You probably think the sun circles your world, but in fact all three objects are in a static configuration and Erspia has a twenty-eight hour rotation beneath them. They wouldn’t need much power to do that: they are outside the gravity well. Anyway, the configuration seems stable enough. The nearest star is about four light years away.”
He uttered the technicalities automatically, careless that she was unable to understand them. She stared at the screen, eyes glazed. “So this is how the gods speak to us,” she breathed.
“Twin powers, pulling in opposite directions. Having to pass through the bulk of Erspia attenuates the beams only slightly, just enough so that Ahriman has the advantage by night, and Ormazd by day…”
He tailed off. Perhaps she would grasp enough to help her resist. If he could persuade her to make use of the lead cabinet, she might be prevented from falling into the kind of life which was offered here in the encampment.
He still could not fathom what was behind the set-up. It was obviously a contrived travesty of Zoroastrianism, the ancient dualistic religion in which a good god and an evil god fought over possession of the universe. It even used the same names for those gods. That, together with the way their force diminished in alternation with the diurnal rotation of the planetoid, had given him the idea of searching for them beyond the shallow atmosphere.
Earlier he had demonstrated his findings to Hoggora, the man who called himself the High Priest of the Forces of Darkness. Hoggora, to give him his due, possessed an unusually sharp brain. He had quickly understood the notion of spaceships, of viewscreens that could see out into space and even round the curve of the planetoid, and showed by his questions that he understood nearly everything Laedo said to him. He had been delighted at the sight of the Ahrimanic thought-projector, calling it ‘Ahriman’s mouth’.
When Laedo suggested that the evidence was in favour of Ahriman not being a god at all, he had simply shrugged, as though the question didn’t interest him.
Laedo had heard of experiments in thought-rays, using low-frequency radiation, but to his knowledge they had never been even moderately successful. The twin beams that bathed this little world were highly sophisticated and fully effective, able to persuade the recipient that the suggestions invading his mind were his own. Laedo did not think the projectors were of human manufacture.
And the inhabitants of Erspia—how had they got here? They all spoke fairly good Argot Galactica, the interstellar language of human intercourse, but had no traditions or legends that told of them arriving from anywhere else. As far as they knew, they had always been on Erspia.
He killed the picture on the screen, replacing it with a view of the camp. By the blazing lights of the fires, banners were raised. Whatever entertainment Hoggora had planned was in progress.
He keyed in sound. A swell of screams and triumphant, hoarse shouts filled the cabin. It was the same every night. There were always plenty of prisoners to satisfy the horde’s bloodlust.
Laedo wondered what it would be like to give way entirely to sensuousness, greed and violence.
He blanked out the screen and turned to Histrina. “Okay,” he said with a sigh, “let’s get to bed.”
In the following days Laedo suffered a number of disappointments. Histrina consented, at first, to join him in his twice-daily sessions in the lead cabinet—including one at midnight, to ward off Ahriman at his strongest. But after a while he sensed her reluctance to continue. Once she disappeared into the encampment for an entire day, to return at dawn, flushed, bright-eyed and exhilarated.
He did not ask her what she had been doing. He had come to realize that a person’s eventual allegiance to one god or the other owed something to an inner disposition as well as to social influences. The Ormazdian priests had become adept at blocking sinful thoughts, and likewise the worshippers of Ahriman had learned to block any good or worthy thoughts.
Something in Histrina liked Ahriman better than it liked Ormazd.
His second disappointment concerned the work Hoggora had ordered an artisan to do for him. Laedo’s forced stay on Erspia had lasted several weeks now. When his star engine failed he had at first suspected something amiss with the fuel rods, which he had bought cheap from a roadside vendor. But he had checked them out and found them all right.
There had been nothing for it but to strip down the engine. He had cursed himself mightily for not providing himself with a proper tool kit, but fortunately the fault had come to light as soon as he got the cowling off. A transductor had fractured. It was lucky the spilled energy had not melted down the entire ship.
It would be no good trying to weld it. Essentially, however, the part was simple—merely a rectangular conduit about six feet long, with a precisely aligned arrangement of internal flanges. There were a number of skilled metal workers in the camp, and Laedo hoped that mild steel, if he put a refrigeration jacket on it, would hold out long enough to get him to the nearest inhabited star, where he could get one made of the proper HCferric.
The artisan bungled the job. The flanges were much too rough, and were not precisely positioned. The energy hazing from the fuel rods, instead of being whirled into a plasmic vortex, would instead erode the pipe before he got half a light year.
He debated whether to inform Hoggora of the metal worker’s failure. Hoggora would likely have the fellow burned alive for it. Laedo was not sure what his own fate would be, either. Hoggora regarded him as a pet, an exotic plaything. He was entranced by Laedo’s tales of other worlds among the stars and plainly meant to visit them himself when the ship was in order—as well, possibly, as make a pilgrimage to Ahriman’s mouth, where he felt sure he would be well received as High Priest.
One afternoon, four days after he had accepted Histrina into his household, Laedo came out of the anti-radiation cabinet and trudged to the main cabin, where he found her just emerging from her bed. He took some coffee and food slabs from the dispenser, gave them to her and took some for himself, munching the slabs absently while he gazed at the viewscreen, which was focused on the encampment.
There was a great deal of activity in the camp. Hoggora was planning one of his periodic crusades in which he would mark off some section of Erspia and attempt to destroy all vestige of Ormazdian worship inside it. A constant war was being waged on the planetoid, perpetually inconclusive because the Ahrimanics, for all their ferocity, were matched by a stout defence on the part of the Ormazdian villages—who in turn would, if they could, annihilate the servants of the Evil One.
Histrina slurped the coffee, enjoying its novel flavour (the only beverage on Erspia was a weak beer brewed from maize, the staple crop). Laedo’s mind was on the orbiting thought projectors. It occurred to him that he might find what he needed there. Tools, materials, repair robots, most likely. The projectors had been there a long time and there would have to be some provision for maintenance.
His ship, even though it couldn’t go into star drive, could certainly travel a few hundred miles on its manoeuvring engine, even a few thousand miles. It was worth trying, especially since the only alternative was to stay here until he could get a serviceable transductor made, which might be never.
Energised by this thought, he sprang up and made his way to the engine compartment, where he levered in place the baffles that would prevent the fuel rods from delivering any of their power through the cracked transductor. They would now service only the close manoeuvring engine.
He spent some time checking the pipes and joints. Quite a bit of energy haze had leaked into the works generally. It wouldn’t do to get total failure a hundred miles or so up.
What of Histrina? Might as well bring her along with him, he thought. If he got what he wanted he’d take her on to Harkio, rescuing her from this damned planetoid, though he didn’t know why he should bother.