Sal didn’t need the archives to tell her about the ruins. They had been a topic of settler discussion for years. Should they be razed? Could they be used for something else? Except for the most recent ruin, the rest were only tumbled circles of outer and inner walls, stubby remnants of radiating arches, a few fragments of metal grills, and a few square feet of mosaic. Even the most recent one had no roof, door, or windows, no seats in what must have been the assembly space, though the trough-shaped area wouldn’t have been at all suitable for any human gathering. It was a wonder, considering all the disputation about them, that the ruins had never been disturbed. The two at the center of the settlement certainly occupied sites that could have been put to better use. If Bondru Dharm actually died, the whole question would undoubtedly come up again.
Sal looked up from the frozen images in the stage to find her brother standing beside her, his face not saying much, which was rare for Sam. He usually either grinned or scowled at the world, furrowing his handsome brow and making a gargoyle of himself, managing to evoke some response from even the reluctant or taciturn. Still unspeaking, he sat down next to her, looking preoccupied and rather ill. She could hear many people moving out in the street. The shuffling of feet sounded faintly where there should have been no people before dusk.
“Sam?” she asked. “Was there an accident or something?”
He didn’t answer. She went to the window to see a silent throng gathered down the street, not precisely in front of the temple, more or less to one side of it: several hundred men and women and their children as well—virtually the entire population of the settlement. As she watched, they fell to their knees in one uncontrolled wave of motion. A cry rose in her throat and stayed there as she fell to her own knees, possessed by a feeling of loss so great that she could not speak, could not moan, could only kneel, then bend forward to put her head on the floor, then push out her legs until she was pressed to the floor, utterly flat, arms and hands pressed down, legs apart and pressed down, cheek pressed down, as though to imprint herself deep into the surface below her, knowing in some far-off part of herself that Sam was beside her and that out in the street the whole settlement was lying face down in the dust, possibly never to rise again, because Bondru Dharm had just died.
• A day later, when they came, more or less, to their senses, there was nothing left of the God. The altar, if it had been an altar, was empty and dust-covered by the time the first settler was able to get up off the ground to go look. Birribat was where Sal had left him, in the central chamber, except now he was curled on the floor, covered with fine black dust, dead.
Sam and two or three other people wrapped Birribat’s body loosely in a blanket and carried it out to the north side of town, near the ruined temples, even though the burying ground was nowhere near there. The burying ground was on a hill east of the settlement, but it seemed more fitting to those who took Birribat’s body that a One Who should be buried near a temple, even a ruined temple. They laid him in a shallow grave, and it wasn’t long before people were saying that when a God died, he took his interpreter with him.
But that was after everyone in the settlement lay idly about for eight or nine days, unable to do anything. People started for the fields and then found themselves back in their clanhomes, looking at the walls. People started to cook meals and then found themselves lying on the floor. Mothers went to look at their kids and never got there, and the kids slumped in logy groups, not moving a lot of the time. Even the babies didn’t cry, didn’t seem to be hungry, scarcely wet themselves.
About the tenth day, however, whatever-it-was began to wear off, and someone had enough energy to call Central Management. Within hours there were med-techs and investigators swarming over the place, hungry babies were yelling, and hungry, grumpy people were snapping at each other.
“Has it happened anywhere else,” Sam wanted to know, rubbing his itchy beard and scraping gunk out of the corners of his eyes, feeling as though he’d slept quite badly for about a week. Sam had been in the habit of meeting with a private and personal friend every two or three evenings, rather late, and he had just realized he hadn’t seen his friend since this event began. This made him even more snappish and apprehensive. “Has anything like this happened elsewhere?” he repeated, snarling.
“This is the only settlement built on the site of an Owlbrit village,” the harried med-tech in charge told him as she took a blood sample. “All the other Owlbrit ruins are up on the escarpment. So, no, it hasn’t happened anywhere else.”
“Any ideas about what caused this … this depression?” He could remember feeling depressed and inexpressibly sad, though right now he just felt edgy and annoyed and his legs jumped as though he wanted to run away somewhere.
“One theory is that the thing had some kind of field around it that you’d all gotten used to. Chemical, maybe. Pheromones, possibly. Electromagnetic, less likely. Whatever it was, when
