Small Gods полностью

‘I am Deacon Vorbis of the Citadel Quisition,’ said Vorbis coldly.

The Tyrant looked up and gave him another lizard smile.

‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘You torture people for a living. Please be seated, Deacon Vorbis. And your plump young friend who seems to be looking for something. And the rest of you. Some young women will be along in a moment with grapes and things. This generally happens. It’s very hard to stop it, in fact.’

There were benches in front of the Tyrant’s chair. The Omnians sat down. Vorbis remained standing.

The Tyrant nodded. ‘As you wish,’ he said.

‘This is intolerable!’ snapped Vorbis. ‘We have been treated—’

‘Much better than you would have treated us,’ said the Tyrant mildly. ‘You sit or you stand, my lord, because this is Ephebe and indeed you may stand on your head for all I care, but don’t expect me to believe that if it was I, seeking peace in your Citadel, I would be encouraged to do anything but grovel on what was left of my stomach. Be seated or be upstanding, my lord, but be quiet. I have nearly finished.’

‘Finished what?’ said Vorbis.

‘The peace treaty,’ said the Tyrant.

‘But that is what we are here to discuss,’ said Vorbis.

‘No,’ said the Tyrant. The lizard scuttled again. ‘That is what you are here to sign.’

Om took a deep breath and then pushed himself forward.

It was quite a steep flight of steps. He felt every one as he bumped down, but at least he was upright at the bottom.

He was lost, but being lost in Ephebe was preferable to being lost in the Citadel. At least there were no obvious cellars.

Library, library, library …

There was a library in the Citadel, Brutha had said. He’d described it, so Om had some idea of what he was looking for.

There would be a book in it.

Peace negotiations were not going well.

‘You attacked us!’ said Vorbis.

‘I would call it pre-emptive defence,’ said the Tyrant. ‘We saw what happened to Istanzia and Betrek and Ushistan.’

‘They saw the truth of Om!’

‘Yes,’ said the Tyrant. ‘We believe they did, eventually.’

‘And they are now proud members of the Empire.’

‘Yes,’ said the Tyrant. ‘We believe they are. But we like to remember them as they were. Before you sent them your letters, that put the minds of men in chains.’

‘That set the feet of men on the right road,’ said Vorbis.

‘Chain letters,’ said the Tyrant. ‘The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain — the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn.’

Vorbis sat back.

‘What is it you fear?’ he said. ‘Here in your desert, with your … gods? Is it not that, deep in your souls, you know that your gods are as shifting as your sand?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the Tyrant. ‘We know that. That’s always been a point in their favour. We know about sand. And your God is a rock — and we know about rock.’

Om stumped along a cobbled alley, keeping to the shade as much as possible.

There seemed to be a lot of courtyards. He paused at the point where the alley opened into yet another of them.

There were voices. Mainly there was one voice, petulant and reedy.

This was the philosopher Didactylos.

Although one of the most quoted and popular philosophers of all time, Didactylos the Ephebian never achieved the respect of his fellow philosophers. They felt he wasn’t philosopher material. He didn’t bath often enough or, to put it another way, at all. And he philosophized about the wrong sorts of things. And he was interested in the wrong sorts of thing. Dangerous things. Other philosophers asked questions like: Is Truth Beauty, and is Beauty Truth? and: Is Reality Created by the Observer? But Didactylos posed the famous philosophical conundrum: ‘Yes, But What’s It Really All About, Then, When You Get Right Down To It, I Mean Really!’

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools — the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans — and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink. Mine’s a double, if you’re buying. Thank you. And a packet of nuts. Her left bosom is nearly uncovered, eh? Two more packets, then!’

Many people have quoted from his famous Meditations:

‘It’s a rum old world all right. But you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? Nil Illegitimo Carborundum is what I say.^{42} The experts don’t know everything. Still, where would we be if we were all the same?’

Om crawled closer to the voice, bringing himself around the corner of the wall so that he could see into a small courtyard.

There was a very large barrel against the far wall. Various debris around it — broken wine amphora, gnawed bones, and a couple of lean-to shacks made out of rough boards — suggested that it was someone’s home. And this impression was given some weight by the sign chalked on a board and stuck to the wall over the barrel.

It read: