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.
SEVEN
Moon of Doom
“That was fantastic!” Histrina exclaimed. “Even better than the orchids!”
“I must admit I enjoyed it too,” Laedo agreed. “But it’s still manipulation.”
They were in the projector station’s living quarters. Their return from the ‘Festival of Light’ had left them still somewhat aroused, and they had continued erotic practices with one another for a while. Then they had fallen asleep.
It was now the following day. Laedo was considering what to do next. He was half convinced that ‘Voluptus’ was in fact Klystar, and that Erspia-5’s moon was his dwelling place.
Of course, he only had the word of the Guardians of Ormazd that there was a being called Klystar at all.
But someone had fashioned the Erspia worlds. Whoever it was possessed a technology in advance of mankind’s.
What kept the Erspia worlds together as a group, for instance? They were in interstellar space and should have drifted apart. Artificial inertial fields—those known to human technology, at any rate—acted over short distances only. Yet the planetoids were thousands of miles apart, and had remained grouped together for a century at least.
Would the projector station head for the moon if he again asked it to take him to Klystar? Perhaps, but perhaps not. If he wanted to see the moon, a better bet would be to use his own cargo ship.
Should he be thinking of visiting the moon at all? Should he not get down to gaining control of the projector station’s drive? There was no guarantee of success there either. While the station seemed fairly simple technically, ‘Klystar’ had very likely made sure the human Guardians of Ormazd could not seize control of it prematurely. For that matter, he didn’t know if the station really could reach a human-inhabited world as ‘Klystar’ had promised.
If only he had a forming machine and the right grade of steel, he could probably make a transductor for his cargo ship himself…