“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.”
What followed was the nearest thing to organised collective labour Laedo had yet seen on Erspia-2. The men arranged themselves two to a dead girl. One stepped between the corpse’s legs and lifted it with his arms behind the knees. The other lifted it by the arms.
Awkwardly the procession went off through the jungle. The females stayed behind. They lay down, lounged and chewed grass. They showed no sign of distress over the sudden deaths of their friends, though occasionally they glanced worriedly at Histrina
Laedo was curious to see whether any ceremony would attend the disposal of the bodies, or if they would simply be left lying somewhere. Quietly he followed the party. They didn’t go far, only about fifty yards, to halt before a cream-coloured, capsule-shaped orchid bell he had vaguely noticed before. It had no visible mouth and hung close to the ground on its stem. It looked, he thought, almost fungoid.
The leader dropped his burden, still leaving his partner holding the dead girl up by her knees. He cupped his hands to his mouth and let out a high-pitched musical tone which wavered, like the ringing of a bell.
In answer the orchid promptly opened up a gaping maw which ran its entire length. With a shudder Laedo saw that its interior resembled, not a little, the inside of the girl-mimicking pod that had trapped him, except that this was much, much bigger.
Big enough, in fact, not just for three bodies but for twice that number, had they been present.
Wordlessly the work party took hold of the cadavers one by one, by wrists and ankles, swung them once, then tossed them into the bell of the waiting orchid.
That was it. No ceremony, no farewell. The orchid closed again with a crunch, and the men set off back the way they had come, giving Laedo vague but friendly smiles as they passed.
He turned and bumped into Histrina, who without his knowing it had followed him. “Just what is it,” he said in a low, angry tone, “that makes you think you can murder whoever you like whenever you like?”
She stared at him as though he were mad. “What are you worrying about them for? They deserved to die. They were wicked.”
“These people? How can you call them wicked?”
“Because they sin. They do it all the time.” Her eyes widened. “In the orchids. That’s just as bad as killing people, the priest at home says.”
Laedo saw that she believed what she was saying. She was not joking. Before he could frame a reply she continued, speaking waspishly. “It’s terrific here, Laedo. Do you see what these people are like? They’re just like little children—naughty children, but quite helpless. You can do anything you like with them.
We’re going to be their king and queen. They’ll all be our slaves, every one, and do our bidding.”
“I thought you wanted to go on to Harkio,” Laedo reminded her wearily.
“Yes!” she said passionately, and her words came in a rush. “We’ll do everything we want to do here and then we’ll go to Harkio and do everything we want to do there!”
The will-numbing effect of the pod’s poison must have worn off. At any rate Laedo know what he had to do, and he did it quickly. He stepped to Histrina, kneed her in the solar plexus, and jabbed his fist at her jaw as she doubled up and dropped the gun. She reeled and sprawled stunned to the ground.
Wrestling her over his shoulder, he stooped to retrieve the gun, and then he was off through the orchid jungle towards the projector station. She began to stir as he was clambering up the stairway, making him wonder if he had hit her hard enough, but she didn’t struggle.
He withdrew the stairway, closed the hatch, and made for the control room. Dropping her in a corner, he activated the board. The viewscreen lit up, showing the ground hanging aslant the from top of the screen, upended by the angle of the station’s inner floors.
He looked at Histrina, who was conscious now and had sat up. “Just stay there, and don’t move or you’ll get the same again,” he warned her.