Temple Trouble | Page 5

"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 knuckle-heads 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