Gods of Riverworld by Philip José Farmer Page A

screen would be on the corridor wall facing the suite door.
    The two ordered from their converters a pair of suits and helmets for them and enclosures for the chairs. This could have been reported to the Snark, but they were gambling that the Computer—if it had recorded these actions—would not submit them to the Snark until the Snark awoke.
    Clad in the heat-retaining outfits, carrying the enclosures, Frigate and Nur had left the suite. And the wall sensors had not been activated by them. The unknown, not having made provisions for such deceptions, had slept on. Unlike the Computer, she could have imagined these, but she had not done so.
    “We were very lucky,” Burton said. “Events turned out to favor us, and they could just as easily not have done so. In fact, the probabilities that we would succeed were not very high.”
    “You think that we were too lucky,” Nur said. Burton waited for him to elaborate, but Nur said, “The first thing I thought of when I killed her … I only meant to wound her … was that she would have arranged for an automatic and immediate resurrection.”
    They followed the Moor into the room. At one corner was a converter, and a few feet near it, sprawled facedown, was another body of the woman. The auxiliary computer console had been destroyed by beamer fire.
    “I came into this room as soon as I’d killed her,” Nur said. “Her body had just formed, and she was running to get a beamer on a table. I told her to stop. She ignored me, and so I shot her. I immediately rayed the computer and so prevented a third resurrection. Unfortunately, the ray also destroyed her body-recording.”
    He led Burton to the ruin and pointed at a section that had been cut off. Inside was a blackish, half-melted, cranberry-sized object that had held everything needed to duplicate the body down to the submolecular level.
    “I would be devastated with remorse and grief if I thought I had forever eliminated her chance of being resurrected again. But I’m sure that she must have another recording in the Computer file. I doubt that we can reach it, though. She would have inhibited the Computer from enabling us to find it.”
    “We’ll see,” Burton said. “You’re probably right, though.”
    “Who the hell was she?” Frigate said. “What was she doing here? Loga said that all the Ethicals and their Agents were dead. If he was right, then she wasn’t one of them. But what else could she be?”
    “One of Loga’s enemies, otherwise she wouldn’t have eliminated him,” Nur said. “But if she wasn’t an Ethical or Agent, what reason would she have to do away with him? If she just wanted complete power, why didn’t she kill us?”
    Aphra said, slowly, “Perhaps Monat the Operator was more far-seeing than Loga expected. Perhaps Monat made arrangements for an Agent, this woman, to be resurrected if certain events happened. Certain events in general, I mean. Monat could not have anticipated all events in particular.”
    Burton requested the Computer to identify the dead woman. It replied that the data was unavailable, and it would not or could not say why.
    Burton asked it if the dead woman’s body-recording was in its files.
    The Computer said that it was unavailable.
    “One more mystery,” said Frigate, and he groaned.
    Burton asked the Computer for the location of the machine that had broken through the barricade walls. As he had expected, he was told that that information was also unavailable.
    “I’ve seen all the robots the tower contains,” Burton said. “I had the Computer show them on a screen. That machine was not among them.”
    The woman might have had it made for her by the Computer just to break down the walls.
    Nur and Frigate dragged the body from the corridor and laid it down by the body near the cabinet. Stretched out, faceup, they looked like identical twins.
    “Shall we have them disintegrated in the converter?” Nur said.
    “One of them,” Burton said. “I want the