He gazed at her morosely, unwilling to leave. Her craftsmen were watching him.

“I know,” she said, scorning his open love. “You’d kill for me. Now get out!”

35

VERY CAREFULLY FROM behind the sand bags Joesai pulled the wire attached to the thumb that tripped the hammer. The air cracked! Then: deaf silence. Neither Joesai nor Gaet breathed for heartbeats. They ran over and examined the acrid-smelling tube. It wasn’t split. A hole had appeared in the wooden target.

“God’s Streak!” said Gaet, jumping up and down like a boy.

Joesai roared with laughter. “By God! You just tell those og’Sieth to build something and they build it.”

Joesai opened the breach and put in another cartridge and screwed the breach closed. The cartridges had taken him a whole day to make. It was easy to use Shoemi’s Method to calculate the structure of an organic compound that would break down into gases with a sudden release of energy — but cooking up the compound itself was scary. Such molecules are fragile. In the end he had used two explosives, one to detonate the other. God had said nothing to suggest an appropriate explosive and he wasn’t sure that he had the right ones.

“This pressure tube has use in some ritual?” asked Gaet.

“God alone knows. It is used for putting holes in things.” The larger brother examined the hole in the wooden target with some care. A drill would have done much better. “I think it is mainly used to punch holes in distant people. A knife for cowards.”

“A killing tool?” Gaet was not sure how it could be used in such a fashion. Perhaps the tube could be set up so that someone tripped over the trigger wire.

“It is held against the shoulder. You pull the metal thumb with your forefinger while you keep the tube lined up with whatever you wish to hole. Do you want to grasp it in your hands for the next explosion?” Joesai enjoyed teasing his brother.

“Do I look the fool?”

Joesai was cracking up laughing. “Not a fool. Perhaps a coward? You’re not going to take God’s word that such is safe?”

“Suddenly I hear Oelita’s voice preaching atheism in my ear.”

“She has begun to talk to you?”

“Yes.”

“Same old bees in her robe?”

“She’s not going to change. Why should we all believe the same thing?”

“Why should we believe lies? Go ahead, believe a stone is a potato — but you’ll break your teeth! She signs contracts with Hoemei as if she were Kaiel. Ho. I grant you that she is as tough as the bi-wood that bends but cannot be carved. Still her mind is pudding.”

“She has a simple reverence for life that I respect.”

“She has a simpleminded reverence for falsehood. Before I leave I shall show her God. I vow that.”

“The Death Rite is ended!” said Gaet as a command.

Joesai smiled cunningly. “You would protect her from words?”

“Husband, she’s had enough,” Gaet pleaded.

“You pity her,” Joesai exclaimed in astonishment. They were creche and they did not pity. To pity was to insult. “She rots your mind with her sexy wiggle. How is it that you did not answer my question? If a Trial of Words destroys her, can she be Kaiel?”

“How will you show her the truth of God? How can you show the sky to a blind man?”

“And I ask you, how can she deny the revelations of God that appear from her own crystal? I’ll show her this.” He shook his steel spitter-of-lead-pebbles. “How could I have built this except at the command of God?” He mused, holding God’s revealed weapon. “What I hold is called a ‘rifle’. Actually the description was enigmatic and I had to use my imagination. I had quite a discussion with your og’Sieth friend trying to reconstruct the fine details. Teenae verified my logic. The deduction demanded skill because there was no description of how the rifle worked. All I have is a few anecdotal recountings of its use. The World in the Sky is a weird world of killers. I’ll show you a passage when we go back to the Palace that tells the story of hill people wandering around with rifles holing Russian priests who live inside mobile temples of steel four thumbs thick. That impressed me.”

“A God who preaches killing will not impress Oelita.”

Joesai lifted the rifle to his shoulder and aimed into the hill…

“No!” screamed Gaet.

… and pulled the metal thumb. There was another crack! a terrible impact against his shoulder, and a flying chip of stone. “The logic that will destroy her mind if she is unwilling to change is this: God saved us from a world where they were breeding only for better killers. He did not speak to us of this until we had learned of ourselves to breed for better values. Now He tells us how to kill again through Oelita who has brought us His words. It is a test to see what we have learned. God is Oelita’s partner. Can her mind survive knowing that? God abhors Death and through her gives us limitless new ways of Death. What Oelita cannot face today, and must face if she is to survive, is that Death will stop neither for her nor for God. Death is senior to us all. We win only by tricking Death to our own purpose, which is the breeding of kalothi.”

The argument continued while they loaded and flung five lead pebbles. It slogged along intermittently as Getasun, at highnode, found the brothers concentrating their attention on a test of the portable rayvoice. They contacted the Palace and left a message for Hoemei that said simply, “Creche reunion of the Wooden Triangle at sunset.” The argument continued more vigorously on Gaet’s skrei-wheel, bumping back into the city, packsack loaded on the bars and rifle lashed to Joesai’s shoulders. When Hoemei met them in his Palace apartment, its tables readied with cold feast, one of the Liethe playing softly as she sat by the window, legs crossed, the argument languished into an off trail and had to be reintroduced later.

The Liethe, unhurried, concluded her melodious piece before she rose, bowed, and helped them out of their clothes. She was temporarily waylaid in her gentle task by a fascination for the cold steel tube with its strange attachments. “What is this?” Her fingers stroked the barrel.

“A device for quieting inquisitive women,” Joesai joked.

Receiving his joke as a command to be silent, she led them to their bath without even a rustle from her robe. Her delicate hands began to massage away their tiredness, with the dirt, running the warm water over their bodies in a relaxing glory.

Hoemei pulled up a cushion. “I hear Kathein has found the title page.”

“Have you been reading the revelations?” asked Joesai.

“I haven’t had a moment! God’s Feet have been kicking me. Tonight I have a tryst with Teenae for the evening and she promises to read to me selections from the foul book if I properly satisfy her bodily hungers. I’ve missed the excitement. My God, on top of everything I now have duties to the Gathering.”

“Bendaein won’t use you!” Joesai spat scornfully.

Hoemei sighed. “I’m into the Gathering because of you. Some private organizing for your benefit. Bendaein knows nothing of my efforts.”

Joesai glared at Hoemei, telling him to shut up while they were in the same room with one of Aesoe’s spies.

“She’s loyal to me, Joesai.”

“You’d trust your own mother, if you had one.”

“It was Honey who found your men in Soebo.”

Without missing a knead of his muscles, she spoke. “They are held underground at the Temple of Raging Seas. Some high sea priest thinks it will prove useful to keep them alive.”