"What you've just proved," Aphra Behn said, "is that there is no soul, not in the way it's commonly conceived of. Or, if there is one, it's superfluous, it has nothing to do with the immortality of the individual."
Tai-Peng spoke for the first time since Burton had brought up the subject.
"I'd say that the wathan part is all that matters. It's the only immortal part, the only thing the Ethicals can preserve. It must be the same thing as the ka of the Chancers."
"Then the wathan is a half-assed thing!" Frigate cried. "A part only of me, the creature that died on Earth! I can't truly be resurrected unless my original body is resurrected!"
"It's the part that God wants and which he will absorb," Nur said.
"Who wants to be absorbed? I want to be I, the whole creature, the entire!"
"You will have the ecstasy of being part of God's body."
"So what? I won't be I anymore!"
"But on Earth you as an adult weren't the same person you were at fifty," Nur said. "Your whole being, at every second of your life, was and is in the process of change. The atoms composing your body at birth were not the same as when you were eight. They'd been replaced by other atoms. Nor were they the same when you were fifty as when you were forty.
"Your body changed, and with it your mind, your store of memories, your beliefs, your attitudes, your reactions. You were never the same.
"And when—or if—you, the creature, the creation, should return to the Creator, you will change then. It will be the last change. You will abide forever in the Unchanging. Unchanging because He has no need for changing. He is perfect."
"Bullshit!" Frigate said, his face red, his hands clenched. "There is the essence of me, the unchanging thing that wants to live forever, however imperfect! Though I strive for perfection! Which may not be attainable! But the striving is the thing, that which makes life endurable, though sometimes life itself becomes almost unendurable! I want to be I, forever lasting! No matter what the change, there is something in me, an unchanging identity, the soul, whatever, that resists death, loathes it, declares it to be unnatural! Death is both insult and injury and, in a sense, unthinkable!
"If the Creator has a plan for us, why doesn't He tell us what it is? Are we so stupid that we can't understand it? He should tell it to us directly! The books that the prophets, the revelators, and the revisionists wrote, claiming to have authority from God Himself, to have taken His dictations, these so-called revelations are false! They make no sense! Besides, they contradict each other! Does God make contradictory statements?"
"They only seem contradictory," Nur said. "When you've attained a higher stage of thinking, you'll see that the contradictions are not what they appear to be."
"Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis! That's all right for human logic! But I still maintain that we shouldn't have been left in ignorance. We should have been shown the Plan. Then we could make our choice, go along with the Plan or reject it!"
"You're still in a lower stage of development, and you seem to be stuck in it," Nur said. "Remember the chimpanzees. They got to a certain level, but they could not progress further. They made a wrong choice, and..."
"I'm not an ape! I'm a man, a human being!"
"You could be more than that," Nur said.
They came to another bay. This, however, led not to a shaft but to an entrance, huge, arched. Beyond it was a chamber the enormity of which staggered them. It was at least half a mile long and wide. Within it were thousands of tables on each of which were devices the purposes of which were not obvious.
Skeletons by the hundreds lay on the floor and the upper parts of more hundreds were on the desks or tables. Thigh bones and pelvic bones lay on the seats of chairs, and beneath the seats were more leg bones. Death had struck instantly and en masse.
There wasn't a single garment anywhere. The people working the experiments had been nude.
Burton said, "The Council of Twelve which interrogated me was clothed. Perhaps they donned their outfits so they wouldn't offend my sense of modesty. If so, they didn't know me well. Or perhaps they were required to wear garments when they were in session."
Some of the equipment on the tables was still running. The nearest to Burton was a transparent sphere the size of his head. It was seemingly without an opening, yet large bubbles of different colors rose from its top, floated up to the ceiling, and burst. By the sphere was a transparent cube in which characters flashed as the bubbles ascended.
They walked on murmuring about the strangeness of the devices. When they'd gone a quarter of a mile, Frigate said, "Look at that!"
He pointed at a wheeled chair which sat in a broad aisle between tables. A jumble of bones, including a skull, lay on the seat, and leg and foot bones were at its base.
47
THE CHAIR WAS OVERSTUFFED/AND COVERED WITH A SOFT MAterial marked with thin alternating pale-red and pale-green zigzagging lines. Burton brushed the bones from the seat with a callousness which drew a protest from Croomes. He sat down, noting aloud that the chair fitted itself to his body. On the top of each massive arm, near the end, was a wide metal circle.
He gingerly pressed down on the black center of the white disc on his right. Nothing happened.
But when he pressed on the fingertip-thick center on the left, a long thin metal rod slid out.
"Aha!"
He pulled back slowly on the rod.
Nur said, "There's a light coming from beneath the chair."
The chair lifted soundlessly from the floor for a few inches.
"Press on the forward edge of the disc on your right," Frigate said. "Maybe it controls the speed."
Burton frowned because he did not like anyone telling him what to do. But he did use a fingertip to push the metal as suggested. The chair moved toward the ceiling at a very slow rate.
Ignoring the exclamations and several more suggestions, he pushed the lever to dead center. The chair straightened out at a horizontal level, continuing to move forward. He increased its speed, then moved the left-hand rod toward the right. The chair turned with the rod, maintaining its angle—no banking as in an airplane—and headed for the faraway wall. After making the chair go up to the ceiling and then down to the floor, whirling it a few times, and speeding it up to an estimated ten miles per hour, Burton landed the chair.
He was smiling; his black eyes were shiny with eagerness.
"We may have a vehicle to lift us up the shaft!" he cried.
Frigate and some of the others weren't satisfied with the demonstration.
"It must be capable of even greater speed," the American said. "What happens if you have to stop suddenly? Do you hurtle on out of the chair?"
"There's one way of finding out," Burton said. He made the chair lift a few inches, then accelerated it toward the wall, half a mile distant. When he was within twenty yards of the wall, he removed pressure from the right-hand disc. The chair at once slowed down but not so quickly that its passenger was in danger of being ejected. And when it was within five feet of the wall, it stopped.
When he returned, Burton said, "It must have built-in sensors. I tried to ram it into the wall, but it wouldn't do it."
"Fine," Frigate said. "We can try to go through the shaft. But what if the Ethical is observing us now? What if he can cut off the power by remote control? We'd fall to our deaths or at least be stuck halfway between floors."
"We'll go one at a time. Each one will stop off at a floor before the next one goes. He won't be able to catch more than one of us, and the others will be warned."