“I recruited the lazari because there was a very slight probability that what has happened might happen. I put all the situations I could think of into the computer and told it to estimate their probability. Unfortunately, the computer cannot detect what sentient beings will think, what final choices they’ll make, unless it has all the data and that’s impossible. Well, not even if it had every item could it predict one hundred percent. Thus, Monat, and the others did what I couldn’t expect. Just as I did what he couldn’t anticipate. Just as you did what I couldn’t predict. The human, the sentient, mind is still a deep mystery.”
“May it always be so,” Burton said.
“It is, it is! That is why you can’t predict the stage of development of any wathan. One may be rather advanced, yet go no further. Another may be in a low stage and, suddenly, almost overnight as it were, leap to a far higher state than the previously much further advanced. It’s a quantum ethical leap. Also, people regress.”
“Are you an example of regression?” Burton said.
“No! That’s what Siggen accused me of being when we were living in that hut in Parolando. The truth is, I am more highly advanced than anyone else in the project. Isn’t it much more ethical to give everyone all the time they might need to develop? Isn’t it? Yes, it is! That can’t be denied!”
Alice murmured, “He’s crazy.”
Burton wasn’t so sure. What Loga had said seemed reasonable. But his ideas for insuring his plans didn’t seem so. Yet, if he continued to send false messages, then the Gardenworlders wouldn’t come to investigate. Loga might gain a thousand years. Surely, in that time, anybody would attain the stage desired.
His deep pessimism told him that it might not be so.
What was his own progress?
Or did he want to get to a stage where the essential part of him just disappeared?
Why not? It would be an adventure even greater than this one, the greatest in his life.
“Very well,” he said. “I think we understand all that’s happened. But you’ve hinted that you may not be able to carry out your plans even if you have no one to stop you.
“What terrible thing has happened?”
“It’s my fault, mine only!” Loga cried. He rose from the chair and, despite his limp, paced back and forth, his face twisted and sweating.
“Because of what I did, billions may be doomed forever! In fact, almost everybody! Perhaps, everybody! Forever!”
52
THERE WAS SILENCE FOR A WHILE. LOGA CONTINUED HIS PAINful limping. Then Burton said, “You might as well tell us.”
Loga sat down in his chair.
“My signal put an inhibit on the resurrection line. I didn’t want any Ethical to commit suicide and get to the tower before I did. What I didn’t know was that another Ethical had also commanded an inhibit on the resurrection line when I was found out.”
The reason for this, Loga said, was that Monat didn’t want the unknown traitor to gain access to the tower. There he or she might be able to carry out his plans—whatever they were— before his presence was known.
Monat’s command overrode everybody else’s.
“He was the Operator.”
Moreover, Monat, through his proxy, had commanded the computer to obey no one else but him until normal operations were restored.
“I’m sure that if he’d known exactly what was to happen, he’d not have given such a command. But fie had no more idea than I what course events would take.”
“The universe is infinite, and the events in it are also infinite,” Nur said.
“Perhaps. But you see, the computer used the wathans as its… what shall I say?… blueprints to duplicate bodies. Once, records were kept of the bodies, but it was more economical to use the wathans themselves, as I’ve explained. There are no other records. So, if the wathans are lost, then we have no way to duplicate bodies anymore.”
Burton rolled this around in his mind.
“Well, you have the wathans. We saw them in that enclosure in the middle of the tower.”
“Yes, but when the computer dies, the wathans will be released! And there is no means then to resurrect the dead. They are lost forever!”