Small Gods (19 page)

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?