GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

38

Loga paled, turned, set the goblet on a table, and turned again. He was smiling, and his eyes moved from left to right and back again as if he were looking for something beyond the group.

“I’m not crazy!”

“Consider all that you’ve done for the sake of a score or so of people,” Burton said.

“I am not crazy! What I did, I did for love.”

“Love has its insanities,” Burton said. He leaned back in his chair, blew cigar smoke out, smiled, and said, “It doesn’t, for the moment, matter if you are insane or not. You still haven’t answered us. Must we go back to The Valley or may we stay here?”

“I had thought you could stay,” Loga said. “I had judged that you had attained the level where you could be trusted and where we could all enjoy each other’s company in love. You could bring in others. I intend to bring in my family and show them what they must do if they would be immortal. Some of them …”

“You’re doubtful about some of them, then?” Burton said.

Frigate leaned over the table and, staring hard at Loga, said, “We were told that passing the test, Going On, was an automatic event. It involved no judging by human beings. Now … who judges?”

Burton was annoyed by the question, though he had wondered about it. The important question was the one he had just put. The others could be answered later.

“That will be done by the Computer. After that, the people in this project, the Valleydwellers, will eat food that will cause them to fall asleep and die. Their wathans will then be scanned by the Computer. As you know, the wathan displays through its colors and their relative breadths the ethical development of the individual. Those that meet the standards will be reunited on Earth with their bodies. Those that do not will be released and go to wherever they go.”

“Judging by a machine?” Frigate said.

“It is infallible.”

“Unless it’s tampered with,” Burton said.

“That is not very likely.”

“Not until you made it likely,” Burton said.

Loga glared at him. “I won’t be here.”

“Where will you be?”

“I will have gone on one of the ships in the hangar to an uninhabited planet.”

“You could have done that at any time after you got rid of your fellow Ethicals and their Agents,” Frigate said. “Why didn’t you just pick up your family and take them with you?”

Loga looked at Frigate as if he just could not believe that anybody would say that. “No, I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” Burton said. “It seems the logical action to take.”

“They wouldn’t be ready. They wouldn’t have passed the test; the Computer would reject them. They’d be doomed.”

“You don’t make sense,” Frigate said. “What do you care about that? You’d be safe on some planet where they wouldn’t find you for a thousand years, maybe never, and you’d have your family.”

Loga frowned, and sweat oozed on his forehead. “You don’t understand. They shouldn’t be living then. They would not have Gone On. I couldn’t take them until they had attained the level that makes immortality bearable for them.”

The others looked at each other. Unspoken: he is crazy.

Burton sighed and leaned forward, reached under the table, and withdrew from its shelf a beamer that had been there since the day the castle was built. His finger moved the dial on its side to stun-power. He brought the weapon out swiftly and pressed the sliding tongue that acted as the trigger. The very pale red line struck Loga in the chest, and the Ethical fell backwards.

“I had to do it,” Burton said. “He is hopelessly psychotic and he would have sent us back to The Valley. God knows what he would have done then.”

At Burton’s orders, Frigate ran to get from a converter a hypodermic syringe containing the needed amount of somnium. Burton stood guard, waiting to stun Loga again if he showed signs of consciousness. The man was immensely powerful; a bolt that would knock most men out might make him only semiconscious.