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 time-line 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 outb