“I never chose anyone,” said Om. “They chose themselves.”
“If you’re really Om, stop being a tortoise.”
“I told you, I can’t. You think I haven’t tried? Three years! Most of that time I thought I was a tortoise.”
“Then perhaps you were. Maybe you’re just a tortoise who thinks he’s a god.”
“Nah. Don’t try philosophy again. Start thinking like that and you end up thinking maybe you’re just a butterfly dreaming it’s a whelk or something. No. One day all I had on my mind was the amount of walking necessary to get to the nearest plant with decent low-growing leaves, the next…I had all this memory filling up my head. Three years before the shell. No, don’t you tell me I’m a tortoise with big ideas.”
Brutha hesitated. He knew it was wicked to ask, but he wanted to know what the memory was. Anyway, could it be wicked? If the God was sitting there talking to you, could you say anything truly wicked? Face to face? Somehow, that didn’t seem so bad as saying something wicked when he was up on a cloud or something.
“As far as I can recall,” said Om, “I’d intended to be a big white bull.”
“Trampling the infidel,” said Brutha.
“Not my basic intention, but no doubt some trampling could have been arranged. Or a swan, I thought. Something impressive. Three years later, I wake up and it turns out I’ve been a tortoise. I mean, you don’t get much lower.” Careful, careful…you need his help, but don’t tell him everything. Don’t tell him what you suspect.
“When did you start think—When did you remember all this?” said Brutha, who found the phenomenon of forgetting a strange and fascinating one, as other men might find the idea of flying by flapping your arms.
“About two hundred feet above your vegetable garden,” said Om, “which is not a point where it’s fun to become sapient, I’m here to tell you.”
“But why?” said Brutha. “Gods don’t have to stay tortoises unless they want to!”
“I don’t know,” lied Om.
If he works it out himself I’m done for, he thought. This is a chance in a million. If I get it wrong, it’s back to a life where happiness is a leaf you can reach.
Part of him screamed: I’m a god! I don’t have to think like this! I don’t have to put myself in the power of a human!
But another part, the part that could remember exactly what being a tortoise for three years had been like, whispered: no. You have to. If you want to be up there again. He’s stupid and gormless and he’s not got a drop of ambition in his big flabby body. And this is what you’ve got to work with…
The god part said: Vorbis would have been better. Be rational. A mind like that could do anything!
He turned me on my back!
No, he turned a tortoise on its back.
Yes. Me.
No. You’re a god.
Yes, but a persistently tortoise-shaped one.
If he had known you were a god…
But Om remembered Vorbis’s absorbed expression, in a pair of gray eyes in front of a mind as impenetrable as a steel ball. He’d never seen a mind shaped like that on anything walking upright. There was someone who probably would turn a god on his back, just to see what would happen. Someone who’d overturn the universe, without thought of consequence, for the sake of the knowledge of what happened when the universe was flat on its back…
But what he had to work with was Brutha, with a mind as incisive as a meringue. And if Brutha found out that…
Or if Brutha died…
“How are you feeling?” said Om.
“Ill.”
“Snuggle down under the sails a bit more,” said Om. “You don’t want to catch a chill.”
There’s got to be someone else, he thought. It can’t be just him who…the rest of the thought was so terrible he tried to block it from his mind, but he couldn’t.
…it can’t be just him who believes in me.
Really in me. Not in a pair of golden horns. Not in a great big building. Not in the dread of hot iron and knives. Not in paying your temple dues because everyone else does. Just in the fact that the Great God Om really exists.
And now he’s got himself involved with the most unpleasant mind I’ve ever seen, someone who kills people to see if they die. An eagle kind of person if ever there was one…
Om was aware of a mumbling.
Brutha was lying facedown on the deck.
“What are you doing?” said Om.
Brutha turned his head.
“Praying.”
“That’s good. What for?”
“You don’t know?”
“Oh.”
If Brutha dies…
The tortoise shuddered in its shell. If Brutha died, then it could already hear in its mind’s ear the soughing of the wind in the deep, hot places of the desert.
Where the small gods went.
Where do gods come from? Where do they go?
Some attempt to answer this was made by the religious philosopher Koomi of Smale in his book Ego-Video Liber Deorum, which translates into the vernacular roughly as Gods: A Spotter’s Guide.
People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?
And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn’t in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a much better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to thinks like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere.
This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn’t looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts’ Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.
So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble.
And yet there seemed to be a lot of lesser gods around the place. Koomi’s theory was that gods come into being and grow and flourish because they are believed in. Belief itself is the food of the gods. Initially, when mankind lived in small primitive tribes, there were probably millions of gods. Now there tended to be only a few very important ones—local gods of thunder and love, for example, tended to run together like pools of mercury as the small primitive tribes joined up and became huge, powerful primitive tribes with more sophisticated weapons. But any god could join. Any god could start small. Any god could grow in stature as its believers increased. And dwindle as they decreased. It was like a great big game of ladders and snakes.
Gods liked games, provided they were winning.
Koomi’s theory was largely based on the good old Gnostic heresy, which tends to turn up all over the multiverse whenever men get up off their knees and start thinking for two minutes together, although the shock of the sudden altitude tends to mean the thinking is a little whacked. But it upsets priests, who tend to vent their displeasure in traditional ways.
When the Omnian Church found out about Koomi, they displayed him in every town within the Church’s empire to demonstrate the essential flaws in his argument.
There were a lot of towns, so they had to cut him up quite small.
Ragged clouds ripped across the skies. The sails creaked in the rising wind, and Om could hear the shouts of the sailors as they tried to outrun the storm.
It was going to be a big storm, even by the mariners’ standards. White water crowned the waves.
Brutha snored in his nest.
Om listened to the sailors. They were not men who dealt in sophistries. Someone had killed a porpoise, and everyone knew what that meant. It meant that there was going to be a storm. It meant that the ship was going to be sunk. It was simple cause and effe
ct. It was worse than women aboard. It was worse than albatrosses.
Om wondered if tortoises could swim. Turtles could, he was pretty sure. But those buggers had the shell for it.
It would be too much to ask (even if a god had anyone to ask) that a body designed for trundling around a dry wilderness had any hydrodynamic properties other than those necessary to sink to the bottom.
Oh, well. Nothing else for it. He was still a god. He had rights.
He slid down a coil of rope and crawled carefully to the edge of the swaying deck, wedging his shell against a stanchion so that he could see down into the roiling water.
Then he spoke in a voice audible to nothing that was mortal.
Nothing happened for a while. Then one wave rose higher than the rest, and changed shape as it rose. Water poured upward, filling an invisible mold; it was humanoid, but obviously only because it wanted to be. It could as easily have been a waterspout, or an undertow. The sea is always powerful. So many people believe in it. But it seldom answers prayers.
The water shape rose level with the deck and kept pace with Om.
It developed a face, and opened a mouth.
“Well?” it said.
“Greetings, oh Queen of—” Om began.
The watery eyes focused.
“But you are just a small god. And you dare to summon me?”
The wind howled in the rigging.
“I have believers,” said Om. “So I have the right.”
There was the briefest of pauses. Then the Sea Queen said, “One believer?”
“One or many does not matter here,” said Om. “I have rights.”
“And what rights do you demand, little tortoise?” said the Queen of the Sea.
“Save the ship,” said Om.
The Queen was silent.
“You have to grant the request,” said Om. “It’s the rules.”
“But I can name my price,” said the Sea Queen.
“That’s the rules, too.”
“And it will be high.”
“It will be paid.”
The column of water began to collapse back into the waves.
“I will consider this.”
Om stared down into the white sea. The ship rolled, sliding him back down the deck, and then rolled back. A flailing foreclaw hooked itself around the stanchion as Om’s shell spun around, and for a moment both hind legs paddled helplessly over the waters.
And then Om was shaken free.
Something white swept down toward him as he see-sawed over the edge, and he bit it.
Brutha yelled and pulled his hand up, with Om trailing on the end of it.
“You didn’t have to bite!”
The ship pitched into a wave and flung him to the deck. Om let go and rolled away.
When Brutha got to his feet, or at least to his hands and knees, he saw the crewmen standing around him. Two of them grabbed him by the elbows as a wave crashed over the ship.
“What are you doing?”
They were trying to avoid looking at his face. They dragged him toward the rail.
Somewhere in the scuppers Om screamed at the Sea Queen.
“It’s the rules! The rules!”
Four sailors had got hold of Brutha now. Om could hear, above the roaring of the storm, the silence of the desert.
“Wait,” said Brutha.
“It’s nothing personal,” said one of the sailors. “We don’t want to do this.”
“I don’t want you to do it either,” said Brutha. “Is that any help?”
“The sea wants a life,” said the oldest sailor. “Yours is nearest. Okay, get his—”
“Can I make my peace with my God?”
“What?”
“If you’re going to kill me, can I pray to my God first?”
“It’s not us that’s killing you,” said the sailor. “It’s the sea.”
“‘The hand that does the deed is guilty of the crime,’” said Brutha. “Ossory, chapter LVI, verse 93.”
The sailors looked at one another. At a time like this, it was probably not wise to antagonize any god. The ship skidded down the side of a wave.
“You’ve got ten seconds,” said the oldest sailor. “That’s ten seconds more than many men get.”
Brutha lay down on the deck, helped considerably by another wave that slammed into the timbers.
Om was dimly aware of the prayer, to his surprise. He couldn’t make out the words, but the prayer itself was an itch at the back of his mind.
“Don’t ask me,” he said, trying to get upright, “I’m out of options—”
The ship smacked down…
…on to a calm sea.
The storm still raged, but only around a widening circle with the ship in the middle. The lightning, stabbing at the sea, surrounded them like the bars of a cage.
The circle lengthened ahead of them. Now the ship sped down a narrow channel of calm between gray walls of storm a mile high. Electric fire raged overhead.
And then was gone.
Behind them, a mountain of grayness squatted on the sea. They could hear the thunder dying away.
Brutha got uncertainly to his feet, swaying wildly to compensate for a motion that was no longer there.
“Now I—” he began.
He was alone. The sailors had fled.
“Om?” said Brutha.
“Over here.”
Brutha fished his God out of the seaweed.
“You said you couldn’t do anything!” he said accusingly.
“That wasn’t m—” Om paused. There will be a price, he thought. It won’t be cheap. It can’t be cheap. The Sea Queen is a god. I’ve crushed a few towns in my time. Holy fire, that kind of thing. If the price isn’t high, how can people respect you?
“I made arrangements,” he said.
Tidal waves. A ship sunk. A couple of towns disappearing under the sea. It’ll be something like that. If people don’t respect then they won’t fear, and if they don’t fear, how can you get them to believe?
Seems unfair, really. One man killed a porpoise. Of course, it doesn’t matter to the Queen who gets thrown overboard, just as it didn’t matter to him which porpoise he killed. And that’s unfair, because it was Vorbis who did it. He makes people do things they shouldn’t do…
What am I thinking about? Before I was a tortoise, I didn’t even know what unfair meant…
The hatches opened. People came on deck and hung on the rail. Being on deck in stormy weather always has the possibility of being washed overboard, but that takes on a rosy glow after hours below decks with frightened horses and seasick passengers.
There were no more storms. The ship plowed on in favorable winds, under a clear sky, in a sea as empty of life as the hot desert.
The days passed uneventfully. Vorbis stayed below decks for most of the time.
The crew treated Brutha with cautious respect. News like Brutha spreads quickly.
The coast here was dunes, with the occasional barren salt marsh. A heat haze hung over the land. It was the kind of coast where shipwrecked landfall is more to be dreaded than drowning. There were no seabirds. Even the birds that had been trailing the ship for scraps had vanished.
“No eagles,” said Om. There was that to be said about it.
Toward the evening of the fourth day the unedifying panorama was punctuated by a glitter of light, high on the dune sea. It flashed with a sort of rhythm. The captain, whose face now looked as if sleep had not been a regular nighttime companion, called Brutha over.
“His…your…the deacon told me to watch out for this,” he said. “You go and fetch him now.”
Vorbis had a cabin somewhere near the bilges, where the air was as thick as thin soup. Brutha knocked.
“Enter.”*
There were no portholes down here. Vorbis was sitting in the dark.
“Yes, Brutha?”
“The captain sent me to fetch you, lord. Something’s shining in the desert.”
“Good.
Now, Brutha. Attend. The captain has a mirror. You will ask to borrow it.”
“Er…what is a mirror, lord?”
“An unholy and forbidden device,” said Vorbis. “Which regretfully can be pressed into godly service. He will deny it, of course. But a man with such a neat beard and tiny mustache is vain, and a vain man must have his mirror. So take it. And stand in the sun and move the mirror so that it shines the sun towards the desert. Do you understand?”
“No, lord,” said Brutha.
“Your ignorance is your protection, my son. And then come back and tell me what you see.”
Om dozed in the sun. Brutha had found him a little space near the pointy end where he could get sun with little danger of being seen by the crew—and the crew were jittery enough at the moment not to go looking for trouble in any case.
A tortoise dreams…
…for millions of years.
It was the dreamtime. The unformed time.
The small gods chittered and whirred in the wilderness places, and the cold places, and the deep places. They swarmed in the darkness, without memory but driven by hope and lust for the one thing, the one thing a god craves—belief.
There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there’s light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space…then there’s a race—between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up.
Sometimes, you can make your own space.
Forests were a long way from the wilderness. The nameless voice that was going to be Om drifted on the wind on the edge of the desert, trying to be heard among countless others, trying to avoid being pushed into the center. It may have whirled for millions of years—it had nothing with which to measure time. All it had was hope, and a certain sense of the presence of things. And a voice.
Then there was a day. In a sense, it was the first day.
Om had been aware of the shepherd for some ti—for a while. The flock had been wandering closer and closer. The rains had been sparse. Forage was scarce. Hungry mouths propelled hungry legs further into the rocks, searching out the hitherto scorned clumps of sun-seared grass.
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