“Look how fair he is!” one of the women exclaimed. “Look how much handsomer than us he is!”
“Look how richly he’s dressed! Look at the jewels shining in his silver belt!”
Imbry’s translator raced to give him representative crowd comments, and he grinned back at the crowd. His rescue training had always presupposed grim, hostile or at best noncommittal ETs that would have to be persuaded into helping him locate the crashed personnel of the stricken ship. Now, the first time he’d put it to actual use, he found reality giving theory a bland smile, and he sighed and relaxed completely. Once he’d disabused this village of its god-notions in connection with him, he’d be able to not only work but be friendly with these people. Not that they weren’t already cordial.
He looked around at the crowd, both to observe it and to give everybody a look at his smile.
The crowd was composed, in nearly equal parts, of men and women very much like Tylus, with no significant variation except for age and sex characteristics that ranged from the appreciable to the only anthropologically interesting. In lesser part, there were children, most of them a little timid, some of them awestruck, all of them naked.
An older man, wearing a necklace of carved wood in addition to his wraparound, came forward through the crowd. Imbry had to guess at his age, but he thought he had it fairly accurately. The native had white hair, for one thing, and a slight thickness to his waist. For another, he was rather obviously the village head man, and that indicated age and the experience it brought with it.
The head man raised his arm in greeting, and Imbry replied.
“I am Iano. Will you stay with us in our village?” Imbry nodded. “My name’s Imbry. I’d like to stay here for a while.” Iano broke into a smile. “Fine! We’re all very glad to meet you. I hope your journey can be interrupted for a long tune.” He smiled. “Well, if you say you’re not a god, who do you say you are?” There was a ripple of chuckling through the crowd.
“I’m a man,” Imbry answered. The translator had meanwhile worked out the proper wording for what he wanted to say next. “I’m an explorer from another country.” The local word, of course, was not quite “explorer”—it was traveler-from-other-places-for-the-enjoyment-of-it-and-to-see-what-I-can-find. Iano chuckled. Then, gravely, he asked: “Do you always travel in an Ihoni egg, Imbry-who-says-he-is-Imbry?”
Imbry chuckled back in appreciation of Iano’s shrewdness. He was enjoying this, even if it was becoming more and more difficult to approach the truth.
“That’s no Ihoni egg,” he deprecated with a broad gesture to match. “That’s only my…” And here the translator had to give up and render the word as canoe.
Iano nodded with a gravity so grave it was obviously no gravity at all. Tylus, standing to one side, gave Imbry a look of total admiration at this effort which overmatched all his others.
“Ah. Your canoe. And how does one balance a canoe shaped like an Ihoni egg?”
Imbry realized what the translator had had to do. He’d been afraid of as much. He searched for the best answer, and the best answer seemed to be to tell the truth and stick to it. These people were intelligent. If he presented them with a consistent story and backed it up with as much proof as he could muster, they’d eventually see that nothing so scrupulously self-consistent could possibly be anything but the truth. “Well,” he said slowly, wondering what the effect would be at first, “it’s a canoe that doesn’t sail on water. It sails in the sky.”
There was a chorus of admiration through the crowd. As much of it seemed to be meant for Iano as for Imbry. They appeared to think Imbry had made a damaging admission in this contest.
Iano smiled. “Is your country in the sky?” Imbry struggled for some way of making it understandable. “Yes and no,” he said carefully. “It’s necessary to travel through the sky to get to my country, but when you get there you’re in a place that’s very much like here, in some ways.” Iano smiled again. “Well, of course. How else would you be happy if there weren’t places like this to live, in the sky?”
He turned toward the other villagers. “He said he wasn’t a god,” he declared quietly, his eyes twinkling.
There was a burst of chuckling, and now all the admiring glances were for Iano.
The head man turned back to Imbry. “Will you stay in my house for a while? We will produce a feast later in the day.”
Imbry nodded gravely. “I’d be honored.” The villagers were smiling at him gently as they drifted away, and Imbry got the feeling that they were being polite and telling him that his discomfiture didn’t really matter.
“Don’t be sad,” Tylus whispered. “lano’s a remarkably shrewd man. He could make anybody admit the truth. I’m quite sure that when he dies, he’ll be some kind of god himself.”
Then he waved a hand in temporary farewell and moved away, leaving Imbry alone with the gravely smiling Iano.
Imbry sat on the porch with Iano. Both of them looked out over the village square, sitting side by side. It seemed to be the expected posture for conversation between a god and someone who was himself a likely candidate for a similar position, and it certainly made for ease of quiet contemplation before each new sentence was brought out into words.
Imbry was still wearing his suit. Iano had politely suggested that he might be warm in it, but Imbry had explained.
“It cools me. That’s only one of the things it does. For one thing, if I took it off I wouldn’t be able to talk to you. In my country we have different words.” Iano had thought about it for a moment. Then he said: “Your wraparound must have powerful ancestors living in it.” He thought a moment more. “Am I right in supposing that this is a new attribute you’re trying out, and it hasn’t grown up enough to go about without advice?”
Imbry’d been glad of several minutes in which to think. Then he’d tried to explain.
“No,” he said, “the suit” (perforce, the word was wrap-around-for-the-whole-body) “was made—was built—by other men in my country. It was built to protect me and to make me able to travel anywhere without being in any danger.” But that was only just as much as repeating lano’s theory back to him in different form, and he realized it after lano’s polite silence had extended too long to be anything but an answer in itself.
He tried to explain the concept “machine.”
“I’ll teach you a new word for a new thing,” he said. Iano nodded attentively.
Imbry switched off the translator, making sure Iano saw the motion and understood the result. Then he repeated “machine” several times, and, once Iano had accustomed himself to Imbry’s new voice, which up to now he’d only heard as an indistinct background murmur to the translator’s speaker, the head man picked it up quickly.
“Mahschin,” he said at last, and Imbry switched his translator back on. “Go on, Imbry.”
“A machine is a number of levers, working together. It is built by perfectly ordinary artisans—not gods, Iano, but men like yourself and myself—who have a good deal of knowledge and skill. With one lever, you can raise a tree trunk. With many levers, shaped into paddles, men can push the tree trunk through the water, after they have shaped it into a canoe.
“So a machine is like the many levers that move the canoe. But usually it doesn’t need men to push it. It goes on by itself, because it—”
Here he had to stop for a minute. These people had no concept of storing energy and then releasing it to provide motive power. Iano waited, patient and polite.
“It has a little bit of fire in it,” Imbry was forced to say lamely. “Fire can be put in a box—in something like two pots fastened tightly on top of each other—so that it can’t get out. But it wants to get out-—it pushes against the inside of the two pots—so if you make a hole in the pots and put a lever in the way, the fire rushing out pushes the lever.”
He looked at Iano, but couldn’t make out whether he was being believed or not. Half the time, he had no idea what kind of almost-but-sadly-not-quite concepts the translator might be substituting for the things he was saying.
“A machine can be built to do almost anything that would otherwise require a lot of men. For instance, I could have brought another man with me who was skilled at learning words that weren’t his. Then I wouldn’t need the little black pot, which is a machine that learns words that aren’t the same as mine. But the machine does it faster and in some ways better.”
He stopped, hoping Iano had understood at least part of it.
After a time, Iano nodded gravely. “That’s very ingenious. It saves your ancestors the inconvenience of coming with you and fatiguing themselves. I had no idea such a thing could be done. But of course, in your country there are different kinds of fires than we have here.”
Which was a perfectly sound description, Imbry had to admit, granting lano’s viewpoint.
So now they’d been sitting quietly for a number of minutes, and Imbry had begun to realize that he might have to work for a long time before he extricated himself from this embarrassment. Finally he said, “Well, if you think I’m a god, what kind of a god do you think I am?” Iano answered slowly. “Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know. You might be an ancestor. Or you might be only a man who has made friends with a lot of his ancestors.” Imbry felt a flash of hope, but Iano went on: “Which, of course, would make you a god. Or—” He paused, and Imbry, taking a sideward look, caught Iano looking at him cautiously. “Or you might be no ancestor and no man-god. You might be one of the very-real-gods. You might be the cloud god, or the jungle god, taking the attribute of a man. Or… you might be the god. You might be the-father-of-all-Ihoni.”
Imbry took a deep breath. “Would you describe the Ihoni to me, please,” he said.
“Certainly.” lano’s voice and manner were still cautious. “The Ihoni are animals which live in the sea or on the beaches, as they choose. They leave their eggs on the beaches, but they rear their young in the sea. They are fishers, and they are very wise. Many of them are ancestors. He said it with unusual respect and reverence.
Imbry sat quietly again. The god who was the-father-of-all-the-lhoni would not only be the father of many ancestors, who were themselves minor gods, he would also control the sea, everything pertaining to the sea, the beaches, probably all the islands, and the fates of those whose lives were tied to the sea, who were themselves fishers, like the villagers. Imbry wondered how much geography the villagers knew. They might consider that the land was always surrounded by ocean—that, as a matter of fact, the universe consisted of ocean encircling a relatively small bit of land.
If Iano thought that was who Imbry might be, then he might very well be thinking that he was in the presence of the greatest god there was. A typical god, of course—there wasn’t a god in the world who didn’t enjoy a joke, a feast, and a good untruth-for-the-fun-of-everybody at least as much as anybody else—but still, though you might not expect too much of the household lares and penates, when it came to Jupiter himself…
Imbry couldn’t let that go on. Almost anything might happen. He might leave a religion behind him that, in a few generations of distortion, might twist itself—and the entire culture—into something monstrous. He might leave the way open for the next Corporation man to practice a brand of exploitation that would be near to unimaginable.
Imbry remembered what the conquistadores had done in Central and South America, and his hackles rose.
“No!” he exploded violently, and Iano recoiled a little, startled. “No, I’m not a god. Not any kind. I’m a man—a different kind of man, maybe, but just a man. The fact that I have a few machines doesn’t prove anything. The fact that I know more about some things than you do doesn’t prove anything. I come from a country where the people can keep records, so nothing’s lost when a man who has some wisdom dies. I’ve been taught out of those records, and I’m helped by machines built by other men who study other records. But you think my people are any better than yours? You think the men I have to work with are good or brave or kind? No more than you. Less. We kill each other, we take away from other people what isn’t ours, we lie—we tell untruths-for-unfair-advantage—we leave bad where we found good—we’re just men, we’re not anything like gods, and we never will be!”
Iano had recovered his composure quickly. He nodded.