"I heard that Ossory once sailed to the island of Erebos on a millstone," he ventured by way of conversation.
"Nothing is impossible for the strong in faith," said Vorbis.
"Try striking a match on jelly, mister."
Brutha stiffened. It was impossible that Vorbis could have failed to hear the voice.
The Voice of the Turtle was heard in the land.
"Who's this bugger?"
"Forward," said Vorbis. "I can see that our friend Brutha is agog to get on board."
The horse trotted on.
"Where are we? Who's that? It's as hot as hell in here and, believe me, I know what I'm talking about."
"I can't talk now!" hissed Brutha.
"This cabbage stinks like a swamp! Let there be lettuce! Let there be slices of melon!"
The horses edged along the jetty and were led one at a time up the gangplank. By this time the box was vibrating. Brutha kept looking around guiltily, but no one else was taking any notice. Despite his size, Brutha was easy not to notice. Practically everyone had better things to do with their time than notice someone like Brutha. Even Vorbis had switched him off, and was talking to the captain.
He found a place up near the pointed end, where one of the sticking-up bits with the sails on gave him a bit of privacy. Then, with some dread, he opened the box.
The tortoise spoke from deep within its shell.
"Any eagles about?"
Brutha scanned the sky.
"No."
The head shot out.
"You-” it began.
"I couldn't talk!" said Brutha. "People were with me all the time! Can't you . . . read the words in my mind? Can't you read my thoughts?"
"Mortal thoughts aren't like that," snapped Om. "You think it's like watching words paint themselves across the sky? Hah! It's like trying to make sense of a bundle of weeds. Intentions, yes. Emotions, yes. But not thoughts. Half the time you don't know what you're thinking, so why should I?"
"Because you're the God," said Brutha. "Abbys, chapter LVI, verse 17: `All of mortal mind he knows, and there are no secrets.' "
"Was he the one with the bad teeth?"
Brutha hung his head.
"Listen," said the tortoise, "I am what I am. I can't help it if people think something else."
"But you knew about my thoughts . . . in the garden . . ." muttered Brutha.
The tortoise hesitated. "That was different," it said. "They weren't . . . thoughts. That was guilt."
"I believe that the Great God is Om, and in His Justice," said Brutha. "And I shall go on believing, whatever you say, and whatever you are."
"Good to hear it," said the tortoise fervently. "Hold that thought. Where are we?"
"On a boat," said Brutha. "On the sea. Wobbling."
"Going to Ephebe on a boat? What's wrong with the desert?"
"No one can cross the desert. No one can live in the heart of the desert."
"I did."
"It's only a couple of days' sailing." Brutha's stomach lurched, even though the boat had hardly cleared the jetty. "And they say that the God-”
"-me-”
"-is sending us a fair wind."
"I am? Oh. Yes. Trust me for a fair wind. Flat as a mill-race the whole way, don't you worry."
"I meant mill-pond! I meant mill-pond!"
Brutha clung to the mast.
After a while a sailor came and sat down on a coil of rope and looked at him interestedly.
"You can let go, Father," he said. "It stands up all by itself."
"The sea . . . the waves . . ." murmured Brutha carefully, although there was nothing left to throw up.
The sailor spat thoughtfully.
"Aye," he said. "They got to be that shape, see, so's to fit into the sky."
"But the boat's creaking!"
"Aye. It does that."
"You mean this isn't a storm?"
The sailor sighed, and walked away.
After a while, Brutha risked letting go. He had never felt so ill in his life.
It wasn't just the seasickness. He didn't know where he was. And Brutha had always known where he was. Where he was, and the existence of Om, had been the only two certainties in his life.
It was something he shared with tortoises. Watch any tortoise walking, and periodically it will stop while it files away the memories of the journey so far. Not for nothing, elsewhere in the multiverse, are the little traveling devices controlled by electric thinking-engines called "turtles."
Brutha knew where he was by remembering where he had been-by the unconscious counting of footsteps and the noting of landmarks. Somewhere inside his head was a thread of memory which, if you had wired it directly to whatever controlled his feet, would cause Brutha to amble back through the little pathways of his life all the way to the place he was born.
Out of contact with the ground, on the mutable surface of the sea, the thread flapped loose.
In his box, Om tossed and shook to Brutha's motion as Brutha staggered across the moving deck and reached the rail.
To anyone except the novice, the boat was clipping through the waves on a good sailing day. Seabirds wheeled in its wake. Away to one side-port or starboard or one of those directions-a school of flying fish broke the surface in an attempt to escape the attentions of some dolphins. Brutha stared at the gray shapes as they zigzagged under the keel in a world where they never had to count at all
"Ah, Brutha," said Vorbis. "Feeding the fishes, I see."
"No, lord," said Brutha. "I'm being sick, lord."
He turned.
There was Sergeant Simony, a muscular young man with the deadpan expression of the truly professional soldier. He was standing next to someone Brutha vaguely recognized as the number-one salt or whatever his title was. And there was the exquisitor, smiling.
"Him! Him!" screamed the voice of the tortoise.
"Our young friend is not a good sailor," said Vorbis.
"Him! Him! I'd know him anywhere!"
"Lord, I wish I wasn't a sailor at all," said Brutha. He felt the box trembling as Om bounced around inside.
"Kill him! Find something sharp! Push him overboard!"
"Come with us to the prow, Brutha," said Vorbis. "There are many interesting things to be seen, according to the captain."
The captain gave the frozen smirk of those caught between a rock and a hard place. Vorbis could always supply both.
Brutha trailed behind the other three, and risked a whisper.
"What's the matter?"
"Him! The bald one! Push him over the side!"
Vorbis half-turned, caught Brutha's embarrassed attention, and smiled.
"We will have our minds broadened, I am sure," he said. He turned back to the captain, and pointed to a large bird gliding down the face of the waves.
"The Pointless Albatross," said the captain promptly. "Flies from the Hub to the Ri-” he faltered. But Vorbis was gazing with apparent affability at the view.
"He turned me over in the sun! Look at his mind!"
"From one pole of the world to the other, every year," said the captain. He was sweating slightly.
"Really?" said Vorbis. "Why?"
"No one knows."
"Excepting the God, of course," said Vorbis.
The captain's face was a sickly yellow.
"Of course. Certainly," he said.
"Brutha?" shouted the tortoise. "Are you listening to me?"
"And over there?" said Vorbis.
The sailor followed his extended arm.
"Oh. Flying fish," he said. "But they don't really fly," he added quickly. "They just build up speed in the water and glide a little way."
"One of the God's marvels," said Vorbis. "Infinite variety, eh?"
"Yes, indeed," said the captain. Relief was crossing his face now, like a friendly army.
"And the things down there?" said the exquisitor.
"Them? Porpoises," said the captain. "Sort of a fish."
"Do
they always swim around ships like this?"
"Often. Certainly. Especially in the waters off Ephebe."
Vorbis leaned over the rail, and said nothing. Simony was staring at the horizon, his face absolutely immobile. This left a gap in the conversation which the captain, very stupidly, sought to fill.
"They'll follow a ship for days," he said.
"Remarkable." Another pause, a tar pit of silence ready to snare the mastodons of unthinking comment. Earlier exquisitors had shouted and ranted confessions out of people. Vorbis never did that. He just dug deep silences in front of them.
"They seem to like them," said the captain. He glanced nervously at Brutha, who was trying to shut the tortoise's voice out of his head. There was no help there.
Vorbis came to his aid instead.
"This must be very convenient on long voyages," he said.
"Uh. Yes?" said the captain.
"From the provisions point of view," said Vorbis.
"My lord, I don't quite-”
"It must be like having a traveling larder," said Vorbis.
The captain smiled. "Oh no, lord. We don't eat them."
"Surely not? They look quite wholesome to me. "
"Oh, but you know the old saying, lord . . .
"Saying?"
"Oh, they say that after they die, the souls of dead sailors become-”
The captain saw the abyss ahead, but the sentence had plunged on with a horrible momentum of its own.
For a while there was no sound but the zip of the waves, the distant splash of the porpoises, and the heaven-shaking thundering of the captain's heart.
Vorbis leaned back on the rail.
"But of course we are not prey to such superstitions," he said lazily.
"Well, of course," said the captain, clutching at this straw. "Idle sailor talk. If ever I hear it again I shall have the man flog-”
Vorbis was looking past his ear.
"I say! Yes, you there!" he said.
One of the sailors nodded.
"Fetch me a harpoon," said Vorbis.
The man looked from him to the captain and then scuttled off obediently.
"But, ah, uh, but your lordship should not, uh, ha, attempt such sport," said the captain. "Ah. Uh. A harpoon is a dangerous weapon in untrained hands, I am afraid you might do yourself an injury-”
"But I will not be using it," said Vorbis.
The captain hung his head and held out his hand for the harpoon.
Vorbis patted him on the shoulder.
"And then," he said, "you shall entertain us to lunch. Won't he, sergeant?"
Simony saluted. "Just as you say, sir."
"Yes."
Brutha lay on his back among sails and ropes somewhere under the decking. It was hot, and the air smelled of all air anywhere that has ever come into contact with bilges.
Brutha hadn't eaten all day. Initially he'd been too ill to. Then he just hadn't.
"But being cruel to animals doesn't mean he's a . . . bad person," he ventured, the harmonics of his tone suggesting that even he didn't believe this. It had been quite a small porpoise.
"He turned me on to my back," said Om.
"Yes, but humans are more important than animals," said Brutha.
"This is a point of view often expressed by humans," said Om.
"Chapter IX, verse 16 of the book of-” Brutha began.
"Who cares what any book says?" screamed the tortoise.
Brutha was shaken.
"But you never told any of the prophets that people should be kind to animals," he said. "I don't remember anything about that. Not when you were . . . bigger. You don't want people to be kind to animals because they're animals, you just want people to be kind to animals because one of them might be you."
"That's not a bad idea!"
"Besides, he's been kind to me. He didn't have to be.
"You think that? Is that what you think? Have you looked at the man's mind?"
"Of course I haven't! I don't know how to!"
"You don't?"
"No! Humans can't do-”
Brutha paused. Vorbis seemed to do it. He only had to look at someone to know what wicked thoughts they harbored. And grandmother had been the same.
"Humans can't do it, I'm sure," he said. "We can't read minds."
"I don't mean reading them, I mean looking at them," said Om. "Just seeing the shape of them. You can't read a mind. You might as well try and read a river. But seeing the shape's easy. Witches can do it, no trouble."
" `The way of the witch shall be as a path strewn with thorns,' " said Brutha.
"Ossory?" said Om.
"Yes. But of course you'd know," said Brutha.
"Never heard it before in my life," said the tortoise bitterly. "It was what you might call an educated guess."
"Whatever you say," said Brutha, "I still know that you can't truly be Om. The God would not talk like that about His chosen ones."
"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 lowgrowing 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 grey 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 face down 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 puttogether watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere.
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