The Sinners of Erspia

TWO Orchid Paradise

The drive had been in operation for only minutes when a mechanism behind the panel of the control board chattered and a sheet of parchment-like material came stuttering out of a slot.

Laedo snatched it up as it floated floorwards. Words, still smoking, had been etched or burned into the sheet in argot galactica.

Experiment incomplete, they read. Return station to duty.

Laedo stared. It had not occurred to him that the projector station might be able to monitor the performance of its staff.

How to reply? Laedo searched the panel. The mechanism had not spoken out loud, so he presumed there would be a writing plate or something even more primitive, such as a keyboard. But he found nothing. Finally, in exasperation, he responded as if to a normal control device.

“The experiment has been abandoned. The staff are all dead,” he said, raising his voice.

After a pause there came more chattering and another sheet of parchment was extruded.

Must report to Klystar, he read. Then he felt movement under his feet.

The dials on the board were shifting their settings. With a yell he seized control levers and tried to correct the course, but it was no good. The station was changing direction and all the flight parameters—velocity flow, fuel rate, flight tensor—were being adjusted by an unseen, expert power.

Not back to Erspia. Not towards Harkio. To where?

He groaned and sank back in the pilot’s seat.

The door slid open. Histrina stepped into the room, her gun thrust into the belt of her gauzy shift-like gown, dimpling her soft belly.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, in the cool and self-possessed voice she had acquired since the killings.

“I don’t know where the hell we’re going—if anywhere.”

“I thought we were going to your home world. To Harkio.”

“So did I. But this thing has a mind of its own. I think it’s trying to take us to Klystar, the being who made Erspia. Only I don’t suppose it even knows where Klystar is.”

“Well, do something,” Histrina said, in a tone whose sharpness surprised and even frightened him a little.

Raising his face, and ignoring Histrina’s puzzlement at seeing him address thin air, he spoke again.

“Klystar went away a long time ego. There’s no one to report to. Hand back control of the station to me.”

This time there was no chattering of words being burned onto parchment, and no change in the dial readings. “It’s no good,” Laedo muttered.

Histrina clenched her fists in frustration. “Think of something else, ” she insisted bitingly.

“I’ll have to see if I can get the casing off and jigger about with the cybernetics somehow. The trouble is, putting it out of action might disconnect the drive unit controls as well. We’d be stranded.”

“Look!” said Histrina.

Over the control panel a part of wall had changed colour from grey to smudgy white, forming a wide oval patch. The oval cleared and became glasslike. It was a viewscreen.

In it, Laedo saw what he presumed lay ahead of them: black space dotted with stars. Then, to the accompaniment of more movement under their feet, the view swivelled round.

Suddenly they were looking at a planet, shining in the darkness, lit on one side by an unseen sun.

“It’s Erspia!” Histrina cried. “We’re back at Erspia!”

“No, we couldn’t be.” Laedo inspected the dials with a frown. “We haven’t gone back, not unless these readings are all wrong. We’re thousands of miles away.”

For all that, it did look a lot like Erspia. Now he spotted where the planet’s daytime illumination came from: a point source of light, orbiting the globe not far away. It was the Erspia system in duplicate, and automatically he began to see it not as a planet proper but as a spherically shaped planetoid, even though the screen gave no ranging figures from which to estimate size.

“Erspia looks brownish-green from space,” he said to Histrina. “Look close at that planet. It’s mottled in different colours.”

“I don’t see.”

Laedo wasn’t sure if he saw the colours either now. Perhaps it had been an optical effect, a sort of shading of phantom hues. But the globe was definitely lighter in tone than Erspia. It was almost pastel.

“It’s obvious Klystar made more than one world,” he said tonelessly. “We’ll wait till the station parks itself in orbit or whatever. Then I’ll have a go at the casing.”

But the station didn’t go into orbit. Laedo gave a hiss of indrawn breath as the planetoid’s globe shape swooped nearer.

They were going in—fast!

“Look out!” he yelled to the hidden controller. “There’s a planet ahead! We’re going to crash!”

“What’s happening?” Histrina shrieked.

“We’re out of control. Quick—get into this chair.” He pointed to the padded, braced seat next to his. It wasn’t much protection, but it was better than standing.

Histrina disregarded his advice. “I’ll fix that thing,” she snarled. She pulled the gun from her waistband and pointed it at the control board as the worldlet swelled and swelled on the screen, blotting out the ebony margin that had surrounded it.

“No!” Laedo jumped up and began wrestling with her, forcing the nozzle of the gun away from the control board. “That won’t help! Stop it!”

Again he felt the floor shift beneath his feet, then a slight pressure. He knew that these indications were leaks through the artificial gravity from much more powerful acceleration forces that would have crushed them both instantly. Either the station was changing course, or it was decelerating.

“It’s all right!” he shouted. “Put the gun away, Histrina!”

Dubiously she obeyed. The sunlit side of the planetoid was now so close that blurry surface features could be made out—fuzzy mottled colours, lavender, light green, daffodil yellow, swaying and sliding past. Then, abruptly, it all streaked aside and they were once more looking into space, with the point-source sun glaring out at them.

The station had turned itself over. It was coming down for a landing, right side up.

Laedo seated himself back at the control board. Experimentally he worked a set of slides whose use he had been unable to discover before. As he now guessed, they controlled the viewscreen. In moments he learned how to direct the scope downwards, so that he was able once more to survey the surface.

This definitely was not Erspia. The projector station was descending gently, with a lateral drift so that it appeared to skim over a landscape now clearly visible in all its features. It was a world of flamboyant jungle—though not a jungle of trees, but instead of what appeared to be gigantic blooms or orchids, riotous with colour. At first Laedo thought he had got the focus wrong and was scanning a tropical garden from an apparent height of a foot or two, but no, the viewpoint was their true one, hundreds or thousands of feet in the air. Interspersing the growths were clear patches carpeted with pale green grass or moss, and here and there, azure lakes.

He felt Histrina lean over him. “Isn’t it lovely?” she murmured. Her arm hung limply, the gun still clasped in her fingers.

Laedo wondered if the projector station could survive a planetary landing in Earth-normal gravity.

Presumably it was built for space, without much by way of internal bracing. Still, it was of sturdy construction otherwise…

Histrina was cooing and mooing as if at a fireworks display. They had begun to dip into the forest, brushing through the huge, fleshy orchids, tearing through titanic petals, ripping through tangles of sunlit vines, becoming engulfed in colour. There was a sudden jar as the station struck the ground. On the screen was nothing but a flurry. Something had gone wrong; they were tumbling over and over, rolling through the jungle, snapping and breaking the apparently unresisting growths—even though the artificial gravity within the control room kept Laedo and Histrina sitting and standing calmly, undisturbed by the violent motions.

Fascinated, they watched as the tumbling spectacle slowed and became still. They had come to a stop.

Once at rest, the scope showed an expanse of close-cropped, light green grass among which were patches of moss. Laedo worked the cursors again. The spherical station had settled on its side—if the location of the drive unit could be taken to represent its underneath—in a large clearing. Wide mossy trails seemed to wander into the jungle. There was a glimpse of blue water.

And that jungle…

Actually it was not, as he had first thought, close-packed. One could have strolled through it with ease.

The place was like some alien Eden, a flower forest whose trees were giant blooms, whose huge orchids replaced timber boles and trunks.

And the colours! Nowhere did they clash, nowhere were they even glaring, but the total effect was breathtaking. Pale colours, yellows, ochres, cyan, lavender, sometimes glowingly transparent, shot through with stronger tones—scarlet, saffron, mazarine. For long minutes Laedo and Histrina gazed entranced, while Laedo slowly panned the cursor.

“Come on,” Histrina said eagerly. “Let’s go outside!”

“We’ll have to check the atmosphere first.”

“We’ll have to do what?” Mystified, Histrina stared at him.

He sighed. “I suppose it’s bound to be all right, on second thought. This is one of Klystar’s productions, after all.”

“I’ve never seen this part of Erspia before.”

“This isn’t Erspia, Histrina,” Laedo said wearily. “I just tried to explain. It’s another world, something like Erspia, only different. Do you understand that?”

“I suppose so.” She frowned, then brightened. “I wonder if there are people here?”

“So do I.”

Getting out was easier than he had thought it would be. They walked the corridor to the hatch which was the only portal Laedo had found in the whole station so far. He opened it and poked his head out.

The sensation was peculiar. The hatch was about thirty feet off the ground, but it was on the under-curve of the station, facing downwards. The artificial gravity kept him standing on the floor of the corridor, but this was upside down to the ground, at an angle of about forty-five degrees, so that the landscape appeared to rear crazily over him. Once his head cleared the skin of the station, however, the planetoid’s gravity took over and his head and his body were tugged in different directions.

He was pondering the problem of how to reach the ground when Histrina casually solved it for him.

“What do you think this is for?” she said, and pulled a lever behind him. Something rattled out from a slot below the hatch. It was a folding stairway which flapped, swayed and dropped, until it offered a steep but negotiable route to the floor of the clearing, complete with handrail.

He stepped down carefully, holding on to the rail. He could feel Histrina’s tread behind him, urging him on.

On the ground they stopped to take in their surroundings. The air was delightful: light, invigorating, filled with delicate scents. Laedo saw that the glimpse of blue he had seen was a lake in a meadow or parkland, partly hidden by a fringe of the giant orchids. Only in that direction did the close horizon betray the small size of this world. Elsewhere, because of the way the jungle hid everything, they could have been on a full-sized planet.

Laedo looked up at the projector station, backing away to take it in. Evidently it was perfectly capable of coping with the stresses of normal gravity, though whether this was due to structural strength or help from the internal gravity field he did not know. It reared over the tops of the titanic flowers; but somehow, now that it was down on the ground, it seemed less bulky than it had in space. It was, in fact, about the size of a small passenger liner, or perhaps an interworld shuttle.

Large enough, he supposed, to be a miniature world in itself for the eight people who had staffed it.

It seemed to have suffered no harm from rolling through the jungle. His own ship, though, was missing. It had been torn off. No doubt it lay in the jungle somewhere.

Given time, he might be able to gain control over the station’s drive unit. At least he’d better be able to do it, he told himself fiercely. Otherwise he’d be stuck here for good.

He turned back to look at the jungle again. Only now did the silence of the place strike him. There was no singing of birds, such as had been ever-present on Erspia. There was no buzzing of insects. In fact, no sign of animal life at all.

That air, though… breathing in deeply, he felt his senses tingle. It was like wine, it was like… where had he breathed air such as that before? He could only think of one of the pleasure houses back in civilisation, its air loaded with molecules to stimulate the appetite for food, sex or whatever.

Evidently Histrina was enjoying it, too. She gave a happy sigh. Then she sauntered towards the nearby orchids.

But suddenly she stopped, and stared like a stalking cat. “Look!” she hissed.

Laedo followed her gaze and caught up with her. Two figures had entered the jungle from the direction of the park-like grassland. They were tall, fair-haired and fair-skinned, though tanned by the sun. Silently, with graceful, light steps, they walked between the monstrous growths like fairies in a paradisical garden.

One was a man, one a woman. Both were completely naked, a circumstance which caused Histrina to giggle lickerishly. “Look at him,” she whispered aside to Laedo. “He’s stiff!”

And so he was. Laedo stared at his feet, aware that the was probably about to witness an act the couple would regard as private. But what happened next removed his sense of reserve.

The two had reached the mouth of a fleshy orchid, a glowing pale lavender in colour. Reminding Laedo once more of fairies, they proceeded to climb through its thick petals and into the roomy bell, vanishing from view.

The huge flower trembled. From within came cries which Laedo would have interpreted as cries of agony and despair, had he not known better.

Histrina turned to him, her faced flushed, her eyes glistening. “Come on!” she urged, as she grabbed him by the wrist and tugged him at a half run towards the jungle.

She selected the first orchid they came to, an almost globular flower of a translucent, luminous yellow.

She had to reach up to its entrance, which was a narrow gap or porticoed slot, and it yielded reluctantly to her arms like the jaws of a snapdragon, as she hauled herself up and in, her legs kicking as she wriggled her way inside.

Moments later her head and shoulders reappeared, thrusting through the portico lips. Apparently she had discarded her gown. Her hair, face, and shoulders were dusted with a fine yellow powder. It was, Laedo realized, pollen.

“Come on in, quick!” she shouted, in a note of almost hysterical urgency.

Unsure of what was happening, Laedo hesitated. But Histrina would brook no delay. She bared her teeth in a grimace. At the same time, her arm poked through the entrance. She was holding the gun, and it pointed right at him.

“Come on in here, I say!” she screeched.

It was with something of a shock that Laedo recognised the expression on Histrina’s face. She was transfigured with lust. Naked, raging lust, as compelling as an animal’s fear, sweeping away all logic.

Now, he reasoned, might not be the time to cross Histrina. Besides, something was working on him, too.

As they approached the orchid he had become aware of its aroma, a delightful sharp-sweet smell which wafted to his nostrils even more strongly now as Histrina wallowed about in the flower’s throat. A warm desirous feeling was rising in him, further stimulated by the sounds coming from within the lavender orchid some tens of yards away. Any resistance he might have had quickly evaporated.

He clambered up, gripping the lips of the slit and hauling himself inside as he had seen Histrina do.

They were in a fair-sized cavity, amply lit by the light sifting through the translucent walls of petal flesh.

The floor was carpeted with a kind of thick fleecy pile, from which clouds of pollen rose with every tread. Near the walls the carpet sprouted big penis-like stamens which also ended in pollen dispensers.

The effect was to drench them both in pollen every time they moved.

The sensation of actually being inside a flower was delightful, but there was scarcely time to savour a feeling so delicate, for the smell of the orchid was now overwhelming. Laedo had already guessed what the plant did. It released human pheromones, airborne chemicals which brought on an irresistible sexual urge. Histrina grabbed him as soon as he was inside, impatiently tugging at his clothing, of which he was just as anxious to divest himself. They went down together, rolling on the pollen mat, blood pounding, gasping with eagerness.

It seemed to Laedo that the whole globular chamber was banging like a drum to the beating of his heart.

He had never known anything like it, not even in a pleasure house. Somewhere he could hear an uncontrolled roaring and wailing, both a man’s voice and a woman’s, and he completely failed to realize, at first, that it was his and Histrina’s voices he was hearing.

How long did it go on for? He couldn’t tell. He was submerged in his urges; there was no time. But eventually, after slaking his desires more deeply than he would have thought possible, he recovered his senses somewhat. He was lying on the floor of the orchid, arms still clasped around Histrina.

The gun lay a few feet away.

Only that forced him to clear his head. Otherwise he would probably have gone on, reaching plateau after plateau. He disentangled himself, casually picked up the gun, then wrapped it in his strewn clothing.

“Come on,” he said huskily, “let’s get back outside… for a while.”

They stood up, and each laughed to see the other. Skin and hair were golden, dusted and shining. Still chuckling, Histrina bent to scoop up her gown.

Then she looked around for the gun, a frown crossing her features. Laedo forced himself quickly through the opening and lowered himself to the ground, then walked away at a steady pace.

Some distance away a man and a woman were standing looking up at the projector station. They were the same two, as far as Laedo could tell, who had entered the lavender orchid. Histrina caught up with him. He turned so as to keep his face to her. She seemed upset, furious, in fact—dangerously so. But, as long as he had the gun…

Placatingly he smiled. “That was great, wasn’t it?”

“Give it back to me,” she said in a hard voice.

He ignored her. “There are no insects here,” he mused, looking up at the jungle, then at the sky. “No animals, no birds. Only people. The flowers use us to fertilise themselves with. That’s why they’re so big.”

It was a marvellous piece of adaptation. Elsewhere it would have betokened an interesting line in selective evolution. On this planetoid, of course, the case was a little different. The orchids hadn’t evolved quite by themselves. A guiding intelligence had given them a hand, or so he imagined—the intelligence of Klystar.

“Give me my gun,” Histrina said in a low, controlled screech.

“It isn’t your gun,” Laedo said calmly. “It’s mine, and I’m keeping it.”

“Give it to me, you—” Histrina flew at him, snatching at the bundle of clothing under his arm, kicking and scratching.

“Stop it!” he bellowed. Putting out a hand to fend her off, he placed it squarely on a voluminous breast, and pushed her away.

Panting, she stopped, to stare over his right shoulder. Cautiously he turned. The other couple had strolled up. They were smiling a greeting.

“Haven’t you finished?” the man said pleasantly. “You should have stayed in the bell.”

“We have finished, actually,” Laedo murmured. He inspected the two, interested to think they were the same whose ecstatic cries he had heard earlier. They were perfect physical specimens. The man was also undeniably handsome, and the woman beautiful. Quite obviously they were accustomed to their nakedness and had no use for clothing of any sort. They moved with a natural gracefulness, and radiated an air of unabashed friendliness.

Pure children of nature, he told himself. He was reminded of legends of man before the Fall. Something else they radiated was the sweetish odour of orchid pollen, an odour which he realized also surrounded Histrina and himself. The yellow dust clung to them all over, drenching the hair of head and genitals and adding a golden patina to the skin. Histrina, he noted, was eyeing the man up and down and was evidently excited by him. For his part, he found it hard to keep his eyes off the woman. Desirable though Histrina’s body was, he had to admit that the other female surpassed her in comeliness.

“I haven’t seen you two before,” the woman said in a warm contralto. “Are you from another region?”

“We come from another world altogether,” Laedo told her. He pointed to the bulking projector station.

“We came in that. It’s a spaceship, of sorts.”

They glanced back at the station. “So that’s what it is,” the man said. He and the woman cooed, as though at something surprising, but then turned to Laedo again. Their lack of genuine astonishment was, to Laedo’s mind, itself astonishing.

“Will you stay here long?” the man said.

“Some time, perhaps. It depends.”

The woman spoke again, looking speculatively at Laedo. “Do you have flowers on your world?”

“Flowers? No, not the sort you have here. Only tiny ones.” He demonstrated with his hands.

She pulled a face, as a child might. “I think I’d rather be here on Erspia.”

“Erspia?”

“There you are!” Histrina said furiously to Laedo. “I told you this was Erspia!”

Laedo lowered his head towards her. “But it isn’t Erspia,” he insisted quietly.

“Oh yes, this is Erspia,” the planetoid woman said brightly. “It’s always been Erspia. What’s the name of the world you come from?”

“Erspia!” Histrina said triumphantly.

Laedo sighed. “Look, it’s only the name that’s the same,” he explained to Histrina. “Klystar must have given the one name to both worlds.” He addressed the woman again. “Is there a being called Klystar on this world, by any chance?”

“Klystar?” She looked puzzled. “No, I don’t think so.”

The man looked at him with a new respect. “You speak of the great gardener,” he said gravely. “He who created the garden of Erspia and placed us in the midst of it. No, he doesn’t live here himself. He lives in heaven.” He glanced back quickly at the projector station, a new thought seeming to strike him. “Can your spaceship go to heaven?”

Histrina laughed shortly.

The man laughed too, sharing her amusement even though ignorant of its cause. “My name is Lallalo,” he said, making it sound musical, almost a snatch of song. “And this is Lila. What are you called?”

Laedo told him, and Lallalo smiled. “Well, we’ll see you again, perhaps. Call on us before you leave.”

Unconcernedly the pair strolled away.

“Wait!” Histrina cried. “Where are you going? Take us with you!”

She was animated, excited. They looked back, and smiled. Histrina hurried after them.

There were several other matters that Laedo thought he ought to be attending to. But his curiosity was too great, and after a few moments he, too, followed after the innocent dwellers in the garden of Erspia-2.