Small Gods

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 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,”