideally should be.

Somehow, Burton had come to regard Monat as a father, a being stronger and wiser than he, a teacher, a pointer-out of right paths. And now Monat was gone forever.

Why should he shed tears and be choked up? He should be happy, gloriously happy because Monat had arrived at the stage where he no longer had to suffer the encumbering flesh.

Was it because he suffered a sense of loss? Had he thought, deep in the dark unconscious, that Monat wold somehow free himself from Loga’s lock on him and be, in short, a savior? Had he felt that Monat would come up out of the records like Jesus from the tomb or Arthur from the lake or Charlemagne from his cave and rescue the defeated and the besieged?

It was strange to be thinking such thoughts. They must have been circulating somewhere in him, waiting for the right moment to break out.

His own father had not been a real father, not what a son wanted as a father. So, in some manner, Burton had taken Monat as one, perhaps because he could never accept another Earthman as one. Monat was from another world, therefore not, what was the word …
tainted
? That was a curious word to leap to his mind.

In any event, Monat was forever out of reach of anybody in this world, Gone On. To what?

To conceal the tears, Burton strode to the furniture and began dragging it away from the door. By the time the others had joined him, his eyes were dry.

He opened the door and breathed deeply. The air was no fresher than that in the suite. But it offered liberation.

6

Near their apartments was a room containing a swimming pool sixty meters long and thirty meters wide. When no one was in the room it was dark, but the heat detectors would turn the light on if a single person entered it. The light was a simulated sun at zenith in a cloudless blue sky. The walls displayed a forest surrounding the pool and snow-capped mountains far in the distance. Even if a person stood within an inch of the wall, the trees seemed to be real. As real-looking as the trees, birds flew among the branches or lit on them, and their songs cried out pleasantly. Occasionally, the swimmers could see a rabbit or fox among the trees and, rarely, a pantherlike beast or bear moving silently in the twilight under the branches.

The water was fresh and about 68°F and had a depth of twelve meters at the deep end. Here the eight tenants usually gathered for an hour or so of swimming in midmorning.

Burton had been studying the list of operational limits until 11:00
A.M.
He entered the huge echoing chamber noisy with cries and splashes and stood for a moment. All were there except Nur. The men were in scanty trunks and the women in bikinis. They did not seem to have a care nor had they posted a guard. Beamers, however, lay along the edge of the pool, and he saw several at the bottom outlined against the red, black, and green mural.

Burton dived in and swam the length of the pool seven times. Then he hauled himself out and waited until de Marbot swam by. He called out to him; the Frenchman turned, came to the edge, and looked up. Burton considered his merry blue eyes, slick black hair, round face, and snub nose.

Burton squatted down and said, “I’m going to make a flying trip, an exploratory one, through the tower. Do you want to come along?”

“That sounds like fun,” de Marbot said. He narrowed his eyes and grinned. “Do you hope to surprise the Snark?”

“There’s little chance of that,” Burton said. “But … well … we might entice him to take some action. We’ll be human decoys.”

“I’m your man,” the Frenchman said, and he pulled himself out. He was only five feet five inches tall and shared with Nur the distinction of being the smallest man in the group. Burton had chosen him as his companion, however, because he was utterly courageous and had more experience in martial action than any of them. Serving under Napoleon, he had been in most of the conqueror’s great battles, had been wounded seventeen times, had fought in hundreds of small engagements, and had led so adventurous a life that A. Conan Doyle had written a series of stories based on his exploits. He was an excellent swordsman and a deadly shot and had an unsurpassed coolness under fire.

They dried themselves off in an anteroom, changed into dry clothes, sleeveless shirts and shorts, put their beamers in holsters, and walked along the pool. Burton paused for a minute to tell Turpin that they were going exploring.

“What time you coming back?” Turpin said through a mouthful of baked Montana grouse fed on huckleberries.

“About six
P.M.
,” Burton said, glancing at his wristwatch.

“Maybe you should report in every hour on the hour.”

“I don’t think so,” Burton said in a low voice, looking at the wall as if it had ears. Which it did. “I’m not going to make it easy for the unknown to find us.”

Turpin smiled. “Yeah, that’s right. Hope I see you again.” He laughed, spewing out bits of meat and bread.

Burton was worried about Turpin. The man had lost much weight during the trying and dangerous passage over the mountains to the north polar sea. Now he seemed to be intent on becoming as fat as he had been on Earth, close to three hundred pounds. He was always eating, and he was not far behind Li Po in drinking.

Burton said, “We’ll be flying around at random. I don’t have the slightest idea where we’ll be.”

“Good luck,” Turpin said.

Burton started to walk away but became aware that the Frenchman was not with him. Looking around, he saw him talking to Aphra. Evidently, he was explaining to her why he would be absent for a while. De Marbot was envied because he had a bedmate, but there were disadvantages to that. He had to account for his time to her, and, judging by their expressions and gestures, they were probably arguing over why she could not come along. Burton had no strong objections to taking her along at another time; she was tough and cool and skilled. Just now, he did not want more than one companion.

De Marbot, looking a little angry, returned to Burton.

“I have never heard that English expression, ‘Take a flying fuck at a galloping goose,’ ” he said. Then, with that mercurial swiftness distinguishing him, he laughed, and he said, “How droll! How indeed could one do that?”