Gods of Riverworld (7 page)

“It’s a matter of synchronization,” Burton said, grinning.

They left the pool and the door closed behind them. The noise was cut off; the corridor was huge and silent. It was easy to imagine someone—something—waiting around the corner for them, crouching, ready to spring.

Burton pointed out to de Marbot that he had filled the pockets on the sides of both chairs with power boxes for the beamers. They got into their chairs and caused them to rise into the air. Burton in front, de Marbot about twelve feet behind him, they sped toward the vertical shaft at the end of the hall. With a skill learned during the past three weeks, Burton curved the flight path so that he entered the shaft with only a slight decrease in speed, and he shot upwards.

He came out of the shaft at the next level at such velocity that his head was a few inches from the ceiling. He sent the chair down until his feet were twelve inches from the floor, and he hurtled along the muraled walls until he reached the end of the corridor. Then he stopped, pivoted the chair, and said, “You lead for a while.”

The Frenchman led him through every passageway on that floor. The doors of every room were closed. For all Burton knew, their enemy was behind one. He did not believe this, however. Surely the Snark would have been notified by the Computer of the detection of heat from the two men. He would have told the Computer to warn him if the two were on an approach that would take them anywhere near him. He also might have activated the wall-screens, so that he could be watching them.

When they had passed through every corridor, de Marbot stopped his chair by a shaft. “This is fun,” he said, “the wind on your face, your hair blowing, the scenery, such as it is, whistling by. It is not as good as riding a horse, but it will do. And, certainly, no horse would jump off into the shaft.”

Burton took the lead now and rose up the shaft until he came to the top level. Down the corridor would be the entrance to the hangar, visited several days before. They entered the very wide entrance into the vast area with its brooding craft. Burton counted them and found that there were the same number as before. The unknown was still in the tower. That is, unless he had a ship secreted somewhere else. There was always an
unless.

“I suppose we could remove the navigational tapes,” he said, “and that would keep the Snark from using the spacecraft. But I’m sure that they’ll be recorded. All he’d have to do would be to have the Computer run off new ones.”

“Why would he want to use a spaceship?”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to throw a monkey wrench in his plans, upset him somehow.”

“The bite of the mosquito.”

“That, I’m afraid, is all it would be. However, a mosquito may kill a man if it gives him malaria.”

He was not expressing pure bravado. He believed that there must be a weakness, a hole, however small, somewhere in the Snark’s defenses.

They sped on their chairs to the centrally located shaft and dropped to the level just below the top one. They entered a circular area with a 150-foot diameter and 500-foot-high walls. Twelve square metal doors were set equidistantly in the walls. Each, according to the Computer diagrams, gave entrance to a triangular chamber, pie-slice-shaped, which was 5.4 miles long and 401 feet high. The tip of each was blunted somewhat, ending in the walls of the central circle.

When Burton had viewed the diagrams, he had meant to ask the Computer about the contents of the vast chambers. An urgent matter had interrupted him before he could do so, and he had forgotten to return to his question. Now, while here, he would see for himself what they held.

Each door bore on its center a gold symbol indicating the identity of the member of the Ethical Council of Twelve whose property was beyond the door. The symbol directly in front of Burton was two horizontal bars crossed by two longer vertical bars. This was Loga’s symbol. It could, Burton thought, be called a doublecross.

Burton gave the codeword that identified him, and a glowing screen formed above the bars.

“I wish to enter the room behind this door,” Burton said. “Do I need a codeword to open the door?”

The screen displayed:
YES.

“What is the codeword needed to activate the door?” Burton said.

He had expected that the Computer would reply that that information was unavailable to him. It flashed, however, in Ethical characters:
LOGA SAYS.

“That, it is simple enough,” de Marbot murmured.

Burton, hoping that the words were not keyed to Loga’s voice-print, pronounced perfectly the Ethical phrase.

The door opened outward, revealing a small, bare, well-lit room. At the farther wall was a staircase to a small platform. The two went up it, and Burton pushed in on the conventional oblong door. The area beyond was bright, the light having come on just as the door was opened. They stood blinking for a while before they grasped what they were seeing.

Though they must be standing next to the outcurving walls, they were under the illusion that the walls stretched for miles to right and left. The horizon seemed very far away.

The distance ahead of them was no illusion, however. This vast room was 5.4 miles long.

“It’s a little world,” de Marbot said softly.

“Not so little.”

Most of it seemed to be a great well-kept park with many trees and clipped grass. Ahead, seemingly about two and a half miles away, was a sloping hill on top of which was a building gleaming in the noon sun. The villa was probably real; the sun was undoubtedly simulated.

“It looks rather Roman,” Burton said. “I’d wager, though, that if we got close, we’d see a difference in the details.”

Their chairs would have gone through the doors, but Burton decided not to explore. They returned to the central area and asked the Computer for the codeword to the chamber next to Loga’s. This had been the property of Loga’s wife and had the same kind of anteroom. But it opened to a vista that bewildered them. The entire Brobdingnagian area was a labyrinth of small and large mirrors in a complex arrangement that they could not figure out. Their images were caught by near mirrors and reflected inward for as far as they could see. The source of the light was not apparent; it seemed to come from everywhere. Far off, dimly seen, was a circle of pillars. These, too, were reflected, but the arrangement was such that they saw their own tiny figures standing inside the pillars.

“What is the purpose of this?” de Marbot said.

Burton shrugged and said, “We’ll have to find out. Not just now, though.”

The next chamber admitted them into what seemed to be an Arabian desert. Under a hot sun was an expanse of sand and rock, mostly a plain but with hills here and there. The air was much drier than that in the first two places. About three miles distant was what looked like a large oasis. Tall palm trees grew from grass, and the moving waters of a lake in the midst of the trees gleamed in the midmorning sunlight.

Near them were the skeletons of three animals. Burton picked up a skull and said, “Lion.”

“
C’est remarquable
,” de Marbot muttered, reverting in his wonder to his native tongue. Then, in English, “Three different worlds. Lilliputian, yes. Yet large enough for all practical purposes, though I do not know about the practicality.”

“I’d venture that these are … were … retreats for the Council,” Burton said. “Sort of, ah, vacation areas. Each made his world according to his wishes, his own temperamental inclinations, and retired here now and then for spiritual and, of course, physical satisfaction.”

De Marbot wished to look into all of the vast rooms, but Burton said that they had plenty of time for that later. They should continue their patrol.

The Frenchman opened his mouth to say something. Burton said, “Yes, I know. But what I’d like to do is see all that we can as swiftly as we can. It’s better than having the Computer show us everything while we’re lolling about in our rooms. Besides, how do we know that the Computer
is
showing us everything? It can delete as the Snark wishes it to, and we can’t be sure that it’s not doing so. We have to make a be-there visit. We’ll make a flying patrol, be birds, get an overall view of everything. Then we can take our time and get the details.”

“You mistake me,” de Marbot said. “I was merely going to comment on the state of my stomach. It is complaining of its emptiness.”

They took their chairs through the tube in the center of the floor to the next level, went down a corridor to the nearest door, opened it, and walked inside. It was a suite unfurnished except for a converter against a wall. De Marbot selected for lunch
escargots bourguignonne
with French bread and a glass of white wine. Thirty seconds later, he removed the dishes and silverware and glass and napkin. His blue eyes were big with admiration as he sniffed the delicate aroma. “
Sacrée merde!
Never on Earth could I get such perfection, such ecstasy! Yet surely the Ethicals must have gotten the original from some Parisian chef and copied it! What could be that genius’ name? I would like to resurrect him, if only to thank him!”

“Someday, I’ll order a deliberately badly cooked meal just for the sake of variety,” Burton said. “Don’t you find all this exquisiteness, this perfection, tiring? Every meal is a gustatory triumph.”

“Never!” de Marbot said. He rolled his eyes on seeing Burton’s eclectic choice, buttermilk biscuits and squabs marinated in cream and a schooner of dark beer.

“Barbaric! And I thought that you did not like beer?”

“I do when I eat ham or squabs.”

“
De gustibus non disputandum.
Whoever said that was an idiot.”

A section of wall folded out to make a table, and they ate.

“
Délicieux!
” De Marbot cried, and he smacked his lips loudly.

Until three weeks ago, he had been whip-thin. Now his face was becoming moonlike, and a slight roll was entrenching itself around his waist.

“There is a
glacé de viande
I must try,” de Marbot said.

“Now?”

“No. I am no pig. Later. Tonight.”

For dessert the Frenchman had a fig soufflé and a glass of red wine.

“Superb!”

They washed up in the bathroom and returned to the chairs. “We should be walking this off,” Burton said.

“We’ll work it off with saberplay before supper.”

7

The illuminated halls they passed through had been dark a few seconds before they got to them. Heat detectors in the walls reacted to their bodies and activated switches that turned the lighting on ahead of them and off behind them. Because of this, the unknown probably knew exactly where they were. All he had to do was to command the Computer to give him images of every lit area. However, he could not spend all his time just watching the screens; he would have to sleep. If, however, by some means the tenants managed to get on his track, he could be awakened by the Computer.

The two came down a vertical shaft and came out into a hall. Halfway down this, they stopped their chairs and got out of them. A transparent outward-leaning wall enclosed a vast well glowing brightly from a source below them. The upper part of the enclosure was empty, but a few hundred feet below them was the illumination: a shifting dancing whirling mass of what seemed to be tiny suns. De Marbot got two pairs of dark spectacles from a box on a ledge and handed one pair to Burton. Burton put them on and looked for the twelfth time at the most gorgeous display he had ever seen, more than eighteen billion souls collected and made visible in one place. The Ethicals called them
wathans
, a word more precise than the English
soul.
These were the entities of artificial origin, each of which had been attached to an Earth-person the moment that the sperm and the egg united to form the zygote of that person. These remained attached to the head of each individual until he or she died, and it was these that gave
Homo sapiens
its self-consciousness and held its immortal part.

Each was invisible unless seen with a special device, in this situation the polarized material of the wellwall. They were glowing spheres of many colors and hues, with tentacles that shot out and contracted as the spheres whirled. Seemed to whirl, rather. Burton and de Marbot were not seeing the reality, the whole; they were seeing what their brains could grasp, a reshaping formed by their nervous systems.

The
wathans,
the souls, danced or seemed to dance, whirling, glowing, changing colors, passing through one another, occasionally seeming to coalesce and form a super
wathan,
which broke up into the original spheres after a few seconds.

Were they, when free of the human bodies, their hosts, conscious? Did they think when in this free state? No one knew. None of those who had been dead remembered anything of their existence when they were resurrected and the
wathan
was united again with the physical body.

The two stood rapt for a while before the awesome wonder surely unsurpassed in the universe.

“To think,” Burton murmured, “that I have been part of that spectacle, that glory, many times.”

“And to think,” de Marbot said, “that if the Ethicals had not made these, our bodies would have been dust for thousands of years and would have stayed dust until even dust had died.”

Far below, seen dimly through the coruscating nebula, was a great gray mass. It seemed to be shapeless, but Loga had assured them that it was not.

“That is the top of the titanic mass of organized protein that is the central part of the Computer,” he had said. “It is the living but unselfconscious brain, the body of which is the tower and the grailstones and the resurrection chamber.”

The “brain” was not, however, shaped like the human brain when within the skull.

“It resembles, more than anything, one of your great Gothic cathedrals with its flying buttresses and spires and gargoyle-decorated exterior and doors and windows. It is enveloped in water holding sugar in suspension. The brain would collapse and become a gray ooze if the liquid were removed. It is a lovely thing to see, and you must do so sometime.”