Small Gods

Which meant that mostly you could only ever see where the sun had been, except twice every day when it caught up with itself, and this meant that the whole sun was a faster-than-light particle, a tachyon or, as Didactylos put it, a bugger.



It was still hot. The lifeless sea seemed to steam.



Brutha trudged along, directly above the only piece of shadow for hundreds of miles. Even Om had stopped complaining. It was too hot.



Here and there fragments of wood rolled in the scum at the edge of the sea.



Ahead of Brutha the air shimmered over the sand. In the middle of it was a dark blob.



He regarded it dispassionately as he approached, incapable of any real thought. It was nothing more than a reference point in a world of orange heat, ex?panding and contracting in the vibrating haze.



Closer to, it turned out to be Vorbis.



The thought took a long time to seep through Brutha's mind.



Vorbis.



Not with a robe. All torn off. Just his singlet with. The nails sewn in. Blood -all. Over one leg. Torn by. Rocks. Vorbis.



Vorbis.



Brutha slumped to his knees. On the high-tide line, a scalbie gave a croak.



“He's still . . . alive,” Brutha managed.



“Pity,” said Om.



“We should do something . . . for him.”



“Yes? Maybe you can find a rock and stove his head in,” said Om.



“We can't just leave him here.”



“Watch us.” No."



Brutha got his hand under the deacon and tried to lift him. To his dull surprise, Vorbis weighed almost nothing. The deacon's robe had concealed a body that was just skin stretched over bone. Brutha could have broken him with bare hands.



“What about me?” whined Om.



Brutha slung Vorbis over his shoulder.



“You've got four legs,” he said.



“I am your God!”



“Yes. I know.” Brutha trudged on along the beach.



“What are you going to do with him?”



“Take him to Omnia,” said Brutha thickly. “People must know. What he did.”



“You're mad! You're mad! You think you're going to carry him to Omnia?”



“Don't know. Going to try.”



“You! You!” Om pounded a claw on the sand. “Millions of people in the world and it had to be you! Stupid! Stupid!”



Brutha was becoming a wavering shape in the haze.



“That's it!” shouted Om. “I don't need you! You think I need you? I don't need you! I can soon find another believer! No problem about that!”



Brutha disappeared.



“And I'm not chasing after you!” Om screamed.



Brutha watched his feet dragging one in front of the other.



He was past the point of thinking now. What drifted through his frying brain were disjointed images and fragments of memory.



Dreams. They were pictures in your head. Coaxes had written a whole scroll about them. The superstitious thought they were messages sent by God, but really they were created by the brain itself, thrown up as it nightly sorted and fiIed the experiences of the day. Brutha never dreamed. So sometimes . . .



blackout, while the mind did the filing. It fiIed all the books. Now he knew without learning . . .



That was dreams.



God. God needed people. Belief was the food of the gods. But they also needed a shape. Gods became what people believed they ought to be. So the Goddess of Wisdom carried a penguin. It could have happened to any god. It should have been an owl. Everyone knew that. But one bad sculptor who had only ever had an owl described to him makes a mess of a statue, belief steps in, next thing you know the Goddess of Wisdom is lumbered with a bird that wears evening dress the whole time and smells of fish.



You gave a god its shape, like a jelly fills a mold.



Gods often became your father, said Abraxas the Agnostic. Gods became a big beard in the sky, because when you were three years old that was your father.



Of course Abraxas survived . . . This thought arrived sharp and cold, out of the part of his own mind that Brutha could still call his own. Gods didn't mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life not believing, spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief . . .



Sand. It was what you found in deserts. Crystals of rock, sculpted into dunes. Gordo of Tsort said that sand was worn-down mountains but Irexes had found that sandstone was stone pressed out of sand, which suggested that grains were the fathers of mountains . . .



Every one a little crystal. And all of them getting bigger . . .



Much bigger . . .



Quietly, without realizing it, Brutha stopped falling forward and lay still.



“Bugger Off!”



The scalbie took no notice. This was interesting. It was getting to see whole new stretches of sand it had never seen before and, of course, there was the prospect, even the certainty, of a good meal at the end of it all.



It had perched on Om's shell.



Om stumped along the sand, pausing occasionally to shout at his passenger.



Brutha had come this way.



But here one of the outcrops of rocks, littering the desert like islands in a sea, stretched right down to the water's edge. He'd never have been able to climb it. The footprints in the sand turned inland, toward the deep desert.



“Idiot!”



Om struggled up the side of a dune, digging his feet in to stop himself slaloming backward.



On the far side of the dune the tracks became a long groove, where Brutha must have fallen. Om retracted his legs and tobogganed down it.



The tracks veered here. He must have thought that he could walk around the next dune and find the rock again on the other side. Om knew about deserts, and one of the things he knew was that this kind of logical thinking had been previously applied by a thousand bleached, lost skeletons.



Nevertheless, he plodded after the tracks, grateful for the brief shade of the dune now that the sun was sinking.



Around the dune and, yes, here they zigzagged awkwardly up a slope about ninety degrees away from where they should be heading. Guaranteed. That was the thing about deserts. They had their own gravity. They sucked you into the center.



Brutha crawled forward, Vorbis held unsteadily by one limp arm. He didn't dare stop. His grandmother would hit him again. And there was Master Nhumrod, too, drifting in and out of vision.



“I am really disappointed in you, Brutha. Mmm?”



“Want . . . water . . .”



“-water,” said Nhumrod. “Trust in the great God.”



Brutha concentrated. Nhumrod vanished.



“Great God?” he said.



Somewhere there was some shade. The desert couldn't go on for ever.



The sun set fast. For a while, Om knew, heat would radiate off the sand and his own shell would store it, but that would soon go and then there would be the bitterness of a desert night.



Stars were already coming on when he found Brutha. Vorbis had been dropped a little way away.



Om pulled himself level with Brutha's ear.



“Hey!”



There was no sound, and no movement. Om butted Brutha gently in the head and then looked at the cracked lips.



There was a pecking noise behind him.



The scalbie was investigating Brutha's toes, but its explorations were interrupted when a tortoise jaw closed around its foot.



“I old oo, ugger ogg!”



The scalbie gave a burp of panic and tried to fly away, but it was hindered by a determined tortoise hanging on to one leg. Om was bounced along the sand for a few feet before he let go.



He tried to spit, but tortoise mouths aren't designed for the job.



“I hate all birds,” he said, to the evening air.



The scalbie watched him reproachfully from the top of a dune. It ruffled its handful of greasy feathers with the air of one who was prepared to wait all night, if necessary. As long as it took.



Om crawled back to Brutha. Well, there was still breathing going on.



Water . . .



The god gave it some thought. Smiting the living rock. That was one way. Getting water to flow . . . no problem. It was just a matter of molecules and vectors. Water had a natural tendency to flow. You just have to see to it that it flowed here instead of there. No problem at all to a god in the peak of condition.



How did you tackle it from a tortoise perspective?



The tortoise dragged himself to the bottom of the dune and then walked up and down for a few minutes. Finally he selected a spot and began digging.



This wasn't right. It had been fiery hot. Now he was freezing.



Brutha opened his eyes. Desert stars, brilliant white, looked back at him. His tongue seemed to fill his mouth. Now, what was it . . .



Water.



He rolled over. There had been voices in his head, and now there were voices outside his head. They were faint, but they were definitely there, echoing quietly over the moonlit sands.



Brutha crawled painfully toward the foot of the dune. There was a mound there. In fact, there were several mounds. The muffled voice was coming from one of them. He pulled himself closer.



There was a hole in the mound. Somewhere far underground, someone was swearing. The words were unclear as they echoed backward and forward up the tunnel, but the general effect was unmistakable.



Brutha flopped down, and watched.



After a few minutes there was movement at the mouth of the hole and Om emerged, covered with what, if this wasn't a desert, Brutha would have called mud.



“Oh, it's you,” said the tortoise. “Tear off a bit of your robe and pass it over.”



Dreamlike, Brutha obeyed.



“Turnin' round down there”, said Om, “is no picnic, let me tell you.”



He took the rag in his jaws, backed around carefully, and disappeared down the hole. After a couple of minutes he was back, still dragging the rag.



It was soaked. Brutha let the liquid dribble into his mouth. It tasted of mud, and sand, and cheap brown dye, and slightly of tortoise, but he would have drunk a gallon of it. He could have swum in a pool of it.



He tore off another strip for Om to take down.



When Om re-emerged, Brutha was kneeling beside Vorbis.



“Sixteen feet down! Sixteen bloody feet!” shouted Om. “Don't waste it on him! Isn't he dead yet?”



“He's got a fever.”



“Put him out of our misery.”



“We're still taking him back to Omnia.”



“You think we'll get there? No food? No water?”



“But you found water. Water in the desert.”



“Nothing miraculous about that,” said Om. “There's a rainy season near the coast. Flash floods. Wadis. Dried-up river beds. You get aquifers,” he added.



“Sounds like a miracle to me,” croaked Brutha.



“Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.”



“Well, there's no food down there, take it from me,” said Om. “Nothing to eat. Nothing in the sea, if we can find the sea again. I know the desert. Rocky ridges you have to go round. Everything turning you out of your path. Dunes that move in the night . . . lions . . . other things . . .”



. . . gods.



“What do you want to do, then?” said Brutha. “You said better alive than dead. You want to go back to Ephebe? We'll be popular there, you think?”



Om was silent.



Brutha nodded.



“Fetch more water, then.”



It was better traveling at night, with Vorbis over one shoulder and Om under one arm.