Divinity | Page 7

one else had given up hope for him, she had not. Perhaps she had protected him too much--but she had early learned the need for protection. He could look at her now in a new light. Her own father had died early in life, and then her husband soon after her son had been born. She had faced a tough fight, and had thought to spare him what she herself had gone through. Too bad she hadn't realized exactly what she was doing. She was bringing him up with the ability, as the old epigram had it, to resist everything but temptation.
The temptation to steal that petty cash, to put his hands into a drunk's pocket and lift the man's wallet, to lie to a pretty girl, to slug a helpless victim--he had resisted none of them. He had resisted nothing until that day he had poured the jugful of liquor on the ground and smashed the jug itself.
But could he blame his mother for all that? It had all been his own fault.
* * * * *
And it would be his own fault if he failed to resist the new temptation that now reared its pretty head--Aoooya. She had taken to coming to his hut-shrine for a private little ceremony of her own. You might almost have thought that she had fallen in love with him as an individual. He wondered whether she had been impressed by his helmet. Did she take that to be his actual head? No, of course not. They had made helmets for themselves, therefore they knew that the thing he wore was also a helmet. Perhaps they knew more about him than he thought.
But they continued to worship him, that was the main thing. And Aoooya brought him, every day, little presents, special flowers and food delicacies, that argued a personal affection.
This was a danger that he recognized from the beginning. Perhaps a god might fall in love with a mortal without losing his godliness. Perhaps. It had happened before. But, however the rest of the tribe might react to the idea, Bradley had noticed one young man who liked to stay near the girl, and he knew that this rival wouldn't take kindly to it at all. He might resent the god's behavior. And what happened when these people didn't like the way a god behaved? Why, they struck his head off.
The god might act first, of course. The young man wouldn't stand a chance against him if he used his gun. In fact, Bradley could blast the other man unobserved, make him disappear into vapor, without leaving any traces of how he died. That was murder, but if a god couldn't get away with murder, what sort of god was he? A pretty poor, cheap sort indeed. Yes, he could make his own rules.
And he could go on, maintaining his godhood by little murders of that sort, and other deadly miracles, until they hated him more than they loved him. That would follow inevitably. And then, when they all hated him, not even his gun would save him. Then--
"You're a liar," he told himself fiercely. "That isn't the thing you're afraid of. Your weakness is that you don't have a murderous nature. You could kill one or two of them and get away with it, and you'd be able to control yourself and kill no more. That time you hit the man over the head, you didn't intend to kill him either. You were more frightened, at first, anyway, by the thought that you might have killed him, than by the danger of being caught. You were overjoyed when he lived.
"You hate to kill, that's your trouble. You've had a sense of responsibility all along, but it never had a chance to develop. Now it's developed. You feel responsible for these people, for Aoooya and for the rest of them. That's why you can't take advantage of them. You've been posing as a rebel all your life, and you're just a respectable, law-abiding citizen at heart."
He winced at the thought. His own society had never accepted him at his own valuation. This one took him for a much greater being than he took himself, and there seemed to be nothing to do but to live up to what he was expected to be.
* * * * *
All the same, Aoooya continued to be a tempting morsel, and sooner or later, he feared, he would not be able to resist her. And then the planet itself provided a diversion.
They had never seen such a thing and had no idea of what it presaged, but he knew. He had heard of it on Earth and on Venus, and he had seen it on other planets where the rock formations had not yet settled down.