Riverworld05- Gods of Riverworld (1983)

by Philip José Farmer

  "Unlike you, my Muslim if heretical friend, I did not believe in a hereafter. I did agree with The Sage that the spirit-land was none of our business. I thought that when I died, I would become rotten flesh and then dust and that would be that. Awakening by The River was a great shock, the worst in my life. Where were the gods who had raised me from the dead, the gods in whom I had not believed? There were no gods or demons here, only human beings like myself who, though in another world, knew no more about the why and wherefore of it than they had of Earth's. Poor wretches! Poor ignoramuses stumbling in the dark. Where were those who had lit us up once again so that we'd be little flames looking for the mother flame?"

  "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" Frigate said. "Easy to answer. They melted and became clouds and became snow again, today's."

  At the end of wandering on Earth and the Riverworld, Li Po had reached the tower. He seemed not to have changed, which, Nur said, was regrettable. The Riverworld was designed to make people change. The tall, lean, handsome, devil-faced man with the green eyes and his black hair coiled in a topknot only laughed at that.

  "Perfection can change only for the worse."

  He had redecorated his suite so that it looked like the palace of the Glorious Emperor. From the Computer's files he had had reproduced many famous Chinese paintings and was painting some of his own works. These were not duplicates of his Terrestrial creations but scenes from the Riverworld.

  "I have everything the emperor had and much more. Except, of course, millions of subjects and many wives and concubines. In fact, I have not one wife and so am poorer and more miserable than the lowliest peasant. Not for long, though."

  There was one woman whom the historians knew nothing of, though Li Po had written two hundred poems about her. These, however, were among his nine thousand lost works.

  In Eastern Lu, a part of twentieth-century Shantung in north China, Li Po had built a house attached to a tavern owned by his fourth wife's family. And in the tavern was a slave girl who served the patrons; her name was Hsing Shih. In English, Star Spoon.

  "The most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You will pardon me, Alice, Aphra, when I say that. You two are indeed surpassingly beautiful, but you will surely agree with me, since you're fair-minded for your sex, that you just possibly may not be the most beautiful.

  "Star Spoon was quiet and soft-spoken and had elegant manners quite out of place in that tavern and unappreciated by the customers. She was no peasant girl. Her mother had been a concubine of the Glorious Monarch, and Star Spoon was supposed to be his daughter. That paternity, however, was questioned when Star Spoon's mother was caught in adultery with a palace guard. The mother and the lover were beheaded, and Star Spoon, then nine years old, was sold to a wealthy merchant. He took her to his bed when she was ten. After he tired of her, his six sons took their turns with her as they became juveniles. When the merchant lost his fortune and died shortly thereafter, Star Spoon was sold to my father-in-law, the tavern owner. She became his concubine, and she was treated well, relatively speaking anyway, though she had to work in the tavern. After I married his daughter, I came to know Star Spoon well. I fell passionately in love with her. Of course, I do everything passionately. She had a child by me, but he died a few days after birth from a fever. Though I am afraid of nothing, I did not want to cause trouble under my roof. My wife was very jealous and prone to violence. I had a scar on my shoulder from her knife to prove it. So neither Star Spoon nor I ever told anyone who the father was."

  If it was only intimate companionship that Li Po wanted, he would have chosen a man. But he needed a female, and his thoughts turned to Hsing Shih. He would find his old comrades later for masculine warmth and uproariousness and mental stimulation.

  The first question in locating Star Spoon was: Was she available in the Computer's files?

  These began in 97,000 B.C. when the predecessors of the Ethicals had landed on Earth. (Loga had said that they started in about 100,000 B.C, but he was speaking loosely, rounding off the figure.) The Computer listed 97,000 B.C as Year One in its chronology. Thus, since Star Spoon had been born in A.D. 721, by Western reckoning, her birth year was 97,724 by computer reckoning.

  Li Po had ordered that the search start in that year and in the area where she had been born. Since the Glorious Monarch's palace was a very important place in China, it was probable that Ethical agents had photographed it and its tenants.

  The recordings were far from complete, however. It was possible that there were very few films made at this place during the T'ang dynasty. Li Po had, however, reconstructed Star Spoon's features with the aid of the Computer and his memory, which, like Burton's and Nur's, gripped like an eagle's talon.

  The Computer had then extrapolated the woman's face backward, as it were, shaping her features as they would have been in childhood.

  With this as a model, the Computer had scanned its files for this area and period. And it had located her, not just once but three times. Li Po had been very lucky — so far.

  Her wathan was now identified from the films, which photographed more than her body. Using this as reference, the Computer scanned the eighteen billion plus wathans in the great central well of the tower. If Star Spoon was alive in The Valley, her wathan would not be in the well, and Li Po was out of luck. But the Computer found it. Fifteen minutes later, it delivered Star Spoon via the e-m converter to Li Po's apartment.

  She was shocked and confused. She had been killed in those horrible days when the east bank of grailstones had failed to provide food for the east bank's inhabitants. She, with hordes of others, had crossed The River in boats to fight for the food supplied to the west bank dwellers. She had not known then that resurrection of the dead had ceased, and so she had expected to awake somewhere along The River.

  Instead, here she was in a strange place, one obviously not in The Valley. And who was this fellow countryman grinning like a demon at her?

  "Truly, she thought I was a devil at first," Li Po was to say. "She was half-mistaken." He added, "She did not even recognize me until I spoke. Then everything flooded in on her, and she wept for a long time."

  It had taken most of the night for him to explain to her just what had happened to him and to her. Then he had allowed her to sleep, though he lusted to get her into bed with him.

  "I am not one to force myself upon a Woman. She must be willing."

  Everyone came to his suite to meet the newcomer. She was indeed beautiful and delicate, about five feet tall, slim-boned and slim-fleshed but well rounded and long-legged. Her eyes were huge and dark brown, and she was dressed in the same kind of clothes she had worn on Earth. She was not as shy as Li Po had portrayed her. The Riverworld had changed her in that respect. Her voice was, however, low and husky as she spoke to them in Esperanto. She was fluent in a dozen or more languages, but English was not one of them.

  Burton was enraged, but, for once, he controlled himself. Star Spoon was a deed done. Reproaching the Chinese for breaking the agreement not to resurrect anybody as yet would upset the woman and only cause Li Po to argue with him or, worse, challenge him to a duel. Burton had lost whatever authority he had. Now that the situation was changed, the danger over, he could no longer be captain of this group of strong individualists. They would pretty much do what they wished.

  Burton managed to smile, but his voice betrayed him. He growled, "How many more are you planning to raise?"

  "Not many. I am no maniac."

  Burton snorted.

  "The Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove, my immortal companions. You'd like them. Women for them and perhaps a few more for me. My honorable parents, my sisters and brothers and an aunt whom I greatly loved. My children. Of course, I have to find them first."

  Frigate groaned and said, "An invasion. The Yellow Peril all over again."

  "What?" Li Po said.

  "Nothing. I'm sure that we'll all be happy and pleased."

  "I look forward to meeting those you will bring back," L
i Po said.

  Frigate grinned and clapped Li Po on the shoulder. He was very fond of the poet, though, like the others, he was sometimes irritated by him.

  14

  * * *

  Peter Jairus Frigate was born in 1918 in North Terre Haute, Indiana, near the banks of the WabashRiver. Though he called himself a rationalist, he believed, or claimed to believe, that each Earthly area had its unique psychic properties. Thus, VigoCounty soil had absorbed the peculiar qualities of the Indians who had lived there and of the pioneers who had driven them away and settled there. His own psyche, soaked with the effluvia of Amerindianness and Hoosierness, would never get rid of these no matter how much they evaporated in other climes and times.

  "In a sense, I contain redskins and frontiersmen."

  His voice reminded people of that of the Montana movie actor, Gary Cooper, but now and then the Hoosier twang appeared in it. He sometimes pronounced "wash" as "warsh," and a "bucket" was sometimes a "pail." "Illinois" more often than not was "Ellinois."

  In his childhood, he had been subjected to Christian Science, that mélange of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy transmuted into Western religion by the woolly-minded and neurotic Mary Baker Eddy. His parents had originally been Methodist Episcopalian and Baptist, but a "miracle" had occurred when his father's aunt was sent home from a hospital to die of incurable cancer. A friend had talked her into reading The Key to the Scriptures and, while she was doing this, the aunt's cancer had remissed. Most of the Frigate family in Terre Haute had become devout disciples of Eddy and of Jesus Christ as Scientist.

  The child Peter Frigate had somehow confused the figure of Jesus with those of scientists he read about at the age of seven, Doctors Frankenstein and Doolittle and Van Hesling. Two of these were involved with dead people come to life, and Doolittle, who fused with St. Francis later on, was involved with talking animals. The precocious and highly imaginative youngster visualized the bearded and robed Christ as working in a laboratory when he was not roaming the countryside and preaching. "Shall we operate now, Judas? I think that that leg goes there, but I don't have the least idea where that eye came from or where it goes."

  This conversation would take place when Jesus was trying to raise Lazarus. The problem was complicated by the other bodies that had been put in Lazarus' tomb, before his interment. After lying three days in a hole in a cliff in this hot climate, Lazarus was pretty much decayed and fallen apart, hence the confusion. Hence, also, the gas masks that Jesus and his assistants, Judas and Peter, wore over their surgical masks.

  Near them were giant retorts with bubbling liquids and a static generator shooting twisting electrical currents from node to node and other impressive-looking Hollywoodish laboratory equipment. These came, not from the Frankenstein motion picture, which did not appear until 1931, but from a silent movie serial Frigate saw when he was six.

  Judas, the treasurer of Dr. Christ's organization, which depended entirely upon voluntary contributions, was nervous about the expense. "This operation will wipe us out," he said hoarsely to the great scientist.

  "Yes, but think of the publicity. When the millionaire, Joseph of Arimathea, hears of this, he'll kick in with plenty of shekels. Besides, it's deductible on his income tax."

  In later years, when thinking of this scene, Frigate was sure that he had not known about such things as publicity and income tax deductions. He must be reconstructing his childhood imagination. But imagination works backward as well as forward, better in fact.

  Perhaps it was this version of Christ as scientist that veered young Frigate toward the reading of science fiction. Though reading heavily in Swift, Twain, Doyle, London, Dumas, Baum, and Homer, he also read the Bible, and an edition of John Bunyan illustrated by Doré. Somewhere, deep in the boiling muddy depths of his unconscious, his religious impulses were mixed with his worship of science as savior of mankind. The early science-fiction magazines and books he read were based on the premise that rationality, logic and science would get Homo sapiens out of the mess it had made during the past hundred thousand years. He had not learned then that, though he lived in a high-technology civilization, the Old Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, the New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Dark Ages were in every newborn infant. Baggage that went with every person throughout his or her life. Few there were who would rid themselves of this impedimenta, and no one would ever shuck all of it.

  Well, Nur might be an exception.

  "There are certain things about those ages that are desirable," Nur had said. "I have not rid myself of them, I am sure."

  When Frigate was eleven, his parents slid into religious apathy. They stopped going, for a while, to the First Church of Christ Scientist on

  Hamilton Boulevard

  in Peoria. But though they did not want their eldest son to stop attending church, they did not want to transport him every morning to the ChristScientistChurch. So they enrolled him in the Sunday school of the Arcadia Avenue Presbyterian Church, which was within walking distance.

  It was here that he ran head on and at full theological speed into predestination. He had not as yet recovered from the concussion of soul and philosophical trauma resulting from the collision.

  "The whole world became for me a convalescent ward after that," Frigate had once told Burton. "Of course, I'm exaggerating somewhat."

  Until then, Frigate had been convinced that you were rewarded with Heaven if you lived a life full of good deeds and thoughts and of unshaken doubt in the existence of God and the validity of the Bible.

  "The Presbyterians maintained that it did not make any difference whether you thought you were full of grace and were an exemplary Christian. God had decreed thousands of years before you were born, before the making of the universe, in fact, that this unborn person would be saved and that unborn person would be damned. Their belief was like Twain's theory of predeterminism. From the moment that the first primal atom bumped into the second created atom, a chain of motion was set up the directions of which were fixed by whether the primal atom collided with the second at this angle or that angle and the velocity it was traveling at when it bumped the other. If the angle and velocity had been different, everything that happened from then on would have been different. Your course through life was set. Nothing you did could change it. Everything you did was predetermined. To use twentieth-century computerese, preprogrammed."

  The catch was that you could not then say to yourself, "What the hell?" and live a dissolute godless life. You had to behave as if you were a complete Christian. What was worse, you had to be one. You had to truly believe; you could not be a hypocrite.

  But you would not know until after you'd died whether God had chosen you to fly up to Paradise or to fall into the eternal flames of Hell.

  "Actually, if the Presbyterians were right, you could be a wicked person all your life. But if God had marked you as one of the saved, you would repent at the last moment and rise up to eternal bliss. Who, however, was going to take the chance that that would happen?

  "I should have told my parents about my spiritual agonies over this. They would have straightened me out by telling me that there was no such thing as predestination and a literal Hell. At least, they would have tried to ease my mind. But I said nothing to them — which gives you an idea of my communicativeness — and I suffered. They, of course, had no idea what I was being taught there in that church within walking distance. A short walk to Despair, Doubt, and Hell."

  "Did you really suffer that much?" Burton had said.

  "Not all the time. Just now and then, here and there. After all, I was an active healthy boy. And I observed that, if the adults in the church really believed in predestination, they did not behave as if they did. They certainly weren't obsessed with doubts and griefs about their strange doctrine. They paid it lip service in church and forgot about it as soon as they walked out. Maybe sooner.

  "Also, reading "about Twain's life, I saw that he did not believe in his godless and stric
tly mechanical universe. He acted as if he had free will even though he talked a lot about its absence from human beings."

  At the age of twelve, Frigate became an atheist.

  "Rather, I should say, a devout believer in science as our savior. Science as used by rational people. However, I had forgotten that Swift had said, implied, anyway, that most people were Yahoos."

  He had hastened to amend and modify his statement. Most people were only Yahooish; only a minority were genuine, dyed- in- the- wool Yahoos. Too big a minority, though.

  "Science could only be our savior in a limited sense and then only if not abused. But everything is abused and misused. I did not really learn that I was until thirty-five, though. Midway in my life, like Dante, I was just outside the Gates of Hell."

  "It took him a long time to realize that people are irrational most of the time and usually more than that," Nur had said. "What an astounding revelation!"

  "Not only the Paleolithic Age but also the bipedal ape lives in us," Burton had said. "I'm not sure, though, that that is not an insult to the apes."

  Frigate had maintained for many years that there was no such thing as a soul. But it came to him that if God had not given Homo sapiens a soul, then it must make its own soul. He wrote a story based on the idea of artificial souls that insured people the immortality that God, if there was one, had neglected to create.

  As far as he knew, no one had ever thought of this, and it made a very good premise for a science-fiction novel. It also made him conscious that, somewhere in him, he still believed that only humanity could save itself. There was no savior to come from Heaven or another planet and redeem humankind.

  "I was wrong, yet right," Frigate had said. "Our salvation was the synthetic soul, but it was invented by an extra-Terrestrial species."

  "That soul, the wathan, is not our salvation," Nur had said. "It is only a means to an end. Salvation must still come from ourselves."

  Science and the religious impulse had combined to make the Riverworld and the wathan, but these could carry you only so far. At that point, science faded away like a sunset and metaphysics took over.