GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"True," Nur said. "But before we can do that, we must determine just how much control of the Computer we have. What our limits are. When you fight, you must know your strengths and your weaknesses as well as you know your face in the mirror. Only thus can we determine how to overcome the strengths and weaknesses of our enemy."

"If he is our enemy," Frigate said.

The others looked at him with surprise.

"That's very good," Nur said. "Don't think in old categories. You're learning."

"What else could he be?" Aphra Behn said.

"I don't know," Frigate said. "We've been so manipulated by Loga that I'm not one hundred percent convinced that he is on our side or that he is right in what he's done. This unknown ... he may be doing this for the right reason. Still ..."

"If Loga was his only obstacle, the unknown's removed it," Burton said. "Why doesn't he come forward now? What could we do to oppose him? We're like children, really. We don't know how to use all the powers available. We don't even know what they are."

"Not yet," Nur said. "Pete has proposed another way of looking at events. But, for the time being, it's not useful. We have to assume that the unknown is our enemy until we find out otherwise. Does anyone disagree?"

It was evident that no one did.

Tom Turpin said, "What you say is OK. But I think that the very first thing we got to do is protect ourselves. We got to set up some kind of defense so what happened to Loga don't happen to us."

"I agree," Burton said. "But if this unknown can override any of our commands ..."

"We should stick together!" Alice said. "Keep together, don't let anyone out of our sight!"

Burton said, "You may be right, and we should confer about that. First, though, I propose that we get out of this gloomy, oppressive place. Let's go back to my apartment."

The interior door to the hangar opened, and they rode their chairs down the corridor to the nearest vertical shaft. The next level was five hundred feet down, which caused Burton to wonder what was between the hangar level and the second one. He would ask the Computer what it contained.

Inside his quarters, with the entrance door shut by his codeword, he began to act as host. A wall section slid back, revealing a very large table standing on end. This moved out from the recess, turned until the tabletop was horizontal, floated to the center of the room, extended its legs, which had been folded against the underside, and settled on the floor. The eight arranged chairs around it and sat down. By then they had gotten their drinks from the energy-matter converter cabinets along one wall. The table was round, and Burton sat in what would have been King Arthur's chair if the room had been Camelot.

He took a sip of black coffee and said, "Alice has a good idea. It means, however, that we must all live in one apartment. This one isn't quite large enough. I propose we move into one down the hall near the elevator shaft. It has ten bedrooms, a laboratory, a control room, and a large dining-sitting room. We can work together and keep an eye on each other."

"And get on each other's nerves," Frigate said.

"I need a woman," Li Po said.

"So do all of us, except Marcelin, and maybe Nur," Turpin said. "Man, it's been a long, hard time!"

"What about Alice?" Aphra Behn said. "She needs a man."

"Don't speak for me," Alice said sharply.

Burton slammed the tabletop with a fist. "First things first!" he bellowed. Then, more softly, "We must have a common front, band together, no matter what the inconvenience. We can work out the other matters, trifling, if I may say so, at this moment. We've been through a lot together, and we can cooperate. We make a good team, despite some differences that have caused some abrasion recently. We must work together, be together, or we may be cut down one at a time. Is there anyone who won't cooperate?"

Nur said, "If anyone insists on living apart, that one is under suspicion."

There was an uproar then, stilled when Burton hit the table again.

"This bottling-up will be scratchsome, no doubt of that. But we've been ridden gallsore by worse things, and the better we work together, the sooner we'll be free to pursue our own interests."

Alice was frowning, and he knew what she was thinking. Since their final breakup, she had avoided him as much as possible. Now ...

"If we're in jail, we're in the best one in two worlds," Frigate said.

"No jail's any good," Turpin said. "You ever been in the slammer, Pete?"

"Only the one that I made for myself all my life," Frigate said. "But it was portable."

That was not true, Burton thought. Frigate has been a prisoner several times on the Riverworld, including being one of Herma

"Success in circuit lies."

Quoting himself, he would say, "The literal man litters reality"

"Well, Captain, what do we do next?" Frigate said.

The first priority was to go to their individual apartments and bring their few possessions to the large apartment down the hall. They went in a body, since it would not do to go alone, and then they picked out their bedrooms. Alice took one as far from Burton's as possible. Peter Frigate chose the apartment next to hers. Burton smiled ferociously on noting this. It was an acknowledged but mostly unspoken fact that the American was "in love" with Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves. He had been ever since, in 1964, he had seen the photographs of her at the ages of ten and eighteen in a biography of Lewis Carroll. He had written a mystery story, The Knave of Hearts, in which thirty-year-old Alice had played the amateur detective. In 1983, he had organized a public subscription drive to erect a monument to her on her unmarked grave in the Hargreaves family plot at Lyndhurst. Times were hard, however, and little money had been given. Then Frigate had died, and he still had not learned if his project had been completed. If it had, above Alice's body there was now a carved marble monument of Alice at the tea table with the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat's head above and behind her.

Meeting her had not lessened his love for her, as a cynic might expect, but had heated it. The literary attractions had become fleshly. Yet he had never said a word to her or Burton about his passion. He loved, or had loved, Burton too much to make what he would have called a dishonorable move toward her. Alice had never shown the slightest sign of feeling toward him as he did toward her. That did not necessarily mean anything. Alice was a master at concealing her feelings in certain situations. There was the public Alice, and there was the private Alice. There might also be an Alice whom even Alice did not know. Whom she would not at all want to know.