Downward to the Earth

by Robert Silverberg

  “Where are their spiritual achievements, then? What does an elephant believe about the nature of the universe? What does he think about the Shaping Force? How does he regard his own place in his society?"

  “I do not know,” said Srin'gahar. “And neither do you, friend of my journey, because the language of the elephants is closed to you. But it is an error to assume the absence of g'rakh where you are incapable of seeing it."

  “In that case, maybe the malidaror have g'rakh too. And the venom-serpents. And the trees, and the vines, and—"

  “No,” said Srin'gahar. “On this planet, only nildoror and sulidoror possess g'rakh. This we know beyond doubt. On your world it is not necessarily the case that humans alone have the quality of reason."

  Gundersen saw the futility of pursuing the point. Was Srin'gahar a chauvinist defending the spiritual supremacy of elephants throughout the universe, or was he deliberately adopting an extreme position to expose the arrogances and moral vulnerabilities of Earth's imperialism? Gundersen did not know, but it hardly mattered. He thought of Gulliver discussing the intelligence of horses with the Houyhnhnms.

  “I yield the point,” he said curtly. “Perhaps someday I'll bring an elephant to Belzagor, and let you tell me whether or not it has g'rakh."

  “I would greet it as a brother."

  “You might be unhappy over the emptiness of your brother's mind,” Gundersen said. “You would see a being fashioned in your shape, but you wouldn't succeed in reaching its soul."

  “Bring me an elephant, friend of my journey, and I will be the judge of its emptiness,” said Srin'gahar. “But tell me one last thing, and then I will not trouble you: when your people call us elephants, it is because they think of us as mere beasts, yes? Elephants are ‘big simple animals', those are your words. Is this how the visitors from Earth see us?"

  “They're referring only to the resemblance in form between nildoror and elephants. It's a superficial thing. They say you are like elephants."

  “I wish I could believe that,” the nildor said, and fell silent, leaving Gundersen alone with his shame and guilt. In the old days it had never been his habit to argue the nature of intelligence with his mounts. It had not even occurred to him then that such a debate might be possible. Now he sensed the extent of Srin'gahar's suppressed resentment. Elephants—yes, that was how he too had seen the nildoror. Intelligent elephants, perhaps. But still elephants.

  In silence they followed the boiling stream northward. Shortly before noon they came to its source, a broad bow-shaped lake pinched between a double chain of steeply rising hills. Clouds of oily steam rose from the lake's surface. Thermophilic algae streaked its waters, the pink ones forming a thick scum on top and nearly screening the meshed tangles of the larger, thicker blue-gray plants a short distance underneath.

  Gundersen felt some interest in stopping to examine the lake and its unusual life-forms. But he was strangely reluctant to ask Srin'gahar to halt. Srin'gahar was not only his carrier, he was his companion on a journey; and to say, tourist-fashion, “Let's stop here a while,” might reinforce the nildor's belief that Earthmen still thought of his people merely as beasts of burden. So he resigned himself to passing up this bit of sightseeing. It was not right, he told himself, that he should delay Srin'gahar's journey toward rebirth merely to gratify a whim of idle curiosity.

  But as they were nearing the lake's farther curve, there came such a crashing and smashing in the underbrush to the east that the entire procession of nildoror paused to see what was going on. To Gundersen it sounded as if some prowling dinosaur were about to come lurching out of the jungle, some huge clumsy tyrannosaur inexplicably displaced in time and space. Then, emerging from a break in the row of hills, there came slowly across the bare soil flanking the lake a little snub-snouted vehicle, which Gundersen recognized as the hotel's beetle, towing a crazy primitive-looking appendage of a trailer, fashioned from raw planks and large wheels. Atop this jouncing, clattering trailer four small tents had been pitched, covering most of its area; alongside the tents, over the wheels, luggage was mounted in several racks; and at the rear, clinging to a railing and peering nervously about, were the eight tourists whom Gundersen had last seen some days earlier in the hotel by the coast.

  Srin'gahar said, “Here are some of your people. You will want to talk with them."

  The tourists were, in fact, the last species whatever that Gundersen wanted to see at this point. He would have preferred locusts, scorpions, fanged serpents, tyrannosaurs, toads, anything at all. Here he was coming from some sort of mystical experience among the nildoror, the nature of which he barely understood; here, insulated from his own kind, he rode toward the land of rebirth struggling with basic questions of right and wrong, of the nature of intelligence, of the relationship of human to nonhuman and of himself to his own past; only a few moments before he had been forced into an uncomfortable, even painful confrontation with that past by Srin'gahar's casual, artful questions about the souls of elephants; and abruptly Gundersen found himself once more among these empty, trivial human beings, these archetypes of the ignorant and blind tourist, and whatever individuality he had earned in the eyes of his nildor companion vanished instantly as he dropped back into the undifferentiated class of Earthmen. These tourists, some part of his mind knew, were not nearly as vulgar and hollow as he saw them; they were merely ordinary people, friendly, a bit foolish, over-privileged, probably quite satisfactory human beings within the context of their lives on Earth, and only seeming to be cardboard figurines here because they were essentially irrelevant to the planet they had chosen to visit. But he was not yet ready to have Srin'gahar lose sight of him as a person separate from all the other Earthmen who came to Belzagor, and he feared that the tide of bland chatter welling out of these people would engulf him and make him one of them.

  The beetle, obviously straining to haul the trailer, came to rest a dozen meters from the edge of the lake. Out of it came Van Beneker, looking sweatier and seedier than usual. “All right,” he called to the tourists. “Everyone down! We're going to have a look at one of the famous hot lakes!” Gundersen, high atop Srin'gahar's broad back, considered telling the nildor to move along. The other four nildoror, having satisfied themselves about the cause of the commotion, had already done that and were nearly out of view at the far end of the lake. But he decided to stay a while; he knew that a display of snobbery toward his own species would win him no credit with Srin'gahar.

  Van Beneker turned to Gundersen and called out, “Morning, sir! Glad to see you! Having a good trip?"

  The four Earth couples clambered down from their trailer. They were fully in character, behaving exactly as Gundersen's harsh image of them would have them behave: they seemed bored and glazed, surfeited with the alien wonders they had already seen. Stein, the helix-parlor proprietor, dutifully checked the aperture of his camera, mounted it in his cap, and routinely took a 360-degree hologram of the scene; but when the printout emerged from the camera's output slot a moment later he did not even bother to glance at it. The act of picture-taking, not the picture itself, was significant. Watson, the doctor, muttered a joyless joke of some sort to Christopher, the financier, who responded with a mechanical chuckle. The women, bedraggled and jungle-stained, paid no attention to the lake. Two simply leaned against the beetle and waited to be told what it was they were being shown, while the other two, as they became aware of Gundersen's presence, pulled facial masks from their backpacks and hurriedly slipped the thin plastic films over their heads so that they could present at least the illusion of properly groomed features before the handsome stranger.

  “I won't stay here long,” Gundersen heard himself promising Srin'gahar, as he dismounted.

  Van Beneker came up to him. “What a trip!” the little man blurted. “What a stinking trip! Well, I ought to be used to it by now. How's everything been going for you, Mr. G?"

  “No complaints.” Gundersen nodded at the trailer. “Where'd you get that noisy contrapti
on?"

  “We built it a couple of years ago when one of the old cargo haulers broke down. Now we use it to take tourists around when we can't get any nildoror bearers."

  “It looks like something out of the eighteenth century."

  “Well, you know, sir, out here we don't have much left in the way of modern equipment. We're short of servos and hydraulic walkers and all that. But you can always find wheels and some planks around. We make do."

  “What happened to the nildoror we were riding coming from the spaceport to the hotel? I thought they were willing to work for you."

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” Van Beneker said. “They're unpredictable. We can't force them to work, and we can't hire them to work. We can only ask them politely, and if they say they're not available, that's it. Couple of days back, they decided they weren't going to be available for a while, so we had to get out the trailer.” He lowered his voice. “If you ask me, it's on account of these eight baboons here. They think the nildoror don't understand any English, and they keep telling each other how terrible it is that we had to hand a planet as valuable as this over to a bunch of elephants."

  “On the voyage out here,” said Gundersen, “some of them were voicing quite strong liberal views. At least two of them were big pro-relinquishment people."

  “Sure. Back on Earth they bought relinquishment as a political theory. ‘Give the colonized worlds back to their long-oppressed natives,’ and all that. Now they're out here and suddenly they've decided that the nildoror aren't ‘natives,’ just animals, just funny-looking elephants, and maybe we should have kept the place after all.” Van Beneker spat. “And the nildoror take it all in. They pretend they don't understand the language, but they do, they do. You think they feel like hauling people like that on their backs?"

  “I see,” said Gundersen. He glanced at the tourists. They were eyeing Srin'gahar, who had wandered off toward the bush and was energetically ripping soft boughs loose for his midday meal. Watson nudged Miraflores, who quirked his lips and shook his head as if in disapproval. Gundersen could not hear what they were saying, but he imagined that they were expressing scorn for Srin'gahar's enthusiastic foraging. Evidently civilized beings were not supposed to pull their meals off trees with their trunks.

  Van Beneker said, “You'll stay and have lunch with us, won't you, Mr. G?"

  “That's very kind of you,” Gundersen said.

  He squatted in the shade while Van Beneker rounded up his charges and led them down to the rim of the steaming lake. When they were all there Gundersen rose and quietly affiliated himself with the group. He listened to the guide's spiel, but managed to train only half his attention on what was being said. “High-temperature life-zone ... better than 70°C ... more in some places, even above boiling, yet things live in it ... special genetic adaptation ... thermophilic, we call it, that is, heat-loving ... the DNA doesn't get cooked, no, but the rate of spontaneous mutation is pretty damned high, and the species change so fast you wouldn't believe it ... enzymes resist the heat ... put the lake organisms in cool water and they'll freeze in about a minute ... life processes extraordinarily fast ... unfolded and denatured proteins can also function when circumstances are such that ... you get quite a range up to middle-phylum level ... a pocket environment, no interaction with the rest of the planet ... thermal gradients ... quantitative studies ... the famous kinetic biologist, Dr. Brock ... continuous thermal destruction of sensitive molecules ... unending resynthesis...."

  Srin'gahar was still stuffing himself with branches. It seemed to Gundersen that he was eating far more than he normally did at this time of day. The sounds of rending and chewing clashed with the jerky drone of Van Beneker's memorized scientific patter.

  Now, unhooking a biosensitive net from his belt, Van Beneker began to dredge up samples of the lake's fauna for the edification of his group. He gripped the net's handle and made vernier adjustments governing the mass and length of the desired prey; the net, mounted at the end of an almost infinitely expandable length of fine flexible metal coil, swept back and forth beneath the surface of the lake, hunting for organisms of the programmed dimensions. When its sensors told it that it was in the presence of living matter, its mouth snapped open and quickly shut again. Van Beneker retracted it, bringing to shore some unhappy prisoner trapped within a sample of its own scalding environment.

  Out came one lake creature after another, red-skinned, boiled-looking, but live and angry and flapping. An armored fish emerged, concealed in shining plates, embellished with fantastic excrescences and ornaments. A lobster-like thing came forth, lashing a long spiked tail, waving ferocious eye-stalks. Up from the lake came something that was a single immense claw with a tiny vestigial body. No two of Van Beneker's grotesque catches were alike. The heat of the lake, he repeated, induces frequent mutations. He rattled off the whole genetic explanation a second time, while dumping one little monster back into the hot bath and probing for the next.

  The genetic aspects of the thermophilic creatures seemed to catch the interest of only one of the tourists—Stein, who, as a helix-parlor owner specializing in the cosmetic editing of human genes, would know more than a little about mutation himself. He asked a few intelligent-sounding questions, which Van Beneker naturally was unable to answer; the others simply stared, patiently waiting for their guide to finish showing them funny animals and take them somewhere else. Gundersen, who had never had a chance before to examine the contents of one of these high-temperature pockets, was grateful for the exhibition, although the sight of writhing captive lake-dwellers quickly palled on him. He became eager to move on.

  He glanced around and discovered that Srin'gahar was nowhere in sight.

  “What we've got this time,” Van Beneker was saying, “is the most dangerous animal of the lake, what we call a razor shark. Only I've never seen one like this before. You see those little horns? Absolutely new. And that lantern sort of thing on top of the head, blinking on and off?” Squirming in the net was a slender crimson creature about a meter in length. Its entire underbelly, from snout to gut, was hinged, forming what amounted to one gigantic mouth rimmed by hundreds of needle-like teeth. As the mouth opened and closed, it seemed as if the whole animal were splitting apart and healing itself. “This best feeds on anything up to three times its own size,” Van Beneker said. “As you can see, it's fierce and savage, and—"

  Uneasy, Gundersen drifted away from the lake to look for Srin'gahar. He found the place where the nildor had been eating, where the lower branches of several trees were stripped bare. He saw what seemed to be the nildor's trail, leading away into the jungle. A painful white light of desolation flared in his skull at the awareness that Srin'gahar must quietly have abandoned him.

  In that case his journey would have to be interrupted. He did not dare go alone and on foot into that pathless wilderness ahead. He would have to ask Van Beneker to take him back to some nildoror encampment where he might find another means of getting to the mist country.

  The tour group was coming up from the lake now. Van Beneker's net was slung over his shoulder; Gundersen saw some lake creatures moving slowly about in it.

  “Lunch,” he said. “I got us some jelly-crabs. You hungry?"

  Gundersen managed a thin smile. He watched, not at all hungry, as Van Beneker opened the net; a gush of hot water rushed from it, carrying along eight or ten oval purplish creatures, each different from the others in the number of legs, shell markings, and size of claws. They crawled in stumbling circles, obviously annoyed by the relative coolness of the air. Steam rose from their backs. Expertly Van Beneker pithed them with sharpened sticks, and cooked them with his fusion torch, and split open their shells to reveal the pale quivering jelly-like metabolic regulators within. Three of the woman grimaced and turned away, but Mrs. Miraflores took her crab and ate it with delight. The men seemed to enjoy it. Gundersen, merely nibbling at the jelly, eyed the forest and worried about Srin'gahar.

  Scraps of conversation drifted
toward him.

  “—enormous profit potential, just wasted, altogether wasted—"

  “—even so, our obligation is to encourage self-determination on every planet that—"

  “—but are they people?"

  “—look for the soul, it's the only way to tell that—"

  “—elephants, and nothing but elephants. Did you see him ripping up the trees and—"

  “—relinquishment was the fault of a highly vocal minority of bleeding hearts who—"

  “—no soul, no relinquishment—"

  “—you're being too harsh, dear. There were definite abuses on some of the planets, and—"

  “—stupid political expediency, I call it. The blind leading the blind—"

  “—can they write? Can they think? Even in Africa we were dealing with human beings, and even there—"

  “—the soul, the inner spirit—"

  “—I don't need to tell you how much I favored relinquishment. You remember, I took the petitions around and everything. But even so, I have to admit that after seeing—"

  “—piles of purple crap on the beach—"

  “—victims of sentimental overreaction—"

  “—I understand the annual profit was on the order of—"

  “—no doubt that they have souls. No doubt at all.” Gundersen realized that his own voice had entered the conversation. The others turned to him; there was a sudden vacuum to fill. He said, “They have a religion, and that implies the awareness of the existence of a spirit, a soul, doesn't it?"

  “What kind of religion?” Miraflores asked.

  “I'm not sure. One important part of it is ecstatic dancing—a kind of frenzied prancing around that leads to some sort of mystic experience. I know. I've danced with them. I've felt at least the edges of that experience. And they've got a thing called rebirth, which I suppose is central to their rituals. I don't understand it. They go north, into the mist country, and something happens to them there. They've always kept the details a secret. I think the sulidoror give them something, some drug, maybe, and it rejuvenates them in some inner way, and leads to a kind of illumination—am I at all clear?” Gundersen, as he spoke, was working his way almost unconsciously through the pile of uneaten jelly-crabs. “All I can tell you is that rebirth is vitally important to them, and they seem to derive their tribal status from the number of rebirths they've undergone. So you see they've not just animals. They have a society, they have a cultural structure—complex, difficult for us to grasp."