to see that the rain poured down more heavily over the tanks.
Apparently Siryl had been checking on the ram with Lari. As they entered the house the native girl was running busily from the kitchen to the table, but she was keeping up a steady fire of conversation.
“Of course Skora brings the water at night. It’s better after all the work in the fields is done,” she explained. “Though sometimes there’s a light fall of natural rain in the daytime. That makes us all feel good. When we first started, we had to import all our water. And now we have two small oceans. Of course, god told us the planet had eight big seas before the sun exploded. I was asking Skora about it, and he says some of the worlds are all covered with water—not even a little bit of land…”
Siryl’s face showed that she had learned nothing—or at least nothing that she wanted to know.
Lari came hurrying back, carrying a huge metal pot of stew to the table. She held it at arm’s length easily, and Derek noticed one of the amulets in her hand—this time a small one with only a few simple marks on it. He pointed. “What’s that, Lari?”
“A lifting tool”. God showed us how to make all kinds of tools. There’s one that eats away the rock, and one that plows the ground—you saw that, didn’t you? Skora bakes them. They make god work for us. Come on, dinner’s ready.”
Derek picked up the little piece and turned it over. It was a twisted lump of clay, baked hard, with a series of marks on the top. It looked as if no design existed, yet there was a certain flow to the lines. He reached out for the kettle, fingering the amulet. If the kettle weighed less because of it, he couldn’t feel the difference. Nor could he find any sign of a switch buried on the surf ace of the gadget.
If there were some kind of broadcast power here, and these things were receivers tuned to convert it into special functions…
He pocketed it while Lari’s back was turned. There might be some penalty for the theft of one, but he had to risk it.
The next day when they reached the ship Kayel took it to pieces bit by bit. Lari had missed it, but had only shrugged and pulled another out of a drawer.
The piece of clay grew smaller and smaller under the grinder as Kayel worked on it. At last it was just a nub that he had to hold with pliers. Then even that was gone. On the floor was a pile of dust, with no trace of metal or foreign element in it. The two men stared at it sickly and then dropped the matter quickly as they turned back to the labor of rebuilding the damaged space-denial generators.
They worked on doggedly for three days more. Ferad had flatly refused to help them, claiming that his marriage to Lari made him a citizen of Vanir and had ended his need to work under Derek. It was a point the captain had no desire to test while his knowledge of things was so uncertain. Maybe Ferad was a citizen now, and any force exerted on him would antagonize the whole village.
It was hopelessly slow going, but they were making more progress than Siryl. She finally admitted that she was getting nowhere. There was one explanation for everything—and that was their god.
“They’re the most superstition-ridden race I’ve ever heard of,” she concluded in disgust.
Derek had his doubts. So far, every bit of superstition he had run into had proved sound empirical sense. It didn’t matter whether they called it god or magic or anything else. It worked. And they were no worse than many of the civilized people who used the tools given to them and had no other explanation than the fact that science somehow made them work.
If men lived on a world where the only cats were leopards, where black leopards were all man-eaters, and where the cats avoided men unless looking for food, it would be extremely bad luck to have a black cat cross one’s path. In such a case, the only superstition would be a denial of the facts and a belief that there had to be some other explanation of why men disappeared.
Siryl’s faith in hypnosis and primitive ignorance might be the real superstition here. Belief in god and the tools probably wasn’t.
He went out into the rain that was falling again, looking for the house of Skora. There were a few people around and he recognized one as Wolm, the brother of Lari. The man directed him toward a house that was somewhat bigger than the others, with stonework that seemed to have mellowed with time. Derek had passed it before, when a group of children from six to nine were seated silently on couches across an open porch, and had been told it was the school where they learned god’s knowledge. He should have guessed that the priest would handle the schooling here.
Skora emerged from an outbuilding that boasted the huge chimney of a kiln and invited Derek in. The walls of the building were lined with amulets of all kinds and sizes, and there was a big workbench along one wall that was covered with tools for shaping clay. It was obviously the source of the amulets.
Derek went through the formula of greeting and accepted a bottle of surprisingly good beer.
“I’m getting ready for a new baking,” the priest said. “This village has to supply some of the smaller places with tools. My usual helper married into another village. Why don’t you and Kayel join me, Derek? It beats farming, and I understand your friend knows a good deal of science. Maybe he can show us better methods of making the tools.”
“He isn’t exactly a ceramicist, but we’ll think about it,” the captain promised. He had been turning over every indirect approach to his question. Now he discarded subterfuge. In spite of SiryPs warnings, the only way to learn anything here was to risk stepping on their taboos. “Skora, I came here to ask about your god.”
Skora put aside the molds he had been cleaning and perched on the edge of the workbench. “That’s asking a lot,” he said, but there was no offense in his voice. “It takes our children several years to learn all about him, though we’ve speeded things up in the last couple of centuries. And there are some things I can’t tell you properly, for your own good, though I’ll be as honest as I can. Ummm. He’s a man—a very wise and very stupid man. He saved us after the sun was exploded in the great war and taught us how to survive. He still teaches our young people.”
Thirteen hundred years had passed since the solar explosion. Derek whistled. “He sounds like a pretty remarkable man, Skora. No other man has found the secret of immortality. Or do you mean that he dies, but a new god replaces the old one each time?”
“Neither one. No man is immortal. And there is only one god. Sometimes I used to wonder about him when I first learned to use the power. I even thought of investigating, of going to see him. But I was always too busy.”
Derek could see no evidence of deceit on Skora’s face, and there was no way he could twist the words to make them mean anything but an impossible contradiction. “Suppose / wanted to visit your god, Skora—could I talk to him?”
The priest laughed and dropped off the bench to fetch two fresh bottles of beer. “You’d have a hard time of it, Derek. God died over a hundred years ago.”
“Then when you say god helps you, I suppose you mean that you still follow his advice, using what he taught you before he died. Is that right?”
“Not exactly. Partly, I suppose. Tradition kept the use of the tools under the false, emotional label of prayer for hundreds of years before we could root it out. I suppose we still use some of the terms in ways that aren’t literally true.” The priest shrugged. “But we still need his help when some new problem comes up. We couldn’t have found where the fruit grows in time without asking him. And he still teaches the children directly.”
“But he’s dead?”
“Quite dead,” Skora assured Derek. “Sometimes I think we’re headed for trouble because of that, and it makes things a little difficult at times. But what’s a little trouble? When I first had to bring rain, it took all my thought to control it. Now I can sit here talking to you and enjoying myself, without losing control of the tool.”
He pulled his hand out of a pocket and showed a quartz amulet in his palm, where his fingers had been fondling it. “When I was younger, I had trouble enough without any distractions. Once I forgot to remove only pure water and nearly ruined the crops with natural sea water. The planet where the rain comes from has a lot of copper salts, and that doesn’t help the land.”
Derek stared at the priest with sudden shock, the bottle still tilted to his lips. He forgot to swallow and gagged as beer ran down his throat and into his windpipe.
It was the complete logic of it that hit him. The rain had to be controlled, since it fell most heavily where it was most needed. Lari had already told them that the planet here had been almost barren of water after the solar explosion. Water didn’t create itself. It had to be brought from somewhere.
