Small Gods

sentence. “We’ll just be going then.”
    “Don’t forget your tortoise,” said the barman. “There’s good eating on one of them.”
    “May all your wine turn to water!” Om shrieked.
    “Will it?” said Brutha, as they stepped out into the night.
    “No.”
    “Tell me again. Why exactly are we looking for a philosopher?” said Brutha.
    “I want to get my power back,” said Om.
    “But everyone believes in you!”
    “If they believed in me they could talk to me. I could talk to them. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. No one is worshiping any other gods in Omnia, are they?”
    “They wouldn’t be allowed to,” said Brutha. “The Quisition would see to that.”
    “Yeah. It’s hard to kneel if you have no knees.”
    Brutha stopped in the empty street.
    “I don’t understand you!”
    “You’re not supposed to. The ways of gods aren’t supposed to be understandable to men.”
    “The Quisition keeps us on the path of truth! The Quisition works for the greater glory of the Church!”
    “And you believe that, do you?” said the tortoise.
    Brutha looked, and found that certainty had gone missing. He opened and shut his mouth, but there were no words to be said.
    “Come on,” said Om, as kindly as he could manage. “Let’s get back.”

    In the middle of the night Om awoke. There were noises from Brutha’s bed.
    Brutha was praying again.
    Om listened curiously. He could remember prayers. There had been a lot of them, once. So many that he couldn’t make out an individual prayer even if he had felt inclined to, but that didn’t matter, because what mattered was the huge cosmic susurration of thousands of praying, believing minds. The words weren’t worth listening to, anyway.
    Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time…
    Well, he couldn’t even do the most basic of god tricks now. Thunderbolts with about the same effect as the spark off a cat’s fur, and you could hardly smite anyone with one of those. He had smitten good and hard in his time. Now he could just about walk through water and feed the One.
    Brutha’s prayer was a piccolo tune in a world of silence.
    Om waited until the novice was quiet again and then unfolded his legs and walked out, rocking from side to side, into the dawn.

    The Ephebians walked through the palace courtyards, surrounding the Omnians almost, but not quite, in the manner of a prisoners’ escort.
    Brutha could see that Vorbis was boiling with fury. A small vein on the side of the exquisitor’s bald temple was throbbing.
    As if feeling Brutha’s eyes on him, Vorbis turned his head.
    “You seem ill at ease this morning, Brutha,” he said.
    “Sorry, lord.”
    “You seem to be looking into every corner. What are you expecting to find?”
    “Uh. Just interested, lord. Everything’s new.”
    “All the so-called wisdom of Ephebe is not worth one line from the least paragraph in the Septateuch,” said Vorbis.
    “May we not study the works of the infidel in order to be more alert to the ways of heresy?” said Brutha, surprised at himself.
    “Ah. A persuasive argument, Brutha, and one that the inquisitors have heard many times, if a little indistinctly in many cases.”
    Vorbis glowered at the back of the head of Aristocrates, who was leading the party. “It is but a small step from listening to heresy to questioning established truth, Brutha. Heresy is often fascinating. Therein lies its danger.”
    “Yes, lord.”
    “Hah! And not only do they carve forbidden statues, but they can’t even do it properly.”
    Brutha was no expert, but even he had to agree that this was true. Now the novelty of them had worn off, the statues that decorated every niche in the palace did have a certain badly made look. Brutha was pretty sure he’d just passed one with two left arms. Another one had one ear larger than the other. It wasn’t that someone had set out to carve ugly gods. They had clearly been meant to be quite attractive statues. But the sculptor hadn’t been much good at it.
    “That woman there appears to be holding a