Sam gritted strong white teeth and held onto his patience. “Birribat, you go find Sal. Tell Sal whatever it is that’s got you in an uproar. I’ll talk to Sal about it tonight.” Or next week, or next year. The God had been squatting in its temple since Settlement, thirty some odd years now, without showing any evidence of “doing anything” whatsoever. Sam Girat had the evidence of his own observation for that; he spent time in the temple himself, mostly at night and for his own private reasons. However, he didn’t believe the God was truly “alive,” and the thought of its dying did not greatly perturb him. Still, as Topman, he had to keep in mind that anything Birribat said was likely to create unexpected reverberations among the credulous, of whom there were more than enough in the settlement—in all eleven of the settlements.
Birribat took himself off, and a moment later Sam saw his angular form lurching along the street toward the recreation center. When Sam looked up from his information stage again, it was to see Birribat and Sal striding in the opposite direction, toward the temple.
Saluniel Girat, Sam’s sister, who was serving a more or less permanent term as recreation officer, was both gentler and more patient than her brother. Besides, she rather liked Birribat. At least, she found the bony pietist odd and interesting, and when he told her the God was dying, she was sufficiently concerned to go see for herself. As Birribat did, she stopped at the temple gate to pour water over her hands, stooped on the stone porch to take off her shoes, and knelt at the narrow grilled door in the ringwall to take a veil from the rack and drape it over her head and body. Sal wasn’t a regular temple-goer, but she had observed the sacrifices often enough to know what was appropriate for someone entering the central chamber. The room inside the grill was like a chimney, about twelve feet across and over thirty feet tall. On a stone plinth in the middle stood the God, a roughly man-sized and onion-shaped chunk of something or other, vaguely blue in color, with spiders of light gradually appearing on its surface to glimmer a moment before flickering and vanishing.
“What does it say?” Sal whispered.
“That it’s dying,” cried Birribat in an anguished half whisper.
Sal sat on one of the stone seats along the grill and peered at the God, watching the lights appear and disappear on its surface. The last time she had been here, the sparkles had been rhythmic, like the beating of a heart, flushes of light that started near the rounded bottom, gradually moved toward the top, then went out, only to be replaced a moment later by another galaxy lower down. Now there were only random spiders, bright centers with filaments which seemed to reach almost yearningly into darkness.
“Dying?” she asked, “Is there anything about that in the records?”
Birribat nodded, not taking his eyes from the God. “The Owlbrit told the linguists that Bondru Dharm was the last of the Gods, that there had been others. I think.”
Sal resolved to look up the matter in the Archives. After watching for a bit longer, she left Birribat in attendance on the deity, went out the grilled door, hung up the veil, resumed her shoes on the porch, and went down the empty street to her brother’s office, which she found as empty as the street. At this time of day—except for the kids in school, the babies in the creche, and a few specialists like Sal—the whole village would be out in the fields. Sam had probably gone out there as well and was busy supervising, leaving the Supply and Admin building vacant, which was fine. Saluniel could get more done without interruptions.
The storage files of the Hobbs Land Archives were located deep in the well-protected bowels of Central Management, a considerable distance from any of the settlements, but the files were completely accessible to settlers through their personal information stages, including the high resolution model on Sam’s desk. Sal insinuated herself between chair and desk and told the stage to search Archives for anything to do with the Gods. She was promptly shown an endless catalogue of choices, words, and images, beginning with ancient deities named Baal and Thor and Zeus who had been worshipped on Man-home, and continuing through all the ages of exploration in a listing of every human and non-human deity encountered or invented since.
“Gods of the Owlbrit,” she said impatiently, which made the stage splutter at her in a tiny explosion of red and purple fireworks before the new listing floated by. Most of it was devoted to boring scholarly disputations filed in the Archives since settlement, and she didn’t want any of that. “Original accounts of,” she muttered, wondering why it always took her three or four tries to get anything. “By the Owlbrit,” she instructed, grunting with satisfaction at the appearance of the original interview with the Old One. He or she or it squatted in a corner in turniplike immobility, delicate legs spread like a lace frill at its rump, confronted by one pallid linguist and an Al-sense machine with an irritating squeal in one search drive. All in all, the interview wasn’t notable for either clarity or dramatic impact, but when she’d viewed it through to the end, she knew Birribat had been correct. Old One had said this God, Bondru Dharm, was the last. “Only the Owlbrit last,” said the Old One, giving the linguists something else to argue about.
From the interview alone, it wasn’t clear when the former Gods had been around.
