Gods of Riverworld (5 page)

Burton turned the alarm off.

“The unknown could learn what the combination for the alarm is from the Computer. So I asked for one that I could set myself. There’s no way the Computer can know which I chose, not as long as I blocked the line of sight from its screen with my body when I set the alarm.”

“Admirable,” Frigate said. “But our bedrooms are soundproofed. How are we going to hear the alarm from there?”

The walls, floor, and ceilings were several inches thick and packed with circuits and power lines, most of them unused. Burton could have ordered the Computer to set up a circuit that would set off alarms in all rooms when the door alarm went off. But the unknown could override these circuits.

Burton was thinking about what to do when Frigate spoke.

“We could have the Computer make mass detectors. These could be set inside the bedroom doors so that, even if we didn’t hear the apartment door alarm, we’d hear anybody trying to get into our bedrooms. These should be activated and deactivated by some sort of hand signals. The unknown
can
eavesdrop on us through the Computer. He’s probably doing it now. But, as far as I know, he can’t see us unless he turns on a screen. And we can see that.”

“You say, as far as we know,” Burton said. “Isn’t it possible that he could turn on a screen but make it invisible to us?”

“I suppose so. I don’t really know enough about Ethical science to be sure of what can or can’t be done.”

“Then the unknown may be also watching us.”

“Yes. What we should do is erect some sort of tent in this room and write communications to one another inside it. Or the Computer could make us a soundproof cubicle. Even the floor would be soundproof. The trouble with that is that its walls might contain detectors put in by the order of the unknown. We’d have no way of checking that. Come to think of it, a tent made of cloth could contain detectors, too.”

Burton became angry. “Is there nothing we can do?”

“We can do the best we can and hope that it’ll be enough.”

“We’ll keep the door alarm,” Burton said. “I’ll write the combination on paper. You’ll memorize it, and I’ll make sure that the papers are destroyed.”

“Destroy the papers with a beamer,” Frigate said. “If you just burned them and crumbled the ashes before dropping them in a disposal hole, the Computer might be able to reconstruct the combination.”

Burton said that they would have to make hoods to put over them when they reset the combination. They could make sure that the hoods did not contain detectors by using their bedsheets.

“We can’t trust the mass detectors,” he added. “The Computer will make them for us, but the unknown might hide turn-off devices in them.”

“True,” Frigate said. “He may have installed a turn-off in your burglar alarm, too.”

“Then anything the Computer makes for us could betray us?”

“Sure. Including the food. The unknown could order poison put in it.”

“By God! There must be something we can do to fight this devil!”

Nur, who had been standing near them and smiling slightly, spoke.

“If the unknown had planned to kill us, he would have done it before now. I suggest that if the unknown can override even Loga’s commands, then he or she must be an Ethical. If so, why hasn’t he resurrected Monat and the others? That would be his first thought and his first duty, after he’s immobilized us, of course. Which, I don’t have to point out, he’s accomplished. The only thing is…”

He hesitated so long that Burton said, “Yes? What is it?”

“Would any Ethical erase Loga’s body-recording? I think not. So … the unknown can’t be an Ethical. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Patience, my friend. We are not on a schedule. Unless … it is Loga who’s behind all this.”

Burton exploded. “We’ve been through that line of reasoning! Why would he do this?”

Nur shrugged skinny shoulders and raised the palms of his long hands.

“I don’t know. I doubt that it is Loga. Would Loga erase his own body-recording? Of course not.”

“But he could have a secret resurrection chamber some place in the tower,” Frigate said.

“Just what I was going to say,” Nur said. “We still don’t have an explanation for such irrational conduct. But I keep thinking of the footfalls Frigate heard, or thought he heard, in the corridor outside the room where we were celebrating our victory over the malfunctioning Computer. Loga was disturbed when Pete told him about it. He ran out into the corridor and down to the intersecting hall, and he looked up and down the lift shaft. Then he asked the Computer some questions, but these were in his language, and he talked so fast we did not understand them.”

“I asked him what he was so upset about,” Burton said. “He replied that he wasn’t anymore and that Pete’s experiences had made Pete so paranoiac that he was hearing sounds that did not exist. Pete’s suspicions were infectious. So Loga said.”

“That’s like throwing a stone through your own window!” Frigate said. “There was nobody more paranoiac than Loga!”

“If he was, then we’ve been on the wrong side,” Nur said calmly. “Those who follow a crazy man are as crazy as he. However, talking about that is useless. What do we do
now?
”

Frigate’s sarcastic suggestion that they pile furniture by the door was, realistically, the best offered. It was an inconvenient arrangement if they were to use the door much, but, at the moment, they planned to stay within the suite.

Moreover, there now seemed little chance that the unknown could poison their food and water. Frigate and Nur got simplified schematics of the e-m converters and studied them. The unknown could cut off the power to the converters and so starve them. But the food was produced by e-m conversion via pre-programmed circuits that the unknown could not change. He had no way of introducing poison into them. But their drinking and bathwater came through pipes, and the unknown could put toxic substances into them.

Frigate and Nur made arrangements whereby the water would be produced from the converters in the rooms. The Computer did not balk at producing the necessary plumbing for them to connect the water outlets to the converters. The eight had a plumbing job to do, but their inexperience was overcome by instruction books and tools furnished by the Computer. Meanwhile, the eight would get their water in bowls and pails from the converters.

“This seems useless and stupid,” Li Po said. “There are so many other ways the unknown could get at us.”

“Nevertheless, we must do what we can to avoid his tricks,” Nur said. “That is, if he has any up his sleeve. And if he does indeed exist.”

5

“I’m going to bed,” Burton said.

“I’ll eat first,” Nur said.

The little Moor looked as fresh as if he had just had eight hours of very good sleep. By then, everybody but de Marbot and Behn was in the big room. Burton left it to Nur to explain the door blockade, and he walked down the hall a few steps and entered his apartment within an apartment. It consisted of three rooms: a living room twenty-four feet square, luxuriously furnished yet usable as a workroom, a bedroom, and a bath. Burton unbuckled the belt holding the holster, which encased the beamer, and he shed his single garment, a scarlet kilt decorated by bright yellow male lion-shapes. The floor was covered with a thick carpet like that in the big community entrance room. The inwoven figures were different, each consisting of three interlocking circles. The walls were pale cream, but a word from Burton to the Computer could change the color to whatever he wished. He could also order any shape or symbol, anything, imposed on the basic color. Here and there were paintings that looked like oil originals but had been reproduced by the Computer. No art specialist could have distinguished the original from the copy, since the two were exactly alike down to the molecular level.

Burton crawled into bed and was asleep at once. He awoke feeling drugged and with a vague memory of a nightmare. A hyena twice as tall as he had threatened him with fangs that were curving steel swords. He remembered parrying the scimitarlike teeth with a fencing foil and the hyena laughing at him. The cachinnations had been remarkably like his.

“I’ve been called, quite unjustifiably, a human hyena,” he murmured, and he rolled out of bed. He would have to make the bed himself, though androids—protein robots—were available to do it. For the time being, no androids would be admitted into the suite. They were a potential danger because the unknown might have ordered them to attack the eight.

Burton exercised vigorously for an hour, then ordered breakfast from the Computer. The coffee was the best that had ever been produced on Earth; the shirred eggs, the best; the brown bread toast, exquisitely heated and covered with the best butter Earth had ever known. There was also a jam to send the palate into ecstasy, and a fruit unknown to Earth but tasting somewhat of muskmelon.

He brushed his teeth and took a medium-warm shower despite the possibility that the water could be poisoned. As Frigate had said, if the unknown had intended to kill them off, he could have done it by now.

He selected a dark green kilt and a long flowing robe of green decorated with a design of yellow birds of an unknown species. Then he activated a wall-screen to see what was going on in the main room. Li Po, Nur, Behn, and Turpin were sitting in chairs and reading the lists of control limits. The furniture was still stacked in front of the door.

Burton went into the main room, greeted them, and said, “Have the others reported in?”

Nur said that they had. Burton went to an auxiliary computer and activated the screens in the bedrooms of those absent. He could not see them, but he could hear their voices as they said that they would be right out. A few minutes later, Alice, Frigate, and de Marbot appeared. Alice was wearing a loose Chinese-looking robe, scarlet with green dragons, and brocade slippers with turned-up toes. Her short dark straight hair shone as if it had been brushed many times. Her only makeup was a light red lipstick. She could have used some powder to cover the dark smudges under her eyes.

“I didn’t sleep well at all,” she said as she sat down in a chair. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind that someone might be watching me.”

“If we could trust the androids, we could have them put paper over the bedrooms,” Frigate said. “That’d block out the screens.”

“If … if,” Burton growled. “I’m getting sick of these almighty ifs. I’m fed up with being in a cage. As soon as we find out what we can and can’t do, we’ll conduct a manhunt. It’ll be dangerous, but I, for one, will not keep on hiding like a rabbit in its burrow. We’re not rabbits. We’re human. And human beings are not meant to be cooped up like pigeons.”

“Rabbits and pigeons,” Frigate muttered.

Burton swung around to face him. “What the devil do you mean by that?”

“The rabbits and the pigeons don’t have the slightest idea why they’re caged. They don’t know they’re being fattened up to be eaten. But we, we don’t know why Loga was done away with or what’s planned for us. We’re worse off than the rabbits and pigeons. They, at least, are dumb but happy. We’re dumb but unhappy.”

“Speak for yourself,” Nur said. “I would like to point out to those who may not have thought of it that this list may be incomplete. The unknown may have kept certain powers from the list. Even if he has not done so, he can eliminate almost any of those he wishes to eliminate.”

There was a long silence. The Chinese rose, went to a converter, and ordered a huge goblet of rye whiskey. Burton grimaced but said nothing to him. It would have been useless, and Li Po’s defiance would lessen Burton’s authority.

Li Po sipped the rye, belched to indicate his appreciation, and went back to his chair. He said, “I need a woman!”

Burton had thought that Alice was past blushing, but the Victorian in her was a long time dying.

“You’ll just have to keep jacking off,” Burton said. “We have enough problems without resurrecting a woman just so she can drain off your lust.”

Alice’s face became redder. Aphra Behn laughed.

“It’s unnatural,” Li Po said. “My yang needs its yin.”

Burton laughed because “yang” meant “human excrement” in a West African language. Po asked him why he was laughing. When Burton explained, the Chinese laughed uproariously.

“Well, if I can’t have a woman, I’ll work out my desire with exercise. What say we fence for an hour or so, rapiers or sabers?”

“I need it, too,” Burton said, “but you’re drunk. You’d be no match.”

Li Po protested loudly and shrilly that he could have drunk twice as much and still beat Burton with any weapon Burton cared to choose. Burton turned away from him, and the Chinese staggered to his chair, fell into it, and began snoring. Frigate and Turpin carried him to the bedroom door. This, however, was locked with Po’s codeword, which his bearers did not know. They placed him on the hall floor and returned to the big room.

“We’ll all be behaving like Po if we have to stay here,” Turpin said. He went to a converter and ordered a tall glass of gin with a lemon twist. Aphra, who had a glass of the same, raised it and said, “A toast to craziness! This may be a jail, but it beats Newgate.”

She knew what she was talking about; she had twice been in debtors’ prison.

She could also afford her cavalier attitude, though it was not realistic. She had a lover, de Marbot, with whom she was happy, and she had every luxury she’d ever had on Earth and many more. Except freedom. That, however, did not bother this adaptable and cheery woman just now.

What was keeping some of them from studying their peril was the vast potentialities of the list. Where they should have been examining what limited them, they were considering what gratifications it offered. Though Burton could understand their excitement over this, he was disturbed by their lack of concern for the dangers that were—as it were—just around the corner.

Judging from their facial expressions, Nur was the only one thinking of the unknown enemy. Burton felt like kicking the others. Instead, he slapped his hands together sharply, jolting them from their dreams.

“That’s enough nonsense,” Burton said. “The situation is serious. Deadly. There’s no time to think of anything but how we’re going to fight the enemy. If we defeat him, you may play all you want. Till then … The unknown has a great advantage over us in that he can use the Computer better than we. But if we can learn how to use it against him, it becomes our ally. Let me remind you that the Computer is not just that huge protein electroneural mass at the bottom of the central shaft. The Computer is also the tower, this vast building in which we reside. The
brain
is the central protein organ, the clearinghouse. But the majority of circuits are in the floors, the walls, and the ceilings of the tower. We’re in the heart, the nerves of the enemy. And we can find ways to strike at that heart, those nerves. Or perhaps I should say, ways to seize them and use them as weapons.”