“So we’re prisoners?”
Skora sighed, and he seemed embarrassed. “Not exactly. We feel obligated to you for bungling the way we handled the return of your ship to Sirius, Derek, and we’d like to return you. But that must wait for further study. You have full freedom here, though. And if you are permitted to leave, the ship will be ready.”
“And I suppose you’ll make up all the time when we should be repairing it?” Derek asked grimly.
“We have already done that. We repaired it last night, before we sent it up. Not the space-denial generators—that is beyond our understanding. But from god we learned how to use what was there to set up the much better time-negation drive that was used before your Collapse.”
“But—time-negation…” Kayel swallowed, stumbling. Derek hadn’t known that the little man understood Classic. From the accent, he must have only a reading and weak hearing knowledge of it. But he obviously had understood enough.
“Yes, time-negation works.” Skora smiled at the man’s amazement. “It’s simpler in application, but much more difficult in theory, I believe, than space-denial. It was discovered by accident when our common ancestors had no right to find it. Fortunately, god knew how it worked. And your ship will be ready for you if we find we can let you return.”
He was heading back to the village, and they were following without thought. Kayel caught Derek’s arm, pulling him back out of earshot. He spoke in hasty Universal. “We’ve got to forget the ship. Now it’s up to god and his charms. Derek, I’ve got to see how those amulets are made.”
“But they were nothing but baked clay. We took one apart,” Derek protested.
The physicist shrugged. “A transistor works because of a few parts per millions of impurities. A detector works because of its crystalline structure. Take his job!”
Skora had noticed that they weren’t with him and had slowed his steps. Derek caught up, trying to look somewhat cheerful. “I guess we’ll have to get ourselves a house of our own and stop bothering Lari until you decide, then. And since we can’t use the power of your god, we’d make pretty poor farmers around here. Is the job in your kiln still open?”
“Is it?” The old man chuckled. “Do you think I like doing it by myself? And since we’d have to feed you and care for you even if you did no work, your help will be pure profit to me.”
Derek had little hope for any great revelation from the work. Either there wasn’t much of a secret to the tools, or there was something so tricky that they felt sure Kayel and he couldn’t discover it.
The work seemed to confirm his doubts. Any child could have handled it, with no more than five minutes of instruction. Skora had teleported in a big tub of soft white clay from a bank of the stuff beyond the village. They had to pack this inside metal molds, press them down firmly and let them rough-dry until they would hold their shape. Then they went into the kiln to be baked. Finally, Skora inspected them, throwing out the defective ones along with his own hand-formed failures.
The priest answered Kayel’s stumbling questions without any hesitation. The material wasn’t important, so long as the final product had the right shape and the markings on it were clear. They had a few metal tools, but these were rare and too heavy for normal use.
“You can think of them as instructions,” he suggested. “There is too much to remember easily, and these help. They—well, they describe a stress in space, more or less.”
“Then plastics would work? Because if they would, there are a thousand pounds of thermoplastic in the ship’s stores, and we’d save a lot of time here,” Kayel suggested.
Skora apparently thought it was a fine idea. He questioned the physicist about what to look for, and the stock of plastic was suddenly in front of them. They began boring small holes in the molds for pouring the plastic to make unbreakable amulets, and the work went faster after that.
On the way back to Lari’s that night, Kayel shook his head positively. “Nothing, Derek! Nothing can be concealed in our own plastic. The secret has to be in their god.”
A god who wasn’t immortal, though he had lived for at least twelve hundred years; a god who taught the children somehow, though he had been dead for a hundred years. A god who could fling a seventy-thousand ton ship quintillions of miles instantly!
Derek lingered after the second day of work. He took the bottle of beer from the priest and dropped to a seat. “Skora, I’m still curious about your god. And this time, I’ll try to behave myself. How long did:he live?”
“Since before the sun exploded. Let’s see.” The priest tipped the capped bottle up without thinking. Beer seemed to appear just beyond the seal and run into his mouth. “He was about sixty of your years old then. He came here to see us about five years before the trouble, I think. I could find out, if you like.”
Derek took his eyes off the other’s drinking habits and swallowed his own drink, trying to find some point of exploration. “I haven’t heard any stories about his creating the world or your people, at that. No legends of that?”
“Of course not. We evolved on Terra, like your people; and this planet grew from the usual space whorl.” The old man chuckled. “This isn’t a religion—though I’m afraid sometimes it’s beginning to degenerate. God had some strange ideas that are getting distorted lately. Many of us have a belief in some divine spirit, Derek, but we try not to confuse that with god. He was just a man. Kayel knows more than he did, though not the same—and all of us are stronger than he was.”
“He didn’t teach you to worship him, then?”
“He didn’t know.” Skora shook his head sadly. “He thought we would, mostly be dead. He didn’t care and couldn’t know what happened to us. He was unconscious. And when he revived, he was sure we were dead. With his stores all ruined and nobody to save him, he went crazy. He began blasting his way out and brought down a rock on his skull. Naturally, with his medulla crushed, he died. It was just as well. He couldn’t move the rocks to get out and he’d have been afraid of the world we’d made.”
It made no sense at all. Their god couldn’t even move rocks out of his own way. Yet the rains fell, in spite of the fact that the amulets were nothing but symbols. The power had to come from some source. “So he was destroyed. Yet you say he still is!”
“He’s there, and the young learn from him still. We had to find out how to build the time-negation drive from him since you came.” Skora found another beer, remembering to open this one. He was mellowing from the liquor. “Derek, I don’t know. He’s dead and he’s deteriorating—slowly, but the changes are there. We’ve always been in danger of becoming superstitiously dependent on him without realizing how much so we are. But now, some of us are worried. As he deteriorates, he may warp our children. Sometimes I’ve thought of digging him up and destroying him.”
“Why don’t you?” Derek suggested softly.
“I’ve thought of it. As senior priest for Vanir, I could. But it’s hard… emotional attachment, I suppose. And fear of what would happen.”
Derek frowned. “Suppose I were to destroy him?”
The old priest looked up, studying him, resolution coming slowly. “You could! Of course,
Skora’s hands were trembling as he reached for the bottles.
6
Siryl would have none of it.
“Nonsense,” she told them after she had heard the story, along with Kayel. “Primitive cultures don’t breed agnostics. Skora was just drunk or testing you! Probably saving face by trying not to act superstitious. Derek, if you break any more taboos—”
“They aren’t primitive! Damn it, Siryl, if you can’t get that much through your pathological skull, go outside and watch it rain for a while!”
She stiffened and then cloaked herself in professional calm. “A culture,” she recited, almost by rote, “observed
