GODS OF RIVERWORLD

25

Burton waved a fly away. "Did you have to be so authentic?"

"There are mosquitoes, too. I have to retreat into my stately mansion at dusk because of them. I don't want life here to be an air-conditioned vermin-free paradise. There was a time when I cursed flies, mosquitoes and ants and wondered why God put them on Earth to bedevil us. Now I know. They are a source of pleasure. When they've been bugging the hell out of you—no pun intended—and you get away from them, get to some place where they can't reach you, you find the zero of their presence to be a plus-one pleasure. I put up with them so I can enjoy their absence."

Star Spoon looked at him as if she found him strange. Burton, however, understood him. To know full pleasure you had also to know unpleasure. The existence of evil could be justified. Without it, how would you know that good was good? Perhaps, though, that was not necessary. If it were, why had the Ethicals worked so hard to eliminate evil?

At that moment, a woman came out of the house. She was gorgeous, auburn-haired, green-eyed, pale-ski

Frigate, smiling, introduced her. "Sophie Lefkowitz. I met her at a science-fiction convention in 1955. We corresponded and met occasionally at conventions after that. She died in 1979 of cancer. Her grandparents came over from Russia to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1900, and her father married a woman descended from Sephardic Jews who came to New Amsterdam in 1652. The fu

"Charmed, I'm sure," said Burton, who meant it. "But you warned against resurrecting writers, remember?"

"They're not all rotten."

Sophie was sprightly and intelligent, though too fond of puns. She also seemed very grateful to Frigate for raising her from the dead, and he seemed delighted with her.

"Of course, we're going to resurrect others. We'd get on each other's nerves if we didn't have other companions. That takes a lot of time judging the candidates, though."

"He's looking for perfection, and he isn't going to get it," Sophie said. "The perfect ones have Gone On. I say, pick those who seem reasonably compatible, and if they don't work out, they can always move out."

"The way things are going," Star Spoon said, "the tower is going to bulge with people. Everybody who's resurrected starts resurrecting others."

"It can house over two million people quite comfortably," Sophie said.

"But if everybody who's resurrected brings in four more, it wouldn't take long at an exponential rate for the tower to fill," Burton said.

"Not only that," Frigate said, "but it may get worse. I was talking to Tom Turpin the other day. He said that two couples in his world are trying to have children. They've had the Computer eliminate from their diet the contraceptive chemicals that make them sterile. Tom was angry. He told them that if the women did get pregnant, they'd have to leave Turpinland. But they said they didn't care."

They were silent for a while, aghast at the news. The Ethicals had insured that no children would be born, because there was not enough room on the Riverworld for an expanding population. Moreover, the stage, as it were, had to become empty so that those born on Earth after a.d. 1983 could be resurrected.

"The whole project is going to the dogs," Frigate said.

"To utter hell and damnation," Burton said. "If it's not already there."

Sophie said, smiling, "This doesn't look like Hell to me." She waved a hand to indicate their private world. From nearby came the songs of birds, anachronistic notes, since there were no birds in the Mesozoic, and the chirping of some raccoons, also out of their era. From over the edge of the monolith came the deep gurgling cries of brontosaurs and the express-train rumbling of a tyra

"It's only temporary," Burton said.

The androids, Ro

"But some people do change their characters for the better," Frigate said. "They do it consciously and with effort. Their will manages to overcome their conditioning and even their basic temperament."

"I'll admit that free will sometimes plays a part in some people," Burton said. "However, only a few do use their free will effectively, and they often fail. Even so, most people are, in a sense, robots. The nonrobots, the lucky few, might be able to exercise their free will only because their genes allow them to. Thus, even free will depends upon genetic determinism."

"I may as well tell you now, perhaps I should have told you sooner," Frigate said, "but I've asked the Computer if the Ethicals had done any work on free will and determinism. Not in a philosophical but in a scientific sense. The Computer told me that it had an enormous amount of data because the first Ethicals, the people preceding Monat's, had worked on that subject as had Monat's people and their successors, the Earthchildren raised on the Gardenworld. I didn't have time to review all the data or even a small part of it, and I probably wouldn't have understood it if I did have time. I asked for a summary of the conclusions. The Computer said that the project was still going, but it could give me the results as of now.

"The Ethicals long ago charted all chromosomes, fixed their exact function, and analyzed the interrelationships of the genes. Charted their individual and interacting fields. Which is why, when they resurrected us, our malfunctioning genes had been replaced with healthy ones. We were raised in perfect physical, chemical and electrical condition. Any faults from then on were psychological. Of course, our psychic and social conditioning was not removed. If we were to get rid of these, it was strictly up to the individual. He or she had to use free will, if he or she had any or wished to use it."

"Why didn't you tell me about this?" Burton said.

"Don't get angry. I just wanted you to express your opinion and then show you the truth."

"You wanted me to go out on a limb so you could cut it off!"

"Why not?" Frigate said, smiling. "You're such an overpowering talker and so opinionated, so dogmatic, so self-righteous, that... well, I thought that for once I could make you listen instead of trying to dominate the conversation."

"If it helps you get rid of your resentment," Burton said, also smiling. "There was a time when I would have been very angry at you. But, I, too, have changed."

"Yes, but you'll make me pay for this sometime."

"No, I won't," Burton said. "I'll use my free will to learn this lesson, I'll keep and treasure it."