"Aye. It does that."

"You mean this isn't a storm?"

The sailor sighed, and walked away.

After a while, Brutha risked letting go. He had never felt so ill in his life.

It wasn't just the seasickness. He didn't know where he was. And Brutha had always known where he was. Where he was, and the existence of Om, had been the only two certainties in his life.

It was something he shared with tortoises. Watch any tortoise walking, and periodically it will stop while it files away the memories of the journey so far. Not for nothing, elsewhere in the multiverse, are the little traveling devices controlled by electric thinking-engines called "turtles."

Brutha knew where he was by remembering where he had been-by the unconscious counting of footsteps and the noting of landmarks. Somewhere inside his head was a thread of memory which, if you had wired it directly to whatever controlled his feet, would cause Brutha to amble back through the little pathways of his life all the way to the place he was born.

Out of contact with the ground, on the mutable surface of the sea, the thread flapped loose.

In his box, Om tossed and shook to Brutha's motion as Brutha staggered across the moving deck and reached the rail.

To anyone except the novice, the boat was clipping through the waves on a good sailing day. Seabirds wheeled in its wake. Away to one side-port or starboard or one of those directions-a school of flying fish broke the surface in an attempt to escape the attentions of some dolphins. Brutha stared at the gray shapes as they zigzagged under the keel in a world where they never had to count at all

"Ah, Brutha," said Vorbis. "Feeding the fishes, I see."

"No, lord," said Brutha. "I'm being sick, lord."

He turned.

There was Sergeant Simony, a muscular young man with the deadpan expression of the truly professional soldier. He was standing next to someone Brutha vaguely recognized as the number-one salt or whatever his title was. And there was the exquisitor, smiling.

"Him! Him!" screamed the voice of the tortoise.

"Our young friend is not a good sailor," said Vorbis.

"Him! Him! I'd know him anywhere!"

"Lord, I wish I wasn't a sailor at all," said Brutha. He felt the box trembling as Om bounced around inside.

"Kill him! Find something sharp! Push him overboard!"

"Come with us to the prow, Brutha," said Vorbis. "There are many interesting things to be seen, according to the captain."

The captain gave the frozen smirk of those caught between a rock and a hard place. Vorbis could always supply both.

Brutha trailed behind the other three, and risked a whisper.

"What's the matter?"

"Him! The bald one! Push him over the side!"

Vorbis half-turned, caught Brutha's embarrassed attention, and smiled.

"We will have our minds broadened, I am sure," he said. He turned back to the captain, and pointed to a large bird gliding down the face of the waves.

"The Pointless Albatross," said the captain promptly. "Flies from the Hub to the Ri-” he faltered. But Vorbis was gazing with apparent affability at the view.

"He turned me over in the sun! Look at his mind!"

"From one pole of the world to the other, every year," said the captain. He was sweating slightly.

"Really?" said Vorbis. "Why?"

"No one knows."

"Excepting the God, of course," said Vorbis.

The captain's face was a sickly yellow.

"Of course. Certainly," he said.

"Brutha?" shouted the tortoise. "Are you listening to me?"

"And over there?" said Vorbis.

The sailor followed his extended arm.

"Oh. Flying fish," he said. "But they don't really fly," he added quickly. "They just build up speed in the water and glide a little way."

"One of the God's marvels," said Vorbis. "Infinite variety, eh?"

"Yes, indeed," said the captain. Relief was crossing his face now, like a friendly army.

"And the things down there?" said the exquisitor.

"Them? Porpoises," said the captain. "Sort of a fish."

"Do they always swim around ships like this?"

"Often. Certainly. Especially in the waters off Ephebe."

Vorbis leaned over the rail, and said nothing. Simony was staring at the horizon, his face absolutely immobile. This left a gap in the conversation which the captain, very stupidly, sought to fill.

"They'll follow a ship for days," he said.

"Remarkable." Another pause, a tar pit of silence ready to snare the mastodons of unthinking comment. Earlier exquisitors had shouted and ranted confessions out of people. Vorbis never did that. He just dug deep silences in front of them.

"They seem to like them," said the captain. He glanced nervously at Brutha, who was trying to shut the tortoise's voice out of his head. There was no help there.

Vorbis came to his aid instead.

"This must be very convenient on long voyages," he said.

"Uh. Yes?" said the captain.

"From the provisions point of view," said Vorbis.

"My lord, I don't quite-”

"It must be like having a traveling larder," said Vorbis.

The captain smiled. "Oh no, lord. We don't eat them."

"Surely not? They look quite wholesome to me. "

"Oh, but you know the old saying, lord . . .

"Saying?"

"Oh, they say that after they die, the souls of dead sailors become-”

The captain saw the abyss ahead, but the sentence had plunged on with a horrible momentum of its own.

For a while there was no sound but the zip of the waves, the distant splash of the porpoises, and the heaven-shaking thundering of the captain's heart.

Vorbis leaned back on the rail.

"But of course we are not prey to such superstitions," he said lazily.

"Well, of course," said the captain, clutching at this straw. "Idle sailor talk. If ever I hear it again I shall have the man flog-”

Vorbis was looking past his ear.

"I say! Yes, you there!" he said.

One of the sailors nodded.

"Fetch me a harpoon," said Vorbis.

The man looked from him to the captain and then scuttled off obediently.

"But, ah, uh, but your lordship should not, uh, ha, attempt such sport," said the captain. "Ah. Uh. A harpoon is a dangerous weapon in untrained hands, I am afraid you might do yourself an injury-”

"But I will not be using it," said Vorbis.

The captain hung his head and held out his hand for the harpoon.

Vorbis patted him on the shoulder.

"And then," he said, "you shall entertain us to lunch. Won't he, sergeant?"

Simony saluted. "Just as you say, sir."

"Yes."

Brutha lay on his back among sails and ropes somewhere under the decking. It was hot, and the air smelled of all air anywhere that has ever come into contact with bilges.

Brutha hadn't eaten all day. Initially he'd been too ill to. Then he just hadn't.

"But being cruel to animals doesn't mean he's a . . . bad person," he ventured, the harmonics of his tone suggesting that even he didn't believe this. It had been quite a small porpoise.

"He turned me on to my back," said Om.

"Yes, but humans are more important than animals," said Brutha.

"This is a point of view often expressed by humans," said Om.

"Chapter IX, verse 16 of the book of-” Brutha began.

"Who cares what any book says?" screamed the tortoise.

Brutha was shaken.

"But you never told any of the prophets that people should be kind to animals," he said. "I don't remember anything about that. Not when you were . . . bigger. You don't want people to be kind to animals because they're animals, you just want people to be kind to animals because one of them might be you."

"That's not a bad idea!"

"Besides, he's been kind to me. He didn't have to be.

"You think that? Is that what you think? Have you looked at the man's mind?"

"Of course I haven't! I don't know how to!"

"You don't?"

"No! Humans 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 lowgrowing 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 grey 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," 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 face down 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 puttogether 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 buggers had the shell for it.

It would be too much to ask (even if a god had anyone to ask) that a body designed for trundling around a dry wilderness had any hydrodynamic properties other than those necessary to sink to the bottom.

Oh, well. Nothing else for it. He was still a god. He had rights.

He slid down a coil of rope and crawled carefully to the edge of the swaying deck, wedging his shell against a stanchion so that he could see down into the roiling water.

Then he spoke in a voice audible to nothing that was mortal.

Nothing happened for a while. Then one wave rose higher than the rest, and changed shape as it rose. Water poured upward, filling an invisible mold; it was humanoid, but obviously only because it wanted to be. It could as easily have been a waterspout, or an undertow. The sea is always powerful. So many people believe in it. But it seldom answers prayers.

The water shape rose level with the deck and kept pace with Om.

It developed a face, and opened a mouth.

"Well?" it said.

"Greetings, oh Queen of-” Om began.

The watery eyes focused.

"But you are just a small god. And you dare to summon me?"

The wind howled in the rigging.

"I have believers," said Om. "So I have the right."

There was the briefest of pauses. Then the Sea Queen said, "One believer?"

"One or many does not matter here," said Om. "I have rights."

"And what rights do you demand, little tortoise?" said the Queen of the Sea.

"Save the ship," said Om.

The Queen was silent.

"You have to grant the request," said Om. "It's the rules."

"But I can name my price," said the Sea Queen.

"That's the rules, too."

"And it will be high."

"It will be paid."

The column of water began to collapse back into the waves.

"I will consider this."

Om stared down into the white sea. The ship rolled, sliding him back down the deck, and then rolled back. A flailing foreclaw hooked itself around the stanchion as Om's shell spun around, and for a moment both hind legs paddled helplessly over the waters.

And then Om was shaken free.

Something white swept down toward him as he seesawed over the edge, and he bit it.

Brutha yelled and pulled his hand up, with Om trailing on the end of it.

"You didn't have to bite!"

The ship pitched into a wave and flung him to the deck. Om let go and rolled away.

When Brutha got to his feet, or at least to his hands and knees, he saw the crewmen standing around him. Two of them grabbed him by the elbows as a wave crashed over the ship.

"What are you doing?"

They were trying to avoid looking at his face. They dragged him toward the rail.

Somewhere in the scuppers Om screamed at the Sea Queen.

"It's the rules! The rules!"

Four sailors had got hold of Brutha now. Om could hear, above the roaring of the storm, the silence of the desert.

"Wait," said Brutha.

"It's nothing personal," said one of the sailors. "We don't want to do this."

"I don't want you to do it either," said Brutha."Is that any help?"

"The sea wants a life," said the oldest sailor. "Yours is nearest. Okay, get his-”

"Can I make my peace with my God?"

"What?"

"If you're going to kill me, can I pray to my God first?"

"It's not us that's killing you," said the sailor. "It's the sea."

" `The hand that does the deed is guilty of the crime,' " said Brutha. "Ossory, chapter LVI, verse 93."

The sailors looked at one another. At a time like this, it was probably not wise to antagonize any god. The ship skidded down the side of a wave.

"You've got ten seconds," said the oldest sailor. "That's ten seconds more than many men get."

Brutha lay down on the deck, helped considerably by another wave that slammed into the timbers.

Om was dimly aware of the prayer, to his surprise. He couldn't make out the words, but the prayer itself was an itch at the back of his mind.

"Don't ask me," he said, trying to get upright, "I'm out of options-”

The ship smacked down . . .

. . . on to a calm sea.

The storm still raged, but only around a widening circle with the ship in the middle. The lightning, stabbing at the sea, surrounded them like the bars of a cage.

The circle lengthened ahead of them. Now the ship sped down a narrow channel of calm between gray walls of storm a mile high. Electric fire raged overhead.

And then was gone.

Behind them, a mountain of grayness squatted on the sea. They could hear the thunder dying away.

Brutha got uncertainly to his feet, swaying wildly to compensate for a motion that was no longer there.

"Now I-” he began.

He was alone. The sailors had fled.

"Om?" said Brutha.

"Over here."

Brutha fished his God out of the seaweed.

"You said you couldn't do anything!" he said accusingly.

"That wasn't m-” Om paused. There will be a price, he thought. It won't be cheap. It can't be cheap. The Sea Queen is a god. I've crushed a few towns in my time. Holy fire, that kind of thing. If the price isn't high, how can people respect you?

"I made arrangements," he said.

Tidal waves. A ship sunk. A couple of towns disappearing under the sea. It'll be something like that. If people don't respect then they won't fear, and if they don't fear, how can you get them to believe?

Seems unfair, really. One man killed a porpoise. Of course, it doesn't matter to the Queen who gets thrown overboard, just as it didn't matter to him which porpoise he killed. And that's unfair, because it was Vorbis who did it. He makes people do things they shouldn't do . . .

What am I thinking about? Before I was a tortoise, I didn't even know what unfair meant . . .

The hatches opened. People came on deck and hung on the rail. Being on deck in stormy weather always has the possibility of being washed overboard, but that takes on a rosy glow after hours below decks with frightened horses and seasick passengers.

There were no more storms. The ship ploughed on in favorable winds, under a clear sky, in a sea as empty of life as the hot desert.

The days passed uneventfully. Vorbis stayed below decks for most of the time.

The crew treated Brutha with cautious respect. News like Brutha spreads quickly.

The coast here was dunes, with the occasional barren salt marsh. A heat haze hung over the land. It was the kind of coast where shipwrecked landfall is more to be dreaded than drowning. There were no seabirds. Even the birds that had been trailing the ship for scraps had vanished.

"No eagles," said Om. There was that to be said about it.

Toward the evening of the fourth day the unedifying panorama was punctuated by a glitter of light, high on the dune sea. It flashed with a sort of rhythm.

The captain, whose face now looked as if sleep had not been a regular nighttime companion, called Brutha over.

"His . . . your . . . the deacon told me to watch out for this," he said. "You go and fetch him now."

Vorbis had a cabin somewhere near the bilges, where the air was as thick as thin soup. Brutha knocked.

"Enter."[1][5]

There were no portholes down here. Vorbis was sitting in the dark.

"Yes, Brutha?"

"The captain sent me to fetch you, lord. Something's shining in the desert."

"Good. Now, Brutha. Attend. The captain has a mirror. You will ask to borrow it."

"Er . . . what is a mirror, lord?"

"An unholy and forbidden device," said Vorbis. "Which regretfully can be pressed into godly service. He will deny it, of course. But a man with such a neat beard and tiny mustache is vain, and a vain man must have his mirror. So take it. And stand in the sun and move the mirror so that it shines the sun towards the desert. Do you understand?"

"No, lord," said Brutha.

"Your ignorance is your protection, my son. And then come back and tell me what you see."

Om dozed in the sun. Brutha had found him a little space near the pointy end where he could get sun with little danger of being seen by the crew-and the crew were jittery enough at the moment not to go looking for trouble in any case.

A tortoise dreams . . .

. . . for millions of years.

It was the dreamtime. The unformed time.

The small gods chittered and whirred in the wilderness places, and the cold places, and the deep places. They swarmed in the darkness, without memory but driven by hope and lust for the one thing, the one thing a god craves-belief.

There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there's light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space . . . then there's a race-between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up.

Sometimes, you can make your own space.

Forests were a long way from the wilderness. The nameless voice that was going to be Om drifted on the wind on the edge of the desert, trying to be heard among countless others, trying to avoid being pushed into the center. It may have whirled for millions of years-it had nothing with which to measure time. All it had was hope, and a certain sense of the presence of things. And a voice.

Then there was a day. In a sense, it was the first day.

Om had been aware of the shepherd for some ti-for a while. The flock had been wandering closer and closer. The rains had been sparse. Forage was scarce. Hungry mouths propelled hungry legs further into the rocks, searching out the hitherto scorned clumps of sun-seared grass.

They were sheep, possibly the most stupid animal in the universe with the possible exception of the duck. But even their uncomplicated minds couldn't hear the voice, because sheep don't listen.

There was a lamb, though. It had strayed a little way. Om saw to it that it strayed a little further. Around a rock. Down the slope. Into the crevice.

Its bleating drew the mother.

The crevice was well hidden and the ewe was, after all, content now that she had her lamb. She saw no reason to bleat, even when the shepherd wandered about the rocks calling, cursing, and, eventually, pleading. The shepherd had a hundred sheep, and it might have been surprising that he was prepared to spend days searching for one sheep; in fact, it was because he was the kind of man prepared to spend days looking for a lost sheep that he had a hundred sheep.

The voice that was going to be Om waited.

It was on the evening of the second day that he scared up a partridge that had been nesting near the crevice, just as the shepherd was wandering by.

It wasn't much of a miracle, but it was good enough for the shepherd. He made a cairn of stones at the spot and, next day, brought his whole flock into the area. And in the heat of the afternoon he lay down to sleep-and Om spoke to him, inside his head.

Three weeks later the shepherd was stoned to death by the priests of Ur-Gilash, who was at that time the chief god in the area. But they were too late. Om already had a hundred believers, and the number was growing . . .

Only a mile away from the shepherd and his flock was a goatherd and his herd. The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different.

For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

Ur-Gilash, thought Om. Ah, those were the days . . . when Ossory and his followers had broken into the temple and smashed the altar and had thrown the priestesses out of the window to be torn apart by wild dogs, which was the correct way of doing things, and there had been a mighty wailing and gnashing of feet and the followers of Om had lit their campfires in the crumbled halls of Gilash just as the Prophet had said, and that counted even though he'd said it only five minutes earlier, when they were only looking for the firewood, because everyone agreed a prophecy is a prophecy and no one said you had to wait a long time for it to come true.

Great days. Great days. Every day fresh converts. The rise of Om had been unstoppable . . .

He jerked awake.

Old Ur-Gilash. Weather god, wasn't he? Yes. No. Maybe one of your basic giant spider gods? Something like that. Whatever happened to him?

What happened to me? How does it happen? You hang around the astral planes, going with the flow, enjoy the rhythms of the universe, you think that all the, you know, humans are getting on with the believing back down there, you decide to go and stir them up a bit and then . . . a tortoise. It's like going to the bank and finding the money's been leaking out through a hole. The first you know is when you stroll down looking for a handy mind, and suddenly you're a tortoise and there's no power left to get out.

Three years of looking up at practically everything . . .

Old Ur-Gilash? Perhaps he was hanging on as a lizard somewhere, with some old hermit as his only believer. More likely he had been blown out into the desert. A small god was lucky to get one chance.

There was something wrong. Om couldn't quite put his finger on it, and not only because he didn't have a finger. Gods rose and fell like bits of onion in a boiling soup, but this time was different. There was something wrong this time . . .

He'd forced out Ur-Gilash. Fair enough. Law of the jungle. But no one was challenging him . . .

Where was Brutha?

"Brutha! "

Brutha was counting the flashes of light off the desert. "It's a good thing I had a mirror, yes?" said the captain hopefully. "I expect his lordship won't mind about the mirror because it turned out to be useful?"

"I don't think he thinks like that," said Brutha, still counting.

"No. I don't think he does either," said the captain gloomily.

"Seven, and then four."

"It'll be the Quisition for me," said the captain.

Brutha was about to say, "Then rejoice that your soul shall be purified." But he didn't. And he didn't know why he didn't.

"I'm sorry about that," he said.

A veneer of surprise overlaid the captain's grief.

"You people usually say something about how the Quisition is good for the soul," he said.

"I'm sure it is," said Brutha.

The captain was watching his face intently.

"It's flat, you know," he said quietly. "I've sailed out into the Rim Ocean. It's flat, and I've seen the Edge, and it moves. Not the Edge. I mean . . . what's down there. They can cut my head off but it will still move."

"But it will stop moving for you," said Brutha. "So I should be careful to whom you speak, captain."

The captain leaned closer.

"The Turtle Moves!" he hissed, and darted away.

"Brutha! "

Guilt jerked Brutha upright like a hooked fish. He turned around, and sagged with relief. It wasn't Vorbis, it was only God.

He padded over to the place in front of the mast. Om glared up at him.

"Yes?" said Brutha.

"You never come and see me," said the tortoise. "I know you're busy," it added sarcastically, "but a quick prayer would be nice, even."

"I checked you first thing this morning," said Brutha.

"And I'm hungry."

"You had a whole melon rind last night."

"And who had the melon, eh?"

"No, he didn't," said Brutha. "He eats stale bread and water."

"Why doesn't he eat fresh bread?"

"He waits for it to get stale."

"Yes. I expect he does," said the tortoise.

"Om?"

"What?"

"The captain just said something odd. He said the world is flat and has an edge."

"Yes? So what?"

"But, I mean, we know the world is a ball, because . . .

The tortoise blinked.

"No, it's not," he said. "Who said it's a ball?"

"You did," said Brutha. Then he added: "According to Book One of the Septateuch, anyway."

I've never thought like this before, he thought. I'd never have said "anyway."

"Why'd the captain tell me something like that?" he said. "It's not normal conversation."

"I told you, I never made the world," said Om. "Why should I make the world? It was here already. And if I did make a world, I wouldn't make it a ball. People'd fall off. All the sea'd run off the bottom."

"Not if you told it to stay on."

"Hah! Will you hark at the man!"

"Besides, the sphere is a perfect shape," said Brutha. "Because in the Book of-”

"Nothing amazing about a sphere," said the tortoise. "Come to that, a turtle is a perfect shape."

"A perfect shape for what?"

"Well, the perfect shape for a turtle, to start with," said Om. "If it was shaped like a ball, it'd be bobbing to the surface the whole time."

"But it's a heresy to say the world is flat," said Brutha.

"Maybe, but it's true."

"And it's really on the back of a giant turtle?"

"That's right."

"In that case," said Brutha triumphantly, "what does the turtle stand on?"

The tortoise gave him a blank stare.

"It doesn't stand on anything," it said. "It's a turtle, for heaven's sake. It swims. That's what turtles are for."

"I . . . er . . . I think I'd better go and report to Vorbis," said Brutha. "He goes very calm if he's kept waiting. What did you want me for? I'll try and bring you some more food after supper."

"How are you feeling?" said the tortoise.

"I'm feeling all right, thank you."

"Eating properly, that sort of thing?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Pleased to hear it. Run along now. I mean, I'm only your God. " Om raised its voice as Brutha hurried off. "And you might visit more often!

"And pray louder, I'm fed up with straining!" he shouted.

Vorbis was still sitting in his cabin when Brutha puffed along the passage and knocked on the door. There was no reply. After a while, Brutha pushed the door open.

Vorbis did not appear to read. Obviously he wrote, because of the famous Letters, but no one ever saw him do it. When he was alone he spent a lot of time staring at the wall, or prostrate in prayer. Vorbis could humble himself in prayer in a way that made the posturings of power-mad emperors look subservient.

"Um," said Brutha, and tried to pull the door shut again.

Vorbis waved one hand irritably. Then he stood up. He did not dust off his robe.

"Do you know, Brutha," he said, "I do not think there is a single person in the Citadel who would dare to interrupt me at prayer? They would fear the Quisition. Everyone fears the Quisition. Except you, it appears. Do you fear the Quisition?"

Brutha looked into the black-on-black eyes. Vorbis looked into a round pink face. There was a special face that people wore when they spoke to an exquisitor. It was flat and expressionless and glistened slightly, and even a half-trained exquisitor could read the barely concealed guilt like a book. Brutha just looked out of breath but then, he always did. It was fascinating.

"No, lord," he said.

"Why not?"

"The Quisition protects us, lord. It is written in Ossory, chapter VII, verse-”

Vorbis put his head on one side.

"Of course it is. But have you ever thought that the Quisition could be wrong?"

"No, lord," said Brutha.

"But why not?"

"I do not know why, Lord Vorbis. I just never have."

Vorbis sat down at a little writing table, no more than a board that folded down from the hull.

"And you are right, Brutha," he said. "Because the Quisition cannot be wrong. Things can only be as the God wishes them. It is impossible to think that the world could run in any other way, is this not so?"

A vision of a one-eyed tortoise flickered momentarily in Brutha's mind.

Brutha had never been any good at lying. The truth itself had always seemed so incomprehensible that complicating things even further had always been beyond him.

"So the Septateuch teaches us," he said.

"Where there is punishment, there is always a crime," said Vorbis. "Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God."

"That's what my grandmother used to say," said Brutha automatically.

"Indeed? I would like to know more about this formidable lady."

"She used to give me a thrashing every morning because I would certainly do something to deserve it during the day," said Brutha.

"A most complete understanding of the nature of mankind," said Vorbis, with his chin on one hand. "Were it not for the deficiency of her sex, it sounds as though she would have made an excellent inquisitor."

Brutha nodded. Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.

"And now," said Vorbis, with no change in his tone, "you will tell me what you saw in the desert."

"Uh. There were six flashes. And then a pause of about five heartbeats. And then eight flashes. And another pause. And two flashes."

Vorbis nodded thoughtfully.

"Three-quarters," he said. "All praise to the Great God. He is my staff and guide through the hard places. And you may go."

Brutha hadn't expected to be told what the flashes meant, and wasn't going to enquire. The Quisition asked the questions. They were known for it.

Next day the ship rounded a headland and the bay of Ephebe lay before it, with the city a white smudge on the horizon which time and distance turned into a spilling of blindingly white houses, all the way up a rock.

It seemed of considerable interest to Sergeant Simony. Brutha had not exchanged a word with him. Fraternization between clergy and soldiers was not encouraged; there was a certain tendency to unholiness about soldiers . . .

Brutha, left to his own devices again as the crew made ready for port, watched the soldier carefully. Most soldiers were a bit slovenly and generally rude to minor clergy. Simony was different. Apart from anything else, he gleamed. His breastplate hurt the eyes. His skin looked scrubbed.

The sergeant stood at the prow, staring fixedly as the city drew nearer. It was unusual to see him very far away from Vorbis. Wherever Vorbis stood there was the sergeant, hand on sword, eyes scanning the surroundings for . . . what?

And always silent, except when spoken to. Brutha tried to be friends.

"Looks very . . . white, doesn't it?" he said. "The city. Very white. Sergeant Simony?"

The sergeant turned slowly, and stared at Brutha.

Vorbis's gaze was dreadful. Vorbis looked through your head to the sins inside, hardly interested in you except as a vehicle for your sins. But Simony's glance was pure, simple hatred.

Brutha stepped back.

"Oh. I'm sorry," he muttered. He walked back sombrely to the blunt end, and tried to keep out of the soldier's way.

Anyway, there were more soldiers, soon enough . . .

The Ephebians were expecting them. Soldiers lined the quay, weapons held in a way that stopped just short of being a direct insult. And there were a lot of them.

Brutha trailed along, the voice of the tortoise insinuating itself in his head.

"So the Ephebians want peace, do they?" said Om. "Doesn't look like that. Doesn't look like we're going to lay down the law to a defeated enemy. Looks like we took a pasting and don't want to take any more. Looks like we're suing for peace. That's what it looks like to me."

"In the Citadel everyone said it was a glorious victory," said Brutha. He found he could talk now with his lips hardly moving at all; Om seemed able to pick up his words as they reached his vocal chords.

Ahead of him, Simony shadowed the deacon, staring suspiciously at each Ephebian guard.

"That's a funny thing," said Om. "Winners never talk about glorious victories. That's because they're the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterward. It's only the losers who have glorious victories."

Brutha didn't know what to reply. "That doesn't sound like god talk," he hazarded.

"It's this tortoise brain."

"What?"

"Don't you know anything? Bodies aren't just handy things for storing your mind in. Your shape affects how you think. It's all this morphology that's all over the place."

"What?"

Om sighed. "If I don't concentrate, I think like a tortoise!"

"What? You mean slowly?"

"No! Tortoises are cynics. They always expect the worst."

,Why?"

"I don't know. Because it often happens to them, I suppose."

Brutha stared around at Ephebe. Guards with helmets crested with plumes that looked like horses' tails gone rogue marched on either side of the column. A few Ephebian citizens watched idly from the roadside. They looked surprisingly like the people at home, and not like two-legged demons at all.

"They're people," he said.

"Full marks for comparative anthropology."

"Brother Nhumrod said Ephebians eat human flesh," said Brutha. "He wouldn't tell lies."

A small boy regarded Brutha thoughtfully while excavating a nostril. If it was a demon in human form, it was an extremely good actor.

At intervals along the road from the docks were white stone statues. Brutha had never seen statues before. Apart from the statues of the SeptArchs, of course, but that wasn't the same thing.

"What are they?"

"Well, the tubby one with the toga is Tuvelpit, the God of Wine. They call him Smimto in Tsort. And the broad with the hairdo is Astoria, Goddess of Love. A complete bubblehead. The ugly one is Offler the Crocodile God. Not a local boy. He's Klatchian originally, but the Ephebians heard about him and thought he was a good idea. Note the teeth. Good teeth. Good teeth. Then the one with the snakepit hairdo is-”

"You talk about them as if they were real," said Brutha.

"They are."

"There is no other god but you. You told Ossory that."

"Well. You know. I exaggerated a bit. But they're not that good. There's one of 'em that sits around playing a flute most of the time and chasing milkmaids. I don't call that very divine. Call that very divine? I don't."

The road wound up steeply around the rocky hill. Most of the city seemed to be built on outcrops or was cut into the actual rock itself, so that one man's patio was another man's roof. The roads were really a series of shallow steps, accessible to a man or a donkey but sudden death to a cart. Ephebe was a pedestrian place.

More people watched them in silence. So did the statues of the gods. The Ephebians had gods in the same way that other cities had rats.

Brutha got a look at Vorbis's face. The exquisitor was staring straight ahead of himself. Brutha wondered what the man was seeing.

It was all so new!

And devilish, of course. Although the gods in the statues didn't look much like demons-but he could hear the voice of Nhumrod pointing out that this very fact made them even more demonic. Sin crept up on you like a wolf in a sheep's skin.

One of the goddesses had been having some very serious trouble with her dress, Brutha noticed; if Brother Nhumrod had been present, he would have had to hurry off for some very serious lying down.

"Petulia, Goddess of Negotiable Affection," said Om. "Worshiped by the ladies of the night and every other time as well, if you catch my meaning."

Brutha's mouth dropped open.

"They've got a goddess for painted jezebels?"

"Why not? Very religious people I understand. They're used to being on their-they spend so much time looking at the-look, belief is where you find it. Specialization. That's safe, see. Low risk, guaranteed returns. There's even a God of Lettuce somewhere. I mean, it's not as though any one else is likely to try to become a God of Lettuce. You just find a lettuce-growing community and hang on. Thunder gods come and go, but it's you they turn to every time when there's a bad attack of Lettuce Fly. You've got to . . . uh . . . hand it to Petulia. She spotted a gap in the market and filled it."

"There's a God of Lettuce?"

"Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything . . ."

Om stopped himself and waited to see if Brutha had noticed. But Brutha seemed to have something else on his mind.

"That's not right. Not treating people like that. Ow."

He'd walked into the back of a subdeacon. The party had halted, partly because the Ephebian escort had stopped too, but mainly because a man was running down the street.

He was quite old, and in many respects resembled a frog that had been dried out for quite some time. Something about him generally made people think of the word "spry," but, at the moment, they would be much more likely to think of the words "mother naked" and possibly also "dripping wet" and would be one hundred percent accurate, too. Although there was the beard. It was a beard you could camp out in.

The man thudded down the street without any apparent selfconsciousness and stopped outside a potter's shop. The potter didn't seem concerned at being addressed by a little wet naked man; in fact, none of the people in the street had given him a second glance.

"I'd like a Number Nine pot and some string, please," said the old man.

"Yes sir, Mr. Legibus." The potter reached under his counter and pulled out a towel. The naked man took it in an absent-minded way. Brutha got the feeling that this had happened to both of them before.

"And a lever of infinite length and, um, an immovable place to stand," said Legibus, drying himself off.

"What you see is what I got, sir. Pots and general household items, but a bit short on axiomatic mechanisms."

"Well, have you got a piece of chalk?"

"Got some right here from last time," said the potter.

The little naked man took the chalk and started to draw triangles on the nearest bit of wall. Then he looked down.

"Why haven't I got any clothes on?" he said.

"We've been having our bath again, haven't we?" said the potter.

"I left my clothes in the bath?"

"I think you probably had an idea while you were in the bath?" prompted the potter.

"That's right! That's right! Got this splendid idea for moving the world around!" said Legibus. "Simple lever principle. Should work perfectly. It's just a matter of getting the technical details sorted out."

"That's nice. We can move somewhere warm for the winter," said the potter.

"Can I borrow the towel?"

"It's yours anyway, Mr. Legibus."

"Is it?"

"I said, you left it here last time. Remember? When you had that idea for the lighthouse?"

"Fine. Fine," said Legibus, wrapping the towel around himself. He drew a few more lines on the wall. "Fine. Okay. I'll send someone down later to collect the wall."

He turned and appeared to see the Omnians for the first time. He peered forward and then shrugged.

"Hmm," he said, and wandered away.

Brutha tugged at the cloak of one of the Ephebian soldiers.

"Excuse me, but why did we stop?" he said.

"Philosophers have right of way," said the soldier.

"What's a philosopher?" said Brutha.

"Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting," said a voice in his head.

"An infidel seeking the just fate he shall surely receive,' said Vorbis. "An inventor of fallacies. This cursed city attracts them like a dung heap attracts flies."

"Actually, it's the climate," said the voice of the tortoise. "Think about it. If you're inclined to leap out of your bath and run down the street every time you think you've got a bright idea, you don't want to do it somewhere cold. If you do do it somewhere cold, you die out. That's natural selection, that is. Ephebe's known for its philosophers. It's better than street theater."

"What, a lot of old men running around the streets with no clothes on?" said Brutha, under his breath, as they were marched onward.

"More or less. If you spend your whole time thinking about the universe, you tend to forget the less important bits of it. Like your pants. And ninety-nine out of a hundred ideas they come up with are totally useless."

"Why doesn't anyone lock them away safely, then? They don't sound much use to me," said Brutha.

"Because the hundredth idea," said Om, "is generally a humdinger."

"What?"

"Look up at the highest tower on the rock."

Brutha looked up. At the top of the tower, secured by metal bands, was a big disc that glittered in the morning light.

"What is it?" he whispered.

"The reason why Omnia hasn't got much of a fleet any more," said Om. "That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does a Falling Tree in the Forest Make a Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles," he added. "Always coming up with amazing new ideas, the philosophers. The one before that was some intricate device that demonstrated the principles of leverage by incidentally hurling balls of burning sulphur two miles. Then before that, I think, there was some kind of an underwater thing that shot sharpened logs into the bottom of ships."

Brutha stared at the disc again. He hadn't understood more than one-third of the words in the last statement.

"Well," he said, "does it?"

"Does what?"

"Make a sound. If it falls down when no one's there to hear it."

"Who cares?"

The party had reached a gateway in the wall that ran around the top of the rock in much the same way that a headband encircles a head. The Ephebian captain stopped, and turned.

"The . . . visitors . . . must be blindfolded," he said.

"That is outrageous!" said Vorbis. "We are here on a mission of diplomacy!"

"That is not my business," said the captain. "My business is to say: If you go through this gate you go blindfolded. You don't have to be blindfolded. You can stay outside. But if you want to go through, you got to wear a blindfold. This is one of them life choices."

One of the subdeacons whispered in Vorbis's ear. He held a brief sotto voce conversation with the leader of the Omnian guard.

"Very well," he said, "under protest."

The blindfold was quite soft, and totally opaque. But as Brutha was led . . .

. . . ten paces along a passage, and then left five paces, then diagonally forward and left threeand-a-half paces, and right one hundred and three paces, down three steps, and turned around seventeen-and-one-quarter times, and forward nine paces, and left one pace, and forward nineteen paces, and pause three seconds, and right two paces, and back two paces, and left two paces, and turned threeand-a-half times, and wait one second, and up three steps, and right twenty paces, and turned around five-and-a-quarter times, and left fifteen paces, and forward seven paces, and right eighteen paces, and up seven steps, and diagonally forward, and pause two seconds, right four paces, and down a slope that went down a meter every ten paces for thirty paces, and then turned around seven-and-a-half times, and forward six paces . . .

. . . he wondered what good it was supposed to do.

The blindfold was removed in an open courtyard, made of some white stone that turned the sunlight into a glare. Brutha blinked.

Bowmen lined the yard. Their arrows were pointing downwards, but their manner suggested that pointing horizontally could happen any minute.

Another bald man was waiting for them. Ephebe seemed to have an unlimited supply of skinny bald men wearing sheets. This one smiled, with his mouth alone.

No one likes us much, Brutha thought.

"I trust you will excuse this minor inconvenience," said the skinny man. "My name is Aristocrates. I am secretary to the Tyrant. Please ask your men to put down their weapons."

Vorbis drew himself up to his full height. He was a head taller than the Ephebian. Pale though his complexion normally was, it had gone paler.

"We are entitled to retain our arms!" he said. "We are an emissary to a foreign land!"

"But not a barbarian one," said Aristocrates mildly. "Weapons will not be required here."

"Barbarian?" said Vorbis. "You burned our ships!"

Aristocrates held up a hand.

"This is a discussion for later," he said. "My pleasant task now is to show you to your quarters. I am sure you would like to rest a little after your journey. You are, of course, at liberty to wander anywhere you wish in the palace. And if there is anywhere where we do not wish you to wander, the guards will be sure to inform you with speed and tact."

"And we can leave the palace?" said Vorbis coldly.

Aristocrates shrugged.

"We do not guard the gateway except in times of war," he said. "If you can remember the way, you are free to use it. But vague perambulations in the labyrinth are unwise, I must warn you. Our ancestors were sadly very suspicious and put in many traps out of distrust; we keep them well-greased and primed, of course, merely out of a respect for tradition. And now, if you would care to follow me . . ."

The Omnians kept together as they followed Aristocrates through the palace. There were fountains. There were gardens. Here and there groups of people sat around doing nothing very much except talking. The Ephebians seemed to have only a shaky grasp of the concepts of "inside" and "outside"-except for the palace's encircling labyrinth, which was very clear on the subject.

"Danger attends us at every turn," said Vorbis quietly. "Any man who breaks rank or fraternizes in any way will explain his conduct to the inquisitors. At length."

Brutha looked at a woman filling a jug from a well. It did not look like a very military act.

He was feeling that strange double feeling again. On the surface there were the thoughts of Brutha, which were exactly the thoughts that the Citadel would have approved of. This was a nest of infidels and unbelievers, its very mundanity a subtle cloak for the traps of wrong thinking and heresy. It might be bright with sunlight, but in reality it was a place of shadows.

But down below were the thoughts of the Brutha that watched Brutha from the inside . . .

Vorbis looked wrong here. Sharp and unpleasant. And any city where potters didn't worry at all when naked, dripping wet old men came and drew triangles on their walls was a place Brutha wanted to find out more about. He felt like a big empty jug. The thing to do with something empty was fill it up.

"Are you doing something to me?" he whispered.

In his box, Om looked at the shape of Brutha's mind. Then he tried to think quickly.

"No," he said, and that at least was the truth. Had this ever happened before?

Had it been like this back in the first days? It must have been. It was all so hazy now. He couldn't remember the thoughts he'd had then, just the shape of the thoughts. Everything had been highly colored, everything had been growing every day-he had been growing every day; thoughts and the mind that was thinking them were developing at the same speed. Easy to forget things from those times. It was like a fire trying to remember the shape of its flames. But the feeling-he could remember that.

He wasn't doing anything to Brutha. Brutha was doing it to himself. Brutha was beginning to think in godly ways. Brutha was starting to become a prophet.

Om wished he had someone to talk to. Someone who understood.

This was Ephebe, wasn't it? Where people made a living trying to understand?

The Omnians were to be housed in little rooms around a central courtyard. There was a fountain in the middle, in a very small grove of sweet-smelling pine trees. The soldiers nudged one another. People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time.

There was a bowl of fruit in Brutha's cell, and a plate of cold meat. But first things first. He fished the God out of the box.

"There's fruit," he said. "What're these berries?" "Grapes," said Om. "Raw material for wine."

"You mentioned that word before. What does it mean?"

There was a cry from outside.

"Brutha! "

"That's Vorbis. I'll have to go."

Vorbis was standing in the middle of his cell.

"Have you eaten anything?" he demanded.

"No, lord."

"Fruit and meat, Brutha. And this is a fast day. They seek to insult us!"

"Um. Perhaps they don't know that it is a fast day?" Brutha hazarded.

"Ignorance is itself a sin," said Vorbis.

"Ossory VII, verse 4," said Brutha automatically.

Vorbis smiled and patted Brutha's shoulder.

"You are a walking book, Brutha. The Septateuch perambulatus. "

Brutha looked down at his sandals.

He's right, he thought. And I had forgotten. Or at least, not wanted to remember.

And then he heard his own thoughts echoed back to him: it's fruit and meat and bread, that's all. That's all it is. Fast days and feast days and Prophets' Days and bread days . . . who cares? A God whose only concern about food now is that it's low enough to reach?

I wish he wouldn't keep patting my shoulder.

Vorbis turned away.

"Shall I remind the others?" Brutha said.

"No. Our ordained brothers will not, of course, require reminding. As for soldiers . . . a little licence, perhaps, is allowable this far from home . . ."

Brutha wandered back to his cell.

Om was still on the table, staring fixedly at the melon.

"I nearly committed a terrible sin," said Brutha. "I nearly ate fruit on a fruitless day."

"That's a terrible thing, a terrible thing," said Om. "Now cut the melon."

"But it is forbidden!" said Brutha.

"No it's not," said Om. "Cut the melon."

"But it was the eating of fruit that caused passion to invade the world," said Brutha.

"All it caused was flatulence," said Om. "Cut the melon!"

"You're tempting me!"

"No I'm not. I'm giving you permission. Special dispensation! Cut the damn melon!"

"Only a bishop or higher is allowed to giv-” Brutha began. And then he stopped.

Om glared at him.

"Yes. Exactly," he said. "And now cut the melon." His tone softened a bit. "If it makes you feel any better, I shall declare that it is bread. I happen to be the God in this immediate vicinity. I can call it what I damn well like. It's bread. Right? Now cut the damn melon."

"Loaf," corrected Brutha.

"Right. And give me a slice without any seeds in it.

Brutha did so, a bit carefully.

"And eat up quick," said Om.

"In case Vorbis finds us?"

"Because you've got to go and find a philosopher," said Om. The fact that his mouth was full didn't make any difference to his voice in Brutha's mind. "You know, melons grow wild in the wilderness. Not big ones like this. Little green jobs. Skin like leather. Can't bite through 'em. The years I've spent eating dead leaves a goat'd spit out, right next to a crop of melons. Melons should have thinner skins. Remember that."

"Find a philosopher?"

"Right. Someone who knows how to think. Someone who can help me stop being a tortoise."

"But . . . Vorbis might want me."

"You're just going for a stroll. No problem. And hurry up. There's other gods in Ephebe. I don't want to meet them right now. Not looking like this."

Brutha looked panicky.

"How do I find a philosopher?" he said.

"Around here? Throw a brick, I should think."

The labyrinth of Ephebe is ancient and full of one hundred and one amazing things you can do with hidden springs, razor-sharp knives, and falling rocks. There isn't just one guide through it. There are six, and each one knows his way through one-sixth of the labyrinth. Every year they have a special competition, when they do a little redesigning. They vie with one another to see who can make his section even more deadly than the others to the casual wanderer. There's a panel of judges, and a small prize.

The furthest anyone ever got through the labyrinth without a guide was nineteen paces. Well, more or less. His head rolled a further seven paces, but that probably doesn't count.

At each changeover point there is a small chamber without any traps at all. What it does contain is a small bronze bell. These are the little waiting-rooms where visitors are handed on to the next guide. And here and there, set high in the tunnel roof over the more ingenious traps, are observation windows, because guards like a good laugh as much as anyone else.

All of this was totally lost on Brutha, who padded amiably along the tunnels and corridors without really thinking much about it, and at last pushed open the gate into the late evening air.

It was fragrant with the scent of flowers. Moths whirred through the gloom.

"What do philosophers look like?" said Brutha, "When they're not having a bath, I mean."

"They do a lot of thinking," said Om. "Look for someone with a strained expression."

"That might just mean constipation."

"Well, so long as they're philosophical about it . . ."

The city of Ephebe surrounded them. Dogs barked. Somewhere a cat yowled. There was that general susurration of small comfortable sounds that shows that, out there, a lot of people are living their lives.

And then a door burst open down the street and there was the cracking noise of a quite large wine amphora being broken over someone's head.

A skinny old man in a toga picked himself up from the cobbles where he had landed, and glared at the doorway.

"I'm telling you, listen, a finite intellect, right, cannot by means of comparison reach the absolute truth of things, because being by nature indivisible, truth excludes the concepts of "more" or "less" so that nothing but truth itself can be the exact measure of truth. You bastards," he said.

Someone from inside the building said, "Oh yeah? Sez you."

The old man ignored Brutha but, with great difficulty, pulled a cobblestone loose and hefted it in his hand.

Then he dived back through the doorway. There was a distant scream of rage.

"Ah. Philosophy," said Om.

Brutha peered cautiously round the door.

Inside the room two groups of very nearly identical men in togas were trying to hold back two of their colleagues. It is a scene repeated a million times a day in bars around the multiverse-both would-be fighters growled and grimaced at one another and fought to escape the restraint of their friends, only of course they did not fight too hard, because there is nothing worse than actually succeeding in breaking free and suddenly finding yourself all alone in the middle of the ring with a madman who is about to hit you between the eyes with a rock.

"Yep," said Om, "that's philosophy, right enough."

"But they're fighting!"

"A full and free exchange of opinions, yes."

Now that Brutha could get a clearer view, he could see that there were one or two differences between the men. One had a shorter beard, and was very red in the face, and was waggling a finger accusingly.

"He bloody well accused me of slander!" he was shouting.

"I didn't!" shouted the other man.

"You did! You did! Tell 'em what you said!"

"Look, I merely suggested, to indicate the nature of paradox, right, that if Xeno the Ephebian said, `All Ephebians are liars-' "

"See? See? He did it again!"

"-no, no, listen, listen . . . then, since Xeno is himself an Ephebian, this would mean that he himself is a liar and therefore-”

Xeno made a determined effort to break free, dragging four desperate fellow philosophers across the floor.

"I'm going to lay one right on you, pal!"

Brutha said, "Excuse me, please?"

The philosophers froze. Then they turned to look at Brutha. They relaxed by degrees. There was a chorus of embarrassed coughs.

"Are you all philosophers?" said Brutha.

The one called Xeno stepped forward, adjusting the hang of his toga.

"That's right," he said. "We're philosophers. We think, therefore we am."

"Are," said the luckless paradox manufacturer automatically.

Xeno spun around. "I've just about had it up to here with you, Ibid!" he roared. He turned back to Brutha. "We are, therefore we am," he said confidently. "That's it."

Several of the philosophers looked at one another with interest.

"That's actually quite interesting," one said. "The evidence of our existence is the fact of our existence, is that what you're saying?"

"Shut up," said Xeno, without looking around.

"Have you been fighting?" said Brutha.

The assembled philosophers assumed various expressions of shock and horror.

"Fighting? Us? We're philosophers," said Ibid, shocked.

"My word, yes," said Xeno.

"But you were-” Brutha began.

Xeno waved a hand.

"The cut and thrust of debate," he said.

"Thesis plus antithesis equals hysteresis," said Ibid. "The stringent testing of the universe. The hammer of the intellect upon the anvil of fundamental truth-”

"Shut up," said Xeno. "And what can we do for you, young man?"

"Ask them about gods," Om prompted.

"Uh, I want to find out about gods," said Brutha.

The philosophers looked at one another.

"Gods?" said Xeno. "We don't bother with gods. Huh. Relics of an outmoded belief system, gods."

There was a rumble of thunder from the clear evening sky.

"Except for Blind to the Thunder God," Xeno went on, his tone hardly changing.

Lightning flashed across the sky.

"And Cubal the Fire God," said Xeno.

A gust of wind rattled the windows.

"Flatulus the God of the Winds, he's all right too," said Xeno.

An arrow materialized out of the air and hit the table by Xeno's hand.

"Fedecks the Messenger of the Gods, one of the alltime greats," said Xeno.

A bird appeared in the doorway. At least, it looked vaguely like a bird. It was about a foot high, black and white, with a bent beak and an expression that suggested that whatever it was it really dreaded ever happening to it had already happened.

"What's that?" said Brutha.

"A penguin," said the voice of Om inside his head.

"Patina the Goddess of Wisdom? One of the best," said Xeno.

The penguin croaked at him and waddled off into the darkness.

The philosophers looked very embarrassed. Then Ibid said, "Foorgol the God of Avalanches? Where's the snowline?"

"Two hundred miles away," said someone.

They waited. Nothing happened.

"Relic of an outmoded belief system," said Xeno.

A wall of freezing white death did not appear anywhere in Ephebe.

"Mere unthinking personification of a natural force," said one of the philosophers, in a louder voice. They all seemed to feel a lot better about this.

"Primitive nature worship."

"Wouldn't give you tuppence for him."

"Simple rationalization of the unknown."

"Hah! A clever fiction, a bogey to frighten the weak and stupid!"

The words rose up in Brutha. He couldn't stop himself.

"Is it always this cold?" he said. "It seemed very chilly on my way here."

The philosophers all moved away from Xeno.

"Although if there's one thing you can say about Foorgol," said Xeno, "it's that he's a very understanding god. Likes a joke as much as the next . . . man."

He looked both ways, quickly. After a while the philosophers relaxed, and seemed to completely forget about Brutha.

And only now did he really have time to take in the room. He had never seen a tavern before in his life, but that was what it was. The bar ran along one side of the room. Behind it were the typical trappings of an Ephebian bar-the stacks of wine jars, racks of amphorae, and the cheery pictures of vestal virgins on cards of salted peanuts and goat jerky, pinned up in the hope that there really were people in the world who would slatheringly buy more and more packets of nuts they didn't want in order to look at a cardboard nipple.

"What's all this stuff?" Brutha whispered.

"How should I know?" said Om. "Let me out so's I can see."

Brutha unfastened the box and lifted the tortoise out. One rheumy eye looked around.

"Oh. Typical tavern," said Om. "Good. Mine's a saucer of whatever they were drinking."

"A tavern? A place were alcohol is drunk?"

"I very much intend this to be the case, yes."

"But . . . but . . . the Septateuch, no less than seventeen times, adjures us most emphatically to refrain from-”

"Beats the hell out of me why," said Om. "See that man cleaning the mugs? You say unto him, Give me a-”

"But it mocks the mind of Man, says the Prophet Ossory. And-”

"I'll say this one more time! I never said it! Now talk to the man!"

In fact the man talked to Brutha. He appeared magically on the other side of the bar, still wiping a mug.

"Evening, sir," he said. "What'll it be?"

"I'd like a drink of water, please," said Brutha, very deliberately.

"And something for the tortoise?"

"Wine!" said the voice of Om.

"I don't know," said Brutha. "What do tortoises usually drink?"

"The ones we have in here normally have a drop of milk with some bread in it," said the barman.

"You get a lot of tortoises?" said Brutha loudly, trying to drown out Om's outraged screams.

"Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races . . . very handy."

"Uh . . . I haven't got any money," said Brutha.

The barman leaned towards him. "Tell you what," he said. "Declivities has just bought a round. He won't mind."

"Bread and milk?"

"Oh. Thank you. Thank you very much."

"Oh, we get all sorts in here," said the barman, leaning back. "Stoics. Cynics. Big drinkers, the Cynics. Epicureans. Stochastics. Anamaxandrites. Epistemologists. Peripatetics. Synoptics. All sorts. That's what I always say. What I always say is"-he picked up another mug and started to dry it "it takes all sorts to make a world."

"Bread and milk!" shouted Om. "You'll feel my wrath for this, right? Now ask him about gods!"

"Tell me," said Brutha, sipping his mug of water, "do any of them know much about gods?"

"You'd want a priest for that sort of thing," said the barman.

"No, I mean about . . . what gods are . . . how gods came to exist . . . that sort of thing," said Brutha, trying to get to grips with the barman's peculiar mode of conversation.

"Gods don't like that sort of thing," said the barman. "We get that in here some nights, when someone's had a few. Cosmic speculation about whether gods really exist. Next thing, there's a bolt of lightning through the roof with a note wrapped round it saying `Yes, we do' and a pair of sandals with smoke coming out. That sort of thing, it takes all the interest out of metaphysical speculation."

"Not even fresh bread," muttered Om, nose deep in his saucer.

"No, I know gods exist all right," said Brutha, hurriedly. "I just want to find out more about . . . them."

The barman shrugged.

"Then I'd be obliged if you don't stand next to anything valuable," he said, "Still, it'll all be the same in a hundred years." He picked up another mug and started to polish it.

"Are you a philosopher?" said Brutha.

"It kind of rubs off on you after a while," said the barman.

"This milk's off," said Om. "They say Ephebe is a democracy. This milk ought to be allowed to vote."

"I don't think," said Brutha carefully, "that I'm going to find what I want here. Um. Mr. Drink Seller?"

"Yes?"

"What was that bird that walked in when the Goddess"-he tasted the unfamiliar word-"of Wisdom was mentioned?"

"Bit of a problem there," said the barman. "Bit of an embarrassment."

"Sorry? "

"It was," said the barman, "a penguin."

"Is it a wise sort of bird, then?"

"No. Not a lot," said the barman. "Not known for its wisdom. Second most confused bird in the world. Can only fly underwater, they say."

"Then why-”

"We don't like to talk about it," said the barman. "It upsets people. Bloody sculptor," he added, under his breath.

Down the other end of the bar the philosophers had started fighting again.

The barman leaned forward. "If you haven't got any money," he said, "I don't think you're going to get much help. Talk isn't cheap around here."

"But they just-” Brutha began.

"There's the expenditure on soap and water, for a start. Towels. Flannels. Loofahs. Pumice stones. Bath salts. It all adds up."

There was a gurgling noise from the saucer. Om's milky head turned to Brutha.

"You've got no money at all?" he said.

"No," said Brutha.

"Well, we've got to have a philosopher," said the tortoise flatly. "I can't think and you don't know how to. We've got to find someone who does it all the time."

"Of course, you could try old Didactylos," said the barman. "He's about as cheap as they come."

"Doesn't use expensive soap?" said Brutha.

"I think it could be said without fear of contradiction," said the barman solemnly, "that he doesn't use any soap at all whatsoever in any way."

"Oh. Well. Thank you," said Brutha.

"Ask him where this man lives," Om commanded.

"Where can I find Mr. Didactylos?" said Brutha.

"In the palace courtyard. Next door to the Library. You can't miss him. Just follow your nose."

"We just came-” Brutha said, but his inner voice prompted him not to complete the 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 penguin," said Vorbis.

"Patina, Goddess of Wisdom," said Brutha automatically, and then realized he'd said it.

"I, er, heard someone mention it," he added.

"Indeed. And what remarkably good hearing you must have," said Vorbis.

Aristocrates paused outside an impressive doorway and nodded at the party.

"Gentlemen," he said, "the Tyrant will see you now."

"You will recall everything that is said," whispered Vorbis.

Brutha nodded.

The doors swung open.

All over the world there were rulers with titles like the Exalted, the Supreme, and Lord High Something or Other. Only in one small country was the ruler elected by the people, who could remove him whenever they wanted-and they called him the Tyrant.

The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote.[6] Every five years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy. Immediately after he was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher in the street looking for a towel. And then five years later they elected another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent people kept on making the same mistakes.

Candidates for the Tyrantship were elected by the placing of black or white balls in various urns, thus giving rise to a well-known comment about politics.

The Tyrant was a fat little man with skinny legs, giving people the impression of an egg that was hatching upside down. He was sitting alone in the middle of the marble floor, in a chair surrounded by scrolls and scraps of paper. His feet didn't touch the marble, and his face was pink.

Aristocrates whispered something in his ear. The Tyrant looked up from his paperwork.

"Ah, the Omnian delegation," he said, and a smile flashed across his face like something small darting across a stone. "Do be seated, all of you."

He looked down again.

"I am Deacon Vorbis of the Citadel Quisition," said Vorbis coldly.

The Tyrant looked up and gave him another lizard smile.

"Yes, I know," he said. "You torture people for a living. Please be seated, Deacon Vorbis. And your plump young friend who seems to be looking for something. And the rest of you. Some young women will be along in a moment with grapes and things. This generally happens. It's very hard to stop it, in fact."

There were benches in front of the Tyrant's chair. The Omnians sat down. Vorbis remained standing.

The Tyrant nodded. "As you wish," he said.

"This is intolerable!" snapped Vorbis. "We have been treated-

"Much better than you would have treated us," said the Tyrant mildly. "You sit or you stand, my lord, because this is Ephebe and indeed you may stand on your head for all I care, but don't expect me to believe that if it was I, seeking peace in your Citadel, I would be encouraged to do anything but grovel on what was left of my stomach. Be seated or be upstanding, my lord, but be quiet. I have nearly finished."

"Finished what?" said Vorbis.

"The peace treaty," said the Tyrant.

"But that is what we are here to discuss," said Vorbis.

"No," said the Tyrant. The lizard scuttled again: "That is what you are here to sign."

Om took a deep breath and then pushed himself forward.

It was quite a steep flight of steps. He felt every one as he bumped down, but at least he was upright at the bottom.

He was lost, but being lost in Ephebe was preferable to being lost in the Citadel. At least there were no obvious cellars.

Library, library, library . . .

There was a library in the Citadel, Brutha had said. He'd described it, so Om had some idea of what he was looking for.

There would be a book in it.

Peace negotiations were not going well.

"You attacked us!" said Vorbis.

"I would call it preemptive defense," said the Tyrant. "We saw what happened to Istanzia and Betrek and Ushistan."

"They saw the truth of Om!"

"Yes," said the Tyrant. "We believe they did, eventually."

"And they are now proud members of the Empire."

"Yes," said the Tyrant. "We believe they are. But we like to remember them as they were. Before you sent them your letters, that put the minds of men in chains."

"That set the feet of men on the right road," said Vorbis.

"Chain letters," said the Tyrant. "The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain-the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn."

Vorbis sat back.

"What is it you fear?" he said. "Here in your desert, with your . . . gods? Is it not that, deep in your souls, you know that your gods are as shifting as your sand?"

"Oh, yes," said the Tyrant. "We know that. That's always been a point in their favor. We know about sand. And your God is a rock-and we know about rock."

Om stumped along a cobbled alley, keeping to the shade as much as possible.

There seemed to be a lot of courtyards. He paused at the point where the alley opened into yet another of them.

There were voices. Mainly there was one voice, petulant and reedy.

This was the philosopher Didactylos.

Although one of the most quoted and popular philosophers of all time, Didactylos the Ephebian never achieved the respect of his fellow philosophers. They felt he wasn't philosopher material. He didn't bathe often enough or, to put it another way, at all. And he philosophized about the wrong sorts of things. And he was interested in the wrong sorts of things. Dangerous things. Other philosophers asked questions like: Is Truth Beauty, and is Beauty Truth? and: is Reality Created by the Observer? But Didactylos posed the famous philosophical conundrum: "Yes, But What's It Really All About, Then, When You Get Right Down To It, I Mean Really!"

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools-the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Epicureansand summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, "You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink. Mine's a double, if you're buying. Thank you. And a packet of nuts. Her left bosom is nearly uncovered, eh? Two more packets, then!"

Many people have quoted from his famous Meditations:

"It's a rum old world all right. But you've got to laugh, haven't you? Nil Illegitimo Carborundum is what I say. The experts don't know everything. Still, where would we be if we were all the same?"

Om crawled closer to the voice, bringing himself around the corner of the wall so that he could see into a small courtyard.

There was a very large barrel against the far wall. Various debris around it-broken wine amphorae, gnawed bones, and a couple of lean-to shacks made out of rough boardssuggested that it was someone's home. And this impression was given some weight by the sign chalked on a board and stuck to the wall over the barrel.

It read:

DIDACTYLOS and Nephew

Practical Philosophers

No Proposition Too Large

"We Can Do Your Thinking For You"

Special Rates after 6 pm

Fresh Axioms Every Day

In front of the barrel, a short man in a toga that must have once been white, in the same way that once all continents must have been joined together, was kicking another one who was on the ground.

"You lazy bugger!"

The younger one sat up.

"Honest, Uncle-”

"I turn my back for half an hour and you go to sleep on the job!"

"What job? We haven't had anything since Mr. Piloxi the farmer last week-”

"How d'you know? How d'you know? While you were snoring dozens of people could've been goin' past, every one of 'em in need of a pers'nal philosophy!"

"-and he only paid in olives."

"I shall prob'ly get a good price for them olives!"

"They're rotten, Uncle."

"Nonsense! You said they were green!"

"Yes, but they're supposed to be black."

In the shadows, the tortoise's head turned back and forth like a spectator's at a tennis match.

The young man stood up.

"Mrs. Bylaxis came in this morning," he said. "She said the proverb you did for her last week has stopped working."

Didactylos scratched his head.

"Which one was that?" he said.

"You gave her `It's always darkest before dawn.' "

"Nothing wrong with that. Damn good philosophy."

"She said she didn't feel any better. Anyway, she said she'd stayed up all night because of her bad leg and it was actually quite light just before dawn, so it wasn't true. And her leg still dropped off. So I gave her part exchange on `Still, it does you good to laugh.' "

Didactylos brightened up a bit.

"Shifted that one, eh?"

"She said she'd give it a try. She gave me a whole dried squid for it. She said I looked like I needed feeding up."

"Right? You're learning. That's lunch sorted out at any rate. See, Urn? Told you it would work if we stuck at it."

"I don't call one dried squid and a box of greasy olives much of a return, master. Not for two weeks' thinking."

"We got three obols for doing that proverb for old Grillos the cobbler."

"No we didn't. He brought it back. His wife didn't like the color."

"And you gave him his money back?" Yes."

"What, all of it?"

"Yes."

"Can't do that. Not after he's put wear and tear on the words. Which one was it?"

" `It's a wise crow that knows which way the camel points.' "

"I put a lot of work in on that one."

"He said he couldn't understand it."

"I don't understand cobbling, but I know a good pair of sandals when I wears 'em."

Om blinked his one eye. Then he looked at the shapes of the minds in front of him.

The one called Urn was presumably the nephew, and had a fairly normal sort of mind, even if it did seem to have too many circles and angles in it. But Didactylos's mind bubbled and flashed like a potful of electric eels on full boil. Om had never seen anything like it. Brutha's thoughts took eons to slide into place, it was like watching mountains colliding; Didactylos's thoughts chased after one another with a whooshing noise. No wonder he was bald. Hair would have burned off from the inside.

Om had found a thinker.

A cheap one, too, by the sound of it.

He looked up at the wall behind the barrel. Further along was an impressive set of marble steps leading up to some bronze doors, and over the doors, made of metal letters set in the stone, was the word LIBRVM.

He'd spent too much time looking. Urn's hand clamped itself on to his shell, and he heard Didactylos's voice say, "Hey . . . there's good eating on one of these things . . .

Brutha cowered.

"You stoned our envoy!" shouted Vorbis. "An unarmed man!"

"He brought it upon himself," said the Tyrant. "Aristocrates was there. He will tell you."

The tall man nodded and stood up.

"By tradition anyone may speak in the marketplace," he began.

"And be stoned?" Vorbis demanded.

Aristocrates held up a hand.

"Ah," he said, "anyone can say what they like in the square. We have another tradition, though, called free listening. Unfortunately, when people dislike what they hear, they can become a little . . . testy."

"I was there too," said another advisor. "Your priest got up to speak and at first everything was fine, because people were laughing. And then he said that Om was the only real God, and everyone went quiet. And then he pushed over a statue of Tuvelpit, the God of Wine. That's when the trouble started."

"Are you proposing to tell me he was struck by lightning?" said Vorbis.

Vorbis was no longer shouting. His voice was level, without passion. The thought rose in Brutha's mind: this is how the exquisitors speak. When the inquisitors have finished, the exquisitors speak . . .

"No. By an amphora. Tuvelpit was in the crowd, you see."

"And striking honest men is considered proper godly behavior, is it?"

"Your missionary had said that people who did not believe in Om would suffer endless punishment. I have to tell you that the crowd considered this rude."

"And so they threw stones at him . . ."

"Not many. They only hurt his pride. And only after they'd run out of vegetables."

"They threw vegetables?"

"When they couldn't find any more eggs."

"And when we came to remonstrate-”

"I am sure sixty ships intended more than remonstrating," said the Tyrant. "And we have warned you, Lord Vorbis. People find in Ephebe what they seek. There will be more raids on your coast. We will harass your ships. Unless you sign."

"And passage through Ephebe?" said Vorbis.

The Tyrant smiled.

"Across the desert? My lord, if you can cross the desert, I am sure you can go anywhere." The Tyrant looked away from Vorbis and towards the sky, visible between the pillars.

"And now I see it is nearing noon," he said. "And the day heats up. Doubtless you will wish to discuss our . . . uh . . . proposals with your colleagues. May I suggest we meet again at sunset?"

Vorbis appeared to give this some consideration.

"I think," he said eventually, "that our deliberations may take longer. Shall we say . . . tomorrow morning?"

The Tyrant nodded.

"As you wish. In the meantime, the palace is at your disposal. There are many fine temples and works of art should you wish to inspect them. When you require meals, mention the fact to the nearest slave."

"Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis.

"So I understand," said the Tyrant. "I imagine that fish have no word for water." He smiled the fleeting smile again. "And there are the baths and the Library, of course. Many fine sights. You are our guests."

Vorbis inclined his head.

"I pray," he said, "that one day you will be a guest of mine."

"And what sights I shall see," said the Tyrant.

Brutha stood up, knocking over his bench and going redder with embarrassment.

He thought: they lied about Brother Murduck. They beat him within an inch of his life, Vorbis said, and flogged him the rest of the way. And Brother Nhumrod said he saw the body, and it was really true. Just for talking! People who would do that sort of thing deserve . . . punishment. And they keep slaves. People forced to work against their will. People treated like animals. And they even call their ruler a Tyrant!

And why isn't any of this exactly what it seems?

Why don't I believe any of it?

Why do I know it isn't true?

And what did he mean about fish not having a word for water?

The Omnians were half-escorted, half-led back to their compound. Another bowl of fruit was waiting on the table in Brutha's cell, with some more fish and a loaf of bread.

There was also a man, sweeping the floor.

"Um," said Brutha. "Are you a slave?"

"Yes, master."

"That must be terrible."

The man leaned on his broom. "You're right. It's terrible. Really terrible. D'you know, I only get one day off a week?"

Brutha, who had never heard the words "day off" before, and who was in any case unfamiliar with the concept, nodded uncertainly.

"Why don't you run away?" he said.

"Oh, done that," said the slave. "Ran away to Tsort once. Didn't like it much. Came back. Run away for a fortnight in Djelibeybi every winter, though."

"Do you get brought back?" said Brutha.

"Huh!" said the slave. "No, I don't. Miserable skinflint, Aristocrates. I have to come back by myself. Hitching lifts on ships, that kind of thing."

"You come back?"

"Yeah. Abroad's all right to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. Anyway, I've only got another four years as a slave and then I'm free. You get the vote when you're free. And you get to keep slaves." His face glazed with the effort of recollection as he ticked off points on his fingers. "Slaves get three meals a day, at least one with meat. And one free day a week. And two weeks being-allowed-to-runaway every year. And I don't do ovens or heavy lifting, and worldly-wise repartee only by arrangement."

"Yes, but you're not free, " said Brutha, intrigued despite himself.

"What's the difference?"

"Er . . . you don't get any days off." Brutha scratched his head. "And one less meal."

"Really? I think I'll give freedom a miss then, thanks."

"Er . . . have you seen a tortoise anywhere around here?" said Brutha.

"No. And I cleaned under the bed."

"Have you seen one anywhere else today?"

"You want one? There's good eating on a-”

"No. No. It's all right-”

"Brutha! "

It was Vorbis's voice. Brutha hurried out into the courtyard and into Vorbis's cell.

"Ah, Brutha."

"Yes, lord?"

Vorbis was sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall.

"You are a young man visiting a new place," said Vorbis. "No doubt there is much you wish to see."

"There is?" said Brutha. Vorbis was using the exquisitor voice again-a level monotone, a voice like a strip of dull steel.

"You may go where you wish. See new things, Brutha. Learn everything you can. You are my eyes and ears. And my memory. Learn about this place."

"Er. Really, lord?"

"Have I impressed you with my use of careless language, Brutha?"

"No, lord."

"Go away. Fill yourself. And be back by sunset."

"Er. Even the Library?" said Brutha.

"Ah? Yes, the Library. The Library that they have here. Of course. Crammed with useless and dangerous and evil knowledge. I can see it in my mind, Brutha. Can you imagine that?"

"No, Lord Vorbis."

"Your innocence is your shield, Brutha. No. By all means go to the Library. I have no fear of any effect on you. "

"Lord Vorbis?"

"Yes?"

"The Tyrant said that they hardly did anything to Brother Murduck . . ."

Silence unrolled its restless length.

Vorbis said, "He lied."

"Yes." Brutha waited. Vorbis continued to stare at the wall. Brutha wondered what he saw there. When nothing else appeared to be forthcoming, he said, "Thank you."

He stepped back a bit before he went out, so that he could squint under the deacon's bed.

He's probably in trouble, Brutha thought as he hurried through the palace. Everyone wants to eat tortoises.

He tried to look everywhere while avoiding the friezes of unclad nymphs.

Brutha was technically aware that women were a different shape from men; he hadn't left the village until he was twelve, by which time some of his contemporaries were already married. And Omnianism encouraged early marriage as a preventive against Sin, although any activity involving any part of the human anatomy between neck and knees was more or less Sinful in any case.

Brutha wished he was a better scholar so he could ask his God why this was.

Then he found himself wishing his God was a more intelligent God so it could answer.

He hasn't screamed for me, he thought. I'm sure I would have heard. So maybe no one's cooking him.

A slave polishing one of the statues directed him to the Library. Brutha pounded down an aisle of pillars.

When he reached the courtyard in front of the Library it was crowded with philosophers, all craning to look at something. Brutha could hear the usual petulant squabbling that showed that philosophical discourse was under way.

In this case:

"I've got ten obols here says it can't do it again!"

"Talking money? That's something you don't hear every day, Xeno."

"Yeah. And it's about to say goodbye."

"Look, don't be stupid. It's a tortoise. It's just doing a mating dance . . ."

There was a breathless pause. Then a sort of collective sigh.

"There!"

"That's never a right angle!"

"Come on! I'd like to see you do better in the circumstances!"

"What's it doing now?"

"The hypotenuse, I think."

"Call that a hypotenuse? It's wiggly."

"It's not wiggly. It's drawing it straight and you're looking at it in a wiggly way!"

"I'll bet thirty obols it can't do a square!"

"Here's forty obols says it can."

There was another pause, and then a cheer.

"Yeah!"

"That's more of a parallelogram, if you ask me," said a petulant voice.

"Listen, I knows a square when I sees one! And that's a square."

"All right. Double or nothing then. Bet it can't do a dodecagon."

"Hah! You bet it couldn't do a septagon just now."

"Double or nothing. Dodecagon. Worried, eh! Feeling a bit avis domestica? Cluck-cluck?"

"It's a shame to take your money . . ."

There was another pause.

"Ten sides? Ten sides? Hah!"

"Told you it wasn't any good! Whoever heard of a tortoise doing geometry?"

"Another daft idea, Didactylos?"

"I said so all along. It's just a tortoise."

"There's good eating on one of those things . . ."

The mass of philosophers broke up, pushing past Brutha without paying him much attention. He caught a glimpse of a circle of damp sand, covered with geometrical figures. Om was sitting in the middle of them. Behind him was a very grubby pair of philosophers, counting out a pile of coins.

"How did we do, Urn?" said Didactylos.

"We're fifty-two obols up, master."

"See? Every day things improve. Pity it didn't know the difference between ten and twelve, though. Cut one of its legs off and we'll have a stew."

"Cut off a leg?"

"Well, a tortoise like that, you don't eat it all at once."

Didactylos turned his face towards a plump young man with splayed feet and a red face, who was staring at the tortoise.

"Yes?" he said.

"The tortoise does know the difference between ten and twelve," said the fat boy.

"Damn thing just lost me eighty obols," said Didactylos.

"Yes. But tomorrow . . ." the boy began, his eyes glazing as if he was carefully repeating something he'd just heard ". . . tomorrow . . . you should be able to get odds of at least three to one."

Didactylos's mouth dropped open.

"Give me the tortoise, Urn," he said.

The apprentice philosopher reached down and picked up Om, very carefully.

"You know, I thought right at the start there was something funny about this creature," said Didactylos. "I said to Urn, there's tomorrow's dinner, and then he says no, it's dragging its tail in the sand and doing geometry. That doesn't come natural to a tortoise, geometry."

Om's eye turned to Brutha.

"I had to," he said. "It was the only way to get his attention. Now I've got him by the curiosity. When you've got 'em by the curiosity, their hearts and minds will follow."

"He's a God," said Brutha.

"Really? What's his name?" said the philosopher.

"Don't tell him! Don't tell him! The local gods'll hear!"

"I don't know," said Brutha.

Didactylos turned Om over.

"The Turtle Moves," said Urn thoughtfully.

"What?" said Brutha.

"Master did a book," said Urn.

"Not really a book," said Didactylos modestly. "More a scroll. Just a little thing I knocked off."

"Saying that the world is flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle?" said Brutha.

"Have you read it?" Didactylos's gaze was unmoving. "Are you a slave?"

"No," said Brutha. "I am a-”

"Don't mention my name! Call yourself a scribe or something!"

"-scribe," said Brutha weakly.

"Yeah," said Urn. "I can see that. The telltale callus on the thumb where you hold the pen. The inkstains all over your sleeves."

Brutha glanced at his left thumb. "I haven't-”

"Yeah," said Urn, grinning. "Use your left hand, do you?"

"Er, I use both," said Brutha. "But not very well, everyone says."

"Ah," said Didactylos. "Ambi-sinister?"

"What?"

"He means incompetent with both hands," said Om.

"Oh. Yes. That's me." Brutha coughed politely. "Look . . . I'm looking for a philosopher. Um. One that knows about gods."

He waited.

Then he said, "You aren't going to say they're a relic of an outmoded belief system?"

Didactylos, still running his fingers over Om's shell, shook his head.

"Nope. I like my thunderstorms a long way off."

"Oh. Could you stop turning him over and over? He's just told me he doesn't like it."

"You can tell how old they are by cutting them in half and counting the rings," said Didactylos.

"Um. He hasn't got much of a sense of humor, either."

"You're Omnian, by the sound of it." Yes."

"Here to talk about the treaty?"

"I do the listening."

"And what do you want to know about gods?"

Brutha appeared to be listening.

Eventually he said: "How they start. How they grow. And what happens to them afterwards."

Didactylos put the tortoise into Brutha's hands.

"Costs money, that kind of thinking," he said.

"Let me know when we've used more than fifty-two obols' worth," said Brutha. Didactylos grinned.

"Looks like you can think for yourself," he said. "Got a good memory?"

"No. Not exactly a good one."

"Right? Right. Come on into the Library. It's got an earthed copper roof, you know. Gods really hate that sort of thing."

Didactylos reached down beside him and picked up a rusty iron lantern.

Brutha looked up at the big white building.

"That's the Library?" he said.

"Yes," said Didactylos. "That's why it's got LIBRVM carved over the door in such big letters. But a scribe like you'd know that, of course."

The Library of Ephebe was-before it burned down-the second biggest on the Disc.

Not as big as the library in Unseen University, of course, but that library had one or two advantages on account of its magical nature. No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books-books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotters' guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen . . .

And so unlike the Library at Ephebe, with its four or five hundred volumes. Many of them were scrolls, to save their readers the fatigue of having to call a slave every time they wanted a page turned. Each one lay in its own pigeonhole, though. Books shouldn't be kept too close together, otherwise they interact in strange and unforeseeable ways.

Sunbeams lanced through the shadows, as palpable as pillars in the dusty air.

Although it was the least of the wonders in the Library, Brutha couldn't help noticing a strange construction in the aisles. Wooden laths had been fixed between the rows of stone shelves about two meters from the floor, so that they supported a wider plank of no apparent use whatsoever. Its underside had been decorated with rough wooden shapes.

"The Library," announced Didactylos.

He reached up. His fingers gently brushed the plank over his head.

It dawned on Brutha.

"You're blind aren't you?" he said.

"That's right."

"But you carry a lantern?"

"It's all right," said Didactylos. "I don't put any oil in it."

"A lantern that doesn't shine for a man that doesn't see?"

"Yeah. Works perfectly. And of course it's very philosophical."

"And you live in a barrel."

"Very fashionable, living in a barrel," said Didactylos, walking forward briskly, his fingers only occasionally touching the raised patterns on the plank. "Most of the philosophers do it. It shows contempt and disdain for worldly things. Mind you, Legibus has got a sauna in his. It's amazing the kind of things you can think of in it, he says."

Brutha looked around. Scrolls protruded from their racks like cuckoos piping the hour.

"It's all so . . . I never met a philosopher before I came here," he said. "Last night, they were all . . ."

"You got to remember there's three basic approaches to philosophy in these parts," said Didactylos. "Tell him, Urn."

"There's the Xenoists," said Urn promptly. "They say the world is basically complex and random. And there's the Ibidians. They say the world is basically simple and follows certain fundamental rules."

"And there's me," said Didactylos, pulling a scroll out of its rack.

"Master says basically it's a funny old world," said Urn.

"And doesn't contain enough to drink," said Didactylos.

"And doesn't contain enough to drink."

"Gods," said Didactylos, half to himself. He pulled out another scroll. "You want to know about gods? Here's Xeno's Reflections, and old Aristocrates' Platitudes, and Ibid's bloody stupid Discourses, and Legibus's Geometries and Hierarch's Theologies . . . "

Didactylos's fingers danced across the racks. More dust filled the air.

"These are all books?" said Brutha.

"Oh, yes. Everyone writes 'em here. You just can't stop the buggers."

"And people can read them?" said Brutha.

Omnia was based on one book. And here were . . . hundreds . . .

"Well, they can if they want," said Urn. "But no one comes in here much. These aren't books for reading. They're more for writing."

"Wisdom of the ages, this," said Didactylos. "Got to write a book, see, to prove you're a philosopher. Then you get your scroll and free official philosopher's loofah."

The sunlight pooled on a big stone table in the center of the room. Urn unrolled the length of a scroll. Brilliant flowers glowed in the golden light.

"Orinjcrates' On the Nature of Plants," said Didactylos. "Six hundred plants and their uses . . ."

"They're beautiful," whispered Brutha.

"Yes, that is one of the uses of plants," said Didactylos. "And one which old Orinjcrates neglected to notice, too. Well done. Show him Philo's Bestiary, Urn."

Another scroll unrolled. There were dozens of Pictures of animals, thousands of unreadable words.

"But . . . pictures of animals . . . it's wrong . . . isn't it wrong to . . ."

"Pictures of just about everything in there," said Didactylos.

Art was not permitted in Omnia.

"And this is the book Didactylos wrote," said Urn.

Brutha looked down at a picture of a turtle. There were . . . elephants, they're elephants, his memory supplied, from the fresh memories of the bestiary sinking indelibly into his mind . . . elephants on its back, and on them something with mountains and a waterfall of an ocean around its edge . . .

"How can this be?" said Brutha. "A world on the back of a tortoise? Why does everyone tell me this? This can't be true!"

"Tell that to the mariners," said Didactylos. "Everyone who's ever sailed the Rim Ocean knows it. Why deny the obvious?"

"But surely the world is a perfect sphere, spinning about the sphere of the sun, just as the Septateuch tells us," said Brutha. "That seems so . . . logical. That's how things ought to be."

"Ought?" said Didactylos. "Well, I don't know about ought. That's not a philosophical word."

"And . . . what is this . . ." Brutha murmured, pointing to a circle under the drawing of the turtle.

"That's a plan view," said Urn.

"Map of the world," said Didactylos.

"Map? What's a map?"

"It's a sort of picture that shows you where you are," said Didactylos.

Brutha stared in wonderment. "And how does it know?"

"Hah!"

"Gods," prompted Om again. "We're here to ask about gods!"

"But is all this true?" said Brutha.

Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork."

"You mean you don't know it's true?" said Brutha.

"I think it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about."

"Talk about gods," said Om.

"Gods," said Brutha weakly.

His mind was on fire. These people made all these books about things, and they weren't sure. But he'd been sure, and Brother Nhumrod had been sure, and Deacon Vorbis had a sureness you could bend horseshoes around. Sureness was a rock.

Now he knew why, when Vorbis spoke about Ephebe, his face was gray with hatred and his voice was tense as a wire. If there was no truth, what was there left? And these bumbling old men spent their time kicking away the pillars of the world, and they'd nothing to replace them with but uncertainty. And they were proud of this?

Urn was standing on a small ladder, fishing among the shelves of scrolls. Didactylos sat opposite Brutha, his blind gaze still apparently fixed on him.

"You don't like it, do you?" said the philosopher.

Brutha had said nothing.

"You know," said Didactylos conversationally, "people'll tell you that us blind people are the real business where the other senses are concerned. It's not true, of course. The buggers just say it because it makes them feel better. It gets rid of the obligation to feel sorry for us. But when you can't see you do learn to listen more. The way people breathe, the sounds their clothes make . . ."

Urn reappeared with another scroll.

"You shouldn't do this," said Brutha wretchedly. "All this . . ." His voice trailed off.

"I know about sureness," said Didactylos. Now the light, irascible tone had drained out of his voice. "I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. This was before the borders were closed, when you still let people travel. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?"

"It has to be done," Brutha mumbled. "So the soul can be shriven and-'

"Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of a philosopher," said Didactylos. "All I know is, it was a horrible sight."

"The state of the body is not-”

"Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit," said the philosopher. "I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wasn't them that they were throwing just as hard as they could."

Urn hovered, looking uncertain.

"I've got Abraxas's On Religion," he said.

"Old 'Charcoal' Abraxas," said Didactylos, suddenly cheerful again. "Struck by lightning fifteen times so far, and still not giving up. You can borrow this one overnight if you want. No scribbling comments in the margins, mind you, unless they're interesting."

"This is it!" said Om. "Come on, let's leave this idiot."

Brutha unrolled the scroll. There weren't even any pictures. Crabbed writing fiIled it, line after line.

"He spent years researching it," said Didactylos. "Went out into the desert, talked to the small gods. Talked to some of our gods, too. Brave man. He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at."

Brutha unrolled a bit more of the scroll. Five minutes ago he would have admitted that he couldn't read. Now the best efforts of the inquisitors couldn't have forced it out of him. He held it up in what he hoped was a familiar fashion.

"Where is he now?" he said.

"Well, someone said they saw a pair of sandals with smoke coming out just outside his house a year or two back," said Didactylos. "He might have, you know, pushed his luck."

"I think," said Brutha, "that I'd better be going. I'm sorry to have intruded on your time."

"Bring it back when you've finished with it," said Didactylos.

"Is that how people read in Omnia?" said Urn.

"What?"

"Upside down."

Brutha picked up the tortoise, glared at Urn, and strode as haughtily as possible out of the Library.

"Hmm," said Didactylos. He drummed his fingers on the tables.

"It was him I saw in the tavern last night," said Urn. "I'm sure, master."

"But the Omnians are staying here in the palace."

"That's right, master."

"But the tavern is outside."

"Yes."

"Then he must have flown over the wall, do you think?"

"I'm sure it was him, master."

"Then . . . maybe he came later. Maybe he hadn't gone in when you saw him."

"It can only be that, master. The keepers of the labyrinth are unbribable."

Didactylos clipped Urn across the back of the head with his lantern.

"Stupid boy! I've told you about that sort of statement."

"I mean, they are not easily bribable, master. Not for all the gold in Omnia, for example."

"That's more like it."

"Do you think that tortoise was a god, master?"

"He's going to be in big trouble in Omnia if he is. They've got a bastard of a god there. Did you ever read old Abraxas?"

"No, master."

"Very big on gods. Big gods man. Always smelled of burnt hair. Naturally resistant."

Om crawled slowly along the length of a line.

"Stop walking up and down like that," he said, "I can't concentrate."

"How can people talk like that?" Brutha asked the empty air. "Acting as if they're glad they don't know things! Finding out more and more things they don't know! It's like children proudly coming to show you a full potty!"

Om marked his place with a claw.

"But they find things out," he said. "This Abraxas was a thinker and no mistake. I didn't know some of this stuff. Sit down!"

Brutha obeyed.

"Right," said Om. "Now . . . listen. Do you know how gods get power?"

"By people believing in them," said Brutha. "Millions of people believe in you."

Om hesitated.

All right, all right. We are here and it is now. Sooner or later he'll find out for himself . . .

"They don't believe," said Om.

"But-”

"It's happened before," said the tortoise. "Dozens of times. D'you know Abraxas found the lost city of Ee? Very strange carvings, he says. Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure."

"I don't understand," said Brutha.

"Let me put it another way," said the tortoise. "I am your God, right?"

"Yes."

"And you'll obey me."

"Yes."

"Good. Now take a rock and go and kill Vorbis."

Brutha didn't move.

"I'm sure you heard me," said Om.

"But he'll . . . he's . . . the Quisition would-”

"Now you know what I mean," said the tortoise. "You're more afraid of him than you are of me, now. Abraxas says here: `Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed.' "

"That can't be true!"

"I think it is. Abraxas says there's a kind of shellfish that lives in the same way. It makes a bigger and bigger shell until it can't move around any more, and so it dies."

"But . . . but . . . that means . . . the whole Church . . ."

"Yes."

Brutha tried to keep hold of the idea, but the sheer enormity of it kept wrenching it from his mental grasp.

"But you're not dead," he managed.

"Next best thing," said Om. "And you know what? No other small god is trying to usurp me. Did I ever tell you about old Ur-Gilash? No? He was the god back in what's now Omnia before me. Not much of one. Basically a weather god. Or a snake god. Something, anyway. It took years to get rid of him, though. Wars and everything. So I've been thinking . . ."

Brutha said nothing.

"Om still exists," said the tortoise. "I mean the shell. All you'd have to do is get people to understand."

Brutha still said nothing.

"You can be the next prophet," said Om.

"I can't! Everyone knows Vorbis will be the next prophet!"

"Ah, but you'll be official. "

"No."

"No? I am your God!"

"And I am my me. I'm not a prophet. I can't even write. I can't read. No one will listen to me."

Om looked him up and down.

"I must admit you're not the chosen one I would have chosen," he said.

"The great prophets had vision," said Brutha. "Even if they . . . even if you didn't talk to them, they had something to say. What could I say? I haven't got anything to say to anyone. What could I say?"

"Believe in the Great God Om," said the tortoise.

"And then what?"

"What do you mean, and then what?"

Brutha looked out glumly at the darkening courtyard.

"Believe in the Great God Om or be stricken with thunderbolts," he said.

"Sounds good to me."

"Is that how it always has to be?"

The last rays of the sun glinted off the statue in the center of the courtyard. It was vaguely feminine. There was a penguin perched on one shoulder.

"Patina, Goddess of Wisdom," said Brutha. "The one with a penguin. Why a penguin?"

"Can't imagine," said Om hurriedly.

"Nothing wise about penguins, is there?"

"Shouldn't think so. Unless you count the fact that you don't get them in Omnia. Pretty wise of them."

"Brutha!"

"That's Vorbis," said Brutha, standing up. "Shall I leave you here?"

"Yes. There's still some melon. I mean loaf."

Brutha wandered out into the dusk.

Vorbis was sitting on a bench under a tree, as still as a statue in the shadows.

Certainty, Brutha thought. I used to be certain. Now I'm not so sure.

"Ah, Brutha. You will accompany me on a little stroll. We will take the evening air."

"Yes, lord."

"You have enjoyed your visit to Ephebe."

Vorbis seldom asked a question if a statement would do.

"It has been . . . interesting."

Vorbis put one hand on Brutha's shoulder and used the other to haul himself up on his staff.

"And what do you think of it?" he asked.

"They have many gods, and they don't pay them much attention," said Brutha. "And they search for ignorance."

"And they find it in abundance, be sure of that," said Vorbis.

He pointed his staff into the night. "Let us walk," he said.

There was the sound of laughter, somewhere in the darkness, and the clatter of pans. The scent of evening-opening flowers hung thickly in the air. The stored heat of daytime radiating from the stones, made the night seem like a fragrant soup.

"Ephebe looks to the sea," said Vorbis after a while. "You see the way it is built? All on the slope of a hill facing the sea. But the sea is mutable. Nothing lasting comes from the sea. Whereas our dear Citadel looks towards the high desert. And what do we see there?"

Instinctively Brutha turned, and looked over the rooftops to the black bulk of the desert against the sky.

"I saw a flash of light," he said. "And again. On the slope."

"Ah. The light of truth," said Vorbis. "So let us go forth to meet it. Take me to the entrance to the labyrinth, Brutha. You know the way."

"My lord?" said Brutha.

"Yes, Brutha?"

"I would like to ask you a question."

"Do so."

"What happened to Brother Murduck?"

There was the merest suggestion of hesitation in the rhythm of Vorbis's stick on the cobbles. Then the exquisitor said, "Truth, good Brutha, is like the light. Do you know about light?"

"It . . . comes from the sun. And the moon and stars. And candles. And lamps."

"And so on," said Vorbis, nodding. "Of course. But there is another kind of light. A light that fills even the darkest of places. This has to be. For if this metalight did not exist, how could darkness be seen?"

Brutha said nothing. This sounded too much like philosophy.

"And so it is with truth," said Vorbis. "There are some things which appear to be the truth, which have all the hallmarks of truth, but which are not the real truth. The real truth must sometimes be protected by a labyrinth of lies."

He turned to Brutha. "Do you understand me?"

"No, Lord Vorbis."

"I mean, that which appears to our senses is not the fundamental truth. Things that are seen and heard and done by the flesh are mere shadows of a deeper reality. This is what you must understand as you progress in the Church."

"But at the moment, lord, I know only the trivial truth, the truth available on the outside," said Brutha. He felt as though he was at the edge of a pit.

"That is how we all begin," said Vorbis kindly.

"So did the Ephebians kill Brother Murduck?" Brutha persisted. Now he was inching out over the darkness.

"I am telling you that in the deepest sense of the truth they did. By their failure to embrace his words, by their intransigence, they surely killed him."

"But in the trivial sense of the truth," said Brutha, picking every word with the care an inquisitor might give to his patient in the depths of the Citadel, "in the trivial sense, Brother Murduck died, did he not, in Omnia, because he had not died in Ephebe, had been merely mocked, but it was feared that others in the Church might not understand the, the deeper truth, and thus it was put about that the Ephebians had killed him in, in the trivial sense, thus giving you, and those who saw the truth of the evil of Ephebe, due cause to launch a-a just retaliation."

They walked past a fountain. The deacon's steelshod staff clicked in the night.

"I see a great future for you in the Church," said Vorbis, eventually. "The time of the eighth Prophet is coming. A time of expansion, and great opportunity for those true in the service of Om."

Brutha looked into the pit.

If Vorbis was right, and there was a kind of light that made darkness visible, then down there was its opposite, the darkness where no light could ever reach: darkness that blackened light. He thought of blind Didactylos and his empty lantern.

He heard himself say, "And with people like the Ephebians, there is no truce. No treaty can be held binding, if it is between people like the Ephebians and those who follow a deeper truth?"

Vorbis nodded. "When the Great God is with us," he said, "who can stand against us? You impress me, Brutha."

There was more laughter in the darkness, and the twang of stringed instruments.

"A feast," sneered Vorbis. "The Tyrant invited us to a feast! I sent some of the party, of course. Even their generals are in there! They think themselves safe behind their labyrinth, as a tortoise thinks himself safe in his shell, not realizing it is a prison. Onward."

The inner wall of the labyrinth loomed out of the darkness. Brutha leaned against it. From far above came the chink of metal on metal as a sentry went on his rounds.

The gateway to the labyrinth was wide open. The Ephebians had never seen the point of stopping people entering. Up a short side-tunnel the guide for the first sixth of the way slumbered on a bench, a candle guttering beside him. Above his alcove hung the bronze bell that would-be traversers of the maze used to summon him. Brutha slipped past.

"Brutha?"

"Yes, lord?"

"Lead the way through the labyrinth. I know you can."

"Lord-”

"This is an order, Brutha," said Vorbis, pleasantly.

There is no hope for it, Brutha thought. It is an order.

"Then tread where I tread, lord," he whispered. "Not more than one step behind me."

"Yes, Brutha."

"If I step around a place on the floor for no reason, you step around it too."

"Yes, Brutha."

Brutha thought: perhaps I could do it wrong. No. I took vows and things. You can't just disobey. The whole world ends if you start thinking like that . . .

He let his sleeping mind take control. The way through the labyrinth unrolled in his head like a glowing wire .

. . . diagonally forward and right three and-a-half paces, and left sixty-three paces, pause two secondswhere a steely swish in the darkness suggested that one of the guardians had devised something that won him a prize-and up three steps . . .

I could run forward, he thought. I could hide, and he'd walk into one of the pits or a deadfall or something, and then I could sneak back to my room and who would ever know?

I would .

. . . forward nine paces, and right one pace, and forward nineteen paces, and left two paces . . .

There was a light ahead. Not the occasional white glow of moonlight from the slits in the roof, but yellow lamplight, dimming and brightening as its owner came nearer.

"Someone's coming," he whispered. "It must be one of the guides!"

Vorbis had vanished.

Brutha hovered uncertainly in the passageway as the light bobbed nearer.

An elderly voice said, "That you, Number Four?"

The light came round a corner. It half-illuminated an old man, who walked up to Brutha and raised the candle to his face.

"Where's Number Four?" he said, peering around Brutha.

A figure appeared behind the man, from out of a sidepassage. Brutha had the briefest glimpse of Vorbis, his face strangely peaceful, as he gripped the head of his staff, twisted and pulled. Sharp metal glittered for a moment in the candlelight.

Then the light went out.

Vorbis's voice said, "Take the lead again."

Trembling, Brutha obeyed. He felt the soft flesh of an outflung arm under his sandal for a moment.

The pit, he thought. Look into Vorbis's eyes, and there's the pit. And I'm in it with him.

I've got to remember about fundamental truth.

No more guides were patrolling the labyrinth. After a mere million years, the night air blew cool on his face, and Brutha stepped out under the stars.

"Well done. Can you remember the way to the gate?"

"Yes, Lord Vorbis."

The deacon pulled his hood over his face.

"Carry on."

There were a few torches lighting the streets, but Ephebe was not a city that stayed awake in darkness. A couple of passers-by paid them no attention.

"They guard their harbor," said Vorbis, conversational. "But the way to the desert . . . everyone knows that no one can cross the desert. I am sure you know that, Brutha."

"But now I suspect that what I know is not the truth," said Brutha.

"Quite so. Ah. The gate. I believe it had two guards yesterday?"

"I saw two."

"And now it is night and the gate is shut. But there will be a watchman. Wait here."

Vorbis disappeared into the gloom. After a while there was a muffled conversation. Brutha stared straight ahead of him.

The conversation was followed by muffled silence. After a while Brutha started to count to himself.

After ten, I'll go back.

Another ten, then.

All right. Make it thirty. And then I'll . . .

"Ah, Brutha. Let us go."

Brutha swallowed his heart again, and turned slowly.

"I did not hear you, lord," he managed.

"I walk softly."

"Is there a watchman?"

"Not now. Come help me with the bolts."

A small wicket gate was set into the main gate. Brutha, his mind numb with hatred, shoved the bolts aside with the heel of his hand. The door opened with barely a creak.

Outside there was the occasional light of a distant farm, and crowding darkness.

Then the darkness poured in.

Hierarchy, Vorbis said later. The Ephebians didn't think in terms of hierarchies.

No army could cross the desert. But maybe a small army could get a quarter of the way, and leave a cache of water. And do that several times. And another small army could use part of that cache to go further, maybe reach halfway, and leave a cache. And another small army . . .

It had taken months. A third of the men had died, of heat and dehydration and wild animals and worse things, the worse things that the desert held . . .

You had to have a mind like Vorbis's to plan it.

And plan it early. Men were already dying in the desert before Brother Murduck went to preach; there was already a beaten track when the Omnian fleet burned in the bay before Ephebe.

You had to have a mind like Vorbis's to plan your retaliation before your attack.

It was over in less than an hour. The fundamental truth was that the handful of Ephebian guards in the palace had no chance at all.

Vorbis sat upright in the Tyrant's chair. It was approaching midnight.

A collection of Ephebian citizens, the Tyrant among them, had been herded in front of him.

He busied himself with some paperwork and then looked up with an air of mild surprise, as if he'd been completely unaware that fifty people were waiting in front of him at crossbow point.

"Ah," he said, and flashed a little smile.

"Well," he said, "I am pleased to say that we can now dispense with the peace treaty. Quite unnecessary. Why prattle of peace when there is no more war? Ephebe is now a diocese of Omnia. There will be no argument."

He threw a paper on to the floor.

"There will be a fleet here in a few days. There will be no opposition, while we hold the palace. Your infernal mirror is even now being smashed."

He steepled his fingers and looked at the assembled Ephebians.

"Who built it?"

The Tyrant looked up.

"It was an Ephebian construction," he said.

"Ah," said Vorbis, "democracy. I forgot. Then who"-he signaled one of the guards, who handed him a sack-"wrote this?"

A copy of De Chelonian Mobile was flung on to the marble floor.

Brutha stood beside the throne. It was where he had been told to stand.

He'd looked into the pit and now it was him. Everything around him was happening in some distant circle of light, surrounded by darkness. Thoughts chased one another round his head.

Did the Cenobiarch know about this? Did anyone else know about the two kinds of truth? Who else knew that Vorbis was fighting both sides of a war, like a child playing with soldiers? Was it really wrong if it was for the greater glory of . . .

. . . a god who was a tortoise. A god that only Brutha believed in?

Who did Vorbis talk to when he prayed?

Through the mental storm Brutha heard Vorbis's level tones: "If the philosopher who wrote this does not own up, the entirety of you will be put to the flame. Do not doubt that I mean it."

There was a movement in the crowd, and the sound of Didactylos's voice.

"Let go! You heard him! Anyway . . . I always wanted a chance to do this . . ."

A couple of servants were pushed aside and the philosopher stumped out of the crowd, his barren lantern held defiantly over his head.

Brutha watched the philosopher pause for a moment in the empty space, and then turn very slowly until he was directly facing Vorbis. He took a few steps forward then, and held the lantern out as he appeared to regard the deacon critically.

"Hmm," he said.

"You are the . . . perpetrator?" said Vorbis.

"Indeed. Didactylos is my name."

"You are blind?"

"Only as far as vision is concerned, my lord."

"Yet you carry a lantern," said Vorbis. "Doubtless for some catchword reason. Probably you'll tell me you're looking for an honest man?"

"I don't know, my lord. Perhaps you could tell me what he looks like?"

"I should strike you down now," said Vorbis.

"Oh, certainly."

Vorbis indicated the book.

"These lies. This scandal. This . . . this lure to drag the minds of men from the path of true knowledge. You dare to stand before me and declare"-he pushed the book with a toe-"that the world is flat and travels through the void on the back of a giant turtle?"

Brutha held his breath.

So did history.

Affirm your belief, Brutha thought. Just once, someone please stand up to Vorbis. I can't. But someone . . .

He found his eyes swiveling toward Simony, who stood on the other side of Vorbis's chair. The sergeant looked transfixed, fascinated.

Didactylos drew himself up to his full height. He half-turned and for a moment his blank gaze passed across Brutha. The lantern was extended at arm's length.

"No," he said.

"When every honest man knows that the world is a sphere, a perfect shape, bound to spin around the sphere of the Sun as Man orbits the central truth of Om," said Vorbis, "and the stars-”

Brutha leaned forward, heart pounding.

"My lord?" he whispered.

"What?" snapped Vorbis.

"He said `no,' " said Brutha.

"That's right," said Didactylos.