THE MAGIC LABYRINTH by Philip Jose Farmer

Gott! Were there others? Where was that Neanderthal, Kazz, who worshipped Burton? The Arcturan who also claimed to be from Tau Ceti? The Tokharian, Loghu? The Jew, Ruach?

Like most of the many people in the salon, they looked up when the party entered. Even the black man playing the ragtime piece, “Kitten on the Keys,” on the piano stopped, his fingers poised.

Strubewell loudly asked for silence and attention and got it. He introduced Brother Fenikso, La Viro’s emissary, and said that Fenikso would be traveling with them to Aglejo. He was to be treated with every courtesy but at this time was not to be approached. His Majesty was taking him for a tour of the Rex.

The piano playing and the conversation started up again. Frigate and Hargreaves stared at him for a minute longer, then returned to their game. They did not seem to recognize him. Well, Goring thought, it has been nearly sixty years since we last saw each other. They didn’t have his near-perfect recall. Still, their experiences with him had been so harrowing that he would have thought they’d never forget his face. Besides, Frigate, on Earth, had seen many photographs of him as a young man, which should reinforce his memory.

No, they wouldn’t have forgotten. What had happened was that Burton had gotten to them during his absence from the tour. He’d told them to act as if they’d never seen him before.

Why?

To spare him guilt, their silence saying, in effect, “We forgive you now that you’ve changed. Let it be as if we’re meeting for the first time”?

That didn’t seem likely unless Burton’s character had also changed. The true reason probably was that Goring, if revealed, would then reveal Burton. And for all he knew, Frigate and Hargreaves were under false names.

He didn’t have much time to think about this matter. King John, playing the gracious host, insisted on showing him almost everything in the Rex. He also introduced him to many people, a large number of whom had been famous, infamous, or well known in their time. John, during the many years of travel up The River, had had a chance to pick up such notables. Which meant that he must have had to kick off those not so famous to make room for the famous.

Goring was not as impressed as John had expected him to be. As one who’d been the second-in-command of the German empire and thus had met many of the world’s greats, Goring was not easily awed or bamboozled. Even more, his experiences with the greats and the near-greats on both worlds had made him well aware that the public image and-the person behind the facade were often pathetically or disgustingly dissimilar.

The one who’d impressed him most on the Riverworld was a man who, on Earth, would have been thought a complete nonentity and failure by almost anybody. That was Jacques Gillot, La Viro, La Fondinto.

During his Terrestrial existence, however, the person who’d awed him the most, in fact, overpowered him, enslaved him by force of personality alone, had been Adolf Hitler. Only once had he stood up to his Fuhrer during the many times he’d known the Fuhrer was wrong, and then he’d quickly backed down. Now, in the retrospect of many years on the Riverworld and the knowledge he’d gained as a Second Chancer, he had no respect at all for the madman. Nor did he have any respect for the Goring of that time. Indeed, he loathed him.

But, he wasn’t so full of self-hatred that he considered himself past salvation. To think thus was to put himself into a special class, to be criminally proud, to be full of hubris, to possess a peculiar form of self-righteousness.

However, there was also the danger of having all these prides because you didn’t have them. To be proud because you were humble.

This was a Christian sin, though also counted as such in some other religions. La Viro, who’d been a stoutly devout Catholic all his Terrestrial life, had never even heard of such a sin then. His priest had never mentioned it during his long sleep-inducing sermons. Gillot had conceived of this old but little-publicized sin himself after he’d come to this planet.