THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

"The old science-fiction concept of going through other dimensions was realized?" Frigate said.

"No. But we don't have the time for the necessarily lengthy explanation of it."

By then The Firsts thought it was their ethical duty to bring immortality and self-awareness via the wathan to all other sentient people. Many expeditions set out to do this. When one found a planet with people whose brains were capable of developing self-awareness, waf/iaw-generating machines were buried so deep in the earth that it was unlikely that they would be discovered by the aborigines.

"Why hidden?" Nur said. He was pale; he looked as if he'd been hard hit by Loga's revelations.

"Why hidden?" Loga said. "Why not just give the machines to the first self-aware generation? You should know why not. Consider your fellow human beings. The wathan generators would have been misused. There would be power struggles to monopolize them and through them the basest exploitation of others. No, the wathan generators can't be entrusted to people until they attain a certain ethical stage."

Burton didn't ask why The Firsts hadn't set up garrisons on each planet to insure that the generators were the property of all. With their scientific knowledge and ethical knowledge, they could have taught the aborigines to advance much more swiftly. But The Firsts would not consider that ethical. Besides, they wouldn't have enough of their own people to rule all the planets they found.

The faces of his companions reflected an agonizing struggle, though Frigate seemed the least affected. Nur, who had always been so flexible, so invulnerable to psychological shock, was suffering the worst. He could not accept the idea that wathans, call them souls, were synthetic. Well, not quite that. But they were formed by humanlike creatures through machines. They did not come parceled out by Allah. Nur had believed this far more deeply than some of the others who, though religious, had not had his firmness of faith.

Loga must have been aware of this.

He said, "There is no Creator unless we accept the creation, this universe, as evidence. The Firsts did, and we do. But there is no evidence whatsoever that It has any interest in Its creatures. It..."

"It?" Alice and de Marbot said.

"Yes. The Creator has no sex—as far as we know. The language of Monat's people has a unique neuter pronoun for the Creator."

"His people are The Firsts?" Tai-Peng said.

"No. The Firsts have Gone On long, long ago. Monat's people are the recipients of The Firsts' work through a line of five other peoples. These, you might say, have handed on the torch to others and then Gone On. Monat himself is just one of ten thousand of his own kind yet alive. The others have all Gone On.

"Some theologians say that the Creator has not done anything Itself to give Its sentient creatures wathans. Its divine plan leaves it to sentients to make their own salvation. But this isn't logical, since it was only an accident that the wathans were generated, and billions died with no chance of self-awareness or immortality before this. And billions, perhaps trillions, have died and will die, perished forever, before we Ethicals will have arrived to give them the wathans. So it looks as if the Creator is also indifferent to our self-awareness and immortality.

"It is up to sentients, however, wherever they live, to do what the primitive religionists believed was the Creator's prerogative."

50

BURTON WAS MUCH SHAKEN, THOUGH HE FOUND THE STORY perhaps easier to take than any of the rest, Frigate excepted. He'd always been intensely interested in religion. He'd investigated many faiths, especially the Oriental. He'd converted to Roman Catholicism, not only because it fascinated him but because doing so had gotten his wife Isabel off his back. He'd been initiated into the mysteries of Moslem Sufism, had earned the red thread of a Brahmin, had been a Sikh, and a Parsi, and had tried to convince the shrewd Brigham Young that he wanted to be a Mormon. Though he'd acted like a sincere convert and sometimes had surprisingly been overcome by patterned emotion, he'd always left the door of the faith as he'd gone in, a congenital infidel.

Even when he was very young, he had refused to accept the tenets of the Anglican Church. He'd infuriated his parents, and not even the enraged bellowings of and the thrashings given by his father had changed his mind. They had made him tend to keep his opinions and his questions to himself until he had gotten old enough that his father didn't dare attack him by word or fist.

Despite this, the orthodox concept of the soul and of its Donor had seeped through his being. Though he hadn't believed it, he hadn't thought of any other, and it hadn't been until recently that he had heard of one.

As that exasperating fellow Frigate had told him more than once when ‘Burton was angry with him, he was a broad but not deep thinker. Nevertheless, the logical extrapolation of the concept of the soul he'd heard when with Frigate and the others had impressed him. Indeed, they had convinced him.

Loga's account was a shock. Not one, though, which stirred the depths of his mind. These had already been disturbed. So, next to Frigate, he was the one who could most accept this extraordinary history.

Loga continued, "It was Monat's people who came to Earth and set up the wathan generators. This would be, approximately, 100,000 B.C."

Frigate said, moaning, "And all those who'd lived before? Beyond saving? Gone? Forever?"

"Enough thought and grief have been expended on them," Loga said. "There is nothing you can do about them, so don't be self-sadistic. As you Americans say, tough shit. It sounds callous, but it's the attitude you must adopt if you don't wish to torment yourself needlessly. Better that some may be redeemed than none at all."

The wathan generators and the wathan catchers were buried far down, so deep that they were surrounded by a heat that would melt nickel-iron.

"Catchers?" Aphra Behn said softly.

"Yes. There is one in a big shaft in the tower. Did you see it on your way up here?"

Burton said, "We saw it."

"That is the very grave problem, the pressing problem which I shall get to after a while."

From that time on, the wathans fixed themselves to or integrated with the human zygotes. When a zygote or an embryo or any of any age died, their wathans were attracted to the buried machine and caged.

"So what the Church of the Second Chance preaches is not entirely true?" Burton said.

"No. It was I who came to Jacques Gillot, La Viro, and told him what we thought he should know. I didn't reveal more than half the truth, and I lied about some things. It was justifiable because you Valleydwellers were not ready for the full truth."

"That's debatable," Burton said.

"Yes. What isn't? But I did tell Gillot that the salvation of the wathan depended upon its attaining a certain ethical stage. That was no lie."

Monat's ancestors came from a planet of a star which was neither Tau Ceti nor Arcturus. They had found a planet which had no sentients as yet, and they had made it into the Gardenworld.

"After about ten thousand years, they began resurrecting the dead children of Earth."

"Including the miscarriages and abortions, etcetera?" Burton said.

"Yes. These were developed into full-term infants. I should say, were and are being. When I left the Garden, all those who'd died under the age of five before approximately A.D. 1925 had been resurrected."

The Gardenworld project had started during the tenth century B.C. The Riverworld project had begun in the late twenty-second century A.D.

Frigate said, "What century is it now in Terrestrial chronology?"

"When I left the Garden for here it was, let's see, umh, to be precise A.D. 2009. It took me one hundred and sixty Terran years to arrive here. It took fifty years to re-form this planet. The wholesale resurrection day took place twenty-seven years after that. That would be, A.D. 2246. It is now, I'm not sure about this, A.D. 2307."