GODS OF RIVERWORLD

For dessert the Frenchman had a fig souffle 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 saber play 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 superwathan, 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."

It must be vast indeed to be visible from where they stood, and through the glowing wathans. It was three miles below them, and they could see only a part of the top as a gray cloud.

The rest of it occupied an expanded part of the well, a dome.

So far, the tenants had not ventured to the level where they could view the brain in its entirety. Nor did Burton plan on going there now. Instead, he returned to his chair and led his companion to the other side of the tower and down a shaft. Burton counted the levels passed—he had counted them during his first ascent from the level that was his destination—until he came to the one containing Loga's hidden room.

Before reaching the room, Burton stopped his chair. The Frenchman pulled up alongside him and said, "What is it?"

Burton shook his head and put a finger to his lips. He could see no mobile wall-screen, but the unknown might have other ways to monitor them. Even if he was not watching them now, it was probable that the Computer was recording their actions for later viewing.

They entered a big laboratory containing equipment whose functions Burton did not know—except for four huge gray metal cabinets. These were energy-matter converters. Their walls held all the needed circuits. In fact, the walls were the circuitry. Their power came through orange circles on the floor, which were matched to the orange circles in the center of the cabinet bottoms. Two cabinets were permanently attached to the floor, but the others could be taken from the room. Not, however, by the muscle power of two men alone.

Burton turned his chair, and, followed by de Marbot, flew out of the room and through the corridor past the wall behind which was Loga's hidden room. De Marbot must have wondered why Burton did not stop there, but he refrained from comment. By the time that they had returned to their suite level, after speeding up and down shafts and along corridors chosen at random, he no longer looked puzzled. He looked bored. But when they were in the hall, he pulled a notebook from the pocket on the outside of the chair and wrote on a sheet.

Burton took the note and held it close to his chest, his left hand partly covering it. He read: How long must I wait before you tell me your plans?

Burton wrote with a pen taken from the container on the side of his chair.

Some time this evening.

De Marbot read it and smiled. "I will have something to look forward to," he murmured.

He tore the note into tiny pieces, placed them on the floor, and ignited them with his beamer ray. He ground the ashes with the toe of his sandal and blew them away.

They waited, and presently a recess in the wall opened and a wheeled, jointed, cylindrical machine rolled out. It headed for the ashes, a scoop-like extension sliding out from its front. It sprayed the dirty area with a liquid that quickly dried into many tiny balls and then sucked the spheres onto the scoop and into an opening. A minute later, it had retreated into the cavity from which it had come, and the recess closed.

De Marbot spat on the floor just to see the robot in action again. As it rolled back to its lair after its cleanup job, the Frenchman kicked it. Unperturbed, the machine disappeared into the cavity.

"Really, I prefer the protein-and-bone robots, the androids," de Marbot said. "These mechanical things, they give me the shivers."

"It's the flesh-and-blood ones that disturb me," Burton said.

"Ah, yes, if one kicks them, not out of a desire to hurt, you comprehend, but a desire to evoke an emotion, one knows that, since they're of flesh and blood, they do hurt. But they do not resent the insult or the injury, and that makes them nonhuman. Still, one does not have to pay them wages, and one knows that they will not go on strike."