Cafferty’s stratagem had depended upon the cargo hold being empty for some little time. Zasper, all unaware that his decision was not merely a distraction but a matter of life and death, took the inventory cube, inserted it into a File reader, and got on with the duty. He was standing in the cargo compartment beside a pile of monomol-packed replacement parts when he heard the sigh. A tiny sigh. The merest breath, meaning nothing except that it occurred in a place where nothing was supposed to be breathing but himself.
It took no time to find the child, asleep behind the pile of cartons, small packages of food and drink stacked near him, a little pad beneath him to speak of concern for his comfort, concern for his life. None of the food had been eaten, none of the water drunk. All the evidence indicated he’d been put aboard in Molock.
Duty required that Zasper Ertigon return the vehicle to Molock and turn the child over to the guards. Nonetheless, he stood for a time, looking at the rise and fall of the little chest, hearing the soft breaths, again, again. The child was a good-looking little rascal, dark-haired, with skin the color of sand. His eyelashes were unbelievably long, the way some children’s were, giving his eyes that fringy, vulnerable look. Zasper made an impatient gesture, went back to the control compartment, and turned the ship.
Shortly the glow of the city came up beneath him, the light of cookfires reflected from a suspended layer of smoke and cloud that formed a level ceiling slightly above the flier. Directly in his path, looming out of the glare, the temple pyramid thrust a wide ceremonial platform toward him, like a rudely outthrust tongue. This time of night the temple complex was empty. Zasper lowered the ship upon the platform, a little awkwardly (flying had never been one of his talents), and got out to stare over the smoky city.
Enforcer duty brought him to Molock from time to time. He’d seen the Molockian temple, though never before close up, and what he hadn’t seen, he’d heard about. After a moment of indecision, he climbed the short flight of stairs leading to the top, where the level rock-paved summit seemed to hang only a few feet below a layer of flame-colored smoke and cloud, the space between suffused with a bloody glow.
He wanted to see if what he’d heard described was really there, and it was, not ten paces from the top of the stairs. Centered upon the paved square was an iron rack made up of wavy spikes, ten wide, ten deep, ten high. On each spike rested a skull, a thousand skulls, all little ones, all from children possibly four or five years old.
The ten skulls from the back row of the top layer had been removed to the stained altar and lay there lined up beside two stone mauls. Twice each year the ten oldest skulls were beaten into powder and distributed to the worshipers as a guarantee of fertility for the fields, the flocks, the men and women of Molock. To the dreadful pounding of drums and the shriek of flutes, all the other skulls were moved up a notch, and twelve little boys were hung upon the sides of the rack to die slowly of thirst and hunger before the eyes of their parents who, during all that long dying, were carefully restrained and fed and given water to drink before the eyes of their sons. The first ten who died were used on the rack. The last two left alive were given back to their parents and sometimes they survived. Seasonally, ten skulls were removed and replaced with ten new ones.
Zasper counted the skulls, as though the act of enumeration might change the total number. He had heard about the rite when it first began, marking it down as another delightful thing about Molock to make him avoid the place. He had refused to consider details then, but now they confronted him in a way he couldn’t simply pretend not to see. In order to have accumulated a thousand skulls in the short time since the rite began, the number of children sacrificed at first must have been many times the current number, which was quite bad enough. Obviously there was only one likely reason for someone having put the child in the cargo compartment: to save that child from ending up here.
He peered into the eyes of the skulls, which seemed to stare back at him. Some of them near the bottom bore shreds of skin and hair. Among them something squirmed and dropped with a sickening plop to the stones.
Molock. Category four. Barbarian. And its temple. Which Zasper was sworn to protect, or at least sworn not to allow any interference with whatsoever. He was a Council Enforcer. His oath and the oaths of those like him were all that stood between the diversity that defines humanity and the loss of humanity itself. Cultural relativism. The necessity of maintaining a nonjudgmental attitude. Diverse but not therefore perverse. Those were a few of the phrases he was accustomed to. Still, he looked at the skulls and didn’t move, feeling sickness clench deep in his bowels.
Abruptly, without thinking about it, he went back to the ship, raised it, and
