GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"Then it must have been given by the woman you killed," Burton said.

"She's the most likely candidate."

"I'm completely at sea about why she ordered this memory-display," Burton said.

"Obviously," Nur said, "it was done to accelerate our ethical advancement. If we're forced to know our past, how we behaved, how others behaved, we'll see our weaknesses, faults, and vices in all their details. Like it or not, we'll have what we were, exactly what we were, rubbed into our noses. Ground into our souls. By watching that inescapable drama and comedy, we might be so strongly affected that we'll take steps to eliminate our undesirable character traits. And then become better human beings."

"Or it might drive us mad," Frigate said.

"More likely it will drive us to ingenious methods to shut it out," Burton said. "Nur, did you ask the Computer to stop the display?"

"Yes. The Computer did not reply. Obviously, the woman's command is another override."

"Just a minute," Burton said.

He walked out of the room into the corridor. The screen had slid along the wall of the big room until he left the room. Now it appeared on the corridor wall opposite him. He cursed and spun on his heels and walked back into the room. The screen accompanied him.

He told the others what had happened. "Apparently, we can't get rid of it. It's like the albatross around the ancient mariner's neck."

Burton shut his eyes. He heard himself screaming. Opening his eyes, he saw the canopy above him and then heard, faintly, the maid's voice. "Saints presarve us! What is it now?"

"I think," he said slowly, "that if we're going to shut this out, we'll have to paint our walls. We can't use the Computer in our apartments, though I suppose we can use the auxiliary computers. And we'll have to wear ear plugs if we want to sleep. There's no way of getting away from this outside the apartments."

"We'll go crazy!" Frigate said.

Nur said, "Surely, the woman must have realized that. Perhaps we'll get relief during certain hours of the day. And at night, too."

Burton asked de Marbot and Behn about the locations of their screens.

"One is on one wall and the other on the wall opposite it," the Frenchman said. "We can take turns, my little diamond and I, watching each other's so charming infancies."

"How the "devil can I get any research done with that going on?" Burton muttered.

He said so-long to the others after agreeing to meet them at the swimming pool. The Computer did not refuse to make him a pair of earphones that blocked off the sounds. The only way he could escape the sight on the wall was to stare at the display screen of the auxiliary computer. And he found that he could not concentrate on his work. He was too curious. He could not resist looking at scenes that he did not remember. Yet, after a minute, he got bored. Not much happened to a baby outside of routine, and seeing his parents when they were young quickly lost its interest. They did not talk of anything except him when they were together, and his mother only spoke baby talk. Which he, of course, had been too undeveloped to understand, though he must have responded to her face and the tones of her voice. Now he became sick of them. Not that she was with him much. The people he mostly saw were the wetnurse and the two maids who took turns cleaning him or carrying him around.

At 11:00 a.m. he went to the swimming pool. The screen followed him along the walls. The pasts of the others accompanied them, too. The screens were at first on one of the long walls, then they were on all the walls.

"Familiarity, I hope, will breed deafness and blindness," Aphra said as she came up out of the water next to Burton.

"It'll never be familiar, even though it now has mostly to do with the family," he said. "What it will breed will be shame, grief and anger. And humiliation. Do you want to see yourself when you were mean, childish, degraded?"

"Oh, I was never mean. And I was never degraded, though others tried to degrade me."

He did not think that she was as unperturbed as she seemed to be. No one could be.

It was difficult to swim and talk and have fun. He could not keep from glancing at the screens.

Frigate bobbed up from the surface of the pool beside Burton.

"Look at that," he said. "I can see myself now."

His mother, a slim woman with Indian-black hair, dark brown eyes, and high cheekbones, was holding her baby up to a mirror. The infant Peter was nude and gri

"It's a jolt to see yourself at that age. And I can expect many thousands of mirror images, from the puling baby to the old man of sixty-five. Jesus H. Christ!"

That evening, Frigate asked the Computer when the life-recordings started. It replied that they started from the moment of conception. The Computer could not answer Frigate's question about why the display had not started then. But Frigate and some of the others decided that that was because the nine months in the womb were mostly darkness and silence. They could learn little from it and could easily ignore it.

However, when Frigate asked the Computer to run off his gestation period and show only those moments when sound did penetrate to the embryo, he was astounded. Many times, though the sounds were muffled, he could clearly hear those close to his mother, and his mother's voice. There were other sounds, too, car motors, locomotive whistles and escaping steam, firecrackers, excretory noises, crashings of fallen glasses or dishes, loud laughter, and, embarrassingly, his parents making love. After two hours of this, Frigate ordered the Computer to stop the recording.

"I suppose that the woman who started this did not do it out of malice," he said. "Its purpose must be to show us, whether or not we want to see it, our weaknesses, vanities, pettinesses, mea

"That's probably true," Nur said. "But ... why the secrecy on her part? Why did she kill Loga?"

"That's something we'll have to find out," Burton said. "If we can."

The woman who had ordered the merciless recordings had had some compassion, however. At 8:00 p.m. the screens' displays faded out, and they did not reappear until 8:00 a.m. There would be some respite.

Burton left early that evening for his apartment. However, a sufferer from insomnia all his life, he was unable to sleep. After two hours of tossing and turning, his mind filled with scenes from the past-displays, he rose, dressed and left the apartment. For three hours, he rode his chair through many corridors and into many rooms and up and down many shafts. His wanderings were aimless until he decided to organize his explorations. Why not get a diagram from the Computer and start from the top and work every level thoroughly down to the bottom? He had no goal in mind, no thought that he'd find something new. He was restless, he wanted to keep moving, and, perhaps, he might come across something novel or useful or both.

On the way up to the hangar, his starting point, he changed his mind again. The twelve vast rooms that had been the private worlds of the Council of Twelve beckoned him. They, at least, would offer a variety, something different from the monotonous sameness of corridor and rooms. His tour lasted four hours. When finished with all of them, he knew that he would tell the others that they, too, should explore these fascinating worlds.

Burton visited the hangar again and found it, as far as he could see, unchanged. He counted the craft to make sure that none were missing. That did not mean that the woman Agent had not used one since his last visit.