THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

"I suggest that the wathan is so closely co

"That is why the Ethicals have resurrected idiots and imbeciles elsewhere—if our speculations are correct—so that these may get special treatment. Through the medical science of the Ethicals, the retarded are enabled to have fully developed brains. Hence, they also have highly developed wathans with a full potentiality for a choice between good and evil."

"And," Nur said, "the opportunity to become super-wathans and so reunited with God. I've been listening carefully to you, Burton. I don't agree with much of what you've said. One implication is that God doesn't care about His souls. He wouldn't allow them to float around as unconscious things. He has made provision for all of them."

"Perhaps God—if there is one—doesn't care," Burton said. "There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.

"Anyway, I argue that the human being without a wathan has no free will. That is, the ability to make choices between or among moral alternatives. To surpass the demands of body and environment and personal inclination. To lift one's self, as it were, by the self's bootstraps. Only the wathan has the free will and the self-awareness. But I admit that it has to express these through the vehicle of the body. And I admit that the wathan closely interacts with and is affected by the body.

"Indeed, the wathan must get its personality traits, most of them, anyway, from the body."

Frigate said, "Well, then. Aren't we back where we started? We still can't make a clear distinction between the wathan and the body. If the wathan furnishes the concept of the / and the free will, it's still dependent upon the body for its character traits and everything else in the genetic and nervous systems. These are actually images which it absorbs. Or photocopies. So, in that sense, the wathan is only a copy, not the original.

"Thus, when the body dies, it stays dead. The wathan floats off, whatever that means. It has the duplicated emotions and thoughts and all that which make up a persona. It also has the free will and the self-awareness if it's reattached to a duplicate body. But it isn't the same person."

"What you've just proved," Aphra Behn said, "is that there is no soul, not in the way it's commonly conceived of. Or, if there is one, it's superfluous, it has nothing to do with the immortality of the individual."

Tai-Peng spoke for the first time since Burton had brought up the subject.

"I'd say that the wathan part is all that matters. It's the only immortal part, the only thing the Ethicals can preserve. It must be the same thing as the ka of the Chancers."

"Then the wathan is a half-assed thing!" Frigate cried. "A part only of me, the creature that died on Earth! I can't truly be resurrected unless my original body is resurrected!"

"It's the part that God wants and which he will absorb," Nur said.

"Who wants to be absorbed? I want to be I, the whole creature, the entire!"

"You will have the ecstasy of being part of God's body."

"So what? I won't be I anymore!"

"But on Earth you as an adult weren't the same person you were at fifty," Nur said. "Your whole being, at every second of your life, was and is in the process of change. The atoms composing your body at birth were not the same as when you were eight. They'd been replaced by other atoms. Nor were they the same when you were fifty as when you were forty.

"Your body changed, and with it your mind, your store of memories, your beliefs, your attitudes, your reactions. You were never the same.

"And when—or if—you, the creature, the creation, should return to the Creator, you will change then. It will be the last change. You will abide forever in the Unchanging. Unchanging because He has no need for changing. He is perfect."

"Bullshit!" Frigate said, his face red, his hands clenched. "There is the essence of me, the unchanging thing that wants to live forever, however imperfect! Though I strive for perfection! Which may not be attainable! But the striving is the thing, that which makes life endurable, though sometimes life itself becomes almost unendurable! I want to be I, forever lasting! No matter what the change, there is something in me, an unchanging identity, the soul, whatever, that resists death, loathes it, declares it to be u

"If the Creator has a plan for us, why doesn't He tell us what it is? Are we so stupid that we can't understand it? He should tell it to us directly! The books that the prophets, the revelators, and the revisionists wrote, claiming to have authority from God Himself, to have taken His dictations, these so-called revelations are false! They make no sense! Besides, they contradict each other! Does God make contradictory statements?"

"They only seem contradictory," Nur said. "When you've attained a higher stage of thinking, you'll see that the contradictions are not what they appear to be."

"Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis! That's all right for human logic! But I still maintain that we shouldn't have been left in ignorance. We should have been shown the Plan. Then we could make our choice, go along with the Plan or reject it!"

"You're still in a lower stage of development, and you seem to be stuck in it," Nur said. "Remember the chimpanzees. They got to a certain level, but they could not progress further. They made a wrong choice, and..."

"I'm not an ape! I'm a man, a human being!"

"You could be more than that," Nur said.

They came to another bay. This, however, led not to a shaft but to an entrance, huge, arched. Beyond it was a chamber the enormity of which staggered them. It was at least half a mile long and wide. Within it were thousands of tables on each of which were devices the purposes of which were not obvious.

Skeletons by the hundreds lay on the floor and the upper parts of more hundreds were on the desks or tables. Thigh bones and pelvic bones lay on the seats of chairs, and beneath the seats were more leg bones. Death had struck instantly and en masse.

There wasn't a single garment anywhere. The people working the experiments had been nude.

Burton said, "The Council of Twelve which interrogated me was clothed. Perhaps they do

Some of the equipment on the tables was still ru

They walked on murmuring about the strangeness of the devices. When they'd gone a quarter of a mile, Frigate said, "Look at that!"

He pointed at a wheeled chair which sat in a broad aisle between tables. A jumble of bones, including a skull, lay on the seat, and leg and foot bones were at its base.