Along the narrow winding street were many little shops, flowering with
a variety of articles. Green was intrigued by the magical charms being
hawked everywhere. Many of these were little towers, replicas of the
large ones that encircled the country. On Earth they could have passed
for toy spaceships. He bought one. It was made of white-painted wood
and was about seven inches long. The big flaring fins and landing
struts were well reproduced, but there weren't any of the fine details
that he could have found in such a toy on Earth. There were no holes
in the stern or nose for the drive-exhaust or any indications of doors
or detector apparatus.
He gave it to Grizquetr and leaned back to do some more thinking.
The charm hadn't disappointed him, because he had not expected any
more than what he'd seen. If, in the beginning, those models had been
furnished with every little detail, the passage of many thousands of
years would have seen them blunted and reduced to their present state
of fuzzy symbolic images. Time ate down to the skeleton of things.
He wondered how the charm could have survived up to the present,
because it surely must have been over twenty thousand years ago that
the prototype, the real spaceship, disappeared and man sank back to
savagery again. Then, why had this lasted here, whereas it had not done
so on other planets, Earth included?
Abruptly, he noticed that his rickshaw had stopped.
"A procession of priests, going to the palace of the King, where
they will spend all night preaching to the demon," said one of their
rickshaw boys. He yawned and stretched. "I suppose that it will be a
fine burning, since the priests have predicted that the sun will shine
at high noon. They are safe doing that, as it has not failed to shine
on Festival Day for a thousand years."
Green leaned forward, his hands gripping the sides of his chair, and
said, "Demon? You meant demons, didn't you? Weren't there two of them?"
"Oh yes, there were. But one died two days ago. Hung himself, I heard,
though I can't swear to it since the priests have released no details.
The holy ones have been giving the demons a rough time."
"Demons?" said Grizquetr, snorting with disbelief and disgust. "Doesn't
the very fact that one killed himself prove they're not fiends?
Everyone knows that a demon can't kill himself."
"Quite true, my small friend," replied the taxi man. "The priests have
admitted their error. They are truly sorry--so they say."
"Then aren't they letting the other man loose?"
"Oh no. Because _he_ may still be a demon. Tomorrow, at high noon, the
prisoner goes under the Sun's Eye and there meets the only death a
demon may know. _By fire he was born, by fire he shall perish._ Chapter
Twenty, Verse Sixty-Two. Or so I remember the High Grauchning saying in
his sermon yesterday. Myself, I'm not much for reading. Too busy making
a living, running my legs off, killing myself so my wife and kids may
eat and have clothes on their backs."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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