No matter what he did, he couldn’t shake the faith of the villagers. It was obvious at a glance that he was a god; therefore, ipso facto, everything he did was godlike.
He sat beside Iano and his wives, watching the fire roar in the communal pit and listening to the pounding beat of the musicians, but, even though the villagers were laughing happily and enjoying themselves immensely, he could not recapture the mood of easy relaxation he had borrowed from them and their world this afternoon. The Sainte Marie pressed too close to him. When he left here, he’d never be able to come back—and a ravaged world would haunt him for the rest of his Me.
“Hey! Imbry! Look what I’ve got to show you!”
He looked up, and there was Tylus, coming toward him hand in hand with a quietly beautiful girl, and holding a baby just into the toddling stage. The child was being half led, half dragged, and seemed to be enjoying it.
Imbry smiled broadly. There was no getting away from it. Tylus enjoyed life so hugely that nobody near him could quite escape the infection.
“This is my woman, Pia,” Tylus said with a proud grin, and the girl smiled shyly. “And this one hasn’t got his name yet.”
He reached down and slapped the baby playfully, and the boy grinned from ear to ear.
Everyone around the fire chuckled. Imbry grinned despite himself and nodded gravely to Tylus. “I’m glad to meet them.” He smiled at Pia. “She must have been blind to pick you when she could have had so much better.” The girl blushed, and everyone burst into laughter, while Tylus postured in proud glee. Imbry nodded toward the boy. “If he didn’t look so much like his father, I’d say he was a fine one.”
There was fresh laughter, and Imbry joined in it because he almost desperately needed to; but after it trailed away and Tylus and his family were gone back into their hut, after the fire died and the feast was over, when Imbry lay on the mat in lano’s house and the wind clashed the tree fronds while the surf washed against the beach—then Imbry lay tightly awake.
Given time—given a year or two—he might be able to break down the villagers’ idea about him. But he doubted it. Iano was right. Even if he threw away his suit and left himself with no more equipment than any of the villagers possessed, he knew too much. Earth and the Terran Union were his heritage, and that was enough to make a god of any man among these people. If he so much as introduced the wheel into this culture, he was doing something none of these people had conceived of in all their history.
And he had nothing like a year. In two weeks’ tune, even using eidetic techniques, he could barely build up enough of a vocabulary in their language to do without his translator for simpler conversations. And, again, it wouldn’t make a particle of difference whether he spoke their language or not. Words would never convince them.
But he had to get through to them somehow.
The cold fact was that during a half day’s talk, he hadn’t gotten anyone in the village to take literally even the slightest thing he said. He was a god. Gods speak in allegories, or gods proclaim laws. Gods do not speak man to man. And if they do, rest assured it is part of some divine plan, designed to meet inscrutable ends by subtle means.
What was it Lindenhoff had told him?
“You’ll contact the natives and try to get them started on some kind of civilization. You’ll explain what the Terran Union is and the advantages of trade. See how they’d respond toward developing a technology.”
It couldn’t be done. Not by a god who might, at worst, be only a demigod, who might at best even be the god, and who could not, under any circumstances, possibly be considered on a par with the other travelers-for-pleasure who occasionally turned up from over the sea but who were manifestly only other men.
He wasn’t supposed to be a stern god or an omnipotent god or a being above the flesh. That kind of deity took a monotheist to appreciate him. He was simply supposed to be a god of these people—vain and happily boastful at times, a liar at times, a glutton at times, a drunkard at times, timid at times, adventurous at times, a hero at times, and heir to other sins of the flesh at other times, but always powerful, always above the people in wisdom of his own kind, always a god. Always a mute with a whispering ancestor on his shoulder.
But if he left them now, they’d be lost. Someone else would come down, and be a god. Kenton, or Ogin or Maguire the killer. And when the new god realized the situation, he’d stop trying to make these people into at least some kind of rudimentary market. They wouldn’t even have that value to turn them into an interest to be protected. Lindenhoff would think of something else to do with them, for the Corporation’s good. Turn them into a labor force for the mines Coogan would be opening up on IV, perhaps. Or else enslave them here. Have the god nudge them into becoming farmers for the luxury market or introduce a technology whether they understood it or not.
That might work. If the god and his fellow gods found stones for them to dig and smelt into metal, and showed them how to make machines, they might do it.
To please the god by following his advice. Not because they understood or wanted machines—or needed them—but to fulfill the god’s inscrutable plan. They’d sicken with the bewilderment in their hearts and lose their smiles in the smelter’s heat. The canoes would rot on the beaches, and the fishing spears would break. The houses would crumble on the ocean’s edge until the sea reached up and swept the village clean, and the Ihoni eggs would hatch out in the warming sun. The village would be gone, and its people slaving far away, lonesome for their ancestors.
He had to do it. Somehow, within these two weeks, he had to give them a chance of some kind.
It would be his last chance, too. Twenty-six years of life and all of it blunted. He was failing here, with the taste of the Corporation bitter in his mouth. He’d found nothing in the TSN but brutal officers and cynical men waiting for a war to start somewhere, so the promotions and bonuses would come, and meanwhile making the best they could out of what police actions and minor skirmishes there were with weak alien races. Before that, school, and a thousand time-markers and campus wheels for everyone who thought that some day, if he was good enough, he’d have something to contribute to Mankind.
The god had to prove to be human after all. And the human could talk to these other men, as just another man, and then perhaps they might advance of themselves to the point where they could begin a civilization that was part of them and part of some plan of theirs, instead of some god’s. And someday these people, too, would land their metal canoes on some foreign beach under a foreign sun.
He had to destroy himself. He had to tear down his own facade.
Just before he fell into his fitful sleep, he made his decision. At the first opportunity to be of help in some way they would consider more than manlike, he’d fail. The legend would crumble, and he could be a man.
He fell asleep, tense and perspiring, and the stars hung over the world, with the mother ship among them.
The chance came. He couldn’t take it.