Alice’s voice trembled as she said, “The wathans? You told us that they were artificial. If it had not been for that ancient race that made them, we’d all be soulless. Is that true, God’s own truth?”
“Who knows what God’s truth is?” Loga said. “God’s truth is that What Is Is. But yes, it is a fact that those ancients did make wathans, and we who have inherited their work have made sure that every human being conceived on Earth had a wathan. What is not true is that the wathans go to God or are absorbed into the Godhead. Perhaps they will be some day. I don’t know; no one does.
“The truth is that you can be immortal, relatively so, anyway. You won’t last beyond the death of the universe and probably not nearly as long as the universe does. But you have the potentiality for living a million years, two, perhaps three or more. As long as you can find a Terrestrial-type planet with a hot core and have resurrection machinery available.
“Unfortunately, not all can be permitted to possess immortality. Too many would make immortality miserable or hellish for the rest, and they would try to control others through their control of the resurrection machinery. Even so, everybody, without exception, is given a hundred years after his Earthly death to prove that he or she can live peacefully and in harmony with himself and others, within the tolerable limits of human imperfections. Those who can do this will be immortal after the two projects are completed.”
“Then,” Burton said slowly, “the standards, the ethical goals, are not so extremely high, so demanding, as we have been led to believe?”
“They are high, though not impossibly high for forty percent of the resurrectees.”
“The other sixty percent?” Alice said.
“Their body-records will be destroyed.”
“That seems hard.”
“It is. But it’s absolutely necessary.”
“And then?” Frigate said. He looked anxious.
“The survivors will be carried, as body-records in the form of the yellow sphere, to Earth.”
“Earth?” Burton said. He had never been told so, but he had had the feeling that Earth had been destroyed.
“Yes. Most of life on Earth was killed by radiation in the hydrogen and neutron bomb war. But the Gardenworlders have cleaned it up—it took them one hundred and sixty years—and have been restocking it with plant and animal life. Earth will be ready for you, but you won’t be the kind of people who will abuse it and slowly kill it by pollution. And—”
“Then we won’t be permitted to have children?” Alice said.
“Not on Earth. It won’t have room, though there will be plenty of living room, I think you call it elbow space, for you. However, there are millions of planets without sentient life in this universe, and you can go there if you want children.”
“Earth!” Burton said dreamily. His homesickness was so keen that his chest ached. Earth. It would not be the Earth he had left, but surely its topography had not changed. And that it would not be the Earth that had existed when he had died was, he had to admit, for the good.
“This is quite a shock,” Alice said. “I was a devout member of the Anglican Church and then, when I came here, I lost my faith and became an agnostic until recently, when I was seriously considering joining the Church of the Second Chance. Now …”
“Loga,” Burton said, “since you are finally telling the truth, tell me this. Why did you turn renegade and pervert the course of events that your fellow Ethicals had decided upon? Is your story that you could not bear that your family, your loved ones, might not Go On, the truth? Go On in the sense you’ve just explained, not the old sense? Did you cause all this blood struggle, this overthrow of your comrades, just to give your parents and siblings and cousins more time?”
“I swear to you by all that was, is, or might be holy that that is the truth.”
“Well, then,” Burton said, “I don’t understand how you, who were raised on the Gardenworld from the age of four, could have passed the test. If the Ethical standards have any meaning, any value, how did you escape being eliminated? How could yoti have become a criminal? A criminal with a conscience, but still a criminal. Or were you truly ethical, and then, somehow, you became crazy? And if you can become crazy, what’s to prevent others who’ve also passed from going insane?”