The Sinners of Erspia

The orchid chamber shook as if experiencing orgasm. Her chest heaved. Raising herself, she stood with eyes closed, as if reciting a mental prayer. The same golden syrup as before seeped from her and ran down her legs, so copiously that at first he thought she was thoughtlessly urinating.

She opened her eyes, as though suddenly recovering her senses, and looked at him. “There's one for you too,” she said calmly. “Look."

Directing his attention to the apricot wall, she showed him a bulge and a cleft in the petal stuff, at about the height of a urinal tube in a men's room. Prising aside fleshy lips, she revealed an orifice.

“It does things,” she said. She inserted a finger, then all four fingers, and seemed to be experiencing something interesting.

“Go on, you do it,” she suggested, removing her fingers.

He put in his own fingers. The orifice was warm, warmer than the phallus had been, and moist. He felt a sucking, toying motion. Quickly he withdrew his hand.

“Go on, then,” she urged impatiently, seeing him just stand there. “Stick it in!” She grabbed his penis and tried to tug it towards the cleft, but he stepped back and shook his head.

“No, I don't want to. I don't feel like it."

“You're just no fun at all,” Histrina said disdainfully. She went down on her knees and wedged the gun between her thighs for safekeeping. She used the fingers of one hand to prise apart the lips of the orchid vulva, and the other to guide her breast to the orifice. Her distended nipple went in. She pushed and squirmed and squeezed until, finally, the breast itself was lodged halfway in the organ, the visible part swollen and tight-skinned as she pressed it as hard as she could against the vulva.

Laedo could see the breast surging under the action of the orchid vagina.

Appreciatively Histrina was going, “Mmmmmm, mmmmmm..."

He had seen enough. He crawled out of the bell and sat on the grass, waiting for Histrina to finish.

Listening to her murmurs of pleasure from within, a horrifying thought struck him.

Was what he had seen simply a variant of the orchids’ usual technique for obtaining a pollen carrier—or was it another, slower form of predation? What was the function of the syrup the vegetable penis had ejaculated? Was it addictive?

Or had the orchid ejected fertilised seed into Histrina, who would now become a doomed seed-bed?

He took his head in his hands and groaned.

She dropped lightly and gaily from the bell a few minutes later. Her breath and loins, he noticed, smelled sweet.

“That was great,” she congratulated herself. “Come on, and I'll show you the other thing. It will be a lesson to you."

Able to summon no will of his own, he followed.

She took him to a place he recognised. It was a glade in the jungle, not far from the grove where he and Histrina lived, and not far from the projector station either, though that was not visible from here, surrounded as they were by orchids.

The previous day Laedo had visited the glade, and had had sex sessions with several of the women there.

The scene which now met his eyes was less inviting. Half a dozen men, and three women, stood surrounding three female forms which lay limply on the grass. Those standing gave Histrina peculiar, puzzled stares which she ignored. Smiling knowingly, she invited Laedo to take a look at the women on the ground, pointing with her gun.

With a feeling of dread he eased himself through the group. Three girls. Each with a hole burned neatly in her forehead.

They were three out of the four women Laedo had copulated with the day before.

“See?” Histrina said primly. “That's what's going to happen every time you're unfaithful to me. I saw what you were up to here yesterday—you dirty beast! I followed you and hid behind an orchid. I would have done for them there and then, but I didn't find the gun till this morning. Then, just as I'd finished and was coming back to the station, I saw you going off with that other bitch! Only she wasn't a bitch, was she?”

she added thoughtfully. “She was some kind of thing."

In spite of how sick he felt, Laedo was able to ask, “You killed them—right here?"

“Yes. Went up to them, put the gun to their heads, and—poof! Down they went!” She broke into a fit of giggles, demonstrating by poking the gun at the air. “And do you know what? Nobody did a damned thing about it!"

He wondered how she had missed seeing him copulate with the fourth girl. Then he remembered that she had also found the new kind of orchid yesterday. She must have wandered off at some point.

The Erspians were paying no heed to their conversation.

“They're not going to get up,” a girl said.

“No,” a man said gravely. “They're finished."

“Come on, then,” said another, nudging a corpse tentatively with his foot. “We'd better take them where they belong."