“I am your God!”
“Yes. I know.” Brutha trudged on along the beach.
“What are you going to do with him?”
“Take him to Omnia,” said Brutha thickly. “People must know. What he did.”
“You're mad! You're mad! You think you're going to carry him to Omnia?”
“Don't know. Going to try.”
“You! You!” Om pounded a claw on the sand. “Millions of people in the world and it had to be you! Stupid! Stupid!”
Brutha was becoming a wavering shape in the haze.
“That's it!” shouted Om. “I don't need you! You think I need you? I don't need you! I can soon find another believer! No problem about that!”
Brutha disappeared.
“And I'm not chasing after you!” Om screamed.
Brutha watched his feet dragging one in front of the other.
He was past the point of thinking now. What drifted through his frying brain were disjointed images and fragments of memory.
Dreams. They were pictures in your head. Coaxes had written a whole scroll about them. The superstitious thought they were messages sent by God, but really they were created by the brain itself, thrown up as it nightly sorted and fiIed the experiences of the day. Brutha never dreamed. So sometimes . . .
blackout, while the mind did the filing. It fiIed all the books. Now he knew without learning . . .
That was dreams.
God. God needed people. Belief was the food of the gods. But they also needed a shape. Gods became what people believed they ought to be. So the Goddess of Wisdom carried a penguin. It could have happened to any god. It should have been an owl. Everyone knew that. But one bad sculptor who had only ever had an owl described to him makes a mess of a statue, belief steps in, next thing you know the Goddess of Wisdom is lumbered with a bird that wears evening dress the whole time and smells of fish.
You gave a god its shape, like a jelly fills a mold.
Gods often became your father, said Abraxas the Agnostic. Gods became a big beard in the sky, because when you were three years old that was your father.
Of course Abraxas survived . . . This thought arrived sharp and cold, out of the part of his own mind that Brutha could still call his own. Gods didn't mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life not believing, spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief . . .
Sand. It was what you found in deserts. Crystals of rock, sculpted into dunes. Gordo of Tsort said that sand was worn-down mountains but Irexes had found that sandstone was stone pressed out of sand, which suggested that grains were the fathers of mountains . . .
Every one a little crystal. And all of them getting bigger . . .
Much bigger . . .
Quietly, without realizing it, Brutha stopped falling forward and lay still.
“Bugger Off!”
The scalbie took no notice. This was interesting. It was getting to see whole new stretches of sand it had never seen before and, of course, there was the prospect, even the certainty, of a good meal at the end of it all.
It had perched on Om's shell.
Om stumped along the sand, pausing occasionally to shout at his passenger.
Brutha had come this way.
But here one of the outcrops of rocks, littering the desert like islands in a sea, stretched right down to the water's edge. He'd never have been able to climb it. The footprints in the sand turned inland, toward the deep desert.