“Where are we? Who's that? It's as hot as hell in here and, believe me, I know what I'm talking about.”
“I can't talk now!” hissed Brutha.
“This cabbage stinks like a swamp! Let there be lettuce! Let there be slices of melon!”
The horses edged along the jetty and were led one at a time up the gangplank. By this time the box was vibrating. Brutha kept looking around guiltily, but no one else was taking any notice. Despite his size, Brutha was easy not to notice. Practically everyone had better things to do with their time than notice someone like Brutha. Even Vorbis had switched him off, and was talking to the captain.
He found a place up near the pointed end, where one of the sticking-up bits with the sails on gave him a bit of privacy. Then, with some dread, he opened the box.
The tortoise spoke from deep within its shell.
“Any eagles about?”
Brutha scanned the sky.
“No.”
The head shot out.
"You- it began.
“I couldn't talk!” said Brutha. “People were with me all the time! Can't you . . . read the words in my mind? Can't you read my thoughts?”
“Mortal thoughts aren't like that,” snapped Om. “You think it's like watching words paint themselves across the sky? Hah! It's like trying to make sense of a bundle of weeds. Intentions, yes. Emotions, yes. But not thoughts. Half the time you don't know what you're thinking, so why should I?”
“Because you're the God,” said Brutha. “Abbys, chapter LVI, verse 17: `All of mortal mind he knows, and there are no secrets.' ”
“Was he the one with the bad teeth?”
Brutha hung his head.
“Listen,” said the tortoise, “I am what I am. I can't help it if people think something else.”
“But you knew about my thoughts . . . in the garden . . .” muttered Brutha.
The tortoise hesitated. “That was different,” it said. “They weren't . . . thoughts. That was guilt.”
“I believe that the Great God is Om, and in His Justice,” said Brutha. “And I shall go on believing, whatever you say, and whatever you are.”
“Good to hear it,” said the tortoise fervently. “Hold that thought. Where are we?”
“On a boat,” said Brutha. “On the sea. Wobbling.”
“Going to Ephebe on a boat? What's wrong with the desert?”
“No one can cross the desert. No one can live in the heart of the desert.”
“I did.”
“It's only a couple of days' sailing.” Brutha's stomach lurched, even though the boat had hardly cleared the jetty. "And they say that the God-
"-me-
“-is sending us a fair wind.”
“I am? Oh. Yes. Trust me for a fair wind. Flat as a mill-race the whole way, don't you worry.”
“I meant mill-pond! I meant mill-pond!”
Brutha clung to the mast.
After a while a sailor came and sat down on a coil of rope and looked at him interestedly.
“You can let go, Father,” he said. “It stands up all by itself.”
“The sea . . . the waves . . .” murmured Brutha carefully, although there was nothing left to throw up.
The sailor spat thoughtfully.
“Aye,” he said. “They got to be that shape, see, so's to fit into the sky.”
“But the boat's creaking!”
“Aye. It does that.”
“You mean this isn't a storm?”
The sailor sighed, and walked away.
After a while, Brutha risked letting go. He had never felt so ill in his life.
It wasn't just the seasickness. He didn't know where he was. And Brutha had always known where he was. Where he was, and the existence of Om, had been the only two certainties in his life.
It was something he shared with tortoises. Watch any tortoise walking, and periodically it will stop while it files away the memories of the journey so far. Not for nothing, elsewhere in the multiverse, are the little traveling devices controlled by electric thinking-engines called “turtles.”
Brutha knew where he was by remembering where he had been-by the unconscious counting of footsteps and the noting of landmarks. Somewhere inside his head was a thread of memory which, if you had wired it directly to whatever controlled his feet, would cause Brutha to amble back through the little pathways of his life all the way to the place he was born.
Out of contact with the ground, on the mutable surface of the sea, the thread flapped loose.
In his box, Om tossed and shook to Brutha's motion as Brutha staggered across the moving deck and reached the rail.
To anyone except the novice, the boat was clipping through the waves on a good sailing day. Seabirds wheeled in its wake. Away to one side-port or starboard or one of those directions-a school of flying fish broke the surface in an attempt to escape the attentions of some dolphins. Brutha stared at the gray shapes as they zigzagged under the keel in a world where they never had to count at all
“Ah, Brutha,” said Vorbis. “Feeding the fishes, I see.”
“No, lord,” said Brutha. “I'm being sick, lord.”
He turned.
There was Sergeant Simony, a muscular young man with the deadpan expression of the truly professional soldier. He was standing next to someone Brutha vaguely recognized as the number-one salt or whatever his title was. And there was the exquisitor, smiling.
“Him! Him!” screamed the voice of the tortoise.
“Our young friend is not a good sailor,” said Vorbis.
“Him! Him! I'd know him anywhere!”
“Lord, I wish I wasn't a sailor at all,” said Brutha. He felt the box trembling as Om bounced around inside.
“Kill him! Find something sharp! Push him overboard!”
“Come with us to the prow, Brutha,” said Vorbis. “There are many interesting things to be seen, according to the captain.”
The captain gave the frozen smirk of those caught between a rock and a hard place. Vorbis could always supply both.
Brutha trailed behind the other three, and risked a whisper.
“What's the matter?”