Small Gods

one another. He was seeing too much from a human point of view. “Take the boat, then. If you must. I just wish it was—”
    “Fair?” said the Sea Queen. She moved forward. Om felt her all around him.
    “There’s no such thing,” she said. “Life’s like a beach. And then you die.”
    Then she was gone.
    Om let himself retreat into the shell of his shell.
    “Brutha?”
    “Yes?”
    “Can you swim?”
    The globe started to spin.
    Brutha heard Urn say, “There. Soon be on our way.”
    “We’d better be.” This was Simony. “There’s a ship out there.”
    “This thing goes faster than anything with sails or oars.”
    Brutha looked across the bay. A sleek Omnian ship was passing the lighthouse. It was still a long way off, but Brutha stared at it with a dread and expectation that magnified better than telescopes.
    “It’s moving fast,” said Simony. “I don’t understand it—there’s no wind.”
    Urn looked around at the flat calm.
    “There can’t be wind there and not here,” he said.
    “I said, can you swim?” The voice of the tortoise was insistent in Brutha’s head.
    “I don’t know,” said Brutha.
    “Do you think you could find out quickly?”
    Urn looked upwards.
    “Oh,” he said.
    Clouds had massed over the Unnamed Boat . They were visibly spinning.
    “You’ve got to know!” shouted Om. “I thought you had a perfect memory!”
    “We used to splash around in the big cistern in the village,” whispered Brutha. “I don’t know if that counts!”
    Mist whipped off the surface of the sea. Brutha’s ears popped. And still the Omnian ship came on, flying across the waves.
    “What do you call it when you’ve got a dead calm surrounded by winds—” Urn began.
    “Hurricane?” said Didactylos.
    Lightning crackled between sky and sea. Urn yanked at the lever that lowered the screw into the water. His eyes glowed almost as brightly as the lightning.
    “Now there’s a power,” he said. “Harnessing the lightning! The dream of mankind!”
    The Unnamed Boat surged forward.
    “Is it? It’s not my dream,” said Didactylos. “I always dream of a giant carrot chasing me through a field of lobsters.”
    “I mean metaphorical dream, master,” said Urn.
    “What’s a metaphor?” said Simony.
    Brutha said, “What’s a dream?”
    A pillar of lightning laced the mist. Secondary lightnings sparked off the spinning globe.
    “You can get it from cats,” said Urn, lost in a philosophical world, as the Boat left a white wake behind it. “You stroke them with a rod of amber, and you get tiny lightnings…if I could magnify that a million times, no man would ever be a slave again and we could catch it in jars and do away with the night…”
    Lightning struck a few yards away.
    “We’re in a boat with a large copper ball in the middle of a body of salt water,” said Didactylos. “Thanks, Urn.”
    “And the temples of the gods would be magnificently lit, of course,” said Urn quickly.
    Didactylos tapped his stick on the hull. “It’s a nice idea, but you’d never get enough cats,” he said. The sea surged up.
    “Jump into the water!” Om shouted.
    “Why?” said Brutha.
    A wave almost overturned the boat. Rain hissed on the surface of the sphere, sent up a scalding spray.
    “I haven’t got time to explain! Jump overboard! It’s for the best! Trust me!”
    Brutha stood up, holding the sphere’s framework to steady himself.
    “Sit down!” said Urn.
    “I’m just going out,” said Brutha. “I may be some time.”
    The boat rocked under him as he half-jumped, half-fell into the boiling sea.
    Lightning struck the sphere.
    As Brutha bobbed to the surface he saw, for a moment, the globe glowing white-hot and the Unnamed Boat , its screw almost out of the water, skimming away through the mists like a comet. It vanished in the clouds and rain. A moment later, above the noise of the storm, there was a muffled “boom.”
    Brutha raised his hand. Om broke the surface, blowing seawater out of his nostrils.
    “You said it would be for the best!” screamed Brutha.
    “Well? We’re still alive! And hold me out of the water! Tortoises can’t swim!”
    “But they might be dead!”
    “Do you want to join them?”
    A wave submerged Brutha. For a moment the world was a dark green curtain, ringing in his ears.
    “I can’t swim with one hand!” he shouted, as he broke surface again.
    “We’ll be saved! She wouldn’t dare!”
    “What do you mean?”
    Another wave