“Thus, when the body dies, it stays dead. The wathan floats off, whatever that means. It has the duplicated emotions and thoughts and all that which make up a persona. It also has the free will and the self-awareness if it’s reattached to a duplicate body. But it isn’t the same person.”
“What you’ve just proved,” Aphra Behn said, “is that there is no soul, not in the way it’s commonly conceived of. Or, if there is one, it’s superfluous, it has nothing to do with the immortality of the individual.”
Tai-Peng spoke for the first time since Burton had brought up the subject.
“I’d say that the wathan part is all that matters. It’s the only immortal part, the only thing the Ethicals can preserve. It must be the same thing as the ka of the Chancers.”
“Then the wathan is a half-assed thing!” Frigate cried. “A part only of me, the creature that died on Earth! I can’t truly be resurrected unless my original body is resurrected!”
“It’s the part that God wants and which he will absorb,” Nur said.
“Who wants to be absorbed? I want to be I, the whole creature, the entire!”
“You will have the ecstasy of being part of God’s body.”
“So what? I won’t be I anymore!”
“But on Earth you as an adult weren’t the same person you were at fifty,” Nur said. “Your whole being, at every second of your life, was and is in the process of change. The atoms composing your body at birth were not the same as when you were eight. They’d been replaced by other atoms. Nor were they the same when you were fifty as when you were forty.
“Your body changed, and with it your mind, your store of memories, your beliefs, your attitudes, your reactions. You were never the same.
“And when—or if—you, the creature, the creation, should return to the Creator, you will change then. It will be the last change. You will abide forever in the Unchanging. Unchanging because He has no need for changing. He is perfect.”
“Bullshit!” Frigate said, his face red, his hands clenched. “There is the essence of me, the unchanging thing that wants to live forever, however imperfect! Though I strive for perfection! Which may not be attainable! But the striving is the thing, that which makes life endurable, though sometimes life itself becomes almost unendurable! I want to be I, forever lasting! No matter what the change, there is something in me, an unchanging identity, the soul, whatever, that resists death, loathes it, declares it to be unnatural! Death is both insult and injury and, in a sense, unthinkable!
“If the Creator has a plan for us, why doesn’t He tell us what it is? Are we so stupid that we can’t understand it? He should tell it to us directly! The books that the prophets, the revelators, and the revisionists wrote, claiming to have authority from God Himself, to have taken His dictations, these so-called revelations are false! They make no sense! Besides, they contradict each other! Does God make contradictory statements?”
“They only seem contradictory,” Nur said. “When you’ve attained a higher stage of thinking, you’ll see that the contradictions are not what they appear to be.”
“Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis! That’s all right for human logic! But I still maintain that we shouldn’t have been left in ignorance. We should have been shown the Plan. Then we could make our choice, go along with the Plan or reject it!”
“You’re still in a lower stage of development, and you seem to be stuck in it,” Nur said. “Remember the chimpanzees. They got to a certain level, but they could not progress further. They made a wrong choice, and…”
“I’m not an ape! I’m a man, a human being!”
“You could be more than that,” Nur said.
They came to another bay. This, however, led not to a shaft but to an entrance, huge, arched. Beyond it was a chamber the enormity of which staggered them. It was at least half a mile long and wide. Within it were thousands of tables on each of which were devices the purposes of which were not obvious.