end of its extension cord, and connected it to a plug inside a flap below his
chin. “Ah, that does feel a lot better,” he agreed after a few seconds.
Thirg passed Groork the cup, then glanced at his hands and down at his feet in
their wheelskin sandals. He gestured toward the electroplating attachment. “If
you’re wearing hungry anywhere, help yourself.”
“You’ve eaten already?”
“Yes, I’ve had a plate. I can recommend a new composition of chromium and
vanadium that you ought to try. Delicious—home-regulated, fresh from the garden.
Or a top-up of lube, perhaps?”
Groork shook his head, and the fervent glint returned to his imaging matrixes.
“My purpose is not to trifle over pleasantries, Thirg. I have a higher calling
to answer, and I do indeed bear thee news—grave news, 0 brother who forsakes his
soul for Black Arts. Thy heresy hath betrayed thee! A writ has been issued by
the King’s Chancellor for you to be brought before the High Council of Priests
by the time of the next west-bright, to recant the public utterances in which
you have denied the Holy Scribings. Soldiers of the Royal Guard have already
departed the city and will arrive hither this bright. Flee now and save thy
wretched body while it lives, for its spirit is surely lost already to the Dark
Master thou wilt never renounce!”
“Oh . . . And what am I supposed to have said now?” Thirg asked. Despite the
tone of Groork’s words, the thermal patterns playing on the surfaces of his face
painted expressions of a concern that was genuine.
“Does thy memory ail?” Groork said. “Is that not the first symptom of the
madness that afflicts all blasphemers and drives them into the deserts to perish
seeking covenant with the accursed in the lands of the Unbelievers?”
“I’d have said they did it more to get away from the priests and avoid being
dipped in acid baths,” Thirg replied, and asked again, “What am I supposed to
have said?”
“Didst thou not, in the hearing of many who were in the marketplace, deny the
Sacred Doctrine of the Divine and Unknowable Essence of the Maker of All
Life?”’ Groork whispered, as if fearful of uttering the words too loudly.
“Hardly. What I said was that some of the sacred logic strikes me as precarious.
For is not the existence of Life cited as proof that the Lifemaker must have
made it … at least when one troubles to penetrate the confusing tangles of
words?” Thirg shrugged and took a short draught from another cord to be
sociable. “But we would never permit such a form of argument in our more mundane
world of everyday affairs. For example, if I decided to invent an Unknowable
Windowmaker, I could hardly claim that because windows exist the Windowmaker
must have made them, could I? It is known that windows grow from cultures that
are engineered by builders. Like the first, the argument is circular: It begins
by assuming that which it sets out to prove.”
Groork, who had raised his hands in an attempt to block his ears, lowered them
again with an anguished moan. “Blasphemy!” he exclaimed. “What false creed of
faith is this?”
“It’s not a creed of faith at all, but a process by which truths can be shown to
follow necessarily from simple observations,” Thirg told him. “My task has been
the reduction of this process to a series of rules which can be written down in
a form of language and used by anyone. Truly the results astonish me. Shall I
demonstrate some examples?”
Groork looked aghast. “Do you presume to impose rules upon the Lifemaker
Himself? You would dare constrain how He might choose to manifest His design?
You would confine His works to the understanding of mere mortals? What arrogance
has taken possession of thee? What manner of—”
“Oh, shut up,” Thirg said wearily. “I impose no rules of my own invention on
anyone. I merely observe the world as it is, and attempt to understand the rules
that are written into it already. It seems to me that if the Lifemaker saw fit
to endow us with intelligence at all, He would have meant us to use it. Well,