Downward to the Earth

Six

WHEN HE WOKE it was some time after midday. The normal life of the encampment had resumed; a good many of the nildoror were in the lake, a few were munching on the vegetation at the top of the slope, and most were resting in the shade. The only sign of last night’s frenzy was in the spongy turf near the lakeshore, which was terribly scuffed and torn.

Gundersen felt stiff and numb. Also he was abashed, with the embarrassment of one who has thrown himself too eagerly into someone else’s special amusement. He could hardly believe that he had done what he knew himself to have done. In his shame he felt an immediate impulse to leave the encampment at once, before the nildoror could show him their contempt for an Earthman capable of making himself a thrall to their festivity, capable of allowing himself to be beguiled by their incantations. But he shackled the thought, remembering that he had a purpose in coming here.

He limped down to the lake and waded out until its water came up to his breast. He soaked a while, and washed away the sweat of the night before. Emerging, he found his clothing and put it on.

A nildor came to him and said, “Vol’himyor will speak to you now.”

The many-born one was halfway up the slope. Coming before him, Gundersen could not find the words of any of the greetings formulas, and simply stared raggedly at the old nildor until Vol’himyor said, “You dance well, my once-born friend. You dance with joy. You dance with love. You dance like a nildor, do you know that?”

“It is not easy for me to understand what happened to me last night.” said Gundersen.

“You proved to us that our world has captured your spirit.”

“Was it offensive to you that an Earthman danced among you?”

“If it had been offensive,” said Vol’himyor slowly, “you would not have danced among us.” There was a long silence. Then the nildor said, “We will make a treaty, we two. I will give you permission to go into the mist country. Stay there until you are ready to come out. But when you return, bring with you the Earthman known as Cullen, and offer him to the northernmost encampment of nildoror, the first of my people that you find. Is this agreed?”

“Cullen?” Gundersen asked. Across his mind flared the image of a short broad-faced man with fine golden hair and mild green eyes. “Cedric Cullen, who was here when I was here?”

“The same man.”

“He worked with me when I was at the station in the Sea of Dust.”

“He lives now in the mist country,” Vol’himyor said, “having gone there without permission. We want him.”

“What has he done?”

“He is guilty of a grave crime. Now he has taken sanctuary among the sulidoror, where we are unable to gain access to him. It would be a violation of our covenant with them if we removed this man ourselves. But we may ask you to do it.”

Gundersen frowned. “You won’t tell me the nature of his crime?”

“Does it matter? We want him. Our reasons are not trifling ones. We request you to bring him to us.”

“You’re asking one Earthman to seize another and turn him in for punishment,” said Gundersen. “How am I to know where justice lies in this affair?”

“Under the treaty of relinquishment, are we not the arbiters of justice on this world?” asked one nildor.

Gundersen admitted that this was so.

“Then we hold the right to deal with Cullen as he deserves,” Vol’himyor said.

That did not, of course, make it proper for Gundersen to act as catspaw in handing his old comrade over to the nildoror. But Vol’himyor’s implied threat was clear: do as we wish, or we grant you no favors.

Gundersen said, “What punishment will Cullen get if he falls into your custody?”

“Punishment? Punishment? Who speaks of punishment?”

“If the man’s a criminal—”

“We wish to purify him,” said the many-born one. “We desire to cleanse his spirit. We do not regard that as punishment.”

“Will you injure him physically in any way?”

“It is not to be thought.”

“Will you end his life?”

“Can you mean such a thing? Of course not.”

“Will you imprison him?”

“We will keep him in custody,” said Vol’himyor, “for however long the rite of purification takes. I do not think it will take long. He will swiftly be freed, and he will be grateful to us.”

“I ask you once more to tell me the nature of his crime.”

“He will tell you that himself,” the nildor said. “It is not necessary for me to make his confession for him.”

Gundersen considered all aspects of the matter. Shortly he said, “I agree to our treaty, many-born one, but only if I may add several clauses.”

“Go on.”

“If Cullen will not tell me the nature of his crime, I am released from my obligation to hand him over.”

“Agreed.”

“If the sulidoror object to my taking Cullen out of the mist country, I am released from my obligation also.”

“They will not object. But agreed.”

“If Cullen must be subdued by violence in order to bring him forth, I am released.”

The nildor hesitated a moment. “Agreed,” he said finally.

“I have no other conditions to add.”

“Then our treaty is made,” Vol’himyor said. “You may begin your northward journey today. Five of our once-born ones must also travel to the mist country, for their time of rebirth has come, and if you wish they will accompany you and safeguard you along the way. Among them is Srin’gahar, whom you already know.”

“Will it be troublesome for them to have me with them?”

“Srin’gahar has particularly requested the privilege of serving as your guardian,” said Vol’himyor. “But we would not compel you to accept his aid, if you would rather make your journey alone.”

“It would be an honor to have his company,” Gundersen said.

“So be it, then.”

A senior nildor summoned Srin’gahar and the four others who would be going toward rebirth. Gundersen was gratified at this confirmation of the existing data: once more the frenzied dance of the nildoror had preceded the departure of a group bound for rebirth.

It pleased him, too, to know that he would have a nildoror escort on the way north. There was only one dark aspect to the treaty, that which involved Cedric Cullen. He wished he had not sworn to barter another Earthman’s freedom for his own safe-conduct pass. But perhaps Cullen had done something really loathsome, something that merited punishment — or purification, as Vol’himyor put it. Gundersen did not understand how that normally sunny man could have become a criminal and a fugitive, but Cullen had lived on this world a long time, and the strangeness of alien worlds ultimately corroded even the brightest souls. In any case, Gundersen felt that he had opened enough honorable exits for himself if he needed to escape from his treaty with Vol’himyor.

Srin’gahar and Gundersen went aside to plan their route. “Where in the mist country do you intend to go?” the nildor asked.

“It does not matter. I just want to enter it. I suppose I’ll have to go wherever Cullen is.”

“Yes. But we do not know exactly where he is, so we will have to wait until we are there to learn it. Do you have special places to visit on the way north?”

“I want to stop at the Earthman stations,” Gundersen said. “Particularly at Shangri-la Falls. So my idea is that we’ll follow Madden’s River northwestward, and—”

“These names are unknown to me.”

“Sorry. I guess they’ve all reverted back to nildororu names. And I don’t know those. But wait—” Seizing a stick, Gundersen scratched a hasty but serviceable map of Belzagor’s western hemisphere in the mud. Across the waist of the disk he drew the thick swath of the tropics. At the right side he gouged out a curving bite to indicate the ocean; on the left he outlined the Sea of Dust. Above and below the band of the tropics he drew the thinner lines representing the northern and southern mist zones, and beyond them he indicated the gigantic icecaps. He marked the spaceport and the hotel at the coast with an X, and cut a wiggly line up from there, clear across the tropics into the northern mist country, to show Madden’s River. At the midway point of the river he placed a dot to mark Shangri-la Falls. “Now,” said Gundersen, “if you follow the tip of my stick—”

“What are those marks on the ground?” asked Srin’gahar.

A map of your planet, Gundersen wanted to say. But there was no nildororu word in his mind for “map.” He found that he also lacked words for “image,” picture,” and similar concepts. He said lamely, “This is your world. This is Belzagor, or at least half of it. See, this is the ocean, and the sun rises here, and—”

“How can this be my world, these marks, when my world is so large?”

“This is like your world. Each of these lines, here, stands for a place on your world. You see, here, the big river that runs out of the mist country and comes down to the coast, where the hotel is, yes? And this mark is the spaceport. These two lines are the top and the bottom of the northern mist country. The—”

“It takes a strong sulidor a march of many days to cross the northern mist country. said Srin’gahar. “I do not understand how you can point to such a small space and tell me it is the northern mist country. Forgive me, friend of my journey. I am very stupid.”

Gundersen tried again, attempting to communicate the nature of the marks on the ground. But Srin’gahar simply could not comprehend the idea of a map, nor could he see how scratched lines could represent places. Gundersen considered asking Vol’himyor to help him, but rejected that plan when he realized that Vol’himyor, too, might not understand; it would be tactless to expose the many-born one’s ignorance in any area. The map was a metaphor of place, an abstraction from reality. Evidently even beings possessing g’rakh might not have the capacity to grasp such abstractions.

He apologized to Srin’gahar for his own inability to express concepts clearly, and rubbed out the map with his boot. Without it, planning the route was somewhat more difficult, but they found ways to communicate. Gundersen learned that the great river at whose mouth the hotel was situated was called the Seran’nee in nildororu, and that the place where the river plunged out of the mountains into the coastal plain, which Earthmen knew as Shangri-la Falls, was Du’jayukh to nildoror. Then it was simple for them to agree to follow the Seran’nee to its source, with a stop at Du’jayukh and at any other settlement of Earthmen that happened to lie conveniently on the path north.

While this was being decided, several of the sulidoror brought a late breakfast of fruit and lake fish to Gundersen, exactly as though they recognized his authority under the Company. It was a curiously anachronistic gesture, almost servile, not at all like the way in which they had tossed him a raw slab of malidar meat the day before. Then they had been testing him, even taunting him; now they were waiting upon him. He was uncomfortable about that, but he was also quite hungry, and he made a point of asking Srin’gahar to tell him the sulidororu words of thanks. There was no sign that the powerful bipeds were pleased or flattered or amused by his use of their language, though.

They began their journey in late afternoon. The five nildoror moved in single file, Srin’gahar at the back of the group with Gundersen perched on his back; the Earthman did not appear to be the slightest burden for him. Their path led due north along the rim of the great rift, with the mountains that guarded the central plateau rising on their left. By the light of the sinking sun Gundersen stared toward that plateau. Down here in the valley, his surroundings had a certain familiarity; making the necessary allowances for the native plants and animals, he might almost be in some steamy jungle of South America. But the plateau appeared truly alien. Gundersen eyed the thick tangles of spiky purplish moss that festooned and nearly choked the trees along the top of the rift wall. The way the parasitic growth drowned its hosts the trees seemed grisly to him. The wall itself, of some soapy gray-green rock, dotted with angry blotches of crimson lichen and punctuated every few hundred meters by long ropy strands of a swollen blue fungus, cried out its otherworldliness: the soft mineral had never felt the impact of raindrops, but had been gently carved and shaped by the humidity alone, taking on weird knobbinesses and hollows over the millennia. Nowhere on Earth could one see a rock wall like that, serpentine and involute and greasy.

The forest beyond the wall looked impenetrable and vaguely sinister. The silence, the heavy and sluggish air, the sense of dark strangeness, the flexible limbs of the glossy trees bowed almost to the ground by moss, the occasional distant snort of some giant beast, made the central plateau seem forbidding and hostile. Few Earthmen had ever entered it, and it had never been surveyed in detail. The Company once had had some plans for stripping away large patches of jungle up there and putting in agricultural settlements, but nothing had come of the scheme, because of relinquishment. Gundersen had been in the plateau country only once, by accident, when his pilot had had to make a forced landing en route from coastal headquarters to the Sea of Dust. Seena had been with him. They spent a night and a day in that forest, Seena terrified from the moment of landing, Gundersen comforting her in a standard manly way but finding that her terror was somehow contagious. The girl trembled as one alien happening after another presented itself, and shortly Gundersen was on the verge of trembling too. They watched, fascinated and repelled, while an army of innumerable insects with iridescent hexagonal bodies and long hairy legs strode with maniacal persistence into a sprawling glade of tigermoss; for hours the savage mouths of the carnivorous plants bit the shining insects into pieces and devoured them, and still the horde marched on to destruction. At last the moss was so glutted that it went into sporulation, puffing up cancerously and sending milky clouds of reproductive bodies spewing into the air. By morning the whole field of moss lay deflated and helpless, and tiny green reptiles with broad rasping tongues moved in to devour every strand, laying bare the soil for a new generation of flora. And then there were the feathery jelly-like things, streaked with blue and red, that hung in billowing cascades from the tallest trees, trapping unwary flying creatures. And bulky rough-skinned beasts as big as rhinos, bearing mazes of blue antlers with interlocking tines, grubbed for roots a dozen meters from their camp, glaring sourly at the strangers from Earth. And long-necked browsers with eyes like beacons munched on high leaves, squirting barrelfuls of purple urine from openings at the bases of their taut throats. And dark fat otter-like beings ran chattering past the stranded Earthmen, stealing anything within quick grasp. Other animals visited them also. This planet, which had never known the hunter’s hand, abounded in big mammals. He and Seena and the pilot had seen more grotesqueness in a day and night than they had bargained for when they signed up for outworld service.

“Have you ever been in there?” Gundersen asked Srin’gahar, as night began to conceal the rift wall.

“Never. My people seldom enter that land.”

“Occasionally, flying low over the plateau, I used to see nildoror encampments in it. Not often, but sometimes. Do you mean that your people no longer go there?”

“No,” said Srin’gahar. “A few of us have need to go to the plateau, but most do not. Sometimes the soul grows stale, and one must change one’s surroundings. If one is not ready for rebirth, one goes to the plateau. It is easier to confront one’s own soul in there, and to examine it for flaws. Can you understand what I say?”

“I think so,” Gundersen said. “It’s like a place of pilgrimage, then — a place of purification?”

“In a way.”

“But why have the nildoror never settled permanently up there? There’s plenty of food — the climate is warm—”

“It is not a place where g’rakh rules” the nildor replied.

“Is it dangerous to nildoror? Wild animals, poisonous plants, anything like that?”

“No, I would not say that. We have no fear of the plateau, and there is no place on this world that is dangerous to us. But the plateau does not interest us, except those who have the special need of which I spoke. As I say, g’rakh is foreign to it. Why should we go there? There is room enough for us in the lowlands.”

The plateau is too alien even for them, Gundersen thought. They prefer their nice little jungle. How curious!

He was not sorry when darkness hid the plateau from view.

They made camp that night beside a hissing-hot stream. Evidently its waters issued from one of the underground cauldrons that were common in this sector of the continent; Srin’gahar said that the source lay not far to the north. Clouds of steam rose from the swift flow; the water, pink with high-temperature microorganisms, bubbled and boiled. Gundersen wondered if Srin’gahar had chosen this stopping place especially for his benefit, since nildoror had no use for hot water, but Earthmen notoriously did.

He scrubbed his face, taking extraordinary pleasure in it, and supplemented a dinner of food capsules and fresh fruit with a stew of greenberry roots — delectable when boiled, poisonous otherwise. For shelter while sleeping Gundersen used a monomolecular jungle blanket that he had stowed in his backpack, his one meager article of luggage on this journey. He draped the blanket over a tripod of boughs to keep away nightflies and other noxious insects, and crawled under it. The ground, thickly grassed, was a good enough mattress for him.

The nildoror did not seem disposed toward conversation. They left him alone. All but Srin’gahar moved several hundred meters upstream for the night. Srin’gahar settled down protectively a short distance from Gundersen and wished him a good sleep.

Gundersen said, “Do you mind talking a while? I want to know something about the process of rebirth. How do you know, for instance, that your time is upon you? Is it something you feel within yourself, or is it just a matter of reaching a certain age? Do you—” He became aware that Srin’gahar was paying no attention. The nildor had fallen into what might have been a deep trance, and lay perfectly still.

Shrugging, Gundersen rolled over and waited for sleep, but sleep was a long time coming.

He thought a good deal about the terms under which he had been permitted to make this northward journey. Perhaps another many-born one would have allowed him to go into the mist country without attaching the condition that he bring back Cedric Cullen; perhaps he would not have been granted safe-conduct at all. Gundersen suspected that the results would have been the same no matter which encampment of nildoror he had happened to go to for his travel permission. Though the nildoror had no means of long-distance communication, no governmental structure in an Earthly sense, no more coherence as a race than a population of jungle beasts, they nevertheless were remarkably well able to keep in touch with one another and to strike common policies.

What was it that Cullen had done, Gundersen wondered, to make him so eagerly sought?

In the olden days Cullen had seemed overwhelmingly normal: a cheerful, amiable ruddy man who collected insects, spoke no harsh words, and held his liquor well. When Gundersen had been the chief agent out at Fire Point, in the Sea of Dust, a dozen years before, Cullen had been his assistant. Months on end there were only the two of them in the place, and Gundersen had come to know him quite well, he imagined. Cullen had no plans for making a career with the Company; he said he had signed a six-year contract, would not renew, and intended to take up a university appointment when he had done his time on Holman’s World. He was here only for seasoning, and for the prestige that accrues to anyone who has a record of outworld service. But then the political situation of Earth grew complex, and the Company was forced to agree to relinquish a great many planets that it had colonized. Gundersen, like most of the fifteen thousand Company people here, had accepted a transfer to another assignment. Cullen, to Gundersen’s amazement, was among the handful who opted to stay, even though that meant severing his ties with the home world. Gundersen had not asked him why; one did not discuss such things. But it seemed odd.

He saw Cullen clearly in memory, chasing bugs through the Sea of Dust, killing bottle jouncing against his hip as he ran from one rock outcropping to the next — an overgrown boy, really. The beauty of the Sea of Dust was altogether lost on him. No sector of the planet was more truly alien, nor more spectacular: a dry ocean bed, greater in size than the Atlantic, coated with a thick layer of fine crystalline mineral fragments as bright as mirrors when the sun was on them. From the station at Fire Point one could see the morning light advancing out of the east like a river of flame, spilling forth until the whole desert blazed. The crystals swallowed energy all day, and gave it forth all night, so that even at twilight the eerie radiance rose brightly, and after dark a throbbing purplish glow lingered for hours. In this almost lifeless but wondrously beautiful desert the Company had mined a dozen precious metals and thirty precious and semiprecious stones. The mining machines set forth from the station on far-ranging rounds, grinding up loveliness and returning with treasure; there was not much for an agent to do there except keep inventory of the mounting wealth and play host to the tourist parties that came to see the splendor of the countryside. Gundersen had grown terribly bored, and even the glories of the scenery had become tiresome to him; but Cullen, to whom the incandescent desert was merely a flashy nuisance, fell back on his hobby for entertainment, and filled bottle after bottle with his insects. Were the mining machines still standing in the Sea of Dust, Gundersen wondered, waiting for the command to resume operations? If the Company had not taken them away after relinquishment, they would surely stand there throughout all eternity, unrusting, useless, amidst the hideous gouges they had cut. The machines had scooped down through the crystalline layer to the dull basalt below, and had spewed out vast heaps of tailings and debris as they gnawed for wealth. Probably the Company had left the things behind, too, as monuments to commerce. Machinery was cheap, interstellar transport was costly; why bother removing them? “In another thousand years,” Gundersen once had said, “the Sea of Dust will all be destroyed and there’ll be nothing but rubble here, if these machines continue to chew up the rock at the present rate.” Cullen had shrugged and smiled. “Well, one won’t need to wear these dark glasses, then, once the infernal glare is gone,” he had said. “Eh?” And now the rape of the desert was over and the machines were still; and now Cullen was a fugitive in the mist country, wanted for some crime so terrible the nildoror would not even give it a name.

/