Gods of Riverworld (44 page)
Hermann Göring, ex-Nazi and late
Reichsmarschall
of the Third Reich, is one of the party. He has repented his evil deeds on Earth and has converted to the Church of the Second Chance. He sacrifices his life trying to get to the malfunctioning valve to repair it. He fails, and it seems that the Computer will perish and with it all hope of immortality for the thirty-five billion people.
However, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, one of the party, ingeniously figures out a way to circumvent the Computer’s suicidal obedience to certain inhibitions, and the project is saved.
Now the Valleydwellers will be given the extra time that Loga, the renegade Ethical, claims they need in order for all to attain the level where they may Go On. The project will be resumed as originally planned with this exception. Loga’s fellow Ethicals and their Agents will not be resurrected because they would interfere with his plans.
The book at hand,
Gods of the Riverworld,
starts a few weeks after the ending of the fourth,
The Magic Labyrinth.
Thirty-five billion people from every country and every age of Earth’s history were resurrected along the great and winding River of Riverworld. The reader will be relieved to hear that only a few of them will play a part in this story.
Loga
:
A grandson of King Priam of ancient Troy, born in the twelfth century
B.C.
, slain at the age of four by a Greek soldier during the fall of that city. Resurrected on the Gardenworld by nonhuman extra-Terrestrials and raised there. He became a member of the Ethical Council of Twelve, which was charged with creating Riverworld and resurrecting there all human beings who had died between 99,000
B.C.
and
A.D.
1983. He became a renegade and involved various Terrestrial resurrectees in his plot to overthrow the other Ethicals and their Agents and to subvert the original plan for the destiny of those reborn in Riverworld.
Richard Francis Burton
:
An Englishman, born in 1821, died in 1890. During his lifetime a
cause célèbre
and
bête noire.
A famous explorer, linguist, anthropologist, translator, poet, author, and swordsman. He discovered Lake Tanganyika; entered the Muslim sacred city of Mecca in disguise (and from the experience wrote the best book ever written about Mecca); did the most famous translation of
A Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights)
, full of footnotes and essays derived from his vast knowledge of the esoterics of African and Oriental life; was noted as one of the greatest swordsmen of his day; and was the first European to enter the forbidden city of Harar, Ethiopia—and leave alive.
Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves
:
Born in England in 1852, died there in 1934. Daughter of Henry George Liddell, domestic chaplain to the Prince Consort, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and coeditor of the famous Scott-Liddell
A Greek-English Lexicon
, which is still today the standard Classical Greek-English dictionary. When ten years old, Alice inspired Lewis Carroll to write his
Alice in Wonderland
and to base his fictional Alice on her.
Peter Jairus Frigate
:
An American science fiction writer, born 1918, died 1983.
Aphra Behn
:
An Englishwoman, born 1640, died 1689. She was a spy for Charles II in the Netherlands, and later a famous—or infamous—novelist, poetess, and playwright. The first English-woman to support herself solely by writing.
Nur ed-Din el-Musafir
:
Born in Moorish Spain in 1164, died in Baghdad 1258. A Muslim, though not orthodox, and a Sufi, a member of that mystical yet realistic discipline to which Omar Khayyám belonged.
Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot
:
Born 1782 in France, died there in 1854. Like Nur, small in stature but very strong and swift. He served very bravely under Napoleon and was wounded many times. His
Memoirs of His Life and Campaigns
so fascinated A. Conan Doyle that he modeled his stories of Brigadier Gerard, the dashing French soldier, on de Marbot’s exploits.
Tom Million Turpin
:
Black American born in 1871 in Savannah, Georgia; died in 1922 in St. Louis. Turpin was a piano player and composer of considerable talent; his
Harlem Rag
, published in 1897, was the first published ragtime piece by a black composer. He was also the boss of the Tenderloin red-light district in St. Louis.
Li Po
:
Born in 710 of Turkish-Chinese lineage in an outlying district of ancient China; died in 762 in China. Considered by many to be China’s greatest poet, he was also a famous swordsman, drunkard, lover, and wanderer. In
The Magic Labyrinth
, his pseudonym was Tai-Peng.
Star Spoon
:
A female contemporary of Li Po, who suffered much both in China and on the Riverworld.
Those who have not read the previous volumes of the Riverworld series,
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat,
The Dark Design,
and
The Magic Labyrinth,
should go to the outline at the back of this book. There the reader can acquaint himself or herself with some events and items only referred to
en passant
in the book at hand. I have written the outline to avoid lengthy recapitulation. Those familiar with the series so far might also want to read the outline to refresh their memories about certain matters.
I stated in the fourth volume,
The Magic Labyrinth,
that it would be the final book in the series. I had intended it to be so, but I did leave myself a tiny escape hatch in the final paragraph. My unconscious knew better than my conscious, and it made me (the devil!) install that little door. Some time after the fourth volume appeared, I got to thinking about the vast powers possessed by the people who had entered the tower and how tempting the powers would be.
Also, as I knew and some readers pointed out, the truths revealed in the fourth volume might not be the final truths after all.
The opinions and conclusions about economics, ideology, politics, sexuality, and other matters re
Homo sapiens
vary according to the characters’ knowledge or biases. They are not necessarily my own. I am convinced that all races have an equal mental potential and that the same spectrum of stupidity, mediocre intelligence, and genius runs through every race. All races, I’m convinced, have an equal potential for good or evil, love or hate, and saintliness or sin. I’m also convinced from sixty years of wide reading and close observation that human life has always been savage and comically absurd but that we are not a totally unredeemable species.
The Lovers
Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
Lord Tyger
Strange Relations
Tarzan Alive
Time’s Last Gift
Traitor to the Living
The Stone God Awakens
Flesh
Behind the Walls of Terra
The Image of the Beast
Blown
A Feast Unknown
The Gates of Creation
The Maker of Universes
Night of Light
A Private Cosmos
The Wind Whales of Ishmael
The Lavalite World
Jesus on Mars
Dark Is the Sun
The Unreasoning Mask
Inside, Outside
The Alley God
The Book of Philip José Farmer
Dayworld
Dayworld Rebel
T
HE
R
IVERWORLD
S
ERIES
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
The Fabulous Riverboat
The Dark Design
The Magic Labyrinth
Gods of Riverworld
Riverworld and Other Stories
Red Orc’s Rage
The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel
“[Farmer is] an excellent science fiction writer.”
—Isaac Asimov
“Riverworld is a venue where anyone can have adventures with anyone else.… The Riverworld books [are] interested in the play of character and ideas, free from the constraints of realism, place, or time. Or, to put it another way, they’re a venue for Farmer to talk about interesting stuff.”
—
Locus
The Magic Labyrinth
“A wide-screen adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse, and educate … His imagination is of the first rank … his velocity breathtaking.… Charts a territory somewhere between
Gulliver’s Travels
and
The Lord of the Rings
.”
—
Time
“This book, like the series as a whole, offers delight to the sense of wonder and storytelling flow as irresistible as the River itself.”
—
Publishers Weekly
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
“One of the most imaginative worlds in science fiction!”
—
Booklist
“From the beginning,
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
gripped me in a way few books have been able to match.”
—
SF Site
The Dark Design
“Its publication is an event with a capital
E
!”
—
Parade of Books
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GODS OF RIVERWORLD
Copyright © 1983 by the Estate of Philip José Farmer
All rights reserved.
A Tor
®
eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Farmer, Philip José.
Gods of riverworld / Philip José Farmer.—1st Tor trade paperback ed.
p. cm.—(Riverworld series)
ISBN 978-0-7653-2656-0 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3556.A72G6 2011
813' .54—dc22
2010036531
First Tor Trade Paperback Edition: February 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-9352-4
First Tor eBook Edition: February 2011
