Burton sat with Loga's weapon across his lap. His first question was how it was operated. Loga indicated the safety lock and the trigger, the use of which Burton had figured out for himself.
"Now," he said, "I think it best that we start out at the beginning. But what is the beginning?"
"Pardon me for interrupting," the Moor said. "We should establish one thing right now. Ah Qaaq . . . Loga . . . you must have a private resurrection chamber in the tower?"
"Yes."
The Ethical hesitated. "It wasn't just for me. Tringu also used it. He was my best friend; we were raised together on the Gardenworld. He was the only one I could trust."
"Was he the man called Stern who tried to kill Firebrass before the Parseval took off the tower?"
"Yes. He failed, as you know. So, when I saw that Firebrass was going to get into the tower ahead of me . . . and Siggen was too, I had to kill them both. Siggen had not told Firebrass who I was. She believed me when I told her that I'd abandon my plans and throw myself on the mercy of the Council. But only after we'd gotten to the tower and the Council was resurrected. She never would have agreed if I'd not lied, not told her that I'd put an inhibit on communication with the computer and that only I could break it. She said she wouldn't tell Firebrass about me until we were in the tower. But she then made arrangements to be in the tower ahead of me with Firebrass. She meant to check up on the truth of what I'd told her. Also, I was afraid that while she and Firebrass were in the helicopter on the way to the top of the tower, she'd change her mind and tell Firebrass. So . . . I set off the bomb I'd planted in the copter just in case . . ."
"Who's Siggen?" Alice said.
"My wife. The woman posing as Anya Obrenova, the Russian airship officer."
"Oh, yes," Alice said as tears ran down Loga's cheeks.
"It's obvious that your people found your private resurrector and deactivated it. Otherwise, you'd have killed yourself and been translated to the tower. Have you reactivated your resurrector?"
"Yes. Actually, I have two. But both were located and deactivated."
Burton said, "Then if we'd killed you just now, you'd have escaped us. Why didn't you let us do it? Or kill yourself?"
"Because, as I said, I may need you. Because I'm sick of this violence. Because I owe you something."
He paused. "I'd set up an inhibition in the general lazarus machinery long ago. It'd be activated at my signal, the same signal which would kill all within the tower, the underground chambers, and in the area of the sea. But Tringu and I had our private lines. One of them was in the room at the base of the tower. Sharmun, the woman in charge in Monat's and Thanabur's absence, told me that the two rooms had been found. She said that it would do no good to commit suicide in the hope that I could rise in the tower and continue my evil deeds. Me! Evil!"
"This is getting confusing," Burton said. "Start at the very beginning."
"Very well. But I'll have to be as brief as possible. By the way, where is Gilgamesh?"
Burton told him.
The Ethical said. "I'm sorry."
He paused, then said, "Like his mythical counterpart, he failed to find the secret of immortality."
Loga rose, saying, "I just want to see the screens. I won't go near them."
They kept their weapons trained on him while he limped to the edge of the revolving platform. It was useless to keep him in their sights, Burton thought. He could elude them at any time by making them kill him if he was telling the truth.
Loga limped back to his chair and eased himself into it.
"We may be able to do something. I don't really know. We do have some time, though. So . . ."
He began in the beginning.
When the universe was young, when the first inhabitable planets had formed after the explosion of the primal ball of energy-matter, evolution brought about a people on one planet who differed from those on other planets.
"I don't mean just in physical construction. All the sentient peoples have either bipedal or centaurine bodies, hands, stereoscopic vision, and so forth. They were intelligent but had no consciousness of self, no concept of the I."
"We speculated on that!" Frigate said. "But . . ."
"You must interrupt as little as possible. I'm telling the truth when I say that all sentient beings throughout the universe were without self-awareness. As far as we know, anyway. I know it's very difficult for you to believe. You can't conceive of such a state. But it was and is true – with exceptions now.
"The people who differed did not differ in their lack of self-awareness in the beginning of their history. They were like the others in this respect. However, they did have science, though they didn't go about dealing with it as self-aware sentients do.
"Nor did they have a concept of religion, of gods or of a God. That comes only with an advanced stage of self-awareness.
"Luckily for these people, called by those who followed them The Firsts, one of their scientists had accidentally formed a wathan during an experiment.
"It was the first indication The Firsts had that there was such a force as extraphysical energy. I use the term extra-physical to avoid any confusion with paraphysical, with such evidently existing but usually uncontrollable and elusive forces as telepathy, telekinesis, and other extrasensory perception phenomena."
Burton forebore saying that it was he who'd coined the term ESP on Earth, though he'd called it extra-sensuous perception.
"The wathan may be a form of this, but, if so, it's the only one that's controllable. This nameless scientist who accidentally generated a wathan from the extraphysical forces did not know what it was. He or she continued to experiment and generated more. I say generated because the equipment he was using formed the wathan from the extraphysical energy. Shaped it or perhaps plucked it from the field that exists in the same space as matter but usually doesn't interact with it.
"The first wathans probably attached themselves to the living beings in their proximity."
"All living creatures?" Nur murmured.
"All living individuals. Insects, trees, starfishes, all. After millions of years of experiments, we still don't know why the wathans are attracted to life energy. One of the hundreds of theories is that life itself may be a form of extraphysical energy. An interface, rather."
The effect of the attachments was not immediately noted. The wathan was the source and genesis of self-awareness. But it could not develop this except through living entities, and these had to have highly developed nervous systems if the potentiality for self-awareness was to be realized.
"But that also can't be realized if the wathan attaches itself to a human entity beyond the initial zygote stage. Beyond the fusion of spermatozoon and ovum. Don't ask me why. Just believe me when I say that it's true. Apparently, there is a hardening in the entity, a resistance to the interface."
The machine spat out billions of wathans during the experiments. Millions attached themselves to the zygotes of the sentients. And, for the first time in the universe, as far as anybody knew, self-awareness was born. Infants grew up with this, and neither the older nor the younger generation could understand that this was unique and new. Self-aware children and youths have always had difficulty understanding the adults, but never before had there been such an empathy gap, such lack of comprehension.
"Eventually, the unself-conscious people died out. It wasn't until twenty-five or so years after the first wathan was formed that the reason for self-awareness was discovered. Then it became a matter of necessity to keep producing wathans."
Centuries passed. Space flight via rockets came. After several centuries, a new form of propulsion was discovered. Interstellar flight became possible at speeds unheard of before when a method of sidepassing matter was invented. Even so, it took seven days of Earth-time to go a lightyear.
"The old science-fiction concept of going through other dimensions was realized?" Frigate said.
"No. But we don't have the time for the necessarily lengthy explan
ation of it."
By then The Firsts thought it was their ethical duty to bring immortality and self-awareness via the wathan to all other sentient people. Many expeditions set out to do this. When one found a planet with people whose brains were capable of developing self-awareness, wathan-generating machines were buried so deep in the earth that it was unlikely that they would be discovered by the aborigines.
"Why hidden?" Nur said. He was pale; he looked as if he'd been hard hit by Loga's revelations.
"Why hidden?" Loga said. "Why not just give the machines to the first self-aware generation? You should know why not. Consider your fellow human beings. The wathan generators would have been misused. There would be power struggles to monopolize them and through them the basest exploitation of others. No, the wathan generators can't be entrusted to people until they attain a certain ethical stage."
Burton didn't ask why The Firsts hadn't set up garrisons on each planet to insure that the generators were the property of all. With their scientific knowledge and ethical knowledge, they could have taught the aborigines to advance much more swiftly. But The Firsts would not consider that ethical. Besides, they wouldn't have enough of their own people to rule all the planets they found.
The faces of his companions reflected an agonizing struggle, though Frigate seemed the least affected. Nur, who had always been so flexible, so invulnerable to psychological shock, was suffering the worst. He could not accept the idea that wathans, call them souls, were synthetic. Well, not quite that. But they were formed by humanlike creatures through machines. They did not come parceled out by Allah. Nur had believed this far more deeply than some of the others who, though religious, had not had his firmness of faith.
Loga must have been aware of this.
He said, "There is no Creator unless we accept the creation, this universe, as evidence. The Firsts did, and we do. But there is no evidence whatsoever that It has any interest in Its creatures. It . . ."
"It?" Alice and de Marbot said.
"Yes. The Creator has no sex – as far as we know. The language of Monat's people has a unique neuter pronoun for the Creator."
"His people are The Firsts?" Tai-Peng said.
"No. The Firsts have Gone On long, long ago. Monat's people are the recipients of The Firsts' work through a line of five other peoples. These, you might say, have handed on the torch to others and then Gone On. Monat himself is just one of ten thousand of his own kind yet alive. The others have all Gone On.
"Some theologians say that the Creator has not done anything Itself to give Its sentient creatures wathans. Its divine plan leaves it to sentients to make their own salvation. But this isn't logical, since it was only an accident that the wathans were generated, and billions died with no chance of self-awareness or immortality before this. And billions, perhaps trillions, have died and will die, perished forever, before we Ethicals will have arrived to give them the wathans. So it looks as if the Creator is also indifferent to our self-awareness and immortality.
"It is up to sentients, however, wherever they live, to do what the primitive religionists believed was the Creator's prerogative."
50
* * *
Burton was much shaken, though he found the story perhaps easier to take than any of the rest, Frigate excepted. He'd always been intensely interested in religion. He'd investigated many faiths, especially the Oriental. He'd converted to Roman Catholicism, not only because it fascinated him but because doing so had gotten his wife Isabel off his back. He'd been initiated into the mysteries of Moslem Sufism, had earned the red thread of a Brahmin, had been a Sikh, and a Parsi, and had tried to convince the shrewd Brigham Young that he wanted to be a Mormon. Though he'd acted like a sincere convert and sometimes had surprisingly been overcome by patterned emotion, he'd always left the door of the faith as he'd gone in, a congenital infidel.
Even when he was very young, he had refused to accept the tenets of the Anglican Church. He'd infuriated his parents, and not even the enraged bellowings of and the thrashings given by his father had changed his mind. They had made him tend to keep his opinions and his questions to himself until he had gotten old enough that his father didn't dare attack him by word or fist.
Despite this, the orthodox concept of the soul and of its Donor had seeped through his being. Though he hadn't believed it, he hadn't thought of any other, and it hadn't been until recently that he had heard of one.
As that exasperating fellow Frigate had told him more than once when 'Burton was angry with him, he was a broad but not deep thinker. Nevertheless, the logical extrapolation of the concept of the soul he'd heard when with Frigate and the others had impressed him. Indeed, they had convinced him.
Loga's account was a shock. Not one, though, which stirred the depths of his mind. These had already been disturbed. So, next to Frigate, he was the one who could most accept this extraordinary history.
Loga continued, "It was Monat's people who came to Earth and set up the wathan generators. This would be, approximately, 100,000 B.C."
Frigate said, moaning, "And all those who'd lived before? Beyond saving? Gone? Forever?"
"Enough thought and grief have been expended on them," Loga said. "There is nothing you can do about them, so don't be self-sadistic. As you Americans say, tough shit. It sounds callous, but it's the attitude you must adopt if you don't wish to torment yourself needlessly. Better that some may be redeemed than none at all."
The wathan generators and the wathan catchers were buried far down, so deep that they were surrounded by a heat that would melt nickel-iron.
"Catchers?" Aphra Behn said softly.
"Yes. There is one in a big shaft in the tower. Did you see it on your way up here?"
Burton said, "We saw it."
"That is the very grave problem, the pressing problem which I shall get to after a while."
From that time on, the wathans fixed themselves to or integrated with the human zygotes. When a zygote or an embryo or any of any age died, their wathans were attracted to the buried machine and caged.
"So what the Church of the Second Chance preaches is not entirely true?" Burton said.
"No. It was I who came to Jacques Gillot, La Viro, and told him what we thought he should know. I didn't reveal more than half the truth, and I lied about some things. It was justifiable because you Valleydwellers were not ready for the full truth."
"That's debatable," Burton said.
"Yes. What isn't? But I did tell Gillot that the salvation of the wathan depended upon its attaining a certain ethical stage. That was no lie."
Monat's ancestors came from a planet of a star which was neither Tau Ceti nor Arcturus. They had found a planet which had no sentients as yet, and they had made it into the Gardenworld.
"After about ten thousand years, they began resurrecting the dead children of Earth."
"Including the miscarriages and abortions, etcetera?" Burton said.
"Yes. These were developed into full-term infants. I should say, were and are being. When I left the Garden, all those who'd died under the age of five before approximately A.D. 1925 had been resurrected."
The Gardenworld project had started during the tenth century B.C. The Riverworld project had begun in the late twenty-second century A.D.
Frigate said, "What century is it now in Terrestrial chronology?"
"When I left the Garden for here it was, let's see, umh, to be precise A.D. 2009. It took me one hundred and sixty Terran years to arrive here. It took fifty years to re-form this planet. The wholesale resurrection day took place twenty-seven years after that. That would be, A.D. 2246. It is now, I'm not sure about this, A.D. 2307."
"My God!" Alice said. "How old are you?" "This is really irrelevant now," Loga said. "But I was born sometime during the twelfth century B.C. In that city which you call Troy. I was a grandson of the king Homer called Priamos. I wasn't quite five years old when the invading Akhaiwoi and Danawoi took the city, sacked and burned it, and slaughtered most of its p
eople. I would've become a slave, I suppose, but I defended my mother. I stuck a spear into the leg of a warrior, annoying him so much that he killed me with his bronze sword." Loga shuddered.
"At least, I didn't have to see her and my sisters raped and my father and brothers butchered."
Monat and his people raised several generations of Terrestrial children. After this, many of Monat's people left for other planets. Monat and some others stayed to supervise the human adults who'd grown up in the Garden and were now taking their turn in raising new generations. Monat had left the Garden, however, to accompany the human beings to the Riverworld.
"We sometimes referred to him as the Operator because he was head of the project and chief engineer of the biocomputer."
"The computer which Spruce mentioned?" Burton said. "The giant protein computer?"
"Yes."
"Spruce lied to us in other things, though," Burton said. "He said he was born in the fifty-second century A.D. and that a sort of chronoscope was used to record the bodies of those who'd died."
"We all had the same false stories if we should somehow get caught and were forced to talk. Of course, we could kill ourselves, but, if there was a chance of escaping, we'd stay alive. Anyway, when you questioned Spruce, Monat was present, and he led Spruce along, fed him the questions which had prepared answers."
"We've figured that out," Burton said.
"How do you record the dead?" Nur said.
"The wathans contain everything that the body contains. That is, the records of the body, including the brain, of course, and this recording is the basis for duplication of the body."
"But . . .but," Frigate said. "Then the duplicates, the resurrected, wouldn't be the same as the dead model! They'd just be duplicates!"