Small Gods

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 around,” 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 around. 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.”
    “I see you’re still managing to exist, little tortoise.”
    “Hanging in there,” said Om. “No problems.”
    There was a pause which, if it were taking place between two people in the human world, would have been spent in coughing and looking embarrassed. But gods are never embarrassed.
    “I expect,” said Om guardedly, “you are looking for your price.”
    “This vessel and everyone in it,” said the Queen. “But your believer can be saved, as is the custom.”
    “What good are they to you? One of them’s an atheist.”
    “Hah! They all believe, right at the end.”
    “That doesn’t seem…” Om hesitated. “Fair?”
    Now the Sea Queen paused.
    “What’s fair?”
    “Like…underlying justice?” said Om. He wondered why he said it.
    “Sounds a human idea to me.”
    “They’re inventive, I’ll grant you. But what I meant was…I mean…they’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
    “ Deserve? They’re human . What’s deserve got to do with it?”
    Om had to concede this. He wasn’t thinking like a god. This bothered him.
    “It’s just…”
    “You’ve been relying on one human for too long, little god.”
    “I know. I know.” Om sighed. Minds leaked into