“What is the purpose of this?” de Marbot said.
Burton shrugged and said, “We’ll have to find out. Not just now, though.”
The next chamber admitted them into what seemed to be an Arabian desert. Under a hot sun was an expanse of sand and rock, mostly a plain but with hills here and there. The air was much drier than that in the first two places. About three miles distant was what looked like a large oasis. Tall palm trees grew from grass, and the moving waters of a lake in the midst of the trees gleamed in the midmorning sunlight.
Near them were the skeletons of three animals. Burton picked up a skull and said, “Lion.”
“C’est remarquable,” de Marbot muttered, reverting in his wonder to his native tongue. Then, in English, “Three different worlds. Lilliputian, yes. Yet large enough for all practical purposes, though I do not know about the practicality.”
“I’d venture that these are … were … retreats for the Council,” Burton said. “Sort of, ah, vacation areas. Each made his world according to his wishes, his own temperamental inclinations, and retired here now and then for spiritual and, of course, physical satisfaction.”
De Marbot wished to look into all of the vast rooms, but Burton said that they had plenty of time for that later. They should continue their patrol.
The Frenchman opened his mouth to say something. Burton said, “Yes, I know. But what I’d like to do is see all that we can as swiftly as we can. It’s better than having the Computer show us everything while we’re lolling about in our rooms. Besides, how do we know that the Computer is showing us everything? It can delete as the Snark wishes it to, and we can’t be sure that it’s not doing so. We have to make a be-there visit. We’ll make a flying patrol, be birds, get an overall view of everything. Then we can take our time and get the details.”
“You mistake me,” de Marbot said. “I was merely going to comment on the state of my stomach. It is complaining of its emptiness.”
They took their chairs through the tube in the center of the floor to the next level, went down a corridor to the nearest door, opened it, and walked inside. It was a suite unfurnished except for a converter against a wall. De Marbot selected for lunch escargots bourguignonne with French bread and a glass of white wine. Thirty seconds later, he removed the dishes and silverware and glass and napkin. His blue eyes were big with admiration as he sniffed the delicate aroma. “Sacrée merde! Never on Earth could I get such perfection, such ecstasy! Yet surely the Ethicals must have gotten the original from some Parisian chef and copied it! What could be that genius’ name? I would like to resurrect him, if only to thank him!”
“Someday, I’ll order a deliberately badly cooked meal just for the sake of variety,” Burton said. “Don’t you find all this exquisiteness, this perfection, tiring? Every meal is a gustatory triumph.”
“Never!” de Marbot said. He rolled his eyes on seeing Burton’s eclectic choice, buttermilk biscuits and squabs marinated in cream and a schooner of dark beer.
“Barbaric! And I thought that you did not like beer?”
“I do when I eat ham or squabs.”
“De gustibus non disputandum. Whoever said that was an idiot.”
A section of wall folded out to make a table, and they ate.
“Délicieux!” De Marbot cried, and he smacked his lips loudly.
Until three weeks ago, he had been whip-thin. Now his face was becoming moonlike, and a slight roll was entrenching itself around his waist.
“There is a glacé de viande I must try,” de Marbot said.
“Now?”
“No. I am no pig. Later. Tonight.”
For dessert the Frenchman had a fig soufflé and a glass of red wine.
“Superb!”
They washed up in the bathroom and returned to the chairs. “We should be walking this off,” Burton said.
“We’ll work it off with saberplay before supper.”
7
The illuminated halls they passed through had been dark a few seconds before they got to them. Heat detectors in the walls reacted to their bodies and activated switches that turned the lighting on ahead of them and off behind them. Because of this, the unknown probably knew exactly where they were. All he had to do was to command the Computer to give him images of every lit area. However, he could not spend all his time just watching the screens; he would have to sleep. If, however, by some means the tenants managed to get on his track, he could be awakened by the Computer.
The two came down a vertical shaft and came out into a hall. Halfway down this, they stopped their chairs and got out of them. A transparent outward-leaning wall enclosed a vast well glowing brightly from a source below them. The upper part of the enclosure was empty, but a few hundred feet below them was the illumination: a shifting dancing whirling mass of what seemed to be tiny suns. De Marbot got two pairs of dark spectacles from a box on a ledge and handed one pair to Burton. Burton put them on and looked for the twelfth time at the most gorgeous display he had ever seen, more than eighteen billion souls collected and made visible in one place. The Ethicals called them wathans, a word more precise than the English soul. These were the entities of artificial origin, each of which had been attached to an Earth-person the moment that the sperm and the egg united to form the zygote of that person. These remained attached to the head of each individual until he or she died, and it was these that gave Homo sapiens its self-consciousness and held its immortal part.
Each was invisible unless seen with a special device, in this situation the polarized material of the wellwall. They were glowing spheres of many colors and hues, with tentacles that shot out and contracted as the spheres whirled. Seemed to whirl, rather. Burton and de Marbot were not seeing the reality, the whole; they were seeing what their brains could grasp, a reshaping formed by their nervous systems.
The wathans, the souls, danced or seemed to dance, whirling, glowing, changing colors, passing through one another, occasionally seeming to coalesce and form a superwathan, which broke up into the original spheres after a few seconds.
Were they, when free of the human bodies, their hosts, conscious? Did they think when in this free state? No one knew. None of those who had been dead remembered anything of their existence when they were resurrected and the wathan was united again with the physical body.
The two stood rapt for a while before the awesome wonder surely unsurpassed in the universe.
“To think,” Burton murmured, “that I have been part of that spectacle, that glory, many times.”
“And to think,” de Marbot said, “that if the Ethicals had not made these, our bodies would have been dust for thousands of years and would have stayed dust until even dust had died.”
Far below, seen dimly through the coruscating nebula, was a great gray mass. It seemed to be shapeless, but Loga had assured them that it was not.
“That is the top of the titanic mass of organized protein that is the central part of the Computer,” he had said. “It is the living but unselfconscious brain, the body of which is the tower and the grailstones and the resurrection chamber.”
The “brain” was not, however, shaped like the human brain when within the skull.
“It resembles, more than anything, one of your great Gothic cathedrals with its flying buttresses and spires and gargoyle-decorated exterior and doors and windows. It is enveloped in water holding sugar in suspension. The brain would collapse and become a gray ooze if the liquid were removed. It is a lovely thing to see, and you must do so sometime.”
It must be vast indeed to be visible from where they stood, and through the glowing wathans. It was three miles below them, and they could see only a part of the top as a gray cloud. The rest of it occupied an expanded part of the well, a dome.
So far, the tenants had not ventured to the level where they could view the brain in its entirety. Nor did Burton plan on going there now. Instead, he returned to his chair and led his companion to the other side of the tower and down a shaft. Burton coun
ted the levels passed—he had counted them during his first ascent from the level that was his destination—until he came to the one containing Loga’s hidden room.
Before reaching the room, Burton stopped his chair. The Frenchman pulled up alongside him and said, “What is it?”
Burton shook his head and put a finger to his lips. He could see no mobile wall-screen, but the unknown might have other ways to monitor them. Even if he was not watching them now, it was probable that the Computer was recording their actions for later viewing.
They entered a big laboratory containing equipment whose functions Burton did not know—except for four huge gray metal cabinets. These were energy-matter converters. Their walls held all the needed circuits. In fact, the walls were the circuitry. Their power came through orange circles on the floor, which were matched to the orange circles in the center of the cabinet bottoms. Two cabinets were permanently attached to the floor, but the others could be taken from the room. Not, however, by the muscle power of two men alone.
Burton turned his chair, and, followed by de Marbot, flew out of the room and through the corridor past the wall behind which was Loga’s hidden room. De Marbot must have wondered why Burton did not stop there, but he refrained from comment. By the time that they had returned to their suite level, after speeding up and down shafts and along corridors chosen at random, he no longer looked puzzled. He looked bored. But when they were in the hall, he pulled a notebook from the pocket on the outside of the chair and wrote on a sheet.
Burton took the note and held it close to his chest, his left hand partly covering it. He read: How long must I wait before you tell me your plans?
Burton wrote with a pen taken from the container on the side of his chair.
Sometime this evening.
De Marbot read it and smiled. “I will have something to look forward to,” he murmured.
He tore the note into tiny pieces, placed them on the floor, and ignited them with his beamer ray. He ground the ashes with the toe of his sandal and blew them away.
They waited, and presently a recess in the wall opened and a wheeled, jointed, cylindrical machine rolled out. It headed for the ashes, a scooplike extension sliding out from its front. It sprayed the dirty area with a liquid that quickly dried into many tiny balls and then sucked the spheres onto the scoop and into an opening. A minute later, it had retreated into the cavity from which it had come, and the recess closed.
De Marbot spat on the floor just to see the robot in action again. As it rolled back to its lair after its cleanup job, the Frenchman kicked it. Unperturbed, the machine disappeared into the cavity.
“Really, I prefer the protein-and-bone robots, the androids,” de Marbot said. “These mechanical things, they give me the shivers.”
“It’s the flesh-and-blood ones that disturb me,” Burton said.
“Ah, yes, if one kicks them, not out of a desire to hurt, you comprehend, but a desire to evoke an emotion, one knows that, since they’re of flesh and blood, they do hurt. But they do not resent the insult or the injury, and that makes them nonhuman. Still, one does not have to pay them wages, and one knows that they will not go on strike.”
“It’s their eyes I don’t like,” Burton said.
De Marbot laughed.
“They look no deader than the eyes of my Hussars at the end of a long campaign. You are reading into them a lack of life that does not exist. The lack, I mean. You know that they are brainless, rather, to be exact, use only a tiny portion of their brains. But one can say that of certain humans we have met.”
“One could say a lot,” Burton said. “Shall we join the others?”
De Marbot glanced at his wristwatch. “An hour until supper. Perhaps I may be able to make Aphra jolly again. There is nothing that upsets one’s digestion like a sullen companion at the table.”
“Tell her that she’ll be in on the next phase of the project,” Burton said. “She’ll brighten up then. But don’t tell her what we did unless you use this.”
He indicated the notebook.
De Marbot grimaced and said, “That one, the watcher, must be wondering what we’re up to. How can we hide anything from him? One can’t fart without his knowing about it.”
Burton grinned and said, “Perhaps we’ll make him fill his pants. In a manner of speaking.”
The eight had agreed that each would take turns hosting the others. Tonight was Alice’s, and she greeted them wearing a long, very lowcut, Lincoln-green evening gown of the style of 1890. Burton doubted that she was also wearing the numerous undergarments of that period. She was too accustomed to the comfortable cool clothes of the Rivervalley, a towel serving as a short skirt and a thin, light cloth serving as a bra. She did have elegant green high-heeled shoes on, and silk stockings, though the latter probably did not reach to her knees. Her jewelry, provided by an e-m converter, was an emerald set in a gold ring, small gold earrings, each with a single large emerald, and a string of pearls.
“You look lovely,” he said as he bowed and kissed her hand. “Eighteen-ninety, heh? The year of my death. Are you trying to tell me in a subtle manner that you are celebrating that occasion?”
“If I am, I am doing so unconsciously,” she said. “Let’s not have any wisecracks, right?”
“Wisecrack. Nineteen thirty-four word,” Frigate said to Alice. “The year of your first death.”
“The only one, thank God,” she said. “Must we speak of the Grim Reaper?”
Frigate bowed and kissed her extended hand.
“You are absolutely devastating. Say the word, and I’m all yours. No, you don’t have to say it. I’m yours anyway.”
“You’re very gallant,” she said. “Also, very pushy.”
Burton snorted and said, “That’s one thing he’s not. Except when he’s been drinking. Dutch courage.”
“In bourbono veritas,” the American said. “But you’re wrong. Not even then. Am I, Alice?”
“Alice is a well-garrisoned castle on a steep hill surrounded by a wide moat,” Burton said. “Don’t try to mine her. Take her by storm.”
The American flushed. Alice did not lose her smile, but she said, “Please, Dick. Let’s not be unpleasant.”
“I promise,” Burton said. He turned, and started. “My God! Who’re…?”
Two men in servant’s livery were standing near the dinner table. Not men. They were androids. One had the face of Gladstone; the other, of Disraeli.
“No one else has ever had two prime ministers of Great Britain wait on them,” Alice said.
Burton spun toward her, his face red and scowling.
“Alice! We talked about the danger! The Snark could program them to attack us!”
She met his fury calmly.
“Yes, we did. But you, or somebody, also said that the Snark has a thousand ways of getting at us. He hasn’t done anything yet, and if he were going to, he’d have done it. Two androids, a thousand, won’t make any difference.”
“Agreed!” Li Po said in his loud shrill voice. “Bravo, Alice, for taking the first step! I myself have some plans for androids! I may put them into effect tonight! Ah, tonight! You will suffer no more, Li Po!”
Burton had to admit, to himself, anyway, that she was right. She should not, however, have done this without getting the consent of the others. At the very least, she should have consulted him about it.
Perhaps, if the leader of this group had been someone other than him, she would have. It seemed to him that she took every opportunity to defy him now. Under that quiet soft demeanor, behind those large soft dark eyes, was a stubborn woman.
De Marbot and Behn arrived somewhat flushed and perspiring, as if they had just gotten out of bed or were in the midst of a quarrel. If the latter was the case, they were covering it up well. They smiled and joked and seemed perfectly at ease.
Burton greeted them and strode to a side table loaded with bottles and goblets and a huge bucket of ice. He waved away the android with Gladstone’s face, which
had approached him and asked if he could pour him a drink. Alice had done a very good job if she had reconstructed the prime minister’s features from memory. She could have done so, since the man had dined a number of times at her house when her parents had been alive. More probably, though, she had asked the Computer to locate Gladstone’s photograph in the files and it had done so. Then she had given the Computer her specifications, and it had reproduced this living but mindless being.
“By the Lord,” he murmured, “it even has his voice!”
He sipped on the rye whiskey, smoother than any he had tasted on Earth, though it must be reproduced from some Terrestrial brand, and he went to talk with Nur. The little Iberian Moor was holding a glass of some pale yellow wine, which would last him for the evening.
“The Prophet did not forbid any alcoholic beverage except wine made from dates,” he had once told Burton, who already knew it. “His excessively zealous disciples later extended the ban to all liquor. Though I felt that I did not have to obey the dictates of those ignoramus fundamentalists, I just did not care for strong waters. However, I have acquired a taste for this Chinese wine. Besides, even if I were a drunkard, what would Allah do to me that I had not done to myself? As for Mahomet, where is he?”
Burton and Nur talked of Mecca for a while, and then the android who looked like Disraeli announced that dinner was served. Since each guest had told Alice in the morning what he or she would like, the menus were in the Computer’s memory. It took one microsecond for the food to appear inside a giant e-m converter; the servants took longer putting the appetizers on the table. Burton had ordered a salad with devil’s-rain dressing followed by sturgeon fumé a la muscovite and for dessert two tarts with rhubarb filling. The appropriate wine was served with each course.
Burton, Behn, Frigate, and Li Po had cigars of the finest Cuban tobacco. Nur smoked his after-dinner cigarette, the only nicotine he allowed himself.
The Gods of Riverworld Page 6
