Small Gods tds-13

by Terry David John Pratchett

  "He wouldn't have read them," said Brutha.

  "Oh, he would. I know that type," said Didactylos "All holy piety in public, and all peeled grapes and self-indulgence in private."

  "Not Vorbis," said Brutha, with absolute certainty. "He wouldn't have read them."

  "Well, anyway," said Didactylos, "if it had to be done, I did it."

  Urn turned away from the bow of the boat, where he was feeding more wood into the brazier under the globe.

  "Can we all get on board?" he said.

  Brutha eased his way on a rough bench seat amidships, or whatever it was called. The air smelled of hot water.

  "Right," said Urn. He pulled a lever. The spinning paddles hit the water; there was a jerk and then, steam hanging in the air behind it, the boat moved forward.

  "What's the name of this vessel?" said Didactylos.

  Urn looked surprised.

  "Name?" he said. "It's a boat. A thing, of the nature of things. It doesn't need a name."

  "Names are more philosophical," said Didactylos, with a trace of sulkiness. "And you should have broken an amphora of wine over it."

  "That would have been a waste."

  The boat chugged out of the boathouse and into the dark harbor. Away to one side, an Ephebian galley was on fire. The whole of the city was a patchwork of flame.

  "But you've got an amphora on board?" said Didactylos.

  "Yes."

  "Pass it over, then."

  White water trailed behind the boat. The paddles churned.

  "No wind. No rowers!" said Simony. "Do you even begin to understand what you have here, Urn?"

  "Absolutely. The operating principles are amazingly simple," said Urn.

  "That wasn't what I meant. I meant the things you could do with this power!"

  Urn pushed another log on the fire.

  "It's just the transforming of heat into work," he said. "I suppose . . . oh, the pumping of water. Mills that can grind even when the wind isn't blowing. That sort of thing? Is that what you had in mind?"

  Simony the soldier hesitated.

  "Yeah," he said. "Something like that."

  Brutha whispered, "Om?"

  "Yes?"

  "Are you all right?"

  "It smells like a soldier's knapsack in here. Get me out."

  The copper ball spun madly over the fire. It gleamed almost as brightly as Simony's eyes.

  Brutha tapped him on the shoulder.

  "Can I have my tortoise?"

  Simony laughed bitterly.

  "There's good eating on one of these things," he said, fishing out Om.

  "Everyone says so," said Brutha. He lowered his voice to a whisper.

  "What sort of place is Ankh?"

  "A city of a million souls," said the voice of Om,

  "many of them occupying bodies. And a thousand religions. There's even a temple to the small gods! Sounds like a place where people don't have trouble believing things. Not a bad place for a fresh start, I think. With my brains and your . . . with my brains, we should soon be in business again."

  "You don't want to go back to Omnia?"

  "No point," said the voice of Om. "It's always possible to overthrow an established god. People get fed up, they want a change. But you can't overthrow yourself, can you?"

  "Who're you talking to, priest?" said Simony.

  "I . . . er . . . was praying."

  "Hah! To Om? You might as well pray to that tortoise."

  "Yes."

  "I am ashamed for Omnia," said Simony. "Look at us. Stuck in the past. Held back by repressive monotheism. Shunned by our neighbors. What good has our God been to us? Gods? Hah!"

  "Steady on, steady on," said Didactylos. "We're on seawater and that's highly conductive armor you're wearing."

  "Oh, I say nothing about other gods," said Simony quickly. "I have not the right. But Om? A bogeyman for the Quisition! If he exists, let him strike me down here and now!"

  Simony drew his sword and held it up at arm's length.

  Om sat peacefully on Brutha's lap. "I like this boy," he said. "He's almost as good as a believer. It's like love and hate, know what I mean?"

  Simony sheathed his sword again.

  "Thus I refute Om," he said.

  "Yes, but what's the alternative?"

  "Philosophy! Practical philosophy! Like Urn's engine there. It could drag Omnia kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat!"

  "Kicking and screaming," said Brutha.

  "By any means necessary," said Simony.

  He beamed at them.

  "Don't worry about him," said Om. "We'll be far away. Just as well, too. I don't think Omnia's going to be a popular country when news of last night's work gets about."

  "But it was Vorbis's fault!" said Brutha out loud. "He started the whole thing! He sent poor Brother Murduck, and then he had him killed so he could blame it on the Ephebians! He never intended any peace treaty! He just wanted to get into the palace!"

  "Beats me how he managed that, too," said Urn. "No one ever got through the labyrinth without a guide. How did he do it?"

  Didactylos's blind eyes sought out Brutha.

  "Can't imagine," he said. Brutha hung his head.

  "He really did all that?" said Simony.

  "Yes."

  "You idiot! You total sandhead!" screamed Om.

  "And you'd tell this to other people?" said Simony, insistently.

  "I suppose so."

  "You'd speak out against the Quisition?"

  Brutha stared miserably into the night. Behind them, the flames of Ephebe had merged into one orange spark.

  "All I can say is what I remember," he said.

  "We're dead," said Om. "Throw me over the side, why don't you? This bonehead will want to take us back to Omnia!"

  Simony rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  "Vorbis has many enemies," he said, "in certain circumstances. Better he should be killed, but some would call that murder. Or even martyrdom. But a trial . . . if there was evidence . . . if they even thought there could be evidence . . "

  "I can see his mind working!" Om screamed. "We'd all be safe if you'd shut up!"

  "Vorbis on trial," Simony mused.

  Brutha blanched at the thought. It was the kind of thought that was almost impossible to hold in the mind. It was the kind of thought that made no sense. Vorbis on trial? Trials were things that happened to other people.

  He remembered Brother Murduck. And the soldiers who had been lost in the desert. And all the things that had been done to people, even to Brutha.

  "Tell him you can't remember!" Om yelled. "Tell him you can't recall!"

  "And if he was on trial," said Simony, "he'd be found guilty. No one would dare do anything else."

  Thoughts always moved slowly through Brutha's mind, like icebergs. They arrived slowly and left slowly and when they were there they occupied a lot of space, much of it below the surface.

  He thought: the worst thing about Vorbis isn't that he's evil, but that he makes good people do evil. He turns people into things like himself. You can't help it. You catch it off him.

  There was no sound but the slosh of water against the Unnamed Boat's hull and the spinning of the philosophical engine.

  "We'd be caught if we returned to Omnia," said Brutha slowly.

  "We can land away from the ports," said Simony eagerly.

  "Ankh-Morpork!" shouted Om.

  "First we should take Mr. Didactylos to Ankh-Morpork," said Brutha. "Then-I'll come back to Omnia."

  "You can damn well leave me there too!" said Om.

  "I'll soon find some believers in Ankh-Morpork, don't you worry, they believe anything there!"

  "Never seen Ankh-Morpork," said Didactylos. "Still, we live and learn. That's what I always say." He turned to face the soldier. "Kicking and screaming."

  "There's some exiles in Ankh," said Simony. "Don't worry. You'll be safe there."

  "Amazing!" said Didactylos. "And to think, this morning, I d
idn't even know I was in danger."

  He sat back in the boat.

  "Life in this world," he said, "is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, `Go on, do Deformed Rabbit . . . it's my favorite.' "

  Vorbis stirred the ashes with his foot.

  "No bones," he said.

  The soldiers stood silently. The fluffy gray flakes collapsed and blew a little way in the dawn breeze.

  "And the wrong sort of ash," said Vorbis.

  The sergeant opened his mouth to say something.

  "Be assured I know that of which I speak," said Vorbis.

  He wandered over to the charred trapdoor, and prodded it with his toe.

  "We followed the tunnel," said the sergeant, in the tones of one who hopes against experience that sounding helpful will avert the wrath to come. "It comes out near the docks."

  "But if you enter it from the docks it does not come out here," Vorbis mused. The smoking ashes seemed to hold an endless fascination for him.

  The sergeant's brow wrinkled.

  "Understand?" said Vorbis. "The Ephebians wouldn't build a way out that was a way in. The minds that devised the labyrinth would not work like that. There would be . . . valves. Sequences of triggerstones, perhaps. Trips that trip only one way. Whirring blades that come out of unexpected walls."

  ` Ah.

  "Most intricate and devious, I have no doubt."

  The sergeant ran a dry tongue over his lips. He could not read Vorbis like a book, because there had never been a book like Vorbis. But Vorbis had certain habits of thought that you learned, after a while.

  "You wish me to take the squad and follow it up from the docks," he said hollowly.

  "I was just about to suggest it," said Vorbis.

  "Yes, lord."

  Vorbis patted the sergeant on the shoulder.

  "But do not worry!" he said cheerfully. "Om will protect the strong in faith."

  "Yes, lord."

  "And the last man can bring me a full report. But first . . . they are not in the city?"

  "We have searched it fully, lord."

  "And no one left by the gate? Then they left by sea."

  "All the Ephebian war vessels are accounted for, Lord Vorbis."

  "This bay is lousy with small boats."

  "With nowhere to go but the open sea, sir."

  Vorbis looked out at the Circle Sea. It filled the world from horizon to horizon. Beyond lay the smudge of the Sto plains and the ragged line of the Ramtops, all the way to the towering peaks that the heretics called the Hub but which was, he _ knew,

  the Pole, visible around the curve of the world only because of the way light bent in atmosphere, just as it did in water . . . and he saw a smudge of white, curling over the distant ocean.

  Vorbis had very good eyesight, from a height.

  He picked up a handful of gray ash, which had once been Dykeri's Principles of Navigation, and let it drift through his fingers.

  "Om has sent us a fair wind," he said. "Let us get down to the docks."

  Hope waved optimistically in the waters of the sergeant's despair.

  "You won't be wanting us to explore the tunnel, lord?" he said.

  "Oh, no. You can do that when we return."

  Urn prodded at the copper globe with a piece of wire while the Unnamed Boat wallowed in the waves.

  "Can't you beat it?" said Simony, who was not up to speed on the difference between machines and people.

  "It's a philosophical engine," said Urn. "Beating won't help."

  "But you said machines could be our slaves," said Simony.

  "Not the beating sort," said Urn. "The nozzles are bunged up with salt. When the water rushes out of the globe it leaves the salt behind."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. Water likes to travel light."

  "We're becalmed! Can you do anything about it?"

  "Yes, wait for it to cool down and then clean it out and put some more water in it."

  Simony looked around distractedly.

  "But we're still in sight of the coast!"

  "You might be," said Didactylos. He was sitting in the middle of the boat with his hands crossed on the top of his walking-stick, looking like an old man who doesn't often get taken out for an airing and is quite enjoying it.

  "Don't worry. No one could see us out here," said Urn. He prodded at the mechanism. "Anyway, I'm a bit worried about the screw. It was invented to move water along, not move along on water."

  "You mean it's confused?" said Simony.

  "Screwed up," said Didactylos happily.

  Brutha lay in the pointed end, looking down at the water. A small squid siphoned past, just under the surface. He wondered what it was-

  -and knew it was the common bottle squid, of the class Cephalopoda, phylum Mollusca, and that it had an internal cartilaginous support instead of a skeleton and a well­-developed nervous system and large, image-forming eyes that were quite similar to vertebrate eyes.

  The knowledge hung in the forefront of his mind for a moment, and then faded away.

  "Om?" Brutha whispered.

  "What?"

  "What're you doing?"

  "Trying to get some sleep. Tortoises need a lot of sleep, you know."

  Simony and Urn were bent over the philosophical engine. Brutha stared at the globe

  -a sphere of radius r, which therefore had a volume V = (4/3)(pi) rrr, and surface area A = 4(pi) rr-

  "Oh, my god . . ."

  "What now?" said the voice of the tortoise.

  Didactylos's face turned towards Brutha, who was clutching at his head.

  "What's a pi?"

  Didactylos reached out a hand and steadied Brutha.

  "What's the matter?" said Om.

  "I don't know! It's just words! I don't know what's in the books! I can't read!"

  "Getting plenty of sleep is vital," said Om. "It builds a healthy shell."

  Brutha sagged to his knees in the rocking boat. He felt like a householder coming back unexpectedly and finding the old place full of strangers. They were in every room, not menacing, but just filling the space with their thereness.

  "The books are leaking!"

  "I don't see how that can happen," said Didactylos. "You said you just looked at them. You didn't read them. You don't know what they mean."

  "They know what they mean!"

  "Listen. They're just books, of the nature of books," said Didactylos. "They're not magical. If you could know what books contained just by looking at them, Urn there would be a genius."

  "What's the matter with him?" said Simony.

  "He thinks he knows too much."

  "No! I don't know anything! Not really know," said Brutha. "I just remembered that squids have an internal cartilaginous support!"

  "I can see that would be a worry," said Simony. "Huh. Priests? Mad, the lot of them."

  "No! I don't know what cartilaginous means!"

  "Skeletal connective tissue," said Didactylos. "Think of bony and leathery at the same time."

  Simony snorted. "Well, well," he said, "we live and learn, just like you said."

  "Some of us even do it the other way round," said Didactylos.

  "Is that supposed to mean something?"

  "It's philosophy," said Didactylos. "And sit down, boy. You're making the boat rock. We're overloaded as it is."

  "It's being buoyed upward by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid," muttered Brutha, sagging.

  "Hmm?"

  "Except that I don't know what buoyed means."

  Urn looked up from the sphere. "We're ready to start again," he said. "Just bale some water in here with your helmet, mister."
/>   "And then we shall go again?"

  "Well, we can start getting up steam," said Urn. He wiped his hands on his toga.

  "Y'know," said Didactylos, "there are different ways of learning things. I'm reminded of the time when old Prince Lasgere of Tsort asked me how he could become learned, especially since he hadn't got any time for this reading business. I said to him, `There is no royal road to learning, sire,' and he said to me, `Bloody well build one or I shall have your legs chopped off. Use as many slaves as you like.' A refreshingly direct approach, I always thought. Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words."

  "Why didn't he chop your legs off?" said Urn.

  "I built him his road. More or less."

  "How? I thought that was just a metaphor."

  "You're learning, Urn. So I found a dozen slaves who could read and they sat in his bedroom at night whispering choice passages to him while he slept."

  "Did that work?"

  "Don't know. The third slave stuck a six-inch dagger in his ear. Then after the revolution the new ruler let me out of prison and said I could leave the country if I promised not to think of anything on the way to the border. But I don't believe there was anything wrong with the idea in principle."

  Urn blew on the fire.

  "Takes a little while to heat up the water," he explained.

  Brutha lay back in the bow again. If he concentrated, he could stop the knowledge flowing. The thing to do was avoid looking at things. Even a cloud-

  -devised by natural philosophy as a means of occasioning shade on the surface of the world, thus preventing overheating-

  -caused an intrusion. Om was fast asleep.

  Knowing without learning, thought Brutha. No. The other way round. Learning without knowing . . .

  Nine-tenths of Om dozed in his shell. The rest of him drifted like a fog in the real world of the gods, which is a lot less interesting than the three-dimensional world inhabited by most of humanity.

  He thought: we're a little boat. She'll probably not even notice us. There's the whole of the ocean. She can't be everywhere.

  Of course, she's got many believers. But we're only a little boat . . .

  He felt the minds of inquisitive fishes nosing around the end of the screw. Which was odd, because in the normal course of things fishes were not known for their-

  "Greetings," said the Queen of the Sea.

  "Ah."