desk and bit the end, spitting it outdisgustedly. "Tularemia, of course," he said, touching his lighter tothe tip. "When that hit, they started going over to Muz-Azin indroves, not only at Zurb but all over the Six Kingdoms. You ought tohave seen the house we had for Sunset Sacrifice, this evening! Abouttwo hundred, and we used to get two thousand. It used to be all twomen could do to lift the offering box at the door, afterward, and allthe money we took in tonight I could put in one pocket!" The highpriest used language that would have been considered unclerical evenamong the Hulguns.
Verkan Vall nodded. Even without the quickie hypno-mech he had takenfor this sector, he knew that the rabbit was domesticated among theProto-Aryan Hulguns and was their chief meat animal. Hulgun rabbitswere even a minor import on the First Level, and could be had at allthe better restaurants in cities like Dhergabar. He mentioned that.
"That's not the worst of it," Stranor Sleth told him. "See, therabbit's sacred to Yat-Zar. Not taboo; just sacred. They have to usea specially consecrated knife to kill them--consecrating rabbit kniveshas always been an item of temple revenue--and they must say a specialprayer before eating them. We could have got around the rest of it,even the Battle of Jorm--punishment by Yat-Zar for the sin ofapostasy--but Yat-Zar just wouldn't make rabbits sick. Yat-Zar thinkstoo well of rabbits to do that, and it'd not been any use claiming hewould. So there you are."
"Well, I take the attitude that this situation is the result of yourincompetence," Brannad Klav began, in a bullyragging tone. "You're notonly the high priest of this temple, you're the acknowledged head ofthe religion in all the Hulgun kingdoms. You should have had more holdon the people than to allow anything like this to happen."
"Hold on the people!" Stranor Sleth fairly howled, appealing to VerkanVall. "What does he think a religion is, on this sector, anyhow? Youthink these savages dreamed up that six-armed monstrosity, up there,to express their yearning for higher things, or to symbolize theirmoral ethos, or as a philosophical escape-hatch from the dilemma ofcausation? They never even heard of such matters. On this sector, godsare strictly utilitarian. As long as they take care of theirworshipers, they get their sacrifices: when they can't put out, theyhave to get out. How do you suppose these Chulduns, living in theCaucasus Mountains, got the idea of a god like a crocodile, anyhow?Why, they got it from Homran traders, people from down in the NileValley. 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, becausethey're combinations of several deities, worshiped in one person. Doyou know anything about the history of this sector?" he asked theParatime Police officer.
"Well, it develops from an alternate probability of what we call theNilo-Mesopotamian Basic sector-group," Verkan Vall said. "On mostNilo-Mesopotamian sectors, like the Macedonian Empire Sector, or theAlexandrian-Roman or Alexandrian-Punic or Indo-Turanian orEuropo-American, there was an Aryan invasion of Eastern Europe andAsia Minor about four thousand elapsed years ago. On this sector, theancestors of the Aryans came in about fifteen centuries earlier, asneolithic savages, about the time that the Sumerian and Egyptiancivilizations were first developing, and overran all southeast Europe,Asia Minor and the Nile Valley. They developed to the bronze-ageculture of the civilizations they overthrew, and then, more slowly, toan iron-age culture. About two thousand years ago, they were usinghardened steel and building large stone cities, just as they do now.At that time, they reached cultural stasis. But as for their religiousbeliefs, you've described them quite accurately. A god is onlyworshiped as long as the people think him powerful enough to aid andprotect them; when they lose that confidence, he is discarded and thegod of some neighboring people is adopted instead." He turned toBrannad Klav. "Didn't Stranor report this situation to you when itfirst developed?" he asked. "I know he did; he speaks of receivingshipments of grain by conveyer for temple distribution. Then whydidn't you report it to Paratime Police? That's what we have aParatime Police Force for."
"Well, yes, of course, but I had enough confidence in Stranor Sleth tothink that he could handle the situation himself. I didn't know he'dgone 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 militarygenius out of a blockhead like Kurchuk. And I can't immunize all therabbits on this time-line against tularemia, even if I'd had anyreason to expect a tularemia epidemic, which I hadn't because thedisease is unknown on this sector; this is the only outbreak of itanybody's ever heard of on any Proto-Aryan time-line."
"No, but I'll tell you what you could have done," Verkan Vall toldhim. "When this Kurchuk started to apostatize, you could have gone tohim at the head of a procession of priests, all paratimers and allarmed with energy-weapons, and pointed out his spiritual duty to him,and if he gave you any back talk, you could have pulled out thatneedler and rayed him down and then cried, 'Behold the vengeance ofYat-Zar upon the wicked king!' I'll bet any sum at any odds that hissuccessor would have thought twice about going over to Muz-Azin, andnone of these other kings would have even thought once about it."
"Ha, that's what I wanted to do!" Stranor Sleth exclaimed. "And whostopped me? I'll give you just one guess."
"Well, it seems there was slackness here, but it wasn't Stranor Slethwho was slack," Verkan Vall commented.
"Well! I must say; I never thought I'd hear an officer of the ParatimePolice criticizing me for trying to operate inside the ParatimeTransposition Code!" Brannad Klav exclaimed.
Verkan Vall, sitting on the edge of Stranor Sleth's desk, aimed hiscigarette at Brannad Klav like a blaster.
"Now, look," he began. "There is one, and only one, inflexible lawregarding outtime activities. The secret of paratime transpositionmust be kept inviolate, and any activity tending to endanger it isprohibited. That's why we don't allow the transposition of any objectof extraterrestrial origin to any time-line on which space travel hasnot been developed. Such an object may be preserved, and then, afterthe local population begin exploring the planet from whence it came,there will be dangerous speculations and theories as to how itarrived on Terra at such an early date. I came within inches,literally, of getting myself killed, not long ago, cleaning up theresult of a violation of that regulation. For the same reason, wedon't allow the export, to outtime natives, of manufactured goods toofar in advance of their local culture. That's why, for instance, youpeople have to hand-finish all those big Yat-Zar idols, to removetraces of machine work. One of those things may be around, a fewthousand years from now, when these people develop a mechanicalcivilization. But as far as raying down this Kurchuk is concerned,these Hulguns are completely nonscientific. They wouldn't have theleast 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 ofthem noticed the needler at all, they'd think it was just a holyamulet of some kind."
]
"But the law is the law--" Brannad Klav began.
Verkan Vall shook his head. "Brannad, as I understand, you werepromoted to your present position on the retirement of Salvan Marth,about ten years ago; up to that time, you were in your company'sfinancial department. You were accustomed to working subject to theFirst Level Commercial Regulation Code. Now, any law binding upon ourpeople at home, on the First Level, is inflexible. It has to be. Wefound out, over fifty centuries ago, that laws have to be rigid andwithout discretionary powers in administration in order that peoplemay be able to predict their effect and plan their activitiesaccordingly. Naturally, you became conditioned to operating in such aclimate 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 time-lines of the order of ten to the hundred-thousandthpower. In effect, that many different worlds. In the past ten thousandyears, we have visited only the tiniest fraction of these, but we havefound everything from time-lines inhabited only by subhuman ape-me
n toSecond Level civilizations which are our own equal in every respectbut knowledge of paratemporal transposition. We even know of oneSecond Level civilization which is approaching the discovery of aninterstellar hyperspatial drive, something we've never even come closeto. And in between are every degree of savagery, barbarism andcivilization. Now, it's just not possible to frame any single code oflaws applicable to conditions on all of these. The best we can do isprohibit certain flagrantly immoral types of activity, such asslave-trading, introduction of new types of narcotic drugs, orout-and-out piracy and brigandage. If you're in doubt as