Star Spoon looked at him as if she found him strange. Burton, however, understood him. To know full pleasure you had also to know unpleasure. The existence of evil could be justified. Without it, how would you know that good was good? Perhaps, though, that was not necessary. If it were, why had the Ethicals worked so hard to eliminate evil?
At that moment, a woman came out of the house. She was gorgeous, auburn-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned, long-legged, full-breasted, tiny-waisted. Her face was irregular, the nose a trifle too long, the upper lip a trifle too short, and her eyes perhaps too deep-sunk. Nevertheless, their integration gave her a beautiful and not easily forgotten strong face. She was about five feet seven inches tall and wore a white gown of some shimmering white stuff, low-cut and slit to the upper thigh on the left side. Her high-heeled shoes were open and white. She wore no jewelry or pearls, but a silver band was around her right wrist.
Frigate, smiling, introduced her. “Sophie Lefkowitz. I met her at a science-fiction convention in 1955. We corresponded and met occasionally at conventions after that. She died in 1979 of cancer. Her grandparents came over from Russia to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1900, and her father married a woman descended from Sephardic Jews who came to New Amsterdam in 1652. The funny thing is that I once met the original immigrant, Abraham Lopez. We didn’t get along; he was a raving bigot. She was a housewife, but she was active in a lot of organizations, including the National Organization for Women. She also made a pile of money writing children’s books under the byline of Begonia West.”
“Charmed, I’m sure,” said Burton, who meant it. “But you warned against resurrecting writers, remember?”
“They’re not all rotten.”
Sophie was sprightly and intelligent, though too fond of puns. She also seemed very grateful to Frigate for raising her from the dead, and he seemed delighted with her.
“Of course, we’re going to resurrect others. We’d get on each other’s nerves if we didn’t have other companions. That takes a lot of time judging the candidates, though.”
“He’s looking for perfection, and he isn’t going to get it,” Sophie said. “The perfect ones have Gone On. I say, pick those who seem reasonably compatible, and if they don’t work out, they can always move out.”
“The way things are going,” Star Spoon said, “the tower is going to bulge with people. Everybody who’s resurrected starts resurrecting others.”
“It can house over two million people quite comfortably,” Sophie said.
“But if everybody who’s resurrected brings in four more, it wouldn’t take long at an exponential rate for the tower to fill,” Burton said.
“Not only that,” Frigate said, “but it may get worse. I was talking to Tom Turpin the other day. He said that two couples in his world are trying to have children. They’ve had the Computer eliminate from their diet the contraceptive chemicals that make them sterile. Tom was angry. He told them that if the women did get pregnant, they’d have to leave Turpinland. But they said they didn’t care.”
They were silent for a while, aghast at the news. The Ethicals had insured that no children would be born, because there was not enough room on the Riverworld for an expanding population. Moreover, the stage, as it were, had to become empty so that those born on Earth after a.d. 1983 could be resurrected.
“The whole project is going to the dogs,” Frigate said.
“To utter hell and damnation,” Burton said. “If it’s not already there.”
Sophie said, smiling, “This doesn’t look like Hell to me.” She waved a hand to indicate their private world. From nearby came the songs of birds, anachronistic notes, since there were no birds in the Mesozoic, and the chirping of some raccoons, also out of their era. From over the edge of the monolith came the deep gurgling cries of brontosaurs and the express-train rumbling of a tyrannosaur, like the beginning of a snow avalanche. Pteranodons with thirty-foot wingspreads sounded like giant crows with asthma.
“It’s only temporary,” Burton said.
The androids, Ronnie and Dicky, brought more drinks. Frigate and Burton, perhaps inspired by the presence of the androids, began talking about free will versus determinism, a favorite subject. Frigate insisted that free will played a larger part in human lives than mechanical, chemical or neural elements. Burton was equally insistent that most people’s choices were fixed by their body chemistry and early conditioning.