GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

“Oh, of course not,” he said. “It is your party, and Mrs. Stride and I get along well now, though we have certain disagreements on theology. Mrs. Crook and Mrs. Kelly are rather cool, understandably so, but I hope to bring them around some day. I assure you that I will not spoil this social function by any unseemly behavior.”

Alice then called the three women, and they said they would be delighted. Could they bring their “beans” with them? Though reluctant to have them, Alice smiled and said they would be welcome. So, that made one hundred and fifty-one guests, since Gull would bring his woman and thirty-two others. Stride and Crook would each bring a man, and Kelly would, as usual, have a man on each arm.

The second time she tried Nur, he was ready to talk to her. He thanked her for the invitation and said that he and Ayesha would be happy to come. He had just had a rather intense conversation with Tom Turpin. Both of them were disturbed because of the two women who had become pregnant. The first birth would occur in four months; the second, two weeks later.

“Tom has told the women many times that the babies will have no wathans. Since the Ethicals did not intend to have babies here, they made no provisions for creating wathans. I asked the Computer if it had the schematics for making a wathan generator, and it said that there was no such thing in its records. That means, as you perhaps remember, that the babies, lacking wathans, will hence lack self-consciousness. For all exterior purposes, they will behave just as babies with wathans will. But they will not be self-conscious. They’ll be biological machines, very superior machines, but still machines.”

“Yes, I know,” Alice said. “But what can one do?”

“If those women want to bear and raise what will be the equivalent of androids, that would be only their business, if that was all there was to it. However, their example may stimulate others to imitate them, to have babies also. Eventually, this tower will be jammed with people, a good part of whom will be soulless. What happens when the overcrowding causes fights for space? War. Suffering. Death. I don’t have to fill in the picture for you.”

“Yes, but …” Alice said.

“Turpin has threatened to kick them out if they bear the children. They don’t care. They’ll just go to an apartment with their men and live there. But this little trouble will lead to great trouble. Somebody … we … will have to take drastic action to stop this and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

“You mean … kill the babies?”

“I don’t like to contemplate that, it pains me greatly, but it will have to be done. The babies, as I said, are really androids, and one should have no more compunction about destroying them than about destroying androids. They look completely human and behave like human beings to a certain extent. But they are not self-conscious; they do not have that which makes Homo sapiens human. The babies can’t be allowed to grow into children; they should be eliminated now before they know what’s happening.”

Alice knew that their death would be instantaneous and painless. They would be placed in a converter and reduced to atoms in a microsecond. Nevertheless, the idea horrified her.

No doubt the kind-hearted Nur felt horror, too. But he knew what had to be done, and he would do it. If Turpin could not get the job done, Nur would see to it.

“If we had a wathan generator,” Nur said, “I would insist… I think almost everybody would agree with me … that these two infants be the exception. We would see that they had wathans, but there would be no more children born. Any woman who used the Computer to make herself fertile would be killed and her body kept in the records until the day … if it ever comes … that the Computer starts resurrecting people again in The Valley. Any man who knowingly made the woman pregnant would also be slain. However …”

“Yes?”