Small Gods

Page 31

“Om?”
“Yes?”
“I don't think I can swim . . .”
Gods are not very introspective. It has never been a survival trait. The ability to cajole, threaten, and terrify has always worked well enough. When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency toward quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point-of-view is seldom necessary.
Which had led, across the multiverse, to men and women of tremendous brilliance and empathy devoting their entire lives to the service of deities who couldn't beat them at a quiet game of dominoes. For example, Sister Sestina of Quirm defied the wrath of a local king and walked unharmed across a bed of coals and propounded a philosophy of sensible ethics on behalf of a goddess whose only real interest was in hairstyles, and Brother Zephilite of Klatch left his vast estates and his family and spent his life ministering to the sick and poor on behalf of the invisible god F'rum, generally considered unable, should he have a backside, to find it with both hands, should he have hands. Gods never need to be very bright when there are humans around to be it for them.
The Sea Queen was considered fairly dumb even by other gods. But there was a certain logic to her thoughts, as she moved deep below the storm-tossed waves. The little boat had been a tempting target . . . but here was a bigger one, full of people, sailing right into the storm.
This one was fair game.
The Sea Queen had the attention span of an onion bahji.
And, by and large, she created her own sacrifices. And she believed in quantity.
The Fin of God plunged from wave crest to wave trough, the gale tearing at its sails. The captain fought his way through waist-high water to the prow, where Vorbis stood clutching the rail, apparently oblivious to the fact that the ship was wallowing half-submerged.
“Sir! We must reef sail! We can't outrun this!”
Green fire crackled on the tops of the masts. Vorbis turned. The light was reflected in the pit of his eyes.
“It is all for the glory of Om,” he said. “Trust is our sail, and glory is our destination.”
The captain had had enough. He was unsteady on the subject of religion, but felt fairly confident that after thirty years he knew something about the sea.
“The ocean floor is our destination!” he shouted.
Vorbis shrugged. “I did not say there would not be stops along the way,” he said.
The captain stared at him and then fought his way back across the heaving deck. What he knew about the sea was that storms like this didn't just happen You didn't just sail from calm water into the midst of a raging hurricane. This wasn't the sea. This was personal.
Lightning struck the mainmast. There was a scream from the darkness as a mass of torn sail and rigging crashed on to the deck.
The captain half-swam, half-climbed up the ladder to the wheel, where the helmsman was a shadow in the spray and the eerie storm glow.
“We'll never make it alive!”
CORRECT.
“We'll have to abandon ship!”
NO. WE WILL TAKE IT WITH US. IT'S A NICE SHIP.
The captain peered closer in the murk.
“Is that you, Bosun Coplei?”
WOULD YOU LIKE ANOTHER GUESS?
The hull hit a submerged rock and ripped open. Lightning struck the remaining mast and, like a paper boat that had been too long in the water, the Fin of God folded up. Baulks of timber splintered and fountained up into the whirling sky . . .
And there was a sudden, velvety silence.
The captain found that he had acquired a recent memory. It involved water, and a ringing in his ears, and the sensation of cold fire in his lungs. But it was fading. He walked over to the rail, his footsteps loud in the quietness, and looked over the side. Despite the fact that the recent memory included something about the ship being totally smashed, it now seemed to be whole again. In a way.
“Uh,” he said, “we appear to have run out of sea.”
YES.
“And land, too.”
The captain tapped the rail. It was grayish, and slightly transparent.
“Uh. Is this wood?”
MORPHIC MEMORY.
“Sorry?”
YOU WERE A SAILOR. YOU HAVE HEARD A SHIP REFERRED TO AS A LIVING THING?
"Oh, yes. You can't spend a night on a ship without feeling that it has a sou-
YES.
The memory of Fin of God sailed on through the silence. There was the distant sighing of wind, or of the memory of wind. The blown-out corpses of dead gales.
“Uh,” said the ghost of the captain, “did you just say `were'?”
YES.
“I thought you did.”
The captain stared down. The crew was assembling on deck, looking up at him with anxious eyes.
He looked down further. In front of the crew the ship's rats had assembled. There was a tiny robed shape in front of them.
It said, SQUEAK.
He thought: even rats have a Death . . .
Death stood aside and beckoned to the captain.
YOU HAVE THE WHEEL.
“But-but where are we going?”
WHO KNOWS?
The captain gripped the spokes helplessly. “But . . . there's no stars that I recognize! No charts! What are the winds here? Where are the currents?”
Death shrugged.
The captain turned the wheel aimlessly. The ship glided on through the ghost of a sea.
Then he brightened up. The worst had already happened. It was amazing how good it felt to know that. And if the worst had already happened . . .
“Where's Vorbis?” he growled.
HE SURVIVED.
“Did he? There's no justice!”
THERE'S JUST ME.
Death vanished.
The captain turned the wheel a bit, for the look of the thing. After all, he was still captain and this was still, in a way, a ship.
“Mr. Mate?”
The mate saluted. Sir!"
“Um. Where shall we go now?”
The mate scratched his head.
“Well, cap'n, I did hear as the heathen Klatch have got this paradise place where there's drinking and singing and young women with bells on and . . . you know . . . regardless.”
The mate looked hopefully at his captain.
“Regardless, eh?” said the captain thoughtfully.
“So I did hear.”
The captain felt that he might be due some regardless.
“Any idea how you get there?”
“I think you get given instructions when you're alive,” said the mate.
“Oh.”
“And there're some barbarians up toward the Hub,” said the mate, relishing the word, “who reckon they go to a big hall where there's all sorts to eat and drink.”
“And women?”
“Bound to be.”
The captain frowned. “It's a funny thing,” he said, “but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?”
“A bit of a poser, that,” agreed the mate. “I s'pose it makes up for 'em . . . enjoying themselves all the time when they're alive, too?” He looked puzzled. Now that he was dead, the whole thing sounded suspicious.
“I suppose you've no idea of the way to that paradise either?” said the captain.
“Sorry, cap'n.”
“No harm in searching, though.”
The captain looked over the side. If you sailed for long enough, you were bound to strike a shore. And no harm in searching.
A movement caught his eye. He smiled. Good. A sign. Maybe it was all for the best, after all . . .
Accompanied by the ghosts of dolphins, the ghost of a ship sailed on . . .
Seagulls never ventured this far along the desert coast. Their niche was filled by the scalbie, a member of the crow family that the crow family would be the first to disown and never talked about in company. It seldom flew, but walked everywhere in a sort of lurching hop. Its distinctive call put listeners in mind of a malfunctioning digestive system. It looked like other birds looked after an oil slick. Nothing ate scalbies, except other scalbies. Scalbies ate things that made a vulture sick. Scalbies would eat vulture sick. Scalbies ate everything.
One of them, on this bright new morning, sidled across the flea-hopping sand, pecking aimlessly at things in case pebbles and bits of wood had become edible overnight. In the scalbie's experience, practically anything became edible if it was left for long enough. It came across a mound lying on the tideline, and gave it a tentative jab with its beak.
The mound groaned.
The scalbie backed away hurriedly and turned its attention to a small domed rock beside the mound. It was pretty certain this hadn't been there yesterday, either. It essayed an exploratory peck.
The rock extruded a head and said, “Bugger off, you evil sod.”
The scalbie leapt backward and then made a kind of running jump, which was the nearest any scalbie ever bothered to come to actual flight, on to a pile of sun-bleached driftwood. Things were looking up. If this rock was alive, then eventually it would be dead.
The Great God Om staggered over to Brutha and butted him in the head with its shell until he groaned.
“Wake up, lad. Rise and shine. Huphuphup. All ashore who's going ashore.”
Brutha opened an eye.
“Wha' happened?” he said.
“You're alive is what happened,” said Om. Life's a beach, he remembered. And then you die.
Brutha pulled himself into a kneeling position.
There are beaches that cry out for brightly colored umbrellas.
There are beaches that speak of the majesty of the sea.
But this beach wasn't like that. It was merely a barren hem where the land met the ocean. Driftwood piled up on the high-tide line, scoured by the wind. The air buzzed with unpleasant small insects. There was a smell that suggested that something had rotted away, a long time ago, somewhere where the scalbies couldn't find it. It was not a good beach.
“Oh. God.”
“Better than drowning,” said Om encouragingly.
“I wouldn't know.” Brutha looked along the beach. “Is there any water to drink?”
“Shouldn't think so,” said Om.
“Ossory V, verse 3, says that you made living water flow from the dry desert,” said Brutha.
“That was by way of being artistic license,” said Om.
“You can't even do that?”
“No.”
Brutha looked at the desert again. Behind the drift?wood lines, and a few patches of grass that appeared to be dying even while it grew, the dunes marched away.
“Which way to Omnia?” he said.
“We don't want to go to Omnia,” said Om.
Brutha stared at the tortoise. Then he picked him up.
“I think it's this way,” he said.
Om's legs waggled frantically.
“What do you want to go to Omnia for?” he said.
“I don't want to,” said Brutha. “But I'm going any?way.”
The sun hung high above the beach.
Or possibly it didn't.
Brutha knew things about the sun now. They were leaking into his head. The Ephebians had been very interested in astronomy. Expletius had proved that the Disc was ten thousand miles across. Febrius, who'd stationed slaves with quick reactions and carrying voices all across the country at dawn, had proved that light travelled at about the same speed as sound. And Didactylos had reasoned that, in that case, in order to pass between the elephants, the sun had to travel at least thirty-five thousand miles in its orbit every day or, to put it another way, twice as fast as its own light.