The Sinners of Erspia

She liked the new feeling of calmness, so much so that she was loth for him to open the door. But eventually he did. They stepped out, left the hold and went back to the control cabin-cum-living room.

After a few minutes she found desirous thoughts jostling in her again, like a crowd of deranged satyrs.

He carried on talking. “I noticed that Ahriman is stronger during the night and Ormazd during the day.

That gave the game away altogether."

He moved to the table and touched one of the queer-looking objects there, spinning a little disk. Histrina gasped as a section of wall suddenly changed colour and then seemed to disappear altogether, so that she was looking beyond it into the starry sky. But surely she should only see another part of this strange house's interior?

“Don't be afraid,” Laedo said, noting her amazed expression. “It's only a picture. You're looking at the night zenith."

As he spun the disk again something sprang into being in the centre of the picture and grew swiftly. It became a ball, or globe, with a cylindrical shaft or well projecting from one side of it and pointing almost directly at them.

The object was pale cream in colour and gleamed dully in the starlight, though one side seemed much more brightly lit than the other.

“This is Ahriman,” Laedo told her. “Or rather, this is where his thoughts come from. See that cylinder?

That's the projector."

Again he flicked switches and spun disks. The picture was replaced by what appeared to be blue sky dotted with fleecy cloud, with the sun flaring fiercely in the centre. The clouds swelled, then vanished and once again there was blackness and stars, with, contradictorily, the sun still glowing, a hard, steady point of light.

And there ahead of them was an identical ball and cylinder, this time shining in the glare of the sun.

“And this is Ormazd,” he announced. “The sun is artificial, too. It's no bigger than a medicine ball. That's why shadows are abnormally large here—but of course, that doesn't seem abnormal to you, does it?

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.