Small Gods

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 effect. 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