GODS OF RIVERWORLD

One night, he was aroused in his hut by a masked and hooded man. That stranger was the one who had also wakened Burton and many others to enlist them in his cause. Of the many recruited by the renegade Ethical, Loga, Li Po had been one of the very few to get to the tower.

"And what have you learned during your sojourn here?" Nur had said. "How has it changed you for better or worse, if it has?"

"Unlike you, my Muslim if heretical friend, I did not believe in a hereafter. I did agree with The Sage that the spiritland was none of our business. I thought that when I died, I would become rotten flesh and then dust and that would be that. Awakening by The River was a great shock, the worst in my life. Where were the gods who had raised me from the dead, the gods in whom I had not believed? There were no gods or demons here, only human beings like myself who, though in another world, knew no more about the why and wherefore of it than they had of Earth's. Poor wretches! Poor ignoramuses stumbling in the dark. Where were those who had lit us up once again so that we'd be little flames looking for the mother flame?"

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" Frigate said. "Easy to answer. They melted and became clouds and became snow again, today's."

At the end of wandering on Earth and the Riverworld, Li Po had reached the tower. He seemed not to have changed, which, Nur said, was regrettable. The Riverworld was designed to make people change. The tall, lean, handsome, devil-faced man with the green eyes and his black hair coiled in a topknot only laughed at that.

"Perfection can change only for the worse."

He had redecorated his suite so that it looked like the palace of the Glorious Emperor. From the Computer's files he had had reproduced many famous Chinese paintings and was painting some of his own works. These were not duplicates of his Terrestrial creations but scenes from the Riverworld.

"I have everything the emperor had and much more. Except, of course, millions of subjects and many wives and concubines. In fact, I have not one wife and so am poorer and more miserable than the lowliest peasant. Not for long, though."

There was one woman whom the historians knew nothing of, though Li Po had written two hundred poems about her. These, however, were among his nine thousand lost works.

In Eastern Lu, a part of twentieth-century Shantung in north China, Li Po had built a house attached to a tavern owned by his fourth wife's family. And in the tavern was a slave girl who served the patrons; her name was Hsing Shih. In English, Star Spoon.

"The most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You will par don me, Alice, Aphra, when I say that. You two are indeed surpassingly beautiful, but you will surely agree with me, since you're fair-minded for your sex, that you just possibly may not be the most beautiful.

"Star Spoon was quiet and soft-spoken and had elegant ma

If it was only intimate companionship that Li Po wanted, he would have chosen a man. But he needed a female, and his thoughts turned to Hsing Shih. He would find his old comrades later for masculine warmth and uproariousness and mental stimulation.

The first question in locating Star Spoon was: Was she available in the Computer's files?

These began in 97,000 b.c when the predecessors of the Ethi-cals had landed on Earth. (Loga had said that they started in about 100,000 b.c, but he was speaking loosely, rounding off the figure.) The Computer listed 97,000 b.c as Year One in its chronology. Thus, since Star Spoon had been born in a.d. 721, by Western reckoning, her birth year was 97,724 by computer reckoning.

Li Po had ordered that the search start in that year and in the area where she had been born. Since the Glorious Monarch's palace was a very important place in China, it was probable that Ethical agents had photographed it and its tenants.

The recordings were far from complete, however. It was possible that there were very few films made at this place during the T'ang dynasty. Li Po had, however, reconstructed Star Spoon's features with the aid of the Computer and his memory, which, like Burton's and Nur's, gripped like an eagle's talon.

The Computer had then extrapolated the woman's face backward, as it were, shaping her features as they would have been in childhood.

With this as a model, the Computer had sca

Her wathan was now identified from the films, which photographed more than her body. Using this as reference, the Computer sca

She was shocked and confused. She had been killed in those horrible days when the east bank of grailstones had failed to provide food for the east bank's inhabitants. She, with hordes of others, had crossed The River in boats to fight for the food supplied to the west bank dwellers. She had not known then that resurrection of the dead had ceased, and so she had expected to awake somewhere along The River.

Instead, here she was in a strange place, one obviously not in The Valley. And who was this fellow countryman gri

"Truly, she thought I was a devil at first," Li Po was to say. "She was half-mistaken." He added, "She did not even recognize me until I spoke. Then everything flooded in on her, and she wept for a long time."

It had taken most of the night for him to explain to her just what had happened to him and to her. Then he had allowed her to sleep, though he lusted to get her into bed with him.

"I am not one to force myself upon a Woman. She must be willing."

Everyone came to his suite to meet the newcomer. She was indeed beautiful and delicate, about five feet tall, slim-boned and slim-fleshed but well rounded and long-legged. Her eyes were huge and dark brown, and she was dressed in the same kind of clothes she had worn on Earth. She was not as shy as Li Po had portrayed her. The Riverworld had changed her in that respect. Her voice was, however, low and husky as she spoke to them in Esperanto. She was fluent in a dozen or more languages, but English was not one of them.

Burton was enraged, but, for once, he controlled himself. Star Spoon was a deed done. Reproaching the Chinese for breaking the agreement not to resurrect anybody as yet would upset the woman and only cause Li Po to argue with him or, worse, challenge him to a duel. Burton had lost whatever authority he had. Now that the situation was changed, the danger over, he could no longer be captain of this group of strong individualists. They would pretty much do what they wished.