He stopped, sipped wine, put the goblet down, and stared around at them.
“As I understand it, Earth’s core will be tapped for the use of e-m converters. But this power will be used only to raise those who die there, and with the type of people on Earth then, there should not be much need for resurrection power. There will be no grails or converters to furnish food. Food will be grown on the soil. Earth, if events work out as the Ethicals plan, will be a nice quiet place. Peace and harmony will reign, though I have doubts that the lion will lie down with the lamb. Not if it’s hungry. Lions do not and never will find grass nourishing.
“And, of course, even those who have Gone On will not be perfect. No human being, with perhaps a few exceptions, and these might be unendurable models for the rest of us, is perfect or will be.”
Many of his audience were looking at him as if they wondered what he was preparing to spring on them.
“Some of you, I’m sure, anticipate life on Earth with great pleasure. You know you’ll always have intellectual adventures because the opportunities for study and for artistic creation will be equal to what the tower provides. And you’re happy with the idea that life will be serene, well-ordered, and secure. You luxuriate in that prospect.”
He stopped, and he frowned.
“However, there is an alternative to the Earth I’ve described. I have investigated the spaceships in the hangar, and I have discovered that they do not require highly trained crews to navigate and operate them. They are complex in themselves, but an intelligent child of twelve, after some study, may get into one and have the ship carry him to whatever destination he wishes. Provided, of course, that the ship has enough fuel.”
Frigate smiled up at him and held up a thumb and a finger to form an O.
“What if we reject the return to the near-Utopian Earth?” Burton said. “What if we prefer another kind of life or are not sure that, even if we would love Earth as I’ve depicted here, we will be chosen to be among her citizens?
“Nothing can stop us from boarding a spaceship, all those in the hangar if we wish, choosing one of the virgin planets catalogued in the ship’s navigation system, and then going there.
“What would we do there, our motley group of near-immortals of many races, nations, languages, and times? We wouldn’t have the rich, easy life we have here, or the more restricted but still easy life on the Earth-to-be. Though we can carry with us the science and technology of the Ethicals in records, we could use very little of it for centuries. It would take a long time before our population increased to the point where we would have enough hands to do all the dirty and hard labor needed to get the raw materials for processing.
“These planets have been seeded with
wathan
generators and catchers just as was done on ancient Earth. We can have children because they will be born with
wathans
and will be self-conscious and free-willed. But—” he looked around him again “—if any of us or our children die, we will be dead for a long time. Perhaps forever. Should the Ethicals be able to track us down, we who went on the ship from the tower will be judged then and there, at once. We may have passed and so be allowed to live. Or we may not. In any event, if we should die early, we will have to stay dead for a long time, because the Ethicals may not get to our planet for many thousands of years. And if, during that time, our descendants do build resurrection machinery, how do we know they’ll decide to raise us? We can’t foresee the political or religious or economic situation of that time. Our descendants may think it best we not be raised.
“That is by no means the worst thing that can happen. In the beginning, after we’ve landed and built homes with our own hands and tilled and planted and reaped and brought forth the first generation, we’ll be a fairly harmonious society. But as the centuries, the millennia, go by, our common language, Esperanto, will become dialects, then language families as unintelligible to one another as French and Albanian. Though there will be much miscegenation, some groups will keep their racial characteristics, and our brave new world will have differing races.
“Different languages and different races. Just as on old Earth. But it will have variety.
“And, try though we will to bring up our children with love, in time, as generation succeeds generation, or perhaps in a very short time, we will have the same kind of people that we had on old Earth.
“Ladies and gentlemen, after we have labored long and mightily, survived many hardships and dangers, and perhaps established a just and equitable society for all, we will nevertheless see the inevitable degeneration of our society. As on Earth, there will be multitudes of the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the pushers and the pushed, the brave and the cowardly, the dull and the bright, the open and the shut, the givers and the takers, the compassionate and the indifferent or cruel, the sensitive and the callous, the tender and the brutal, the victimizers and the victims, the sane, the half-sane, and the mad.
“There will be hate but love, despair but joy, defeat but triumph, misery but happiness, hopelessness but hope.”
He looked briefly at them, seeing all their faces as one. They knew the spirit if not the exact form of what he was going to say.
“But … we will have immense variety, the richness and the full spectrum that a secure life cannot give.
“And we will have adventure.
“We will be rejecting the promised Heaven of Earth. But we will be taking some of Heaven with us, and, I’m sure, more than a bit of Hell. Can Heaven exist in a vacuum? Without Hell, how do you know that you are in Heaven?
“I ask you, my friends, and even those who are perhaps not very fond of me, which shall it be? The new Earth? Or the unknown?”
His audience was silent. Then Frigate called out, “Is all this rhetorical? Where are
you
going, Dick?”
“You know where,” Burton said.
He waved his hand to indicate the stars.
“Who’s going with me?”
While of course an author would like to believe that his every word remains engraved forever on the hearts of his readers, it may be that some of the events of the previous four Riverworld novels have grown dim in some memories. Here is a brief look at the adventures that have led up to
Gods of Riverworld
:
Richard Francis Burton, the famous (or infamous) English explorer, linguist, author, poet, swordsman, and anthropologist, dies in
A.D.
1890 at the age of sixty-nine. Contrary to his expectations, he awakes from death. He is in a vast chamber containing billions of bodies floating in the air. All those he sees are human except for one near him. This body is humanoid but definitely not that of a member of
Homo sapiens.
Before Burton can escape from the chamber, he is rendered unconscious by two men who appear in some kind of aerial craft.
When Burton again awakes, he is lying naked on the bank of a wide river in a narrow valley surrounded by high, unscalable mountains. His body is like the one he had when he was twenty-five, minus its scars. He is only one of an estimated thirty-five billion who have been resurrected under an unfamiliar sky on the banks of a River ten million miles long.
The resurrection is not, as events will show, caused by supernatural means. It has been effected by scientific devices invented by beings unknown during the early part of the first book,
To Your Scattered Bodies Go.
The people responsible for this, the Ethicals, planted recording machines on Earth long before the first humans evolved from the apes. (Or so Burton and others are told during the course of the series.) These machines have recorded every human being from the time of his or her conception continuously to the moment of death. And, as is discovered in the fourth volume,
The Magic Labyrinth,
the souls (called
wathan
s by Ethicals) are artificial. There is no such thing as a natural soul; these have been provided by the Ethicals.
In the early days on the Riverworld, its inhabitants believe that everybody from approximately 2,000,000
B.C.
to
A.D.
2008 has been resurrected. It soon becomes apparent that children who had died on Earth at or under the age of five, the mentally retarded, and the extreme psychopaths have not been raised on the Riverworld. These, Burton finds out from a renegade Ethical, have been resurrected on a planet called the Gardenworld. And it is revealed in a later volume that only those from approximately 99,000
B.C.
to
A.D.
1983 have been placed on the Riverworld. After this current Ethical project is over, those who died after
A.D.
1983 will be raised.
The Ethicals are the heirs of several preceding cultures, some nonhuman, which had assumed the task of recording and resurrecting the sentient species of many worlds throughout the universe. If they did not do so, all sentients who died would be forever dead.
Some Ethicals, disguised as Terrestrials, have spread throughout the Riverworld the religious concept of Going On. A Valleydweller cannot Go On unless he or she attains a certain high ethical standard—in other words, a certain state of being “good.” At the end of a hundred years this project will be phased out, and those who have not arrived at a certain ethical development will die forever. The
wathan
s of those who have reached this stage will be absorbed by the Godhead.
This concept is planted by the Ethicals and transmitted through various religions—for instance, the Church of the Second Chance. The missionaries of the Church also teach their disciples to speak Esperanto. A language that everybody can understand is necessary because of the mixture of peoples from many times and places.
Burton and some others are early on visited by an Ethical who won’t reveal his identity. Burton and others call him X or The Mysterious Stranger. X (revealed as Loga, a member of the Ethical Council of Twelve, in
The Magic Labyrinth
) is thwarting the plans of his fellows. He gives various reasons for this, but the true reason for his becoming a renegade is told in the fourth volume,
The Magic Labyrinth.
X is recruiting some of the resurrectees to help him in his plot. Among these are Burton, Sam Clemens, Cyrano de Bergerac, a gigantic titanthrop called Joe Miller, and other exceptional men and women.
The River, they find out, starts from a small sea at the north pole of this planet, winds back and forth down one hemisphere, circles the south pole, and winds back and forth on the other hemisphere, finally plunging back to its source, the north pole sea. A vast tower built by the Ethicals rears up from the bedrock at the bottom of this sea. It is the headquarters of the Ethicals and contains the circuitry and the huge protein brain of the Computer. It also houses in a central well those
wathan
s held while the dead are stored in the physical recordings. When a person is resurrected, the
wathan
immediately reattaches itself to the raised body. This entity, the
wathan,
contains all the memories that the body also has, duplicates them, as it were, and also provides self-consciousness for the mind of the body. Without the
wathan,
the physical part of the individual would lack self-consciousness and the means to keep its identity.
The first volume,
To Your Scattered Bodies Go,
is mainly concerned with showing the setup of the Riverworld and Burton’s efforts to escape the Ethicals. These have found out that he was awakened in the resurrection chamber by their unidentified renegade colleague. Burton commits suicide 777 times while fleeing the Ethicals, but is finally caught. He is questioned in the tower by the Council of Twelve, one of whom is the renegade. His memory is taped so that the Council may see the renegade through his eyes. But the renegade has secretly rearranged various circuits in the Computer, and he has also arranged it so that the Council believes that Burton’s memory of his questioning has been erased. He returns to The Valley with a complete memory.
In the second volume,
The Fabulous Riverboat,
Samuel Clemens, the American writer, dreams of building a great paddle-wheeled riverboat on which to travel up The River to its source. From there he will go on foot to the seagirt tower. He can’t start fulfilling this dream for a long time because the planet is poor in iron and other heavy metals. X arranges to divert a large iron-nickel meteorite into The Valley, and Clemens uses this for the needed metal. His boat is stolen by his partner, King John of England, brother to Richard the Lion-Hearted. Sam vows to build another boat, catch up with John, and get vengeance.
In the third volume,
The Dark Design,
Clemens finishes his second boat after many hardships and attempts by others to steal this one, too. After he leaves, another group at the base builds a dirigible and flies it to the tower. Only one of the crew can get inside the tower, and he does not come back out. On the way back, one of the crew is discovered to be X, but he escapes, and the airship is blown up by a bomb he planted.
In the fourth volume,
The Magic Labyrinth,
the two heavily armed riverboats meet. Both are sunk in the battle, and their captains die along with most of their crews. Burton and some of X’s recruits survive. They go up The River as far as they can in a small boat, then climb the massive and rugged mountain range ringing the north polar sea. Burton is convinced that one of the party is X. After the party gets into the tower through an entrance secretly installed by X, Burton does find out who X is.
However, in the long absence of all its Ethical and Agent tenants (slain by X), the unattended tower mechanisms need some maintenance. Not getting it, a valve that admits seawater is stuck, and the protein brain of the Computer is threatened. If it dies before the valve can be repaired, the entire project will be doomed, and all the body-recordings will perish.