Small Gods

then.”
    Urn glanced at the deacon. Not Cenobiarch yet, so uncrowned. Among the Iams and bishops standing uncertainly in the open doorway, his bald head gleamed in the morning light.
    “Come on, then,” said Urn.
    “Come on what?”
    “We can rush the steps and save him!”
    “There’s more of them than there are of us,” said Simony.
    “Well, haven’t there always been? There’s not magically more of them than there are of us just because they’ve got Brutha, are there?”
    Simony grabbed his arm.
    “Think logically, will you?” he said. “You’re a philosopher, aren’t you? Look at the crowd!”
    Urn looked at the crowd.
    “Well?”
    “They don’t like it.” Simon turned. “Look, Brutha’s going to die anyway. But this way it’ll mean something. People don’t understand, really understand, about the shape of the universe and all that stuff, but they’ll remember what Vorbis did to a man. Right? We can make Brutha’s death a symbol for people, don’t you see?”
    Urn stared at the distant figure of Brutha. It was naked, except for a loin-cloth.
    “A symbol?” he said. His throat was dry.
    “It has to be.”
    He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they’d left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you’d go mad.
    “You know,” he said, turning to Simony. “Now I know Vorbis is evil. He burned my city. Well, the Tsorteans do it sometimes, and we burn theirs. It’s just war. It’s all part of history. And he lies and cheats and claws power for himself, and lots of people do that, too. But do you know what’s special? Do you know what it is?”
    “Of course,” said Simony. “It’s what he’s doing to—”
    “It’s what he’s done to you .”
    “What?”
    “He turns other people into copies of himself.”
    Simony’s grip was like a vice. “You’re saying I’m like him? ”
    “Once you said you’d cut him down,” said Urn. “Now you’re thinking like him…”
    “So we rush them, then?” said Simony. “I’m sure of—maybe four hundred on our side. So I give the signal and a few hundred of us attack thousands of them? And he dies anyway and we die too? What difference does that make?”
    Urn’s face was gray with horror now.
    “You mean you don’t know?” he said.
    Some of the crowd looked around curiously at him.
    “You don’t know? ” he said.

    The sky was blue. The sun wasn’t high enough yet to turn it into Omnia’s normal copper bowl.
    Brutha turned his head again, towards the sun. It was about a width above the horizon, although if Didactylos’s theories about the speed of light were correct, it was really setting, thousands of years in the future.
    It was eclipsed by the head of Vorbis.
    “Hot yet, Brutha?” said the deacon.
    “Warm.”
    “It will get warmer.”
    There was a disturbance in the crowd. Someone was shouting. Vorbis ignored it.
    “Nothing you want to say?” he said. “Can’t you manage even a curse? Not even a curse?”
    “You never heard Om,” said Brutha. “You never believed. You never, ever heard his voice. All you heard were the echoes inside your own mind.”
    “Really? But I am the Cenobiarch and you are going to burn for treachery and heresy,” said Vorbis. “So much for Om, perhaps?”
    “There will be justice,” said Brutha. “If there is no justice, there is nothing.”
    He was aware of a small voice in his head, too faint yet to distinguish words.
    “Justice?” said Vorbis. The idea seemed to enrage him. He spun around to the crowd of bishops. “Did you hear him? There will be justice? Om has judged! Through me! This is justice!”
    There was a speck in the sun now, speeding toward the Citadel. And the little voice was saying left left left up up left right a bit up left —The mass of metal under him was getting uncomfortably hot.
    “He comes now,” said Brutha.
    Vorbis waved his hand to the great facade of the temple. “Men built this. We built this,” he said. “And what did Om do? Om comes? Let him come! Let him judge between us!”
    “He comes now,” Brutha repeated. “The God.”
    People looked apprehensively upward. There was that moment, just one moment, when the world holds its breath and against all experience waits for a miracle.
    — up left now, when I say three, one, two, THREE —
    “Vorbis?” croaked Brutha.
    “What?”