The Book Of The River by Ian Watson

Author:Ian Watson [Watson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Marching in single file allowed few opportunities for chattering. When we sat round a fire that evening Andri and I talked again, whilst Jothan busied himself boiling soup.

“Do you really think you’re a puppet?” I pressed Andri. “Or a dummy-body, or whatever?”

He scratched his beard a while. “Look: our forebears weren’t bom here, for a fact. If you plunge into water, does that turn you into a fish? Likewise, if you plunge into a foreign world, why should you suddenly be at home?”

“We live here. We are at home.”

He nodded at the cookpot. “Why should we be able to eat what’s here, and live on it?”

“Well, we do.”

“That’s no answer.”

“We must have brought a lot of things with us to eat. Chickens, for instance! Some ancient writings mention chickens.”

“Do they? How d’you know they’re the same sort of chickens, eh? And why should chickens be able to peck around and live here? Unless, girl, unless we’ve all of us—chickens and people—been made into the sort of bodies as can live here. The Deotheorists say if you just dump a man of Eeden down on a strange world exactly as he is, he’ll starve in a few days. He can’t digest the local food. Or it poisons him. Same applies to the air and water.”

“It couldn’t have been too different here.”

“Happen not. Otherwise maybe we’d have needed scales on our skin, or shells on our backs.”

“That’s silly.”

“No, it ain’t. We’d have been made differently. As would the chickens and cucumbers and everything else as came from Eeden. The Deotheorists say that all the kinds of life there are, are spelled out by different words. These aren’t like our words, that we speak. They’re very long magical words—so long, it would take you ten thousand pages to write but a single one of ‘em. These words are written in our flesh. If you change the spelling, you change the shape of life.

“When we arrived here, whatever it was as brought us read all the words of this world back to the God-Mind. He thought about them, learned the language of life here, then he changed the spelling of our own words so as we would fit in.

“And on a hundred other worlds elsewhere, other words were read. And other shapes was bom.

“Only the God-Mind can understand these words and change our spelling. It only takes Him minutes. Hours at the most. It would take us hundreds of years. I’ll warrant He changed our stomachs and our blood quite a bit. Though not our outward looks. We look the same as we would back in Eeden.”

If the God-Mind hadn’t changed our appearance, why assume that he had changed us in secret, hidden ways? This seemed to be a completely unnecessary theory, in high need of the “razor of logic” to cut it out. I said so.

“Why is the idea handed down, if it’s unnecessary?” demanded Andri.

“Because it gives the Brotherhood an excuse to rule the roost.”

He grinned broadly. “Ah, you’ve solved it all in a twinkling! Simplicity itself!” He leaned closer.

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