“No one can cross the desert. No one can live in the heart of the desert.”
“I did.”
“It's only a couple of days' sailing.” Brutha's stomach lurched, even though the boat had hardly cleared the jetty. "And they say that the God-
"-me-
“-is sending us a fair wind.”
“I am? Oh. Yes. Trust me for a fair wind. Flat as a mill-race the whole way, don't you worry.”
“I meant mill-pond! I meant mill-pond!”
Brutha clung to the mast.
After a while a sailor came and sat down on a coil of rope and looked at him interestedly.
“You can let go, Father,” he said. “It stands up all by itself.”
“The sea . . . the waves . . .” murmured Brutha carefully, although there was nothing left to throw up.
The sailor spat thoughtfully.
“Aye,” he said. “They got to be that shape, see, so's to fit into the sky.”
“But the boat's creaking!”
“Aye. It does that.”
“You mean this isn't a storm?”
The sailor sighed, and walked away.
After a while, Brutha risked letting go. He had never felt so ill in his life.
It wasn't just the seasickness. He didn't know where he was. And Brutha had always known where he was. Where he was, and the existence of Om, had been the only two certainties in his life.
It was something he shared with tortoises. Watch any tortoise walking, and periodically it will stop while it files away the memories of the journey so far. Not for nothing, elsewhere in the multiverse, are the little traveling devices controlled by electric thinking-engines called “turtles.”
Brutha knew where he was by remembering where he had been-by the unconscious counting of footsteps and the noting of landmarks. Somewhere inside his head was a thread of memory which, if you had wired it directly to whatever controlled his feet, would cause Brutha to amble back through the little pathways of his life all the way to the place he was born.
Out of contact with the ground, on the mutable surface of the sea, the thread flapped loose.
In his box, Om tossed and shook to Brutha's motion as Brutha staggered across the moving deck and reached the rail.
To anyone except the novice, the boat was clipping through the waves on a good sailing day. Seabirds wheeled in its wake. Away to one side-port or starboard or one of those directions-a school of flying fish broke the surface in an attempt to escape the attentions of some dolphins. Brutha stared at the gray shapes as they zigzagged under the keel in a world where they never had to count at all
“Ah, Brutha,” said Vorbis. “Feeding the fishes, I see.”
“No, lord,” said Brutha. “I'm being sick, lord.”
He turned.
There was Sergeant Simony, a muscular young man with the deadpan expression of the truly professional soldier. He was standing next to someone Brutha vaguely recognized as the number-one salt or whatever his title was. And there was the exquisitor, smiling.
“Him! Him!” screamed the voice of the tortoise.
“Our young friend is not a good sailor,” said Vorbis.