GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"But you said that you didn't need to see your past."

"I don't. But I am not you or the others."

"Isn't that arrogant?"

"One man's arrogance is another's realism."

"You Sufis like to proverb your way through life," Frigate said.

Nur only smiled. This made the American feel as if he had failed to pass a test. For some time, Frigate had suffered from the belief that he had let Nur down—and himself—because he had quit being Nur's disciple. He had lost faith in his own ability ever to attain to Nur's lofty stature as a complete master of himself, free from neurosis and weakness, always logical yet compassionate. He just could not make it. So, rather than not succeed and be humiliated when Nur discharged him, flunked him, as it were, Frigate had resigned as Nur's disciple. "A Sufi does not fear failure," Nur had said. "What if I change my mind and ask you to take me as your pupil again?"

"We'll see."

"I've quit a lot of things or been forced to quit," Frigate said. "But I always went back and tried them again."

"Perhaps it's time that you got rid of this start-and-stop habit. You need to form a psychic momentum that won't run out so quickly."

"The great perhaps."

"What does that mean?"

Frigate did not know, and that made him angry. "You haven't yet learned, after one hundred and thirty-two years, to meld your opposites into a smooth cooperating whole," Nur had said. "You have always had within you a conservative, which isn't always bad by any means, and a liberal, which isn't always good by any means. You have within you a coward and a brave man. You detest and fear violence, yet there is someone violent within you, a person you've tried to repress. You don't know how to make your violence creative, how to control it so that it discharges into the right paths. You—"

"Tell me something I don't know," Frigate had said and had walked away.

He sometimes got the same sort of philosophical drum-beating from Li Po. The Chinese liked to tell him about the process of becoming "round," that is, making one's self into a "whole" man. Balancing his yin and yang, his negative and positive qualities. But Li Po, in Frigate's estimation, was very unbalanced. He admired Li Po's energy and poetical creativeness and compassion and self-confidence and linguistic mastery and courage untainted by fear. On the other hand—people were bimanual in more than one sense—Li Po had an excessive drive to dominate, was too self-absorbed, and utterly failed to see that these qualities often made him tiresome and offensive. He also was a drunk, though unlike any Frigate had ever known.

Frigate believed that Li Po, despite his apparent superiority, had no more chance of Going On than he. Indeed, of the eight, only Nur and perhaps Aphra Behn and Alice were at this moment promising candidates for Going On. Which might or might not be desirable. The theory was that such a state was the end-all and be-all because it could be attained only if you were ethically perfect or near-perfect. The wathan of such a person just disappeared from all detectors and thus, so the reasoning went, was absorbed into the Godhead or God or Allah or What-Do-You-Call-It.

The theory also claimed that the wathan then became part of the Creator, lost its individuality, and experienced from then on an eternity of ecstasy. Ecstasy undescribable, unknown in the physical state.

"How do I know," Frigate thought, "that the wathan doesn't just disappear? Evaporate like an ectoplasmic bubble? Become nothing, nada, nil, zero? Is that something to be hotly wished for? How does that differ from just being dead? Not that there aren't some good things to be said about just being dead. Past knowing, past caring, past torment physical and mental, past frustration and defeat, past loneliness. Oh, Death, where is thy sting?"

Death had no sting. On the other hand, death had no zing.

Gain something, lose something. That was the unchangeable law, the unchanged economy of the universe.

"Am I paranoiac? Is all this a big con game? For what purpose? A con man expects to gain something. Who could gain in this situation? What could be gained?"

Sometimes, his turmoiling thoughts swelled his brain, or seemed to do so, until it seemed that his skull, like a balloon under too much pressure, would burst. Maybe because his thoughts were just too much hot air.

"After a hundred and thirty-two years, I ought to know better than to drive myself into such a state. Will I ever graduate from the sophomore class?"

Life's sophomore, the wise-foolish, could not follow Nur's advice to rid himself of such thoughts, to dump them as if they were ballast on a balloon. Instead, he shunted them, put them on a sidetrack of the Great P.J.F. Railroad, and became for a while an engineer of the G.B.R., the Grailstones-on-the-banks-of-the-River express.

He had found out something that the Ethical, Loga, had not mentioned, though doubtless he would have if he'd lived longer. That was that the grailstones lining both banks of The River were more than just electrical discharge devices to supply the grails with energy converted into food and liquor and various goodies for the Valleydwellers. They were also observation equipment, window-peeping and eavesdropping machines. A person in the tower could see and hear the people within detection range of the grailstones.

Having discovered this, Frigate indulged himself until he became dizzied and confused. He sca

"Always too grandiose, Frigate," he told himself. "You're just not big enough. Your ambition is a lightyear ahead of your ability. Your imagination is the eight-legged steed Sleipnir, but you, as Odin, have fallen off a thousand leagues ago."

It was hard to tell the nationality of the people he saw. Except for those who were nude, and there were plenty of them, they wore the towels as kilts or loincloths and the women used smaller, thi

After two hours, he tired of this kind of observation. "Well, hell! From the collective to the personal." Seeing no one who caught his fancy near the stone he'd stopped at, he moved the observation points a stone at a time southward, pausing for twenty or so seconds at each one. It was now early afternoon, and the citizens of the right bank had eaten their lunch and were passing the time. Some were standing or sitting around and talking. Some were playing games. Many were swimming or fishing. A number of them would be in their huts and so out of sight. Those within three hundred feet could be seen closeup and easily overheard, however. The •stone, like the TV camera, could zoom in and had built-in directional sound amplifiers.