The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer

floating bodies before Resurrection Day, before he was supposed to awake. They must have figured that it was no accident, that…uh…somebody awakened him on purpose. Well, we don’t have to speculate on that. We know that’s what the Council of Ethicals told Burton when they caught him. He was supposed to have his memory of that erased, but X arranged it so that he kept it.
    “Anyway, the Ethicals were suspicious. So they put this pseudo-Frigate, well, actually he’s a real Frigate, on Dick’s trail. My brother was to keep an eye on him and report anything suspicious. But like everybody in The Valley, he got caught with his kilt down.”
    “I’ll take two cards,” Burton said. “That’s very intriguing, Peter. It seems a wild concept, but it may just be true. However, if your brother was an agent, then what was Monat the Tau Cetan or Arcturan or whatever he is? Certainly, he’d have to be an agent, a strange one true, but nevertheless…”
    “Perhaps he’s an Ethical!” Alice said.
    Burton, who didn’t like to be interrupted, glared.
    “I was just going to say that. But if Monat is an agent, I don’t think he’s an Ethical, otherwise he’d have been in the Council…no, by Allah, he wouldn’t have been! If I’d have seen him there, I’d have known that he was one of ’em! And he wouldn’t have been able to stay with me. Though why he stuck to me, I don’t know.
    “However, Monat’s presence means that there is more than one species…genus…zoological family…extra-Terrestrials…involved in this.”
    “I’ll take one card,” Frigate said. “As I was about to say…”
    “Pardon me,” London said. “But how could Peter’s brother know about Burton?”
    “I suppose that the children are educated, probably better than they’d be on Earth. And maybe, just maybe, my brother knew I was his brother. How do we know what incredibly vast and minute knowledge the Ethicals have? Look at the photo of Burton which he found in the kilt of that agent, Agneau. It was taken when Dick was twenty-eight and a subaltern in the East India Army. Doesn’t that prove that the Ethicals were on Earth in 1848? Who knows how long they’ve been walking the streets of Earth taking data? Don’t ask me for what purpose.”
    “Why would James take your name?” Nur said.
    “Well, I was a rabid Burton fan. I even wrote a novel about him. Maybe it pleased James’ sense of humor. I have one. My whole family is known for…an odd sense of humor. And so it struck him funny to be his brother, to pretend to be the Peter that he never knew. Maybe he could vicariously relive the life he’d been denied on Earth. Maybe he thought that if he ran into someone who’d known the Frigate family, he could pass himself off as me. Maybe all these reasons are true. Whatever…I’m sure he punched out Sharkko, the crooked publisher, to avenge me, which shows that he knew much about my life on Earth.”
    Alice said, “But what about the story that agent, Spruce, told? He said he was from the seventy-second century A.D ., and he said something about a chronoscope, something which could look back in time.”
    “Spruce may have been lying,” Burton said.
    “Anyway,” Frigate said, “I don’t believe there could be a chronoscope or such a thing as time-travel in any form. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. We’re all time-traveling. Forward, the only way there is.”
    “What nobody has said,” Nur said, “is that somebody had to resurrect the children. It may or may not have been people from the seventy-second century. More probably, it was Monat’s people who did it. Note also that it was Monat who did most of the questioning of Spruce. He may have been, in a sense, coaching Spruce.”
    “Why?” Alice said.
    That was one question nobody could answer unless the Ethical’s story was true. By now, his recruits thought that he might be as big a liar as his colleagues.
    Nur closed that round with the speculation that the