Day by Night

For, though sometimes worshipping gods, the Yunea did not permit itself to stray too far onto the abstract path of sheer faith. An ambience of security was all the aristocrats required, a guarantee that fate loved them.

Ceedres was her god. To be happy, she must worship him, and let him destroy her, and take pleasure in it.

“I can’t guess,” said Olvia, “why he accepted my invitation. If I had realized he would, I would never have sent it.”

But among the aristocrats whose existence could be lengthily prolonged into three or four hundred spans, boredom came to be the killer, a bizarre running down, a sort of decline and decay, nonphysical but fatal.

The harshest lesson of all was that which ran contrary to the teaching of his own personality.

Like many a longed-for gift, it was, in possession, unwelcome.

It was idiotic to be superstitious.

“Why,” she said, “did they leave their kingdom to us?”

“As well ask why they brought our ancestors to this star. Oh, yes, I think our races were taken from some other planet entirely, to be their toy. If we guess them to be gods, why stint them? Their avarice and callousness would be gargantuan. We can hardly fail to see that.”