GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

The dullness came into her face and voice again, and she became silent.

Nur talked to her but reported that he could find no wedge to open her and let in some light. Her soul had become darkened. He hoped that it would not remain so forever.

“But you don’t know if she’ll… stay the same?” Burton said.

Nur shrugged. “No one can know. Except perhaps Star Spoon.”

Burton was frustrated and, hence, angry. He could not take his anger out on her, so he vented it on Frigate and Nur. Understanding what was affecting him, they endured his insults for a while. Then Nur said that he would see Burton again when Burton was rational. Frigate seemed to feel that he should absorb more than Nur had, perhaps for old time’s sake or perhaps because some part of him enjoyed the tongue-lashing. An hour after Nur had left, Frigate got up from his chair, threw his half-full glass against the wall, said, “I’m getting out of here,” and did so.

A few minutes later, Star Spoon entered. She looked at the spilled whiskey and his brooding face. Then, surprisingly, she went to him and kissed him on the lips.

“I’m much improved now,” she said. “I think I can be the cheery woman you want me to be, what I want to be. You’ll have no reason to worry about me from now on. That is, except …”

“I’m very happy,” he said. “I think. There’s something that is still bothering you?”

“I … I am not ready to go to bed with you yet. I would like to, but I can’t. I do believe, though, Dick, that the time will come when I can, and I’ll be completely willing. Just bear with me. The time will come.”

“As I said, I’m very happy. I can wait. Only, this is so sudden. What caused this metamorphosis?”

“I don’t know. It just happened.”

“Very curious,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll know some day. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t mind if we kissed just a little longer, would you? I promise not to get carried away.”

“Of course not.”

Life for Burton returned to the routine it had had before Dunaway’s violation. Star Spoon was more talkative, even aggressive at times during the parties. Verbally aggressive, in that she was more willing to argue, to present her views. However, she spent as much time with the Computer as she had when she was deeply troubled. Burton did not mind. He had his own projects.

28

All human beings, Nur thought, reported that time seemed to them to have gone much slower when they were infants. Time speeded up a little when they became prejuveniles, got a little faster when they were juveniles, and stepped up the pace even more when they became young adults. When you were in your sixties, what had been a smooth and slow stream, a leisurely flowing and broad river when one was young, became a narrow roaring channel. By the seventies, it was a short waterfall, time hurtling by. By the eighties, it was a deep mountain cataract, water, time itself, shooting by, disappearing over the edge of life, which was near one’s-feet, a precipice over which time rushed by as if eager to destroy itself. And you, too.

If you were an old man or woman of ninety, looking back, childhood seemed to be a long, long, long highway reaching to an unimaginably distant horizon. But the last forty years … how short they had been, how swift.

Then you died, and you awoke on a bank of The River and your body was that which you had when you were twenty-five, except that any physical defects you had had then were repaired. It would seem then that, being young again, you would experience time as a slowed-down stream. Childhood would not seem so remote in your memory, nor would it seem to you as long as it had been before you became twenty-five again.

Not so. The young body held a brain young in tissue but old with memory and experience. If you were eighty when you died on Earth and had lived forty years on the Riverworld, and thus were one hundred and twenty years old, in fact, then time was a series of rapids. It hurried you along, hustled and pushed you. Keep going, keep going, it said. No rest for you. You don’t have the time. No rest for me either.