On the side of the shrine opposite the archway, one of the men began chanting a litany that I recognized better than any of the others, and I looked up suddenly to see if it had happened.

It had.

The glassite plate depicting Shimbo of Darktree, Shrugger of Thunders, was glowing now, green and yellow.

Some of their deities are Pei'apomorphic, to coin a term, while others, like the Egyptians', look like crosses between Pei'ans and things you might find in a zoo. Still others are just weird-looking. And somewhere along the line, I'm sure they must have visited the Earth, because Shimbo is a man. Why any intelligent race would care to make a god of a savage is beyond me, but there he stands, naked, with a slight greenish cast to his complexion, his face partly hidden by his upraised left arm, which holds a thunder cloud in the midst of a yellow sky. He bears a great bow in his right hand and a quiver of thunderbolts hangs at his hip. Soon all six Pei'ans and the eight humans were chanting the same litany. More began to file in through the door. The place began to fill up.

A great feeling of light and power began in my middle section and expanded to fill my entire body.

I don't understand what makes it happen, but whenever I enter a Pei'an shrine, Shimbo begins to glow like that, and the power and the ecstasy is always there. When I completed my thirty-year course of training and my twenty-year apprenticeship in the trade that made me my fortune, I was the only Earthman in the business. The other worldscapers are all Pei'ans. Each of us bears a Name--one of the Pei'an deities'--and this aids us in our work, in a complex and unique fashion. I chose Shimbo--or he chose me--because he seemed to be a man. For so long as I live, it is believed that he will be manifest in the physical universe. When I die, he returns to the happy nothing, until another may bear the Name. Whenever a Name-bearer enters a Pei'an shrine, that deity is illuminated in his place--in every shrine in the galaxy. I do not understand the bond. Even the Pei'ans don't, really.