Cringh smiled sweetly once more. Actually, he had already leafed through the document enough to have seen the page upon which someone had set down a series of brief, though elegantly lettered, questions.
1. How does one define God?
2. How does one know if a God is real?
3. Does a God have to create a race of intelligent creatures in order for that race to consider Him/Her a God?
4. Can a God adopt a people who already exist?
5. If a people become holy because of the influence of something, is that something likely a God?
6. If the answer to the foregoing is “no,” then what should we call it?
And finally, the questions Cringh immediately recognized as at the crux of the matter, from the view point of the Baidee:
7. Could the Overmind have created or allowed the creation of some smaller, lesser Gods or pseudo-Gods for any reason at all?
8. If the Overmind could not have done so, then shouldn’t we immediately dispose of any smaller things of that description we might happen to discover?
“Unofficially, of course,” said Cringh to himself, leaning rather more heavily than was absolutely necessary upon Lurilile. Sometimes he called her Abishag. He had forgotten exactly where he’d encountered that name during his studies, in some ancient volume or other. He connected it to Voorstod, somehow, which meant he had probably read it while researching Voorstoder beliefs, which meant Abishag must have been an ancient tribal beauty mentioned in the tribal scriptures. A young woman obtained to warm the bed of an old, cold chieftain, as he recalled. A chieftain not too distantly related to the ancient chieftains of the Voorstoders. Equally old and cold, no doubt.
“What are you thinking?” Lurilile wanted to know.
“I’m thinking things could get very lively around here quite shortly,” he said. “For a change.”
“Oh, goody,” she replied.
• At Settlement Three on Hobbs Land there had been deaths. A couple of the more violent and contentious of the inhabitants, one of them a Soames brother, had decided to leave Hobbs Land, a decision with which the settlement had been in complete agreement and sympathy. However, before the two could get themselves gone, they had happened upon an excuse for a fight, and the fight had ended with both dead. All in all, thought most of the people of Settlement Three, good riddance.
However, there were two bodies to dispose of. For some reason, it did not seem to anyone that the proper place to put the two bodies was in the Settlement Three graveyard.
“We think they ought to go up on the escarpment,” said Topman Harribon Kruss to Dern Blass, with no effort at all toward explaining himself or thinking up a logical reason for the course he was suggesting.
“On the escarpment,” repeated Dern, casting a look at Spiggy and Jamice, who happened to be with him.
“It’s very nice up there,” said Spiggy, apropos of nothing. “I agree, it would be nice to have a memorial park up there. Burial space near the settlements could be put to better use.”
“Memorial park,” repeated Dern, remembering not to try and make sense out of it.
“For everybody,” agreed Jamice, nodding her head. “One nice cemetery up there for all the settlements. Among the topes. It’s only a daywatch away, by flier.”
“Right,” said Topman Kruss, as he left to go make arrangements. “I knew it would be all right.”
Out of curiosity, Dern attended the interment. The two bodies were laid to rest in shallow graves in the wedge-shaped space between two of the long, strange mounds Volsa had discovered. Several cats, who had come along in the flier, scattered into the surrounding forest and emerged with dead ferfs in their jaws, which they dropped into the graves as they were being filled.
“Those two people never did get along, did they?” Dern asked the Topman, indicating the two graves. “Seems to me I saw reports about their orneriness all the time.”
“They always fought. Each other or somebody else,” said Harribon. “Lately, you know, people who don’t get along sort of get up and leave. Have you noticed that? I’ve had four leave from Three, including these two; five or six left Four; and so on. These two were going to emigrate, but they got overtaken by bellicosity before they had a chance.”
“I have noticed a number of departures lately,” Dern agreed.
“Not in Settlement One,” said Harribon. “All their departures took place years and years ago, shortly after the settlement was started. Funny thing. That’s one of the things I was most interested in about Settlement One. I thought their low hostility-high productivity record might be explained by the mix of people they had. Dracun and I were going to find out about that, but then things happened and it slipped my mind for a while. Then later on I remembered it and looked it up. The rest of us settlements had people coming and going, some of them not fitting in, a constant flux. Settlement One lost a few people during the early years, and then they didn’t lose any more. It made me curious, so I checked out a few of the families who left. Osmer was one. He came in about year twelve, stayed a few years, then left. Couple of years after he left here, he was executed for killing a dozen Glottles. His family moved on somewhere else after that.”
“Almost like he was sorted out to start with,” suggested Dern.
“Almost like that, yes,” said Harribon. “Well, the rest of us have been getting sorted out lately.” He pointed at the graves. “People like these guys somehow just can’t stop fighting. Mad at the universe, they are. Born that way, I guess.”
“So it doesn’t work for everybody,” mused Dern.
“It?”
“Don’t go dumb on me, Kruss. You know what I mean. In Settlement Three, the God Elitia doesn’t work for everyone.”
Harribon gave him a long, level look. “In
