Riverworld05- Gods of Riverworld (1983)

by Philip José Farmer

  They had thought that the only video- audio transmissions inside the worlds were made through the computer sets inside the private worlds, these being connected through cables to the floors of the worlds. But the Snark, the unknown, had found a way to break this communication and video- audio barrier. Selected areas of the world's wall had been made into screens, and Burton and his companions saw the deluge as a flying bird would see it. They watched as the waters of the fountains and the river and the marshes and lake were replaced by the amber liquid. Which, the Computer told them in answer to Burton's question, was bourbon.

  "Bourbon?" Burton said, and he asked the Computer to repeat the statement.

  It was bourbon.

  The inlets for the various water sources had poured in the liquor under great pressure. The fountains had soared up until they almost touched the top of the Brobdingnagian chamber, and the river and lakes and marshes had spewed forth the swift raging floor of whiskey.

  "No doubt, it was the best bourbon," Burton muttered.

  The citizens of Turpinville had been panicked, but, after a few minutes, they had taken every means of transportation to the exit. They had fought each other for the hundred available flying chairs, hitting, knifing and shooting. Those left behind had fought for the automobiles, motorcycles, and horses and buggies. They had jammed into the railroad train and climbed on top of the cars. Those in the chairs had gotten swiftly to the exit, only to find that they could not open the door. The people on foot and in the ground vehicles were drowned before they reached the exit.

  If they had not panicked, they could have made flying chairs in the e-m converters and flown to the exit. Where they would have discovered that their efforts were in vain.

  Though the liquor poured out swiftly, it had an enormous volume to fill, and the surface of the fluid body was only one- fourth of the way up the walls. The people in the chairs had taken them to the ceiling, but they had been overcome by the fumes or died from lack of oxygen. Some of them might still be alive; they would not last long. Though the flood had ceased to rise, it did not have to do so to complete its work.

  "What a way to die!" Burton said.

  He looked at the pale set faces. "I suppose we might as well try Netley's world."

  The same thing had happened there, except that the liquor was gin. The best, of course.

  Burton anticipated that those who had died in both worlds would be denied resurrection by the Computer, and he was right.

  The gypsies had been traveling in a corridor leading to the well of the wathans — perhaps they meant to sightsee it — when a big wheeled robot had come upon them and pierced them with beamer rays. Ten minutes later, robots had cleaned up the blood and carried the bodies off to be turned to ashes in converters.

  "That leaves six of us alive," Burton said. "Seven if the Snark is counted. But . . ."

  "But what?" Alice said after a long silence.

  He did not reply. He was thinking that the killer could have done away with them much more easily if he — or she — had flooded Alice's world. Why the different means? Was it for grisly amusement, using the exotic androids against them, the charming creatures of two fantasy books for children suddenly turned into bloodthirsty monsters?

  It seemed more probable that the killer had made an exception in Alice's world because he or she had been one of the guests. And that guest had perhaps wished to see that his or her enemies, people he or she must have hated .deeply, would be slain most bloodily.

  And that guest had made arrangements by programming the androids to spare him or her.

  He knew Alice, Peter Frigate, and Li Po too well to suspect them. That left only two. William Gull, who claimed to be a changed and deeply religious man, but had once murdered five women. And Star Spoon, who, however, had no motive — as far as he knew.

  Yet Gull had not been in the tower long enough to learn how to operate the Computer with the skill, no, the ingenuity, that the killer needed.

  Star Spoon had been studying the Computer long and hard, but would she have been able in such a relatively short time to gain knowledge that those who had been using the Computer much longer than she did not have?

  It could be that there was a second Snark.

  If so, then the six were at his mercy.

  Still, it was possible that one of the six had probed deeply into the Computer's potentialities and learned how to carry out the slaughters.

  Why would any of them wish to do so?

  He got up from the console chair and said, "We have to run off the memories of everyone for the past six weeks."

  "I'm too tired for that just now," Frigate said. Alice, Gull and Star Spoon also protested that they were exhausted.

  "Let's do it tomorrow after we get rested," Alice said.

  "Anyway, it's a waste of time," Star Spoon said. "You know that anyone who has done all that," she waved her hand, "will have set up false memories."

  "Yes, I know. But we have to do it."

  They sat around for an hour, their brief and dull sentences floating between long gloomy silences. Frigate finally said that he thought that he could get some food down. The others agreed to try it, and they ate more than they had expected to. They also drank much and became more animated, even if not carefree. Burton spoke then of something that had occupied his thoughts ever since he had entered the house.

  "Our enemy closed the exit on the Turpinites and Netleyites.

  He should be able to do the same for this place. Since he failed to kill all of us with the androids, he may use the very successful method of drowning us. It might be best if we left here and moved into a suite."

  They talked about that at some length. Finally, Alice, at Burton's suggestion, ordered that the door to the central area be opened. The screen showed them that it was operating.

  "But that does not mean that the Snark cannot close it on us when he wishes," Burton said.

  "Then let's get out," Frigate said. "The trouble is . . . what's to prevent the Snark from closing the suite door?"

  "I don't know," Burton said. "At least, he can't drown us."

  They had the e-m converter make chairs for them, and they flew out over the darkened world and under the simulated full moon. Nobody said a word about the bodies on the field. They would not have time to dispose of them; the crows, eagles, and hawks would strip them of their flesh. By the time they returned, if they ever did, they would deal with bones only.

  After another nightcap, they went to separate bedrooms in the suite, except for Burton and Star Spoon. She crawled into bed at once, said, "Good night, Dick," and was asleep. He followed her a few minutes later, and, against his expectation, passed into sleep at once. He awoke four hours later, his lifelong insomnia clutching him like the Old Man of the Sea. The woman was on her side, facing away from him, and snoring softly. He got out of bed, put on a robe, went to the main room and got a big cup of coffee. After that had removed some of his weariness, he set to work at the computer console. Five hours later, he had put into the Computer every injunction and override he could think of to protect all in his suite. He was sure, however, that there were others. He would ask his companions to add to the list.

  "I should have done that long long ago," he told himself.

  He decided that he would not wait until his fellow tenants got up for breakfast. As tired as they were, they might sleep until noon. He began scanning the corridors because, at that moment, he could think of nothing else to do. He started from the top of the tower with the hangar, worked the first level and then the second. That was quick because a glance showed that the circular area was empty, and there was no life except animal in the little worlds.

  The scan moved into Level 60 and raced up and down the corridors and into the rooms along them. It came to a corridor the inner wall of which formed a side of the wathan well. Here, he knew, was where an observer could see the surface of the mass of wathans.

  He cried out, "Stop!"

  He stared at the curving
transparent wall of the shaft.

  The beautiful, bright, many- colored, swelling, shrinking and whirling entities called wathans were gone. The well was empty and dark.

  34

  * * *

  Peter Frigate was the first to enter the room. He stopped, and he looked at Burton, at the beamer on the table, and at the half-opened door to the corridor. "What's going on?"

  Li Po came in just as Burton opened his mouth to answer Frigate. Burton said, "Have some coffee first, Pete."

  "How are you, Dick?" the Chinese said.

  "I've been up most of the night. Working."

  Li Po also glanced at the weapon and the door. He raised his eyebrows but did not comment. Frigate, after pouring out coffee from a pot on the table, said, "You look awful. The dark circles around your eyes . . . you look like a debauched raccoon. What've you been doing?"

  "I feel more than awful," Burton said slowly. "I feel . . . how would you feel if you knew that the end of the world was near? Or perhaps I should say that the world has ended — for all practical purposes."

  Frigate drank the whole cup of very hot coffee without flinching. He said, "The end of the world happens every second."

  Burton did not know what he meant and did not think it worthwhile to find out. In any event, Frigate's words were just a means for putting off the bad news.

  Li Po took a sip of coffee and said, "What do you mean?"

  "Perhaps I should wait until everybody's here. I don't like to repeat."

  "Sure you don't," Frigate said. "Let's hear it."

  Burton told them that the wathan enclosure was empty.

  Li Po and Frigate paled but said nothing.

  "I checked the body-records then," Burton said. "I had to force myself to do it because I didn't want to know what had been done to them, although, of course, I already knew. But it needed doing, and so I did it."

  "And they . . . they . . ." Frigate said, choking.

  "They had all been erased. All thirty-five billion six hundred and forty-six million plus. No exceptions. All. And no wathans have come in since I made the discovery."

  Li Po sat down. "I've had too many shocks lately."

  After a long while, Frigate said, "So . . . when we die, we die for the last time."

  "Quite."

  After another long silence — only a super-catastrophe could have kept Li Po's mouth shut so long, Burton thought — Frigate poured brandy into a half-full cup of coffee and downed all of the steaming liquid. Li Po looked as if he would like to do the same, half-rose, shook his head, and sank back into the chair. This was the first time Burton had ever seen him reject a drink.

  The brandy had restored some of the American's color. He drank more, straight this time, and said, "The Snark has overridden that automatic function . . . I mean, no bodies will be recorded from now on?"

  "Right."

  "But if we can survive until the Gardenworlders get here, we can be recorded again. Otherwise, we, too, will lose our chance for immortality forever."

  "Of course," Burton said. "But when they get here, our time will be up anyway. If we're not ready to Go On, our records will be erased. And if we're not, we'll be erased."

  He got up and poured himself more coffee, looked at the brandy bottle, and decided against it. "I immediately asked the Computer about that. I was shocked, of course, and I cursed myself, railed against the fates, if you must know, because as soon as we got here from Alice's, I commanded the Computer to refuse to erase any body-records. I was forestalling that. But I was too late. I did not know that then because the Computer, the idiot, did not tell me that my command was too late. It should have, but the Snark had told it not to display that data unless it was asked for it."

  "We've all been just drifting along, doing things too late," Frigate said in a dull tone. "Sometimes . . . I wonder if the Snark has had the Computer broadcast some sort of neural suppressant field, something dampening our intelligence?"

  "I doubt it. We've just been playing with our toys . . . like children. However" — Burton lifted a napkin and revealed a yellow ball the size of a cranberry — "I've been busy while you were sleeping. This is the sphere that records a body. I had the Computer duplicate one for me. It's empty now, but I wanted to see one. And holding it in my hand enabled me to postulate something . . . a theory, but the only explanation I could come up with that was reasonable. That is, how could the Snark get into Alice's world, into Turpin's and yours . . . Netley's . . . and there arrange for operations that just could not be done from outside those worlds?"

  Alice entered a minute later. Burton had to repeat his story and to wait for her to recover enough before he could continue.

  "First, though, I don't think that the Snark did it. I mean I don't think that there's an Ethical hiding in the tower. Nur eliminated her, though we cannot, of course; ever be sure. But the murders in the little worlds were done by one of us. By one of the survivors."

  Li Po shot up from his chair, and, quivering, said, "Gull! Or Star Spoon! But why?"

  Burton nodded. "Gull may have reverted, but he would have to have gone mad to do that. Star Spoon? She would have to be insane. If either is, he or she has concealed it well. First, let me tell the rest of my theory."

  "First . . . pardon the interruption," Frigate said, "we have to consider that it may be neither Gull nor Star Spoon. What if somebody we haven't even seen is the killer? After all, Williams raised Gull and the others involved in the Ripper killings. And there are the gypsies. We don't know who raised them, but I suspect Williams did it just as a joke or just to bug us. Or maybe somebody else did. Anyway, what if someone raised a person who was destructively insane, to put it mildly, and that person is our second Snark?"

  "I asked the Computer to scan the tower for other people. It reported that it could find none. I asked for a rundown of all those who'd been raised, and the number corresponds exactly with my calculations. Still, the Computer could be reporting only what it's been told to report."

  Frigate threw his hands up. "Nothing's certain!"

  "It never has been. However, I think that we don't have to consider a third party or parties."

  He held up the yellow sphere. "Here is how I think he . . . or she . . . did it."

  The killer had ordered a number of his body-recordings made in an e-m converter.

  "Nobody had inhibited this action until I told the Computer not to allow that, but I was too late. The deed was done."

  The Snark, Snark the Second, as it were, had been given an opportunity to enter the worlds of Turpin, Frigate and Alice. Perhaps all the worlds and some apartment suites, too.

  "There the Snark put the recording-spheres in converters that were out of the way, seldom if ever used. And the Snark also concealed them in other places for easy access and probably carried them around in his clothing."

  The Snark then killed himself in the privacy of an unused apartment. By prearrangement with the Computer, the Snark was resurrected in a converter inside a world.

  "The converter in which the Snark died would then disintegrate the body. The Snark did not want anybody finding it, though that possibility was remote."

  Once inside Alice's world, Snark II did what had to be done. The androids were verbally programmed when they were out of sight of Alice and Maglenna or perhaps they were programmed before Maglenna showed. Since the Snark had to be furtive about the process, it undoubtedly took weeks to complete it.

  The flooding of the two worlds, though, was ordered from the outside.

  "The Ethicals thought that they were one hundred per cent safe when they were in their private worlds. Of course, they were not nearly as security-conscious as we since they believed the tower to be an impregnable fortress. They knew that one of them was a traitor, but they still could not conceive that he would actually personally endanger them.

  "But an ingenious person could flood the little worlds by ordering the liquid supply to pour into it until it was completely filled or its inhabitants had b
een drowned."

  "That may be true," Alice said, "but how could the Snark shut the doors to the worlds? And how could he see what was going on in the worlds when the flooding began? The Computer had commands to open the door only to authorized codewords, and it would not transmit pictures or any communications except as ordered by the tenants. No one could override those."

  "But they could be bypassed by various means. The Snark made cameras in the worlds he had gotten into via the recording- spheres, flew the cameras to the ceilings, probably at night, and attached them there. You see, the Computer had orders not to transmit wave frequencies through the circuits of the walls except through certain channels, but the Computer interpreted those orders literally. It did have orders to transmit the frequencies through the wall circuits to the converters and the computer auxiliary and communication devices. It did not distinguish between those computers installed and authorized by the Ethicals and any installed later. It would assume that the additions were authorized."

  "But the doors?" Alice said.

  "The Snark sealed the exterior of the door with a substance that hardened and so resisted the operating mechanisms of the doors, which open outward."

  That meant that the Snark had sealed the doors while Alice's party was going on. The Snark had killed himself or herself, had been resurrected in an apartment, and then had flown in a chair to the central area and applied the substance to the exit doors of two of the worlds. Then the Snark had ordered the liquid supply to convert to bourbon and gin and started the deluging. After which, the Snark had committed suicide, been resurrected in an apartment, and returned to Alice's place as a guest. There the Snark had waited until the androids had started their predetermined attack. During the battle, the Snark had made sure that he was not harmed by the androids. His or her plans had not been completely successful, but the Snark was not dismayed. There would be other opportunities.

  Li Po said, "Ah! Only those at the party could be suspects! So . . . Gull or Star Spoon!"