GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"As for the unconscious or subconscious, you were more than an explorer of unknown lands. You also explored the darkest Africas of the human mind. You had many hidden enemies, though you also had many open enemies. You did depend on intuitions, hunches, quite often. You loved the solitary pursuits: scholarship and writing. As for institutions, you did not like to work in them, but you studied and analyzed them. As for dream and sleep patterns, you were fascinated by them, and you became a skilled hypnotist.

"Large pets. That seems not to be true. Yours were mostly bull terriers and gamecocks and monkeys. But you did love horses."

"I could take any one of the other zodiacal signs or all of them," Burton had said, sneering, "and I could show you how each and all would apply most appropriately to me. Or to you. Or any of us."

"Probably," Frigate had said. "But it's fun to dabble in astrology, if only to demonstrate that it doesn't work. However ..."

Nur and Frigate were convinced that the universe was one cosmic spiderweb, and a fly landing on one strand sent shivers through the entire web. Someone sneezing on a planet of Mizrab somehow might cause a Chinese peasant to stub his toe on a rock.

"Environment is as important as genes, but the environment is much vaster than most people think."

"Everything is," Burton had replied.

He was thinking of this when the wall before him began glowing. He straightened up and leaned back. This was going to be a much larger screen than usual. When it ceased growing it was ten feet across.

"Well?" he said as the expected face, one of the seven, did not appear. Instead, the light dimmed until it was a blackness on the gray of the wall. Faint noises came from it.

He told the Computer to amplify them and leaned forward. The sounds were as faint as before. He repeated his command; the Computer failed to comply.

Suddenly, light made a ragged hole in the center of the screen, and the sounds loudened, though they were still unintelligible. The hole expanded, and he was looking at something white and streaked with blood. Something wet with other than blood.

"Here comes the little devil," someone said.

Burton shot from the chair.

"Good God!"

He was seeing through someone's eyes. The white thing was a sheet; the water, that which burst before birth; the red streaks, blood. The voice was unfamiliar. But the scream that drowned it out was, he did not know how he knew but he knew, his mother's.

Suddenly, the screen showed him more, though it was a dim vision. Around him was a room containing giants. The screen was blanked out as something passed across it. And then the room rotated, and he glimpsed giant arms, bare from the elbow's^ down, rolled shirt sleeves above. A big bed was turning also, and in it was his mother, sweaty, her hair dank. His mother was young. A giant hand was pulling a sheet over the bare stomach and legs and the bloody hairy home from which he had been pulled.

Now he was upside down. A sharp slap. A thin wailing. His first blow.

"Lusty little devil, isn't he?" a man's voice said.

Burton was witnessing his own birth.

12

Burton could see and hear what was happening to him, to the newborn, rather, but he could not feel its, his, reactions. He felt no pain, except emphatically, when his cord was clipped. Indeed, he did not see the operation, but, when he was picked up, he glimpsed the umbilicus on a towel. Nor did he know that he was being cleaned off until a towel pressed down on his, the baby's eyes. Then he was wrapped in a blanket arid placed in his mother's arms. Of this he saw only the nurse approaching with the blanket, her stiff white pinafore, the upper, part of his mother, and then her face from underneath.

Presently, his father entered. How young that dark sallow Roman face was! And his father was smiling. This usually happened only when Mr. Burton had made a profit in the stock market, and that was not often.

He shuddered when he saw the doctor's hands. They were being wiped on a towel, not given a thorough scrubbing. Doubtless, the doctor had not bothered to wash his hands before ! delivering him. It was strange, though, unusual, anyway, that the doctor had personally delivered him. If he remembered correctly, most doctors at that time instructed the nurses or midwives but did not touch the woman in labor. Some did not even see the mother's lower parts, which were hidden by a sheet, but heard the details of the delivery from the midwife and then gave their instructions.

A huge hand, his father's, came down and lifted something from him. The blanket.

"A fine son you've given me, my dear," his father said.

"He's beautiful, beautiful," a croaking voice said. His mother's.

"Now, now," a deep voice said. The doctor's face hove into view. "We mustn't tire Mrs. Burton. Besides, the little devil seems to be hungry."

At this point, he must have fallen asleep. His next view was of an enormous breast, a swollen, pale red nipple, and his little hands reaching out. Then he saw with one eye a field of pink flesh and the underpart of his wetnurse's face. Mrs. Burton, being a genteel lady, would not have nursed the baby herself.

"I wonder who she was?" Burton muttered. "Some Irishwoman?"

He had a vague memory of his mother having mentioned the nurse's name once. A Mrs. Riley? Kiley?

He was shocked but not so much that he could not think clearly. The Computer had read his memory from his body-recording, reeling it up as a fisherman did a trout. After storing it in a separate file, the Computer was feeding it back to him via the wall-screen. The showing of the whole of it, if done in the same time as that in which the events had occurred, would take a lifetime. However, no one's memory held everything that the person had seen, heard, tasted, felt and thought. Memory was selective and there were great gaps when the person was sleeping, except when he was dreaming, of course. Thus, it did not take as much time as might have been expected to display all that was in the subject's memory bank.

The film, it was a film of sorts, could be speeded up or slowed down or run backward. The Computer might be doing this now. On the other hand, he could have fallen asleep shortly after birth.

Burton, now watching his diapers being changed by another servant, a maid, wondered why this memory display had been commanded. And by whom?

Before he could question the Computer, several small screens whitened wall areas. Frigate's, Turpin's, and de Marbot's faces appeared. They looked shocked.

"Yes," he said before they could begin talking, "I'm being visited by the past, too. From bloody birth onward."

"It's terrible," Alice said. "And wonderful, too. Awesome. I feel like crying."

Frigate said, "I'll call the others and see if they're going through the same thing." His screen dimmed to gray.

Tom Turpin was weeping.

"I'm telling you, seeing my own momma and poppa and that old shack ... I don't think I can take it."

Burton glanced at the big screen. There he was again, being lifted towards that titanic breast. He could hear his infant's cry of hunger. The scene faded and was replaced by a view of a blue canopy, and the room rocking. No, a great hand was rocking his cradle.

The screens of the others came on. Seven faces with various emotions looked at him.

Li Po, gri

"Wait a moment," Burton said, "and I'll ask the Computer."

"I have done that," Nur said. "It says that the who and the why are unavailable. But it did not refuse to tell me the when. The order was given two days ago to start the memory-display this morning."