The Sinners of Erspia

He turned, not to the examiner, but to Harmasch. “Someone is interfering with my control!"

The two older men looked first at one another, then all around them. A little further off, standing between the tables, was a man who glanced furtively aside, as if trying to make himself invisible.

The person was of such odd appearance that it was surprising he had not been noticed before. He wore neither the conical cap of a magician nor the more common-place turban, but was bare-headed. His clothing was drab and without style: a single close-fitting blue overgarment, making it impossible to guess the mood of his native country. His features were unusual, too: sharp, with an angular nose and peculiar eyes.

To a Magus Adeptus the source of the sabotage was quickly evident. Harmasch and the examiner pointed, crying out together.

“Seize him!"

As the projector station flew over the landscape of Erspia-4, Laedo had seen spread below him what seemed to be a huge patchwork quilt. Slowly he realized that it was more like a map showing each country or political entity in a different colour. The colours resulted from the apparent fact that each country possessed its own unique weather, which ended sharply at clearly delineated borders. Sunny, stormy, tranquil, cloudy, fog-covered, and so on. The projector station came lower, and Laedo began to experience mood changes as he passed from one region to another. Delight, gloom, happiness, misery, fury, resignation, all flitted through his mind like wisps of cloud passing across the face of the sun. The transition from one emotion to another was as sudden and obvious as the edge of a moving shadow.

He suspected that he was in the presence of a social experiment similar to the one he had encountered on Erspia-1, but far more complicated.

Still outside his control, the projector station settled itself in a canyon in a bare, rocky region.

No sooner had it landed than a desire to kill Histrina plopped full-blown into his consciousness. The impulse was sudden, vicious, and full of hatred.

He resisted the urge and walked out of the control room. He had not gone far when the murder mood vanished. Instead he was assailed by an almost overwhelming wish to commit suicide.

Moving experimentally from one part of the station to another, he was able to locate a borderline running through the structure. The station straddled a frontier. On one side was the impulse to murder, on the other, suicidal depression.

In both directions the area was bleak, rocky, lacking vegetation and without a population—though possibly it had possessed one once.

Laedo's experiences on Erspia-1 gave him the strength of mind to handle these unwelcome emotions. He treated them as originating from outside himself. This was not the case with Histrina. She made the most determined effort to murder him yet, and when he lured her into a part of the station on the other side of the invisible border, she had tried with equal enthusiasm to end her own life. His solution had been to drag her to his cargo ship and lock her in the lead cabinet which was, in effect, an isolation chamber proof against thought-rays. That was where she was now, with a store of air, food and water.

Laedo could hardly begin to guess what sort of control system could select both weather and emotions for demarcated regions on the planetoid. No orbiting projector stations showed up. Presumably everything was deep inside the worldlet, alongside the gravity generator.

Taking the cargo ship aloft for a brief reconnoitre, he had seen a town a few miles away. The murder and suicide areas were small, no more than localities. Evidently the projector station had chosen the canyon for concealment. Setting the cargo ship back in place, he had set out on foot, even though it occurred to him that Histrina would be in a poor situation should anything untoward happen to him.

On entering Neutralia he was pleased to find himself in a region free of artificially imposed mood.

Wandering through Klyston, as he learned the town was called, he had come upon the grading examinations in magic.

Magic! It did not take him long to realize what this ‘magic’ consisted of. Klystar's technology had a finesse beyond anything he could have imagined. By some extraordinary technique of fine-tuning, thought projection was used to achieve telepathy between individuals. In similar manner, fine-tuned inertial fields projected from within Erspia-4 were made to respond to the human will and achieve telekinesis.

Not that the ‘adepts’ understood any of this. Neither did Laedo grasp what use these somewhat limited

‘magical’ powers were put to, nor why they were so valued on the planetoid. He did realize, however, that he had been rash indeed to experiment with the faculties himself, by interfering with the testing of a young apprentice. As a result he was accused of being a ‘rogue wizard', mentally strong enough to exercise magic, but lacking the proper training. Such individuals were associated with Swirl, the land of continuous whirlwinds, whose people were eccentric mavericks and were forbidden to travel outside their borders because of their disordered lives. If they did, they were treated as outlaws.

He sat in a windowless room of white stone. Facing him across the table were the Magistrate of the Magical Convocation, the examiner whose work he had interrupted, and the magician whose apprentice he had wronged.