Getans were addicted to games, and they flocked to their temples to meet and laugh and compete. Outside the temple they might gamble for money or favors; inside a temple the games were free. There a Getan was gambling with his life and loving it.

To the imposing Temple at Sorrow, Oelita brought her motley group of losers who were not even sure that they had a right to life, much less sure that they had the ability to fight for it and win. Nearing the immense facade of this place where they had been defeated so often, some of the bawdy spirit that Oelita had infused in them began to vaporize. Here was the focus of their lost self-esteem. One man tripped and another made a loud joke about his friend’s clumsiness. Oelita posted them in front of the main portal with instructions to be vocal about their protest but when she was gone they hung back and took on the nature of a crumbling wall of bricks that busy people pass without a glance.

Oelita was welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Temple as an honored guest by the highest of the Stgal priests. They had been expecting her and received her with outward warmth. She was given cushions and drink and encouraged to talk. She spoke eloquently of opposition to both the Mnankrei and the Kaiel, and urged restraint in calling a condition of famine. There were other ways. There were other foods. Vaguely she had some of Nonoep’s profane triumphs in mind. Oelita built her strategy on an appeal to Stgal vanity — they were as good as the Mnankrei and as good as the Kaiel, and cleverness could defeat their opponents.

The Stgal listened, drew her out, laughed with her, and finally, without explanation, had guards take her up to a room high in the tower. It was said of the Stgal that they would feast you with great camaraderie, waiting until the dessert to poison you. She could see her people down below. No one dispersed them, even noticed them. She shouted to them through the bars, but she was too high. No one heard. Till dusk she watched, and with the setting of the sun they just melted away.

Her tower room was more than comfortable. Here the kalothi-weak were pampered to honor the sacrifice they were to make for the Race. The Lowest on the List spent his last night with everything a Getan valued — clear water for the throat and incense for the nose and tastes for the tongue from the stamen of the hug flower and the chanting of a choir of friends and a mate to please the body. Here was gold to feel and the finest cloth to lie upon. Still, the window was barred with iron. From this window, they said, no more exalting sight ever met a human’s eyes than that last transit of the God of the Sky across the stars.

She couldn’t believe she was here. Was it a mirage, that fervent group of people she had commanded? They were ghosts. She was alone. Was it illusion to think that words would ever raise people to action? The first crisis, and my words collapse like a sand city cut down by a single wave. What was loyalty? What made men stick together in good and in bad? I thought I knew.

She was trying to understand why she was here. It was against the rules. She had the highest kalothi rating in all of Sorrow. And then she laughed through the bars at the night sky. The rules were to be broken, as every kol master knew — if you could have the consequences of the broken rule. And what was her death to them? She would slash her wrists and die. I’ll have no choice. No one would care. Life would go on as if she never was.

She found herself staring through the bars vacantly, thoughtlessly, waiting, waiting for God. And when God passed overhead, she laughed and cried. God was a stone. When you were brought up among a whole people who believed in God the Person, some of His Morality remained a part of your soul. God the Stone had no morality. Even knowing that, she had never really felt it before. She was here because there was no morality. God was a stone. That’s all there had ever been. And Oelita wept.

23

THE SMALL SHIP and its one-masted companion were anchored near an ancient breakwater that was smashed by wave action. Someone had tried basing a small fleet here long ago and had given up, defeated by a rocky coast, harborless and inhospitable to ships. Joesai chose this refuge only because of an o’Tghalie clan-home in the mountains near the sea. Teenae had been carried on a stretcher up through the foggy woods and left with relatives to recuperate.

The sweet moments he spent with Teenae soothed his brooding turmoil. Restlessly he wandered through the woods, once finding a red flower of an intricate design he had never seen before, bringing it back to Teenae knowing that his little gift would please her. His anguish was forgotten.

“It is like a little temple,” she said and smiled at him.

“I was up on the peak looking to see if our ships were still there.”

“In this mild weather you expect them to blow away?”

“I expect the Mnankrei to sweep down upon us.”

“We’ll run away together. We can fly before the wind faster than they can. Haven’t I had experience as a sail?” she teased, laughing, and taking his hand.

The o’Tghalie observatory fascinated Joesai, for he had always been interested in the stars. He often brought a bottle and a loaf of bread along the trail at dusk to spend the night there with one of Teenae’s uncles who told stories about that imp’s stubborn youth. “You can see why they sold her!” And he’d roar with laughter.

This uncle was not a very conventional man. He had a love of instruments, which was unusual among the o’Tghalie. He was the renegade who had taught Teenae things she shouldn’t have known. O’Tghalie brains were peculiar in that if they did not learn to perform complicated additions and multiplications in their heads as a child, they never learned to do these operations well. Thus o’Tghalie women, denied school as young girls, became servants rather than mathematicians.

Joesai was awed when he watched “uncle” o’Tghalie take measurements and transform the numbers by elaborate computation during a mere pause and holding of the breath. But uncle was not a man who rested happy with mysteries, and one cloudy night he showed Joesai how to “throw the bones”, a system he had devised so that a non-mathematician might calculate with reasonable accuracy. It was based on the weird principle that multiplications could magically be transformed into additions and back again. Joesai was so delighted by this trick that one morning he brought the bones with him and set them up behind Teenae’s head so that she wouldn’t see what he was doing. He had her give him multiplications to perform which he was able to do correctly, to her amazement.

Joesai learned some facts about astronomy that he had never known before. Once he was speculating with Teenae’s uncle about a philosophical point Oelita had made in a pamphlet. God behaved like a stone. Joesai was convinced that, since God wasn’t a stone, there should be some way of pointing up the difference.

Uncle brightened perceptibly and dragged Joesai down to the library to pore over soiled books of calculations. God’s orbit was indeed predictable to a high degree of accuracy, but there had been two anomalies. The orbit had changed twice with no known cause since it had been under observation. No other celestial objects ever did that.

Joesai remembered Oelita’s crystal and what Teenae had said about it. He was sure that it was only a piece of glass, but what if it really was one of Kathein’s crystals? The enigma of the Silent God was the most fascinating of Geta’s puzzles and it might well be worth a major effort to look into this piece of the riddle. He hadn’t thought about Oelita for a while. He had been preoccupied with the astonishing revelation of Mnankrei intentions the night of the silo firebombing. He was now planning a probe into northern waters. But perhaps while the men took the ship north, he could make a quick return expedition to the south and find out more about that crystal.