“He’s fine! He stopped crying! His leg isn’t hot anymore, and we can touch it without hurting him!” Tylus shouted, looking up at Imbry.
Imbry didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He smiled with an agonized twist of his mouth. “I thought I told you not to touch that foot.”
“But he’s fine, Imbry! He’s even laughing!” Tylus was gesturing joyfully. “Imbry—”
“Yes?”
“Imbry, I want a gift.”
“A gift?”
“Yes. I want you to give him your name. When his naming day comes, I want him to call himself The Beloved of Imbry.” My God, Imbry thought, I’ve done it! I’ve saddled them with the legend of myself. He looked down at Tylus. “Are you sure?” he asked, feeling the words come out of his tight throat.
“I would like it very much,” Tylus answered with sudden quietness.
And there was nothing Imbry could say but, “All right. When his naming day comes, if you still want to.”
Tylus nodded. Then, obviously, he realized he’d run out of things to say and do. With Imbry the ancestor, or Imbry the-man-with-many-powerful-ancestors; with Imbry the demigod, he could have found something else to talk about. But this was Imbry, the god of all gods, and that was different.
“Well… I have to be with Pia. Thank you.” He threw Imbry one more grateful smile and trotted back across the square, to where the other villagers were clustered around Pia, talking excitedly and often looking with shy smiles in Imbry’s direction.
It was growing rapidly darker. Night was coming, and the hurricane was trudging westward with it. Imbry looked at Iano, with his wraparound plastered against his body by the force of the wind and his face in the darkness under the overhanging porch roof.
“What’ll you do when the storm comes?” Imbry asked, Iano gestured indefinitely. “Nothing, if it’s a little one. If it’s bad, we’ll get close to the trees, on the side away from the wind.”
“Do you think it looks like it’ll get bad?” Iano gestured in the same way. “Who knows?” he said, looking at Imbry.
Imbry looked at him steadily. “I’m only a man. I can’t make it better or worse. I can’t tell you what it’s going to be. I’m only a man, no matter what Tylus and Pia think.” Iano gestured again. “There are men. I know that much because I am a man. There may be other men, who are our ancestors and our gods, who in their turn have gods. And those gods may have greater gods. But I am a man, and I know what I see and what I am. Later, after I die and am an ancestor, I may know other men like myself, and call them men. But these people who are not yet ancestors—” He swept his arm in a gesture that encircled the village. “—these people, will call me a god, if I choose to visit them.
“To Tylus and Pia—and to many others—you are the god of all gods. To myself… I don’t know. Perhaps I am too near to being an ancestor not to think there may be other gods above you. But,” he finished, “they are not my gods. They are yours. And to me you are more than a man.”
The hurricane came with the night, and the sea was coldly phosphorescent as it battered at the shore. The wind screamed invisibly at the trees. The village square was scoured clean of sand and stones, and the houses were groaning.
The villagers sat on the ground, resting then’ backs against the thrashing trees.
Imbry couldn’t accustom himself to the constant sway. He stood motionless beside the tree that sheltered Iano, using his pressors to brace himself. He knew the villagers were looking at him through the darkness, taking it as one more proof of what he was, but that made no difference any longer. He faced into the storm, feeling the cold sting of the wind.
Lindenhoff would be overjoyed. And Maguire would grin coldly. Coogan would count his money, and Petrick would drink a solitary toast to the helpless suckers he could make do anything he wanted.
And Imbry? He let the cold spray dash against his face and didn’t bother to wipe it off. Imbry was ready to quit.
The universe was made the way it was, and there was no changing it, whether to suit his ideas of what men should be or not. The legendary heroes of the human race—the brave, the brilliant, selfless men who broke the constant trail for the rest of Mankind to follow—must have been a very different breed from what the stories said they were.
A house crashed over on the far side of the village and crushed apart. He heard a woman moan in brief fear, but then her man must have quieted her, for there was no further sound from any of the dim figures huddled against the trees around him.
The storm rose higher. For a half hour, Imbry listened to the houses tearing down, and felt the spray in his face thicken until it was like rain. The phosphorescent wall of surf crept higher on the beach, until he could see it plainly; a tumbling, ghostly mass in among the trees nearest the beach. The wind became a solid wall, and he turned up the intensity on his pressors. He had no way of knowing whether the villagers were making any sound or not.
He felt a tug at his leg, and bent down, turning off his pressors. Iano was looking up at him, his face distorted by the wind, his hair standing away from one side of his head. Imbry closed one arm around the tree.
“What?” Imbry bellowed into the translator, and the translator tried to bellow into lano’s ear.
“It… very… very bad… very… rain… no rain…”
The translator struggled to get the message through to Imbry, but the wind tore it to tatters.
“Yes, it’s bad,” Imbry shouted. “What was that about rain?”
“Imbry… when… rain…”
Clearly and distinctly, he heard a woman scream. There was a second’s death for the wind. And then the rain and the sea came in among the trees together.
White, furious water tore at his legs and pushed around his waist. He gagged on salt. Coughing and choking, he tried to see what was happening to the villagers.
But he was cut off in a furious, pounding, sluicing mass of water pouring out of the sky at last, blind and isolated as he tried to find air to breathe. He felt it washing into his suit, filling its legs, weighing his feet down. He closed his helmet in a panic, spilling its water down over his head, and as he snapped it tight another wave raced through the trees to break far inland, and he lost his footing.
He tumbled over and over in the churning water, fumbling for his pressor controls. Finally he got to them and snapped erect, with the field on full. The water broke against his face plate, flew away, and he was left standing in a bubble of emptiness that exactly outlined the field. Sea water walled it from the ground to the height of his face, and the rain roofed it from above.
Blind inside his bubble, he waited for the morning.
He awoke to a dim light filtering through to him, and he looked up to see layer after layer of debris piled atop his bubble. It was still raining, but the solid cloudburst was over. There was still water on the ground, but it was only a few inches deep. He collapsed his field, and the pulped sticks and chips of wood fell in a shower on him. He threw back his helmet and looked around.
The water had carried him into the jungle at the extreme edge of the clearing where the village had stood, and from where he was he could see out to the heaving ocean.
The trees were splintered and bent. They lay across the clearing, pinning down a few slight bits of wreckage. But almost all traces of the village were gone. Where the canoes with their household possessions had lain in an anchored row, there was nothing left.
Only a small knot of villagers stood in the clearing. Imbry tried to count them; tried to compare them to the size of the crowd that had welcomed him into the village, and stopped. He came slowly forward, and the villagers shrank back. Iano stepped out to meet him and, slowly, Tylus.