Short Fiction · Temple Trouble (2/5)

“Then Kurchuk, and I might add that the kingdom of Zurb was the hardest hit by the famine, ordered his army mobilized and started an invasion of the Jumdun country, south of the Carpathians, to get grain. He got his army chopped up, and only about a quarter of them got back, with no grain. You ask me, I’d say that Labdurg framed it to happen that way. He advised Kurchuk to invade, in the first place, and I mentioned my suspicion that Chombrog, the Chuldun Emperor, is planning to move in on the Hulgun kingdoms. Well, what would be smarter than to get Kurchuk’s army smashed in advance?”

“How did the defeat occur?” Verkan Vall asked. “Any suspicion of treachery?”

“Nothing you could put your finger on, except that the Jumduns seemed to have pretty good intelligence about Kurchuk’s invasion route and battle plans. It could have been nothing worse than stupid tactics on Kurchuk’s part. See, these Hulguns, and particularly the Zurb Hulguns, are spearmen. They fight in a fairly thin line, with heavy-armed infantry in front and light infantry with throwing-spears behind. The nobles fight in light chariots, usually at the center of the line, and that’s where they were at this Battle of Jorm. Kurchuk himself was at the center, with his Chuldun archers massed around him.

“The Jumduns use a lot of cavalry, with long swords and lances, and a lot of big chariots with two javelin men and a driver. Well, instead of ramming into Kurchuk’s center, where he had his archers, they hit the extreme left and folded it up, and then swung around behind and hit the right from the rear. All the Chuldun archers did was stand fast around the king and shoot anybody who came close to them: they were left pretty much alone. But the Hulgun spearmen were cut to pieces. The battle ended with Kurchuk and his nobles and his archers making a fighting retreat, while the Jumdun cavalry were chasing the spearmen every which way and cutting them down or lancing them as they ran.

“Well, whether it was Labdurg’s treachery or Kurchuk’s stupidity, in either case, it was natural for the archers to come off easiest and the Hulgun spearmen to pay the butcher’s bill. But try and tell these knuckleheads anything like that! Muz-Azin protected the Chulduns, and Yat-Zar let the Hulguns down, and that was all there was to it. The Zurb temple started losing worshipers, particularly the families of the men who didn’t make it back from Jorm.

“If that had been all there’d been to it, though, it still wouldn’t have hurt the mining operations, and we could have got by. But what really tore it was when the rabbits started to die.” Stranor Sleth picked up a cigar from his desk and bit the end, spitting it out disgustedly. “Tularemia, of course,” he said, touching his lighter to the tip. “When that hit, they started going over to Muz-Azin in droves, not only at Zurb but all over the Six Kingdoms. You ought to have seen the house we had for Sunset Sacrifice, this evening! About two hundred, and we used to get two thousand. It used to be all two men could do to lift the offering box at the door, afterward, and all the money we took in tonight I could put in one pocket!” The high priest used language that would have been considered unclerical even among the Hulguns.

Verkan Vall nodded. Even without the quickie hypno-mech he had taken for this sector, he knew that the rabbit was domesticated among the Proto-Aryan Hulguns and was their chief meat animal. Hulgun rabbits were even a minor import on the First Level, and could be had at all the better restaurants in cities like Dhergabar. He mentioned that.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Stranor Sleth told him. “See, the rabbit’s sacred to Yat-Zar. Not taboo; just sacred. They have to use a specially consecrated knife to kill them⁠—consecrating rabbit knives has always been an item of temple revenue⁠—and they must say a special prayer before eating them. We could have got around the rest of it, even the Battle of Jorm⁠—punishment by Yat-Zar for the sin of apostasy⁠—but Yat-Zar just wouldn’t make rabbits sick. Yat-Zar thinks too well of rabbits to do that, and it’d not been any use claiming he would. So there you are.”

“Well, I take the attitude that this situation is the result of your incompetence,” Brannad Klav began, in a bullyragging tone. “You’re not only the high priest of this temple, you’re the acknowledged head of the religion in all the Hulgun kingdoms. You should have had more hold on the people than to allow anything like this to happen.”

“Hold on the people!” Stranor Sleth fairly howled, appealing to Verkan Vall. “What does he think a religion is, on this sector, anyhow? You think these savages dreamed up that six-armed monstrosity, up there, to express their yearning for higher things, or to symbolize their moral ethos, or as a philosophical escape-hatch from the dilemma of causation? They never even heard of such matters. On this sector, gods are strictly utilitarian. As long as they take care of their worshipers, they get their sacrifices: when they can’t put out, they have to get out. How do you suppose these Chulduns, living in the Caucasus Mountains, got the idea of a god like a crocodile, anyhow? Why, they got it from Homran traders, people from down in the Nile Valley. They had a god, once, something basically like a billy goat, but he let them get licked in a couple of battles, so out he went. Why, all the deities on this sector have hyphenated names, because they’re combinations of several deities, worshiped in one person. Do you know anything about the history of this sector?” he asked the Paratime Police officer.

“Well, it develops from an alternate probability of what we call the Nilo-Mesopotamian Basic sector-group,” Verkan Vall said. “On most Nilo-Mesopotamian sectors, like the Macedonian Empire Sector, or the Alexandrian-Roman or Alexandrian-Punic or Indo-Turanian or Europo-American, there was an Aryan invasion of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor about four thousand elapsed years ago. On this sector, the ancestors of the Aryans came in about fifteen centuries earlier, as neolithic savages, about the time that the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations were first developing, and overran all southeast Europe, Asia Minor and the Nile Valley. They developed to the bronze-age culture of the civilizations they overthrew, and then, more slowly, to an iron-age culture. About two thousand years ago, they were using hardened steel and building large stone cities, just as they do now. At that time, they reached cultural stasis. But as for their religious beliefs, you’ve described them quite accurately. A god is only worshiped as long as the people think him powerful enough to aid and protect them; when they lose that confidence, he is discarded and the god of some neighboring people is adopted instead.” He turned to Brannad Klav. “Didn’t Stranor report this situation to you when it first developed?” he asked. “I know he did; he speaks of receiving shipments of grain by conveyer for temple distribution. Then why didn’t you report it to Paratime Police? That’s what we have a Paratime Police Force for.”

“Well, yes, of course, but I had enough confidence in Stranor Sleth to think that he could handle the situation himself. I didn’t know he’d gone slack⁠—”

“Look, I can’t make weather, even if my parishioners think I can,” Stranor Sleth defended himself. “And I can’t make a great military genius out of a blockhead like Kurchuk. And I can’t immunize all the rabbits on this timeline against tularemia, even if I’d had any reason to expect a tularemia epidemic, which I hadn’t because the disease is unknown on this sector; this is the only outbreak of it anybody’s ever heard of on any Proto-Aryan timeline.”

“No, but I’ll tell you what you could have done,” Verkan Vall told him. “When this Kurchuk started to apostatize, you could have gone to him at the head of a procession of priests, all paratimers and all armed with energy-weapons, and pointed out his spiritual duty to him, and if he gave you any back talk, you could have pulled out that needler and rayed him down and then cried, ‘Behold the vengeance of Yat-Zar upon the wicked king!’ I’ll bet any sum at any odds that his successor would have thought twice about going over to Muz-Azin, and none of these other kings would have even thought once about it.”

“Ha, that’s what I wanted to do!” Stranor Sleth exclaimed. “And who stopped me? I’ll give you just one guess.”

“Well, it seems there was slackness here, but it wasn’t Stranor Sleth who was slack,” Verkan Vall commented.

“Well! I must say; I never thought I’d hear an officer of the Paratime Police criticizing me for trying to operate inside the Paratime Transposition Code!” Brannad Klav exclaimed.

Verkan Vall, sitting on the edge of Stranor Sleth’s desk, aimed his cigarette at Brannad Klav like a blaster.

“Now, look,” he began. “There is one, and only one, inflexible law regarding outtime activities. The secret of paratime transposition must be kept inviolate, and any activity tending to endanger it is prohibited. That’s why we don’t allow the transposition of any object of extraterrestrial origin to any timeline on which space travel has not been developed. Such an object may be preserved, and then, after the local population begin exploring the planet from whence it came, there will be dangerous speculations and theories as to how it arrived on Terra at such an early date. I came within inches, literally, of getting myself killed, not long ago, cleaning up the result of a violation of that regulation. For the same reason, we don’t allow the export, to outtime natives, of manufactured goods too far in advance of their local culture. That’s why, for instance, you people have to hand-finish all those big Yat-Zar idols, to remove traces of machine work. One of those things may be around, a few thousand years from now, when these people develop a mechanical civilization. But as far as raying down this Kurchuk is concerned, these Hulguns are completely nonscientific. They wouldn’t have the least idea what happened. They’d believe that Yat-Zar struck him dead, as gods on this plane of culture are supposed to do, and if any of them noticed the needler at all, they’d think it was just a holy amulet of some kind.”

“But the law is the law⁠—” Brannad Klav began.

Verkan Vall shook his head. “Brannad, as I understand, you were promoted to your present position on the retirement of Salvan Marth, about ten years ago; up to that time, you were in your company’s financial department. You were accustomed to working subject to the First Level Commercial Regulation Code. Now, any law binding upon our people at home, on the First Level, is inflexible. It has to be. We found out, over fifty centuries ago, that laws have to be rigid and without discretionary powers in administration in order that people may be able to predict their effect and plan their activities accordingly. Naturally, you became conditioned to operating in such a climate of legal inflexibility.

“But in paratime, the situation is entirely different. There exist, within the range of the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal-field generator, a number of timelines of the order of ten to the hundred-thousandth power. In effect, that many different worlds. In the past ten thousand years, we have visited only the tiniest fraction of these, but we have found everything from timelines inhabited only by subhuman ape-men to Second Level civilizations which are our own equal in every respect but knowledge of paratemporal transposition. We even know of one Second Level civilization which is approaching the discovery of an interstellar hyperspatial drive, something we’ve never even come close to. And in between are every degree of savagery, barbarism and civilization. Now, it’s just not possible to frame any single code of laws applicable to conditions on all of these. The best we can do is prohibit certain flagrantly immoral types of activity, such as slave-trading, introduction of new types of narcotic drugs, or out-and-out piracy and brigandage. If you’re in doubt as to the legality of anything you want to do outtime, go to the Judicial Section of the Paratime Commission and get an opinion on it. That’s where you made your whole mistake. You didn’t find out just how far it was allowable for you to go.”

He turned to Stranor Sleth again. “Well, that’s the background, then. Now tell me about what happened yesterday at Zurb.”

“Well, a week ago, Kurchuk came out with this decree closing our temple at Zurb and ordering his subjects to perform worship and make money offerings to Muz-Azin. The Zurb temple isn’t a mask for a mine: Zurb’s too far south for the uranium deposits. It’s just a center for propaganda and that sort of thing. But they have a House of Yat-Zar, and a conveyer, and most of the upper-priests are paratimers. Well, our man there, Tammand Drav, alias Khoram, defied the king’s order, so Kurchuk sent a company of Chuldun archers to close the temple and arrest the priests. Tammand Drav got all his people who were in the temple at the time into the House of Yat-Zar and transposed them back to the First Level. He had orders”⁠—Stranor Sleth looked meaningly at Brannad Klav⁠—“not to resist with energy-weapons or even ultrasonic paralyzers. And while we’re on the subject of letting the local yokels see too much, about fifteen of the under-priests he took to the First Level were Hulgun natives.”

“Nothing wrong about that: they’ll get memory-obliteration and pseudo-memory treatment,” Verkan Vall said. “But he should have been allowed to needle about a dozen of those Chulduns. Teach the beggars to respect Yat-Zar in the future. Now, how about the six priests who were outside the temple at the time? All but one were paratimers. We’ll have to find out about them, and get them out of Zurb.”

“That’ll take some doing,” Stranor Sleth said. “And it’ll have to be done before sunset tomorrow. They are all in the dungeon of the palace citadel, and Kurchuk is going to give them to the priests of Muz-Azin to be sacrificed tomorrow evening.”

“How’d you learn that?” Verkan Vall asked.

“Oh, we have a man in Zurb, not connected with the temple,” Stranor Sleth said. “Name’s Crannar Jurth; calls himself Kranjur, locally. He has a swordmaker’s shop, employs about a dozen native journeymen and apprentices who hammer out the common blades he sells in the open market. Then, he imports a few high-class alloy-steel blades from the First Level, that’ll cut through this local low-carbon armor like cheese. Fits them with locally-made hilts and sells them at unbelievable prices to the nobility. He’s Swordsmith to the King; picks up all the inside palace dope. Of course, he was among the first to accept the New Gospel and go over to Muz-Azin. He has a secret room under his shop, with his conveyer and a radio.

“What happened was this: These six priests were at a consecration ceremony at a rabbit-ranch outside the city, and they didn’t know about the raid on the temple. On their way back, they were surrounded by Chuldun archers and taken prisoner. They had no weapons but their sacrificial knives.” He threw another dirty look at Brannad Klav. “So they’re due to go up on the triangles at sunset tomorrow.”

“We’ll have to get them out before then,” Verkan Vall stated. “They’re our people, and we can’t let them down; even the native is under our protection, whether he knows it or not. And in the second place, if those priests are sacrificed to Muz-Azin,” he told Brannad Klav, “you can shut down everything on this timeline, pull out or disintegrate your installations, and fill in your mine-tunnels. Yat-Zar will be through on this timeline, and you’ll be through along with him. And considering that your fissionables franchise for this sector comes up for renewal next year, your company will be through in this paratime area.”

“You believe that would happen?” Brannad Klav asked anxiously.