GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

His second wife died, and he and his third wife got a divorce by mutual agreement after a very short marriage. His fourth wife would outlive him.

In a.d. 757, the emperor’s sixteenth son, the prince of Lin, collected an army and fleet, supposedly to fight the rebel An Lu-shan. Li Po, not knowing that Lin intended to revolt against his father, joined him.

“I was fifty-seven years old then but very strong and agile for my age. I thought that it was not too late to gain glory for myself as a warrior, and the emperor might change his mind about me and raise me to some high post. At least, he might give me a pension.”

Unfortunately, Lin’s treason was exposed by an older brother, and his forces were slaughtered. Li Po was sentenced to death—guilty by association—but the emperor decided that Li Po was too great a poet to kill. He was banished, but he was pardoned when he was sixty. On his way home to his fourth wife, he got drunk in a boat and tried to grab his reflection in the water. He fell overboard, caught pneumonia, and died shortly thereafter.

“Were you really convinced at that moment that you could seize your image in the river?” Frigate had said.

“Yes. Had I had one more cup of wine, I could have done it. No one else could, but I would have managed it.”

“And what would you have done with it?” Nur had said drily.

“I would have made it emperor! One Li Po is unconquerable by any fifty men! Two Li Pos would have conquered all of China!”

He had laughed so loudly and long then that the others were convinced that he knew that his boasting was ridiculous. Still, they could not quite be sure.

“The world’s greatest wino,” Frigate had said.

Li Po had awakened from death on the bank of The River. There he had started his wanderings again, but, as he said, he was used to such a life. On Earth, he had been up and down all of China’s great rivers and many of the lesser.

One night, he was aroused in his hut by a masked and hooded man. That stranger was the one who had also wakened Burton and many others to enlist them in his cause. Of the many recruited by the renegade Ethical, Loga, Li Po had been one of the very few to get to the tower.

“And what have you learned during your sojourn here?” Nur had said. “How has it changed you for better or worse, if it has?”

“Unlike you, my Muslim if heretical friend, I did not believe in a hereafter. I did agree with The Sage that the spiritland was none of our business. I thought that when I died, I would become rotten flesh and then dust and that would be that. Awakening by The River was a great shock, the worst in my life. Where were the gods who had raised me from the dead, the gods in whom I had not believed? There were no gods or demons here, only human beings like myself who, though in another world, knew no more about the why and wherefore of it than they had of Earth’s. Poor wretches! Poor ignoramuses stumbling in the dark. Where were those who had lit us up once again so that we’d be little flames looking for the mother flame?”

“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” Frigate said. “Easy to answer. They melted and became clouds and became snow again, today’s.”

At the end of wandering on Earth and the Riverworld, Li Po had reached the tower. He seemed not to have changed, which, Nur said, was regrettable. The Riverworld was designed to make people change. The tall, lean, handsome, devil-faced man with the green eyes and his black hair coiled in a topknot only laughed at that.

“Perfection can change only for the worse.”

He had redecorated his suite so that it looked like the palace of the Glorious Emperor. From the Computer’s files he had had reproduced many famous Chinese paintings and was painting some of his own works. These were not duplicates of his Terrestrial creations but scenes from the Riverworld.