“That is by no means the worst thing that can happen. In the beginning, after we’ve landed and built homes with our own hands and tilled and planted and reaped and brought forth the first generation, we’ll be a fairly harmonious society. But as the centuries, the millennia, go by, our common language, Esperanto, will become dialects, then language families as unintelligible to one another as French and Albanian. Though there will be much miscegenation, some groups will keep their racial characteristics, and our brave new world will have differing races.
“Different languages and different races. Just as an old Earth. But it will have variety.
“And, try though we will to bring up our children with love, in time, as generation succeeds generation, or perhaps in a very short time, we will have the same kind of people that we had on old Earth.
“Ladies and gentlemen, after we have labored long and mightily, survived many hardships and dangers, and perhaps established a just and equitable society for all, we will nevertheless see the inevitable degeneration of our society. As on Earth, there will be multitudes of the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the pushers and the pushed, the brave and the cowardly, the dull and the bright, the open and the shut, the givers and the takers, the compassionate and the indifferent or cruel, the sensitive and the callous, the tender-and the brutal, the victimizers and the victims, the sane, the half-sane, and the mad.
“There will be hate but love, despair but joy, defeat but triumph, misery but happiness, hopelessness but hope.”
He looked briefly at them, seeing all their faces as one. They knew the spirit if not the exact form of what he was going to say.
“But… we will have immense variety, the richness and the full spectrum that a secure life cannot give.
“And we will have adventure.
“We will be rejecting the promised Heaven of Earth. But we will be taking some of Heaven with us, and, I’m sure, more than a bit of Hell. Can Heaven exist in a vacuum? Without Hell, how do you know that you are in Heaven?
“I ask you, my friends, and even those who are perhaps not very fond of me, which shall it be? The new Earth? Or the unknown?”
His audience was silent. Then Frigate called out, “Is all this rhetorical? Where are you going, Dick?”
“You know where,” Burton said.
He waved his hand to indicate the stars.
“Who’s going with me?”
Afterword
While of course an author would like to believe that his every word remains engraved forever on the hearts of his readers, it may be that some of the events of the previous four Riverworld novels have grown dim in some memories. Here is a brief look at the adventures that have led up to Gods of Riverworld: Richard Francis Burton, the famous (or infamous) English explorer, linguist, author, poet, swordsman, and anthropologist, dies in a.d. 1890 at the age of sixty-nine. Contrary to his expectations, he awakes from death. He is in a vast chamber containing billions of bodies floating in the air. All those he sees are human except for one near him. This body is humanoid but definitely not that of a member of Homo sapiens. Before Burton can escape from the chamber, he is rendered unconscious by two men who appear in some kind of aerial craft.
When Burton again awakes, he is lying naked on the bank of a wide river in a narrow valley surrounded by high, unscalable mountains. His body is like the one he had when he was twenty-five, minus its scars. He is only one of an estimated thirty-five billion who have been resurrected under an unfamiliar sky on the banks of a river ten million miles long.
The resurrection is not, as events will show, caused by supernatural means. It has been effected by scientific devices invented by beings unknown during the early part of the first book, To four Scattered Bodies Go. The people responsible for this, the Ethicals, planted recording machines on Earth long before the first humans evolved from the apes. (Or so Burton and others are told during the course of the series.) These machines have recorded every human being from the time of his or her conception continuously to the moment of death. And, as is discovered in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, the souls (called wathans by the Ethicals) are artificial. There is no such thing as a natural soul; these have been provided by the Ethicals.
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