He paused for a moment, thinking. From the very second day after the great resurrection, the lesser resurrections, or translations, as they were generally called, had occurred. People were killed or killed themselves or had fatal accidents, but, at dawn the next day, they found themselves alive. However, they were never raised at the scene of their deaths. Always, they found themselves far away, often in a different climatic zone.
Many attributed this to a supernatural agency. Many more, among whom was Burton, did not think that there was any agency except an advanced science which accounted for this. There was no need to call in the supernatural. “No ghosts need apply,”-to quote the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Physical explanations sufficed.
Burton knew from his own experience, apparently a unique one, that a dead person’s body could be duplicated. He had seen that in the vast space where he had awakened briefly. Bodies were somehow made from some kind of recording, their wounds healed, diseased flesh regenerated, limbs restored, the ravages of old age repaired, youth restored.
Somewhere under the crust of this planet was an immense thermionic energy-matter converter. Probably, it was fueled by heat from the nickel-iron core. Its machinery operated through the complex of grailstones, the roots of which reached deep under the earth, forming a circuit so complex that it staggered the mind to think of it.
Was the recording of the dead person’s cells made by something in the stones themselves? Or was it made as Frigate had suggested, by unseen orbital satellites which kept an eye upon every living being, much as God was supposed to note even the fall of a sparrow?
Nobody knew, or, if they did, they were keeping the secret to themselves.
Energy-matter conversion through the grailstone system also accounted for the free meals every citizen of The Riverworld found in his grail three times a day. The base of each of the metal cylinders must conceal a tiny converter and an electronic menu. The energy was transmitted through the grailstone complex into the grails. And there electricity became complex matter: beef, bread, lettuce, etcetera, and even luxuries, tobacco, marijuana, booze, scissors, combs, cigarette lighters, lipstick, dreamgum.
The towel-like cloths were also provided via the stone system, but not through the grails. They appeared in a neat pile next to the resurrected body and the grail.
There had to be some sort of mechanism inside the underground roots of the stone complex. This somehow could project through many meters of earth the vastly complicated configuration of molecules of human bodies, grails, and cloths at precisely a centimeter above ground level.
Literally, people and things formed from the air.
Burton had sometimes wondered what would happen if the translatee should happen to be formed in an area occupied by another object. Frigate said that there would be a terrible explosion. This had never happened, at least not to Burton’s knowledge. Thus, the mechanism “knew” how to avoid this intermingling of molecules.
There was, however, as Frigate had pointed out, the volume of atmosphere which the newly formed body had to displace. How were the molecules of air kept from a fatal mingling with the molecules of the body?
No one knew. But the mechanism must somehow remove the air, make vacuums into which the body, grail, and cloths appeared. It would have to be a perfect vacuum, too, something which the science of the late 10th century had not succeeded in making.
And it did it silently, without the explosion of a mass of suddenly displaced air.
The question of how bodies were recorded still did not have a satisfactory answer. Many years ago, a captured agent of the Ethicals, a man calling himself Spruce, had said that a sort of chrono-scope, an instrument which could look back in time, recorded the cells of human beings. Of every person who had ever lived from about two million B.C. to 2008 a.d.
Burton did not believe this. It did not seem possible that anything could go backward in time, bodily or visually. Frigate had expressed his disbelief, too, saying that Spruce probably had used “chronoscope” in a figurative sense. Or perhaps he had lied.