Barrington Bayley - The Sinners of Erspia

Sobbing together, clutching one another, they both called piteously on Ormazd for forgiveness.

Histrina wore a simple white dress reaching to her ankles. A white flower was in her hair. On her face was a permanent look of sorrow.

She was looking down on Erspia-1 through the viewscreen. At first, when Laedo came for her, she had wanted to stay in Courhart. True, most of the people she had grown up with were dead, including her immediate family, but it was her home.

Laedo had dissuaded her. He felt it his duty to take her to Harkio, for treatment from his personal mentalist. Besides, she had been through enough, and life was going to be uncertain on Erspia-1 from now on.

He had done the best he could. He had taken the station up into space, choosing a midway elevation where the effects of the Ormazd beam would still be somewhat stronger than from its original height, and he had criss-crossed the planetoid, just as he had the village of Courhart, making sure that its influence would reach everywhere.

Then, when he judged the Ahrimanic influence had been counterbalanced, he had switched the beam off for good. The people of Erspia-1 were now free from artificial mental influence. They could work out their own attitudes, find their own consciences.

If there was such a thing as conscience.

Even then, it would take some time.

When he made his report to the authorities, they would feel it their duty to send help to the twelve Erspia worlds. That would present problems, quite apart from the considerable expense. He did not know, for instance how assistance could be rendered to the genetically altered fairies and gnomes of the split planetoid.

But there would be a pay-back, in the acquisition of Klystar technology, particularly the thought beams.

Which could, of course, be used for either good or ill, but mostly for ill. Perhaps the technique would be banned, buried, deemed too dangerous to human freedom.

“Are we going to Harkio now?” Histrina asked.

Laedo shook his heed. “Not straight away. I don’t trust this heap of cobbled-together junk to get us there. We’re going back to my cargo ship. I’m going to see if I can make a transductor.”

Good and bad. That was the difference.

Laedo took his eyes off the human nest that was the Erspian worldlet. He thought of the great swirling Milky Way galaxy, fermenting with life.

“Ants,” he muttered. “He called us ants.”

Ants. But there was a difference, after all. Klystar had drawn on human religious ideas in designing the two thought projectors. But he himself had no preference between the two, either for Ormazd or for Ahriman. No choice between good and evil—for him, neither existed. He was pure intellect, pure curiosity, an ethical nullity, oblivious of the impact his actions had on others.

Which in human terms, was one way of defining a psychopath.

An entire cosmic generation of sentient beings had arisen blind to the drama of Ormazd and Ahriman.

Man could choose between them. Of course, it remained true what Klystar had said. Human consciousness was feeble and deluded, ludicrously prone to being swayed by persuasion, when compared with the shining, unassailable consciousness of Klystar.

But unlike Klystar’s, mankind’s evolution was not yet over.

Still mulling over the conundrum, Laedo steered the projector station back towards Erspia-5.

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Copyright ©2002 by Barrington Bayley, Cover design copyright 2002 by Juha Lindroos

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