GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

If you can’t find any, Frigate thought, you’ll be relieved of the decision whether or not to resurrect them.

“How about Lewis Carroll, Mr. Dodgson?” he said.

“No.”

She did not offer to elaborate, and she would have been offended if he had asked her to do so.

Frigate left the “shindig” and went to his apartment. Instead of going to bed, he ran some more scenes from Standish’s past. These so troubled him that he could not get to sleep after he had shut them off. Standish was a low-life, a creep, a brutal, dirty, nasty and unintelligent man on Earth and the Riverworld. It was not until two days later, though, that Frigate became so horrified that he quit watching Standish for a while.

Standish was out of a job, his usual circumstance, and living with his sister and her daughter in their apartment in a small Midwestern city. The sister was a twenty-year-old who would have been attractive if she had been clean and shown any signs of intelligence. Her daughter was a blonde, blue-eyed three-year-old who might have been beautiful if she had not been so fat from eating junk food and drinking enormous quantities of Coke. On this particular display, Frigate was watching through Standish’s eyes the living room of the shabby apartment. Standish’s sister, Maizie, was drinking beer on a broken-down sofa. The infant was playing with a ragged doll but was half-hidden by a chair in a corner. Now and then, Frigate could see the can of beer Standish held. Judging from the conversation, the two adults had been drinking beer since breakfast. : “Where’s Linda?” Standish said, looking blearily around.

“There.” Maizie waved a hand at the chair. , “Yeah. Come here Linda!” Standish said loudly. ; Reluctantly, the little girl, holding her doll, walked out from behind the chair. Standish zipped open his pants and pulled out his erect penis.

“Ever sheen one of those, Linda?” Standish said.

Linda backed away. Standish yelled at her to stay where she was. Maizie got up swaying from her chair. “What in fuck are you doing?”

“I’m going to fuck Linda.”

Frigate felt sick, but he watched, his gorge rising, as Maizie argued with her brother but finally said, “Well, what the Hell, she’s gotta get fucked some day. Might as well be now.”

“Yeah, you know it. You was pronged when you was seven years old, wasn’t you?”

Maizie didn’t reply. Standish said, “Come here, Linda.” When she shook her head, he yelled, “Come here, damn it! You want a spanking like Uncle Bill gave you last night? Come here!”

Frigate could not endure it any longer. He turned the scene off. Shaking, he told the Computer to run forward three days. And he saw, through Standish’s eyes, the jail cell. Standish was with two others and bragging about how he had screwed his sister’s kid.

“The little cunt wanted it, so I gave her what she asked for. Anything wrong with that?”

“The poor little girl,” Frigate muttered. “God!” The Computer was locked into Standish’s recording. All Frigate had to do was to order the Computer to destroy it. Standish would be forever dead except for his wathan, and that would float aimlessly and blindly through the universe.

Biting his lip, quivering, heat seething through him, Frigate got up from the console and walked savagely back and forth, muttering “Damn, damn, damn! Damn him to Hell and back! No, not back!”

Finally, he charged up to the console and shouted, “When I give you this codeword, destroy Standish!”

There was more to do than that, though. He had to identify the man’s recording by the Computer’s code, affirm three times that he wished it destroyed, and establish the codeword. “But for the present, Standish is to be on hold,” Frigate said. For no rational reason that he could find, he felt ashamed of himself a few hours later. Who was he to be the judge? Yet … anyone who would rape a child … deserved oblivion.

The next day, hesitatingly, he told Nur what he had done. The Moor raised his eyebrows and said, “I can understand your anger. I did not see what you saw, but I, too, am sick and angry. The man seems totally unredeemable and has proved himself to be no better here than he was on Earth. But he still has time to become something better. I know that you don’t think that he ever will, and you are probably right. The Ethicals, however, gave everybody a certain amount of time to save himself or herself, and Loga managed to extend that time. You must not interfere, no matter what you feel.”