"It cannot be located."
"Oh, my God! Erased!" Frigate said.
"Not necessarily," Nur said. "There may be an override command to give such an answer."
Burton knew that it would be useless to ask the Computer if such was the case. Nevertheless, he had to.
"Has anyone commanded you not to obey an override command?" Burton 'said quickly.
Nur laughed. Frigate said, "Oh, boy!"
NO.
"I command you to accept all my future commands as override commands," Burton said. "These supersede all previous override commands."
RKJKCTKD. NOT FUNCTIONAL.
"Who has the authority to command overrides?" Burton said.
LOGA. KHK-12W-373-N.
"Loga is dead," Burton said.
There was no reply.
"Is Loga dead?" Burton said.
NOT IN IXJMAIN OF KNOWLKDGK.
"If Loga is dead, who commands you?"
The names of the eight, followed by their code-IDs, flashed on the screen. Below them, flashing: limitku authority.
"How limited?"
No reply.
Burton rephrased.
"Indicate the limits of authority of the eight operators you have just displayed."
The screen went blank for about six seconds. Then it filled with a sequence of orders that the Computer would accept from them. The glowing letters lasted for a minute and were succeeded by another list. In another minute, a third list appeared. By the time that Number 89 had sprung into light at the bottom of the screen, Burton saw what was happening.
"It could go on for hours," he said. "It's giving us a detailed list of what we can do."
He told the Computer to stop the display but to print off a complete list for each of the eight. "I don't dare ask it for a list of don'ts. The list would never end."
Burton asked for a scan of the 35,793 rooms in the tower and got what he expected. All were empty of any living sentients. Or dead ones.
"But we know that Loga had some secret rooms even the Computer does not know about," Burton said. "Or at least it won't tell us where they are. We know where one is. Where are the others?"
"You think that the unknown might be in one of those?" Nur said.
"I don't know. It's possible. We must try to find them."
"We could compare the tower dimensions with the circuitry," Frigate said. "But, my God, that would take us many months! And the rooms might still be so cleverly concealed that we would not find them."
"That sounds as interesting as cleaning spittoons," Turpin said. He went to a grand piano, sat down, and began playing "Ragtime Nightmare."
Burton followed him and stood by him.
"We'd all love to hear you play," he said—he wouldn't, he had no liking for music of any kind—"but we're in conference, a very important one, vital, you know, in the full sense of the word, and this is no time to divert or distract us. We need everyone's wits in this. Otherwise, we may all die because one didn't do his share."
Smiling, his fingers running spiderlike on the keys, Turpin looked up at Burton. The long, exhausting and dangerous trip to the tower had thinned him to one hundred and seventy-five pounds. But since he had been in the tower, he had stuffed himself with food and liquor, and his face was waxing into full moonness. His large teeth were very white against his dark skin—not as dark as Burton's—and his dark brown hair was wavy, not kinky. He could have passed for white, but he had chosen to stay in the black world on Earth.
"Nigger is how you was raised, how you think," he would sometimes say. "As the Good Book says, it don't do no good to kick against the pricks." He would laugh softly then, not caring whether or not his hearer understood that by "pricks" he meant "whites."
"I thought I'd give you thinkers some background music. I'm no good at this kind of thing."
"You've a good mind," Burton said, "and we need it. Besides, we have to act as a team, as soldiers in a small army. If everybody does what he wants, ignores this crisis, we become just a disorganized mob."
"And you's the captain, the man," Turpin said. "OK."
He brought his hands down, the chords crashed, and he stood up.
"Lead on, MacDuff."
Though he was furious, Burton showed no sign of it. He strode back to the table, Turpin following him too closely, and he stood by his chair. Turpin, still smiling, took his seat.
"I suggest that we wait until we have mastered the contents of those," Burton said, waving a hand at the mechanism that was piling, sorting, and collating the papers flying from a slot in the wall. "Once we thoroughly understand what we can and cannot do, we may make our plans."
"That'll take some time," de Marbot said. "It'll be like reading a library, not one book."
"It must be done."
"You talk of limits," Nur said, "and that is necessary and good. But within what we call limits we have such power as the greatest kings on Earth never dreamed of. That power will be our strength, but it will also be our weakness. Rather, I should say, the power will tempt us to misuse it. I pray to God that we will be strong enough to overcome our weaknesses—if we have them."
"We are, in a sense, gods," Burton said. "But humans with godlike power. Half-gods."
"Half-assed gods," Frigate said.
Burton smiled and said, "We've been through much on The River. It's scourged us, winnowed out the chaff. I hope. We shall see."
"The greatest enemy is not the unknown," Nur said. He did not need to explain what he meant.
An ancient Greek philosopher, Herakleitos, once said, "Character determines destiny."
Burton was thinking of this as he paced back and forth in his bedroom. What Herakleitos said was only partly true. Everyone had a unique character. However, that character was influenced by environment. And every environment was unique. Every place was not exactly like every other place. In addition, a person's character was part of the environment he traveled in. How a person acted depended not only upon his character but also on the peculiar opportunities and constraints of the environment, which included the person's self. The self carried about in it all the environments that the person had lived in. These were, in a sense, ghosts, some of thicker ectoplasm than the others, and thus powerful haunters of the mobile home, the person.
Another ancient sage, Hebrew, not Greek, had said, "There is nothing new under the sun."
The old Preacher had never heard of evolution and so did not know that new species, unfamiliar to the sun, emerged now and then. Moreover, he overlooked that every newborn baby was unique, therefore new, whether under the sun or under the moon. Like all sages, the Preacher spoke half-truths.
When he said that there was a time to act and a time not to act, he spoke the whole truth. That is, unless you were a Greek philosopher and pointed out that not acting is an act in itself. The difference in philosophy between the Greek and the Hebrew was in their attitudes toward the world. Herakleitos was interested in abstract ethics; the Preacher, in practical ethics. The former stressed the why, the latter, the how.
It was possible, Burton thought, to live in this world and only wonder about the how. But a complete human, one trying to realize all his potential, would also probe the why. This situation demanded the why and the how. Lacking the first, he could not function properly with the second.
Here he was with seven other Earthborns, in a tower set in the center of a sea at the north pole of this world. The sea had a diameter of sixty miles and was ringed by an unbroken range of mountains over twenty thousand feet high. In this sea The River gave up almost all of its warmth before it plunged from the other end and began picking up heat again. Thick mists like those from the gates of Hell hid a tower that rose ten miles from the sea surface. Below the waters and deep into the earth, the tower extended five miles or perhaps even deeper.