The village was built to suit the environment. The roofs and walls of the light, one-room houses were made of woven frond mats tied down to a boxy frame. Every house had a porch for socializing with passersby and a cookfire out front. Most of the houses faced in on a circular village square, with a big, communal cooking pit for special events, and the entire village was set in under the trees just a little away from the shoreline. There were several canoes on the sand above high water, and at some time this culture had developed the outrigger.
There was a large amount of shouting back and forth going on among the villagers, and a good-sized crowd had collected at the point where the trail opened out into the village clearing. But Tylus urged Imbry forward, passing proudly through the crowd, and Imbry went with him, feeling somewhat awkward about it, but not wanting to leave Tylus marching on alone. The villagers moved aside to let him through, smiling, some of them grinning at Tylus’s straight back and proudly carried head, none of them, obviously, wanting to deprive their compatriot of his moment.
Tylus stopped when he and Imbry reached the big central cooking pit, turned around, and struck a pose with one arm around Imbry’s shoulders.
“Hey! Look! I’ve brought a big visitor!” Tylus shouted, grinning with pleasure.
The villagers let out a whoop of feigned surprise, laughing and shouting congratulations to Tylus, and cordial welcomes to Imbry.
“He says he’s not a god!” Tylus climaxed, giving Imbry a broad, sidelong look of grinning appreciation for his ability to be ridiculous. “He came out of a big Ihoni egg on the beach, and he’s got a father-ghost who sits on his shoulder in a little black pot and gives him advice!”
“Oh, that’s ingenious!” someone in the crowd commented in admiration.
“Look how fair he is!” one of the women exclaimed. “Look how much handsomer than us he is!”
“Look how richly he’s dressed! Look at the jewels shining in his silver belt!”
Imbry’s translator raced to give him representative crowd comments, and he grinned back at the crowd. His rescue training had always presupposed grim, hostile or at best noncommittal ETs that would have to be persuaded into helping him locate the crashed personnel of the stricken ship. Now, the first time he’d put it to actual use, he found reality giving theory a bland smile, and he sighed and relaxed completely. Once he’d disabused this village of its god-notions in connection with him, he’d be able to not only work but be friendly with these people. Not that they weren’t already cordial.
He looked around at the crowd, both to observe it and to give everybody a look at his smile.
The crowd was composed, in nearly equal parts, of men and women very much like Tylus, with no significant variation except for age and sex characteristics that ranged from the appreciable to the only anthropologically interesting. In lesser part, there were children, most of them a little timid, some of them awestruck, all of them naked.
An older man, wearing a necklace of carved wood in addition to his wraparound, came forward through the crowd. Imbry had to guess at his age, but he thought he had it fairly accurately. The native had white hair, for one thing, and a slight thickness to his waist. For another, he was rather obviously the village head man, and that indicated age and the experience it brought with it.
The head man raised his arm in greeting, and Imbry replied.
“I am Iano. Will you stay with us in our village?” Imbry nodded. “My name’s Imbry. I’d like to stay here for a while.” Iano broke into a smile. “Fine! We’re all very glad to meet you. I hope your journey can be interrupted for a long tune.” He smiled. “Well, if you say you’re not a god, who do you say you are?” There was a ripple of chuckling through the crowd.
“I’m a man,” Imbry answered. The translator had meanwhile worked out the proper wording for what he wanted to say next. “I’m an explorer from another country.” The local word, of course, was not quite “explorer”—it was traveler-from-other-places-for-the-enjoyment-of-it-and-to-see-what-I-can-find. Iano chuckled. Then, gravely, he asked: “Do you always travel in an Ihoni egg, Imbry-who-says-he-is-Imbry?”
Imbry chuckled back in appreciation of Iano’s shrewdness. He was enjoying this, even if it was becoming more and more difficult to approach the truth.
“That’s no Ihoni egg,” he deprecated with a broad gesture to match. “That’s only my…” And here the translator had to give up and render the word as canoe.
Iano nodded with a gravity so grave it was obviously no gravity at all. Tylus, standing to one side, gave Imbry a look of total admiration at this effort which overmatched all his others.
“Ah. Your canoe. And how does one balance a canoe shaped like an Ihoni egg?”
Imbry realized what the translator had had to do. He’d been afraid of as much. He searched for the best answer, and the best answer seemed to be to tell the truth and stick to it. These people were intelligent. If he presented them with a consistent story and backed it up with as much proof as he could muster, they’d eventually see that nothing so scrupulously self-consistent could possibly be anything but the truth. “Well,” he said slowly, wondering what the effect would be at first, “it’s a canoe that doesn’t sail on water. It sails in the sky.”
There was a chorus of admiration through the crowd. As much of it seemed to be meant for Iano as for Imbry. They appeared to think Imbry had made a damaging admission in this contest.
Iano smiled. “Is your country in the sky?” Imbry struggled for some way of making it understandable. “Yes and no,” he said carefully. “It’s necessary to travel through the sky to get to my country, but when you get there you’re in a place that’s very much like here, in some ways.” Iano smiled again. “Well, of course. How else would you be happy if there weren’t places like this to live, in the sky?”
He turned toward the other villagers. “He said he wasn’t a god,” he declared quietly, his eyes twinkling.
There was a burst of chuckling, and now all the admiring glances were for Iano.
The head man turned back to Imbry. “Will you stay in my house for a while? We will produce a feast later in the day.”
Imbry nodded gravely. “I’d be honored.” The villagers were smiling at him gently as they drifted away, and Imbry got the feeling that they were being polite and telling him that his discomfiture didn’t really matter.
“Don’t be sad,” Tylus whispered. “lano’s a remarkably shrewd man. He could make anybody admit the truth. I’m quite sure that when he dies, he’ll be some kind of god himself.”
Then he waved a hand in temporary farewell and moved away, leaving Imbry alone with the gravely smiling Iano.
Imbry sat on the porch with Iano. Both of them looked out over the village square, sitting side by side. It seemed to be the expected posture for conversation between a god and someone who was himself a likely candidate for a similar position, and it certainly made for ease of quiet contemplation before each new sentence was brought out into words.
Imbry was still wearing his suit. Iano had politely suggested that he might be warm in it, but Imbry had explained.