The Sinners of Erspia

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.