The Sinners of Erspia

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.