“Eventually, they’re going to tire of this sharing and resurrect men for themselves,” Burton said. “What do you plan to do then?”
“Nothing,” Li Po said, smiling. “I am not a tyrant. When that happens, I will raise others to replace them. It is just as well that does happen, since, sooner or later, I will tire of them or, difficult as it is to conceive, they may tire of me.”
Burton could visualize the people-burgeoning of Li Po’s world. When the saturation point was reached, the excess would have to live in the apartments. The same thing was happening in Turpin’s world.
“Man, I don’t know,” Turpin said, shaking his head. “It all started out with the people I brought in, and then it got out of hand. They resurrected people, and those raised people, and now those’re resurrecting like it was going out of style.”
Burton told him about the black motorcyclist. Turpin grinned and said, “That’s Bill Williams. I don’t know who in hell brought him here. I could find out, but what difference would it make? He isn’t an American black, you know. He’s Russian.”
“Russian?”
“Yeah. He’s got quite a story to tell. You ought to talk to him sometime.”
Burton had observed Gull, Netley, Crook, Stride, and Kelly when he entered. They were standing in two corners, the men in one, the women in another, and they were obviously not meshing with the others. Burton took them around the room to introduce them. It seemed, however, that Frigate had already spread the news about them. This had aroused curiosity about the newcomers, but many were uneasy with Netley and Gull. Anyone would be in the company of the two-thirds of the unholy trinity forming “Jack the Ripper.” So affected was Netley by this that he left early. Burton went into the hall off the main room, where he was unobserved, and ordered the Computer to keep track of him.
Noticing the shyness of Stride, Crook, and Kelly, Nur went to them and soon jollied them up. He was at ease with the high and the low, the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, and he adjusted quickly to any company, though he always kept his dignity. After a while, Aphra Behn and Frigate joined them, and Nur drifted off, ending up with Gull. Curious, Burton invited himself into the conversation.
Gull was telling the Moor about the man who had converted him, Lorenzo Dow. Dow had been born in Coventry, Tolland County, Connecticut, in 1777. A highly imaginative and impressionable youngster, he had become devout beyond his years when he had seen an angel. Or claimed to have done so. As a young adult, he became a traveling preacher loosely connected to the Methodist Church. Of all the wandering ministers of the early American frontier, he had been the most traveled and best known. He was famous from Maine to South Carolina and from New York to the wildernesses of the Mississippi River. Wherever there were even a few people, he traveled by boat, by coach, by horse, or on foot, and he preached his eccentric rambling sermons.
When he was raised from the dead on the Riverworld, he had been surprised but not shocked. “I was wrong in some things,” he told his converts. “But mainly right.”
He was convinced that the angel he had seen as a child was one of those who had made this Riverworld as a stage through which the worthy must pass to get to a better world. He believed, like the Second Chancers, that all must strive to better themselves morally and spiritually. Unlike the Chancers, he did not believe that the ultimate goal was absorption in the Godhead. No, this River was only a sort of purgatory in which God and his angels had given everybody another chance. But those who attained the rich change of spirit demanded here would go on to another world in which they would be physically resurrected again. However, those who failed would die here and become dust forever.
“I have met your angels,” Burton said, “and they are only men and women. In fact, except for one, they were born on Earth and died there when they were children. The exception was Monat, an extra-Terrestrial, a nonhuman, who was in charge of this project. Does this tower look as if it had been built by angels?”
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