The Sinners of Erspia

SIX “Don’t Love the Third One”

Before very long yet another Erspia worldlet glowed in the darkness, swelling until it almost filled the oval viewscreen. One could easily have imagined it to be a full-sized planet.

It displayed a new physical feature, though not one as bizarre as Erspia-3’s. It possessed a moon.

The satellite was tiny, perhaps seven miles in diameter, and orbited just outside the shallow atmosphere.

A natural body that size would have been irregular in shape, but this was no asteroid. It was spherical.

Which meant that it had to be artificial, like its primary.

An equally artificial sun, occupying a wider orbit, lit both bodies. The projector station swooped towards the three-body formation, briefly fooling Laedo into thinking it was going to land on the moonlet. But then it veered aside and made for the planetoid.

Laedo glanced at Histrina. Since leaving Murder County (as he thought of it) she had calmed down, emboldening him to release her from her bonds. She had spent the first part of the journey describing the various gruesome ways to kill him that had occurred to her while down on the patchwork world, following that with an account of her past misdeeds, related in minute detail, together with thoughts of future sins she would like to commit. It was a dreary, insane litany, told in a maundering tone. Laedo was glad when she fell silent and watched the new world as it came closer.

The projector station deviated from the approach paths it had adopted earlier and circled Erspia-5 twice before entering the atmosphere. Gradually descending and losing velocity, it continued to hurtle above the landscape, allowing the character of the fifth Erspia world to become evident. It was a peaceful-looking planetoid of neat villages, ploughed fields and grazing herds. More than any of the others, it resembled Histrina’s home world of Erspia-1, except that there were none of the swathes of destruction resulting from the conflict between Ormazd and Ahriman.

The similarity possibly struck Histrina too. “People,” she murmured, gazing on the villages as they passed by. “Lots of people. People to do things to.”

“You’re not going outside at all, unless you swear to behave yourself,” Laedo countered firmly. “Even then I’ll be watching you the whole time. One hint of trouble and I’ll lock you up for the duration.”

Histrina sank wearily on to the couch. “Oh, all right.” She seemed not really interested. Maybe Murder County had burned her out. Either that, or being locked in the lead cabinet had brought her down.

Sailing low with all the majesty of a lighter-than-airship, the station seemed to be looking for a landing place. At length it settled on a grassy meadow just outside a medium-sized settlement.

The moon was a pale yellow orb in the sky, devoid of markings. There had to be a reason for its presence, Laedo thought. Was there intermittent war between it and the planetoid, as with the split world of Erspia-3?

Histrina spoke. “Let’s not go outside yet. Let’s fornicate first.”

Laedo smiled faintly and shook his head. He couldn’t be sure Histrina wouldn’t use the occasion to bite through his jugular.

“Not tonight, Josephine.”

“Josephine? Who’s Josephine?”

“She was… well, never mind. I guess I’m no Napoleon, either.”

“Napoleon? Who’s Napoleon?”

Laedo ignored her. The viewscreen showed crop-bearing fields, as well as a pasture for sheep and another for cows. The outskirts of a village crowded the edge of the screen. The houses were picturesque: black timber beams and thatched roofs.

Men who had been working in the fields were looking up at the projector station with visible astonishment, but with a notable lack of alarm. The impression of imperturbability was reinforced when they came plodding calmly towards it.

Laedo wondered how many Erspias there were, each with its own artificially induced human quirk.

Thousands? For that matter, how did they manage to hang together in a relatively small volume of space?

And was he doomed to tour them indefinitely in search of the mythical Klystar? Maybe he should stay inside and start ripping panels out to begin the possibly hopeless task of gaining control over the command system.

But in the end curiosity won out. Besides, there was always the hope of finding someone skilled enough to make a transductor for his cargo ship.

“We’re going outside,” he told Histrina. “Now remember, I meant what I said. I’ve had more than enough of your misbehaviour. If you kill anyone, or seriously injure anyone, I’ll kill you. Myself. Straight away.”

She looked startled, then pouted in her usual fashion. Most likely she didn’t in the least believe him, and in that she was right. He saw her wickedness as an imposed evil, not her own fault. It would be unethical to kill her, unless absolutely essential in order to protect others.

But self-interest was the one thing she would understand and respond to, after all, and it might help to plant some small doubt in her mind.

“Well, let’s go and see what’s weird about those people out there,” he said. “There’s bound to be something.”

Listlessly Histrina followed him to the portal. The stairway snaked down to the grass.

The three who had been approaching stopped to stare up at them with blank faces as they came out and stood on the platform. The clothing of the villagers was typically rustic: clumpy boots, loose trousers of a coarse, thick material, and waist-length smocks.

Laedo met their stares with one of his own.

“Is Klystar here?” he demanded loudly.

The labourers scratched their heads and looked questioningly at one another. Then one answered in a polite voice.

“No one of that name in our village. Could you have come to the wrong place?”

Laedo let it pass. “Do you have anyone skilled in metalwork?”

“That’s Ebrok the smith you’ll be wanting. He makes all our tools and suchlike.”

Laedo grunted his disappointment, remembering Hoggora’s metalworker on Erspia-1. A village smithy on Erspia-5 would work to about the same standard, he imagined.

He descended the steps. Histrina, with a winsome smile, descended behind him. As her foot touched the turf the local men deferentially fell back, ducking their heads.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” they muttered together.

Then they glanced nervously overhead. The man who had answered for them pointed up at the moon.

“You aren’t from there , are you?” he asked in hushed tones.

“No, we’re not from there,” Laedo assured him.

He congratulated himself. These people did fear the satellite, as he had guessed. But the local’s next words contradicted him.

“I thought not. No one ever comes from there. So where do you come from, in that big… contraption you have?”

Laedo steeled himself to deliver incomprehensible information.

“We come from another world, much, much further off than your moon. You know the lights in the sky you see at night? The stars? Those are other worlds.”

More scratching of heads. “Well, now, it’s hard to see how there could be another world. As for the stars, we always thought them the souls of children waiting to be born.”

The speaker shook his head and sighed, wearing the amiably confounded expression of one told something remarkable but of little account. “You’ve come a long way then, by Voluptus, and you’ll be needing refreshment, so we’d be failing if we showed you no hospitality. Come along and meet the folks.”

All three turned and strolled towards the village without a backward glance to see if their invitation was accepted.

Laedo wondered if it was worthwhile spending any time here, but once again curiosity got the better of him. He beckoned to Histrina, and followed on.

He was struck by a lack of reaction on the part of the farm workers. They accepted his fantastic story with no apparent wish to know more, and with no thought for possible dangers. Was it stupidity, or the habitual placidity of an animal without natural enemies? The inhabitants of Erspia-2 had been like that, and their passivity had hidden a sinister menace. But then they had been genuinely stupid, making no artifacts and with no social organisation. These people had to be smarter—they had an ordered society, built houses, farmed and made tools.

So had Klystar included a rural idyll among his worlds? A peaceful culture without perils or problems?

Perhaps as a control culture with which to compare the others…

But then there was the business of the moon…

In a few minutes they had entered the village, which was arranged around a lush central green shaded by fruit trees. Laedo noted rough dirt roads, scratched out of the landscape by use alone, vanishing into the countryside, presumably leading to other villages.

The atmosphere was tranquil. The timber-framed houses, with their glassless shutter windows, were interspersed with workshops. They passed a cobbler tapping at a nearly-finished boot, his wares laid out under an awning. Nearby was the promised smith, hammering red-hot metal on an anvil. Laedo guessed that the local economy used some form of barter, or even a system of mutual obligations. A number of women were about, accompanied by their children, the girls dressed the same as their mothers in long drab skirts and shapeless blouses, with no attempt at beautification. This was a society where appearances did not matter very much.

Histrina, in a comparatively skimpy shift borrowed from the projector station’s supplies, fetched startled glances, even more so than Laedo in his form-fitting duty suit. Her gaze roved over the bodies of the men present, but half-heartedly. They were an unexciting bunch at that, Laedo thought, both men and women.

Still, they were friendly and welcoming. The field labourers’ spokesman turned his affable, ingenuous face to Laedo. “My name is Brio Fong. My wife Nellie will have food for us shortly.”

Then he made a loud announcement to all within hearing.

“We have visitors from far away! Meet our guests!”

Knowing how suspicious of strangers rural communities could be, Laedo was reassured to see men, women and children wave and smile, the children following their progress with open curiosity. At the end of the village’s single street yet more children spilled from the open door of a cottage, running to and fro between the interior and the dusty thoroughfare. “Behave now, children!” Brio Fong cried jovially.

“Remember your manners in front of guests!”

And indeed the children did fall quiet, lining up and watching in fascination as Laedo and Histrina were ushered into the cottage. In a cosy but disordered room, a thin woman with a drawn face was stirring a large pot hung over an open fire. From it came an appetising smell of stew.

“Put food on the table, Nellie!” Brio ordered with gusto. “Our friends have come a long way! They are hungry!”

Nellie Fong regarded the newcomers with interest. “Then you are not from Crosshatch, or Bubblespring, or any village nearby? Indeed I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

Brio laughed chidingly. “Why no, woman! They are not from a village at all! They come from the sky and floated down on Butterly Meadow! In a sort of, er, flying house, I suppose you could call it.”

Awe and fright came to Nellie’s bony face. The wooden spoon almost dropped from her fingers. “From the sky! You’re not from the Heavenly Mansion?”

Again Brio chortled. “No, no, no, woman! Nobody ever comes from there! Our guests hail from even further off! From the other worlds! The worlds in the sky! You know about those, surely?”

“Worlds in the sky?” echoed Nellie.

“Of course! What a patch of befuddlement you are, girl!”

Nellie stared blankly, then appeared to dismiss the matter. Her face cleared. “Well, as long as you love and serve our Lord Voluptus, I suppose that’s all right.”

With that, she returned to the stewpot.

“Who is this ‘Voluptus’?” Laedo enquired politely. “That’s the second time I have heard the name today.”

Brio, Nellie and their several children gasped and seemed astounded by his words. Nellie was the first to recover herself. “You mean you don’t worship the Lord Voluptus?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Laedo, slightly taken aback. “We have never heard of him.”

Nellie laid down her spoon, straightened herself and faced them with hands on hips. “Then what a mercy it is that you have come to us, poor heathen savages that you are—shoo, children, shoo! Out and play!”

Arms windmilling, she drove the young ones from the house and slammed the door behind them. “Not heard of Voluptus? How could one imagine such a thing! Though there is the tale of the village of Molem in olden times, all of whose people turned their backs on Voluptus. Well! It is up to us to put you right!”

Nellie was clearly in the grip of religious zeal. “The Lord Voluptus is the source of all our blessings. He makes the crops to grow, and the beasts of the field to bear their young. Yes, and the people, too! There would be no one left in the world if he did not bestow children on us. Now anyone may easily see for themselves that Voluptus is real, for you can see his Heavenly Mansion floating up in the sky.” With a frown she added, “I suppose you can see it from your world, too?”

Laedo answered with a vague wave of his hand. “What happened to the people of Molem?”

Brio spoke up. “Why, the Lord Voluptus gathered them to his bosom, to show his forgiveness.”

That sounded to Laedo like a distorted memory of forcible mass transportation to Erspia-5’s tiny moon, some time in the past.

But for what purpose? Was Voluptus an alternative name for Klystar? He recalled how the projector station had seemed to hesitate on passing the moon, as if about to land on it. The place might be worth investigating.

“There’s no question about it, you must stay until the Festival of Light,” Nellie Fong was saying. “It’s only two days away. Then you can go home and explain to everyone there how wonderful it is to adore our benefactor.”

Her face became suddenly stern. She cast a disapproving glance at Histrina before stepping to a chest against a wall and lifting the lid. “You’ll give our menfolk indecent thoughts dressed like that, my dear.

Here, put this on.”

She drew out a gown of a drab brown colour, long-skirted and long-sleeved, holding it up for a rough fitting before handing it over. Histrina fingered the thick cloth, shrugged, then drew it over her head, fumbling to fasten the buttons in the front.

Inspecting herself, she tittered.

“This is almost like Courhart!”

“Is that the name of your village?” Nellie responded fussily. “How pleasant it is to be reminded of home.”

Laedo noticed a sudden sadness in Histrina’s face, an expression he had not seen there before. Brio Fong urged them to the long plank table, shuffling his shoulders in ebullient fashion. “We are all in Voluptus’s hands. Is the meal ready, Nellie my dear?”

“Ready it is, husband. Let us adults eat first. The children can come in later.”

“Please, I hope you are not giving us your children’s supper,” Laedo protested anxiously.

“Oh, there’s no need for that!” she assured him. “Lord Voluptus gives us full crops and abundant cattle!

Our children never go hungry, and what a blessing it is to have them. But don’t love the third one.”

She said the last absent-mindedly, as if repeating a piece of popular wisdom. They ate from wooden dishes, washing the food down with mugs of an unfamiliar hot beverage which tasted sweet and peppery at the same time. Then the children were allowed back in. There were five of them, three girls and two boys ranging in age from about three to about ten or eleven. Laedo’s eye fell on the third eldest. She was a silent, pale-faced girl of six or seven, dressed in a grubby smock. Something about her was different from the others. She was more subdued, more isolated. She came and stood silently by Laedo’s knee, as if seeking to draw comfort from a stranger.

Don’t love the third one. It was an odd saying. But then, rural cultures had many strange sayings drawn from ancient legends, with no particular contemporary meaning.

He put the matter from his mind and watched the young members of the family eat. The scene was refreshingly normal, after everything he had seen on other Erspian worlds.

Once they had eaten the children were allowed to play indoors for a while, and then were packed off upstairs to bed. Laedo thanked his hosts and announced that he and Histrina would return to their spacecraft.

Brio Fong would hear none of it. He explained that the villagers liked to congregate in the evenings, in what sounded like a cross between a community hall and a tavern. Nellie insisted she would stay indoors in case the children needed her. Laedo and Histrina followed Brio through the front door.

Sunset was not a drawn-out process on any of the Erspia worlds. As they left the cottage the little sun slipped rapidly below the nearby horizon and darkness fell like a curtain.

The half-moon was high in the sky and cast a pale silvery light. Laedo had visited Earth, and had seen the moon gazing down from the night sky there. The scene here was uncannily similar; for the moon appeared about the same size in the sky as on Earth, though its surface was without markings.

Brio told them that the moon passed overhead six times a day. Laedo assumed its orbital speed was controlled artificially, rather than dictated by the equally artificial gravity of its primary. The relatively high rate of orbital revolution would make sense if the moon was being used for surveillance of Erspia-5’s surface.

But you wouldn’t need a seven-mile-diameter moon in order to do that.

The community hall was crowded. Everyone was curious about the new arrivals. The hall itself was large and comfortable, provided with alcoves, benches and tables. Illumination was the same as in the Fongs’s cottage: oil lamps which gave out a warm glow and somewhat smelly fumes. At one end stood a counter, from which a mildly alcoholic beverage was dispensed. No currency was exchanged, but the bartender chalked tallies on wooden boards. Laedo congratulated himself on having guessed correctly. This was a no-money economy.

He and Histrina received mugs of the beverage—called ‘beer’—gratis, either on the house or on the tally of some villager or other. Soon they settled into a pleasantly relaxed mood. Laedo let Histrina do most of the talking. This was easy, since the villagers found her the more fascinating of the two. He had to admit that a pretty girl who had dropped out of the sky was more of a draw than a disgruntled middle-aged man, even when he also had dropped out of the sky.

The Erspians were eager to know about the world Histrina came from. A world from beyond their moon was a novel concept. She described it as pretty much like their own, then went on to speak of the worship of the Good Lord.

It was as though she had temporarily forgotten about the evil Ahriman, her master of late. The Good Lord was, she said, the source of everything that was wholesome and pleasant. One only had to follow him to live a happy life.

She might as well have been preaching a sermon by an Ormazdian priest. “Tush, and Brio told us you knew nothing of Voluptus!” exclaimed a plump woman who was the wife of a man called Gollopy.

“That’s Voluptus you are speaking of, surely.”

“No, his name isn’t Voluptus,” Histrina replied doubtfully. “He has a name, a secret name, though it isn’t really secret, which we are told to call upon in times of temptation. I don’t know if I ought to tell it to you, but it’s Ormazd.”

The name mystified them. “I’m sure it must be Voluptus by another name,” Gollopy’s wife said fussily.

“Can you see the Heavenly Mansion from where you live?”

“That big round light in the sky? No, we don’t have one of those, just a sun.” Histrina frowned. “Of course, there’s the other god, Ahriman. He makes you want to do wicked things and tries to turn you against the Good Lord.”

There was a pause. “Then it must have been he who corrupted the people of Molem in olden times,”

someone else said. “But don’t worry, your god of wickedness has no disciples here. Perhaps he wouldn’t be known on your world, either, if you lived closer to the Heavenly Mansion.”

A troubled look came over Histrina. She changed the subject. “Do you know what happens when you die? If you have listened to the Good Lord during your life then your soul goes to paradise and you are given everlasting happiness. But if you gave yourself over to Ahriman then you have everlasting torment.”

She shuddered and seemed to shrivel. Laedo found the spectacle remarkable.

“Oh but you’re wrong there, my dear,” Gollopy’s talkative wife assured her. “Anyone lucky enough to be one of Voluptus’s favourites goes to the Heavenly Mansion, and for them it is the Mansion of Pleasure where they do live forever, that’s true. But as for the rest of us, well, one lifetime of blessings is enough. It would be ungrateful to expect more.”

Histrina only looked confused on hearing this. Laedo thought it unusual for a primitive culture not to have some conception of life after death. Perhaps it went along with the villagers’ contentment, their lack of excitement and absence of anything more than superficial curiosity. Many of them spoke of having walked out to Butterly Meadow to view the projector station. Apart from its awesome size they simply saw it as a dull-coloured lump, its metal surface scored and pitted as it was by micrometeorites. Its stated role as a vehicle for travelling between worlds fell flat in their imaginations.

Laedo sighed to himself. Perhaps a life without change or stress was best after all.

Despite offers of shelter for the night, he persuaded Histrina to return to the station. Saying goodnight to their new friends, they staggered in tipsy fashion across the meadow. The moon was once again lifting itself above the horizon. To Laedo’s surprise Histrina took his hand in hers as they walked along. In the main lounge, she threw off the drab all-covering gown and threw herself on a couch.

“It’s funny,” she said, “I don’t feel the way I have been feeling lately.”

Her voice was subdued, almost plaintive.

“What do you mean?” Laedo asked.

“Well, all that… dreadfulness. The bad things I’ve done. The people I’ve killed. I don’t feel like doing such things any more.”

He looked at her quizzically, recalling his earlier idea that the murder and suicide rays might have burned the badness out of her.

Or maybe she was just exhausted. He couldn’t take anything for granted.

“What about fornication?” he asked her. “Do you still want to do that?”

She blinked. “I don’t see why not.”

“You seemed to think it’s almost as bad as murder before.”

“Did I? I don’t know why. What harm does it do? I wouldn’t like to do the other things any more, though.”

Invitingly she smiled at him.

But he was tired.

And still not sure of Histrina.

He yawned. They slept separately.

He awoke late next day. If Erspia-5 followed the pattern of the other Erspias it had a day of twenty-eight hours. For some still unexplained reason this more accurately represented the natural sleeping and waking cycle of human beings than did the home planet Earth’s day of twenty-four hours. Which meant that Laedo had slept long indeed. He recognised that he was getting tired: a tiredness born of frustration.

Still, that frustration might be coming to an end. It could be that Erspia-5’s moon would be the end of the projector station’s manic search.

He had eaten breakfast before he discovered that Histrina was not in any of the sleeping chambers. The gown given her by Nellie Fong was missing, too. She had left the station.

Outside, men worked in the fields, as before. They waved to him. Brio Fong was not among them, however. Laedo walked into the village and took himself to the Fongs’s house.

The two youngest Fong children were playing on the doorstep. The door was ajar. Laedo knocked politely and peered within.

Histrina was already there, assisting Nellie, who was dressing the quiet young girl Laedo had noticed the day before. She was clearly being prepared for a special occasion, not in everyday wear, but in a shiny dress of bright colours, flounces and frills. The two older children were sitting beside their father, watching in silence.

The girl in the dress appeared to be almost in a state of shock.

“We’re getting Helsey ready for the Festival of Light!” Histrina announced gaily as Laedo entered.

“Oh, indeed, this is her special day,” Nellie Fong added with pride, fussing with pins and tucks.

So that was it. The girl had been chosen to play a role in a religious ceremony. Evidently she was nervous of the attention she was to receive, which to a shy young girl could be intimidating.

Don’t love the third one. Laedo thought he had an explanation now. There must be a myth or legend which made every third child especially favoured by Voluptus, so much so that it rendered the parents’

love almost superfluous.

The fitting finished, Nellie combed out Helsey’s long, fair hair and tied it with ribbons. Brio and the older children clapped and complimented her. She did indeed look pretty, but Laedo wished she would smile occasionally.

Helsey was put back in her drab brown smock while Nellie settled down to stitch the tucks in the ceremonial dress. Brio had taken the day off from his work and cuddled and hugged his daughter often, in a touching display of affection.

“You are attending the Festival yourselves, aren’t you?” Nellie insisted to Laedo and Histrina. “After all, it only comes once a year.”

Laedo assumed the years were measured by the harvests, unless Klystar had arranged a climatic cycle for Erspia-5, which was unlikely.

“Of course!” Histrina promised eagerly.

Fatalistically Laedo agreed. Some time soon he wanted to visit the planetoid’s moon, but he was in no hurry.

Despite Histrina’s apparent good behaviour, he kept an eye on her for the rest of the day. Once or twice he attempted to engage Helsey in conversation, but the child seemed to have developed a need to be no more than a foot or two away from at least one of her parents: a clinging desire more typical of a worried two year old.

As ever the Fongs were all hospitality, gladly including their guests in the midday meal, which was a lamb roast lovingly prepared by Nellie, accompanied by mixed vegetables and followed by a sweet pudding.

The afternoon became an idyllic family scene. Laedo more than once observed Brio wipe a tear from his eye as he watched his daughter being fussed over by her mother. Whenever Helsey looked particularly strained, Nellie would stroke her hair and whisper in her ear, at which the child would utter a relieved giggle, only to relapse into silent sadness shortly afterwards.

The regular work of the community finished early that day. Instead an activity was undertaken on a grassy field, on the opposite side of the village from Butterly Meadow. A platform was erected, overlain with a deep blue cloth. Meantime straw was carried from a barn and spread all over the field.

Consequently there was no congregating in the drinking hall that evening. Laedo and Histrina retired to the projector station, talked for a while, then slept.

The next day dawned warm and bright. There had been no rain to wet the straw or spoil the proceedings—a fact of which the villagers seemed to have been aware in advance. Brio had advised them that the main ceremony would take place at mid-morning. After that, he added, with a brief twinkle in his eye, the festival would begin.

Following a leisurely breakfast, Laedo and Histrina set off. The village was deserted, every door closed.

From the distance they could hear music, and on coming to the meadow, saw musicians on the blue-clad platform. There were two violins, a large wooden flute, and a type of harmonium. Though not played very expertly, the instruments achieved an organ-like effect, reminding Histrina of the sort of music that was played in the chapel in her own village of Courhart. The entire adult population of the village was by now trampling the hay that was strewn on the meadow, but surprisingly Laedo could see no children in the crowd. The musicians finished their session and were replaced on the platform by a plump, round-faced man in an untypical garb of scarlet knee breeches and purple waistcoat. Raising his face to the sky, he began to harangue in a nearly shouting voice.

“Lord Voluptus! We thank you for your many gifts! Forgive us our sins, and guide us so that we may know your love in our hearts! Receive now the service of our little ones and bestow upon us the pleasure of your beneficence!”

There was more in the same vein, and Laedo soon stopped listening to it. He noted that the moon, putative dwelling place of Voluptus, had moved directly overhead. At length the speaker concluded his prayer, lowered his head, and gestured into the crowd.

The only children to be present, Helsey and three others around the same age, were brought forward and lifted on to the platform, where they stood together in a line: two little girls and two little boys, all finely turned out in their special clothes. The gathering fell back, creating a space in front of the platform. Laedo could see the Fongs near the front. Their faces were pinched and strained.

Dead silence prevailed, until suddenly one of the boys began to blubber. The composure of the others broke at this. Helsey Fong imploringly held out her arms.

“Mommy! Daddy! I don’t want to go! I want to stay with you!”

No reply came. The air around the children was misting, forming a bubble about each of them.

Amazingly, their feet lifted off the platform. They were levitating, like puppets being raised up on strings.

The movement was slow at first, but very soon it accelerated. The children were whipped up into the sky.

Towards the moon.

In seconds they had dwindled and disappeared.

Don’t love the third one. Laedo now realized how wrong his explanation had been. The saying was not a meaningless relic of some half-remembered legend. It was a response to a real situation.

Disease-ridden societies of the past, with high infant mortality, had preached a similar wisdom: don’t love your children until they reach the age of ten. Because at least half of them will be dead before then.

The Fongs were relaxed now that the ordeal was over. The tension was gone from their faces. Brio was uncommunicative, but confirmation came easily from the talkative Nellie. Every family’s third child was elevated to the Heavenly Mansion of Pleasure on reaching the age of seven, and lived there in perfect happiness, forever and ever. Just what that happiness consisted of was vague. “Oh, every kind of delight and pleasure,” was all Nellie would say. “But above all, how wonderful to serve the Lord Voluptus!”

She took pride in asserting that Helsey had always known she was special and a favourite of Voluptus, and that she was destined to leave her family and go to the Heavenly Mansion. Like every other third child, it had been impressed on her how fortunate she was.

If Laedo was any judge, Helsey did not want to be special, or fortunate.

He drew away from the others and rejoined Histrina, who was gazing up at the palely shining satellite.

“What goes on up there, do you think?”

“Maybe we could go and take a look.”

“It was incredible the way they shot up into the sky!”

Laedo smiled wryly. The children’s spectacular ascent was simply one more application of the exquisite control of inertial fields exhibited on all the Erspia worlds. After everything he had seen, transferring someone to the orbiting moon in a self-enclosed bubble of air was no great trick.

Others were looking upwards too. The crowd, which had given rise to a subdued hubbub, fell silent again.

The phenomenon known as the Festival of Light began.

It was as though the sky was a canvas to which an artist was applying washes of colour one after another. First came a translucent mauve which streamed down as though spreading through blotting paper. Then came a similar wash of a clear, glasslike cerise, followed by saffron, a shining lemon yellow, a delightful light green, and a pale purple. Without pause the waves of coloured light sifted down and in seconds were falling on the meadow.

The crowd mooed with anticipation, and as the changing colours phased, the scene was transformed.

Laedo found his perceptions altering, subtly at first, then to a startling degree. Outlines became sharper, colours brighter but at the same time softer. The people around him were as if seen under the influence of a psychedelic drug, or as if they were in a surrealist painting. Reality had altered. Time had slowed. His skin tingled.

The tingling was only a premonition. After about a minute his body exploded with pleasure. Erotic desire seized hold of him and shook him like a tree in the wind.

This was not an influence imposed from without, as with Klystar’s thought beams. It welled up from within, as though every sexual desire he had ever experienced thus far was no more than a seeping or leaking from a dam which now had burst.

Pleasure… pleasure… the coloured light was pleasure. The pleasure was the light. He moved in pleasure as a fish swims in water. There was music, too, music which loosened the heart and melted all restrictions—but when he listened closely, there was no music, his brain was inventing it in his delirium.

Not far away he saw Nellie Fong. Her eyes were glazed, her face in a sulk of prurience. She was fumbling with the buttons and hooks of her long drab gown. Soon it was sliding from her to fall in a heap on the ground. Beneath it she wore an equally long and rather grubby shift. That, too, slid off, and Nellie Fong, prim and proper middle-aged wife and mother, stood naked on the spread straw.

Previously her scrawny body and wasted breasts could only have repelled Laedo. Now he was filled with an irresistible need to use her. Without even realizing it he had cast off his utility garment and was also naked. He and Nellie eyed one another, then came together. A sour reek came from her, but that only excited him all the more. She ground her pudendum against him, her breath coming in gasps, but that was not what he wanted. He grabbed her by the haunches, turned her back to him, seized her thin wrists in one hand and pushed her arms up, forcing her to bend over. Her narrow, almost fleshless buttocks angled up at him. Roughly he plunged his stiffened phallus into her revealed anus. He seemed to feel her glorious pain as he delivered vigorous thrusts. The orgasm, when it came, sent spears of sapphire brilliance flashing like jagged lightning behind his eyeballs.

He pushed her off his phallus and sent her sprawling face-first on the straw. Everyone around him either had or was disrobing. Scenes of maddened carnality were unfolding. The meadow was caught within a rainbow, colour succeeding colour, melding and mixing, each colour bringing even more intense pleasure.

The air was filled with what his mind interpreted as strident orchestral music, but which in actuality was a cacophony of shouts, mewlings, grunts and screams. He saw Brio Fong in boisterous coitus with Histrina.

Then, before he knew it, he had become part of a squirming mass of bodies pressing and sliding against one another, male and female. He had taken pleasure-enhancing drugs before, but this was ecstasy such as he had never imagined, another universe in which hands, feet, legs, arms, bellies, buttocks, chests, backs, lips, genitals, were only there for the sake of excitement and voluptuousness.

At some point he again saw Nellie Fong. She was in the midst of a heap or knot composed of herself and ten men. Her stick-like legs were splayed at an extraordinarily lewd angle. Two distended penises were stuffed into her vagina, two up her anus. She was boggle-eyed at the two more being crammed into her grossly distended mouth, while she also gripped two in each fist, pumping them in alternating pistoning motions.

Then she was lost to view amid roiling flesh. After what seemed like years spent in eternity, but which in clock time was about two hours, the mellifluous curtains of colour faded. Mundane reality returned. The moon was low on the horizon. Golden, glorious bodies became, for the most part, the lumpen forms of village dwellers who picked themselves up dazed and exhausted, and began looking for their clothing.

Where were the village children while the orgy was in progress? Presumably locked away in their houses safe from adult goings-on. The waves of light would be restricted to the designated meadow and similar meadows across Erspia-5.

And the ‘third ones’? Laedo now was wondering just what kind of ‘services’ they were required to perform in the Heavenly Mansion.