Gods of Riverworld (31 page)

“Let us do something, too,” Sophie said.

Burton said that he would go along with them; he understood why they insisted. They empathized deeply with Star Spoon because they, too, had been raped more than once. They also needed to take care of her; that compulsion, if you could call it a compulsion, was part of their natures.

“Born nurses,” Burton said to Frigate.

“How lucky can you get?”

The American was not being facetious. He envied people who wanted to use themselves for the benefit of others.

Star Spoon got up in time for breakfast. Though she drank only a little tea and ate part of a piece of toast, she was well enough to take some part in the conversation. She seemed glad to have the three women with her, and they even got her to laugh several times. However, she did not want Burton to hold her, and she responded to his attempts to talk with her with uncompleted sentences or nods or shakes of her head.

After two days, the three women left. Star Spoon immediately quit staring into space for long periods and busied herself with various projects with the Computer.

“She’s withdrawing,” Burton told Nur and Frigate. “I won’t say it’s just into herself. She seems to be burying herself with work with the Computer. She’ll stop whatever she’s doing—she won’t talk about that much—and listen while I talk. But I’ve spent hours, days, trying to get her back to her old self, and I’ve failed.”

“Yet,” Frigate said, “she’s been raped before.”

“This may have been the final trauma. The last and the unendurable wound.”

He did not tell them that she had become animated and genuinely interested for a short time when he asked her what she wanted to do to Dunaway. She had replied that she did not want to destroy his recording. He certainly deserved oblivion forever, but she could not bring herself to do that. Dunaway should be punished, if he would learn anything from it. She doubted that very much. Finally, she said that she was going to forget any punishment or any kind of retribution. She wished that she could forget about him, but she just could not.

The dullness came into her face and voice again, and she became silent.

Nur talked to her but reported that he could find no wedge to open her and let in some light. Her soul had become darkened. He hoped that it would not remain so forever.

“But you don’t know if she’ll … stay the same?” Burton said.

Nur shrugged. “No one can know. Except perhaps Star Spoon.”

Burton was frustrated and, hence, angry. He could not take his anger out on her, so he vented it on Frigate and Nur. Understanding what was affecting him, they endured his insults for a while. Then Nur said that he would see Burton again when Burton was rational. Frigate seemed to feel that he should absorb more than Nur had, perhaps for old times’ sake or perhaps because some part of him enjoyed the tongue-lashing. An hour after Nur had left, Frigate got up from his chair, threw his half-full glass against the wall, said, “I’m getting out of here,” and did so.

A few minutes later, Star Spoon entered. She looked at the spilled whiskey and his brooding face. Then, surprisingly, she went to him and kissed him on the lips.

“I’m much improved now,” she said. “I think I can be the cheery woman you want me to be, what I want to be. You’ll have no reason to worry about me from now on. That is, except…”

“I’m very happy,” he said. “I think. There’s something that is still bothering you?”

“I … I am not ready to go to bed with you yet. I would like to, but I can’t. I do believe, though, Dick, that the time will come when I can, and I’ll be completely willing. Just bear with me. The time will come.”

“As I said, I’m very happy. I can wait. Only, this is so sudden. What caused this metamorphosis?”

“I don’t know. It just happened.”

“Very curious,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll know someday. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t mind if we kissed just a little longer, would you? I promise not to get carried away.”

“Of course not.”

Life for Burton returned to the routine it had had before Dunaway’s violation. Star Spoon was more talkative, even aggressive at times during the parties. Verbally aggressive, in that she was more willing to argue, to present her views. However, she spent as much time with the Computer as she had when she was deeply troubled. Burton did not mind. He had his own projects.

28

All human beings, Nur thought, reported that time seemed to them to have gone much slower when they were infants. Time speeded up a little when they became prejuveniles, got a little faster when they were juveniles, and stepped up the pace even more when they became young adults. When you were in your sixties, what had been a smooth and slow stream, a leisurely flowing and broad river when one was young, became a narrow roaring channel. By the seventies, it was a short waterfall, time hurtling by. By the eighties, it was a deep mountain cataract, water, time itself, shooting by, disappearing over the edge of life, which was near one’s feet, a precipice over which time rushed by as if eager to destroy itself. And you, too.

If you were an old man or woman of ninety, looking back, childhood seemed to be a long, long, long, highway reaching to an unimaginable distant horizon. But the last forty years … how short they had been, how swift.

Then you died, and you awoke on a bank of The River and your body was that which you had when you were twenty-five, except that any physical defects you had had then were repaired. It would seem then that, being young again, you would experience time as a slowed-down stream. Childhood would not seem so remote in your memory, nor would it seem to you as long as it had been before you became twenty-five again.

Not so. The young body held a brain young in tissue but old with memory and experience. If you were eighty when you died on Earth and had lived forty years on the Riverworld, and thus were one hundred and twenty years old, in fact, then time was a series of rapids. It hurried you along, hustled and pushed you. Keep going, keep going, it said. No rest for you. You don’t have the time. No rest for me either.

Nur’s living body had existed for one hundred and sixty-one years. And so, when he looked back at his childhood, he saw it as an everstretching length. The older he got, the longer childhood seemed to him. If he should live to be a thousand, he would think that childhood had lasted seven hundred years; young adulthood, two hundred; middle age, fifty-nine; time since then; a year.

His companions had mentioned this phenomenon now and then, but they did not dwell on it. Only he, as far as he knew, had pondered about it. It shocked him when Frigate mentioned that they had been here only a few months. Actually, almost seven months had passed. Burton had put off going to his private world for a few weeks. Or so he had said. In reality, he had taken two months.

What made it easier for them—himself, too—to be unaware of the passage of time was that they no longer watched the calendar. They could have told the Computer to display the month and day on the wall every morning, but here, where time meant no more than it had to Homer’s lotus eaters, they had neglected to do so. They should have been shaken when Turpin announced that he was celebrating Christmas, but they had had no reference point to measure the passage of time.

It was this failure to notice the passage of time, this super
mañana
attitude, that had caused them to put off something they had been eager to do shortly after getting here. That was the resurrection of those comrades who had died while trying to get to the tower. Joe Miller the titanthrop, Loghu, Kazz the Neanderthal, Tom Mix, Umslopogaas, John Johnston, and many others. These had earned the right to be brought to the tower, and the eight who had made it had intended to do that. They spoke about it now and then, though not often. Somehow, for various reasons, they kept putting it off.

Nur could not excuse himself for having been shot along with them in time’s millrace. He, too, had neglected this very important deed. It was true that he had been even busier than they with various research projects, but it would not take the Computer more than half an hour to locate them—if they could be found—and a few minutes to set up arrangements to raise them.

If you lived a million years, would your childhood then seem to have lasted seven hundred and fifty thousand years? And would the last two hundred and fifty years seem only a century? Could the mind play that sort of gigantic trick on itself?

Time, viewed objectively, flowed always at the same speed. A machine watching day-by-day activities of the people in the Rivervalley would see them as having, every day, the same amount of time to do whatever they did. But, inside these people, would not time have speeded up? And would they not be doing less and less with every day? Perhaps not in the outward physical actions such as eating breakfast, taking baths, exercising, and so forth. But what about mental and emotional processes? Would they be slower? Would not the process of changing themselves for the better, the ostensible goal set for them by the Ethicals, be slowed down, too? If this was so, the Ethicals should have given them more than a hundred years to achieve the moral and spiritual near-perfection necessary for Going On.

There was, however, one undeniable realistic reason why one hundred years was the limit for this group of people. The energy needed to fill the grails, to run the tower, and to resurrect the dead, was derived from the heat from this planet’s molten nickel-iron core. The available energy was enormous, but so was the consumption of it. The Ethicals might have figured out that a hundred years for this group, people who had lived from 100,000
B.C.
through
A.D.
1983, and a hundred years for the next group, those who had lived after
A.D.
1983, would eat up almost all the tappable energy. With all the heat that the thermionic converters drew, two hundred years’ withdrawal would cool off the core to the point where it could no longer supply the requirements.

Loga, the Ethical, had never mentioned this energy limitation. He must have known it, and it must have caused him anguish and guilt. Nur, having thought of this factor, had asked the Computer to give him the computation for the energy needed for the two projects. And the answer had been what Nur had expected. Yes, even the core of this planet, slightly larger than Earth’s, would lose its white-hot glow and become red and dim within two centuries.

Loga’s parents, siblings, and cousins were still in the Rivervalley. Every one of them had been killed at least once, and none had Gone On. Loga had interfered with the project and gotten rid of his fellow Ethicals and the Ethical Agents so that his family might live longer than the time allotted to them. And, Loga hoped, attain that level where they could Go On.

That did not mean, however, that this project, the first, would not be terminated when the hundred years were up. He could salvage his loved ones by making sure that their body-recordings would not be erased and their
wathans
released to float for as long as the universe lasted or perhaps longer. He could end the first group and start the next group on schedule. The slight deviation in the procedure would be that his family would continue to live in The Valley. They would be part of the next group and thus get an extra century.

If that were so, why had Loga not just arranged that the Computer would not report that certain persons who should have been disposed of were still living? Loga had been able to fix it so that the Computer had operated illegally in far more noticeable matters.

Probably, Loga had not wanted to take the chance that he could get by with the minor matter—major, from his viewpoint. He had to assure his complete control, even if trying to do this made the risks far greater. He knew that a year or two before the end of this project, a spaceship would arrive from the Garden-world. It would hold a crew of Ethicals and the body-records of the people for the second project. Loga had to insure that the newcomers would not interfere with him. He had set things up so that the newcomers would be seized or killed when they unsuspectingly got off the ship in the hangar.

Unfortunately, somebody had gotten to Loga, killed him, and erased his body-recording.

All evidence pointed to the Mongolian female agent who had been killed by Nur. But Nur had very little evidence to go by. He had no idea how she had gotten into the tower, what her role was or what it had been intended to be, or, even, whether she was still not hiding someplace in the tower.

Nur and his companions were supposed to have worked on this mystery until it was solved. However, everybody except himself seemed to have neglected it. They were too occupied with the power and the pleasures the tower gave them. Undoubtedly, they had intended to try to solve the enigma, but they had no idea of how much time had passed.

Nur wondered if it would do any good to call this neglect to their attention. He had gotten nowhere in his efforts to clear matters up via the Computer. Why would they do any better?

Yet it was Alice Hargreaves who had thought of the way to trick the Computer shortly after they had gotten into the magic labyrinth, the tower that was also the Computer. Not he, Nur, not any of the others. He knew, however, from observing them, that they just did not think that solving the mystery was urgent. In fact, nothing seemed urgent to them now except enjoying the treasures of the Computer. And they were in no hurry to get all of those.

They were wrong in thinking that. Nur could see another crisis speeding toward them. Li Po had launched that when he had resurrected people without much thought about the effects. Turpin had then raised many whom he had known on Earth and some he had first known in The Valley. These, in turn, had raised those they wanted to have with them. And so on. Turpinville was already crowded; Turpin was going to oust any more newcomers. They would not care; they would just move into one of the unoccupied worlds or into an apartment suite. And there they would continue the populating.

Most of the people brought in had never even heard of computers, not even those primitive and limited ones of Earth technology. Here they were introduced to a machine that made them, in a sense, demigods. But, being human, many of them would misuse the power through accident or design. Williams, for instance, had raised those involved in the Ripper murders just as a rather malicious joke. Nur could not see that there was any harm in that except that Netley might abuse his power. The others seemed to be decent people. Gull had become born again, as the curious Christian phraseology put it, and the three women were not vicious or power-hungry. The men that they had resurrected to be their companions might be another matter, however. And many of those brought to Turpinville had not changed much since they had been on Earth. A town full of those who had been on Earth pimps, whores, drug sellers, bullies, and killers held much danger. Especially when they could operate the Computer.