A recurring theme in Sheri Tepper's work is the urge toward God, and the ways in which that urge motivates personal and cultural choice. This theme is blatantly obvious in Raising the Stones, Tepper's 1990 novel in her Arbai Gates sequence.
Beside the ruined temple north of Settlement One, shallow in the soil lay Birrabat Shum. Shallow he lay, with fragments of roots and crumbs of leaves on his eyes...Like Grass, which preceded it, this novel is set on a human-settled world which already hosts a native life-form. The Owlbrit are already declining when humans arrive, and they soon die out, leaving behind their curiously shaped temples, one of which still boasts a sparkling, stony Owlbrit "god". Some time after this, after the human settlements are already well-established, this remnant of Owlbrit life mysteriously dies.
Shallow under the soil, near the temple at Settlement One, straight fibers ramified into feathers, and the feather into lace, which reached beneath the houses and the storage yards, beneath the settlement buildings, beneath the old temples, out toward open country in a tenuous cottony web which enclosed in its fibrous reticulation all the land from the temples north of the community to the fields in the south...Sam Girat, the Topman of Settlement One, is a genially efficient manager, capable and brave, but he's not prepared for what happens next. The children of Settlement One set out to restore an older temple in the Owlbrit style, not as a religious practice, but "as a way, a convenience, a kindness." Mysteriously, they acquire a new god to raise in the restored temple. Like his predecessor, the god Birrabat is a hard fibrous mass with evanescent sparkles running along just under the surface. Perhaps this god-stone is blasphemous, but Settlement One is suddenly running very well indeed, so the adults decide to let it go.
And the children prove to be very apt missionaries for their fibrous god. Elderly settlers, near death, are recruited to "lie shallow under the soil," to be resurrected as helpful, intrusive Hobb's Land gods. Gradually, this beneficent, quiet infection spreads to fill the world. Everywhere the god-stones are raised, people are kinder to each other, readier to help, more attuned to each other's needs.
But the infection has been noticed—unfortunately, by the Baidee, a culture that is obsessively opposed to "letting anyone mess with their heads." This ukase from the mysterious Prophetess* Morgori Oestrydingh, who arrived on their world through the long-inactive Arbai Gate, has been variously interpreted to mean "don't cut your hair" or "don't allow anyone to change your mind."
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