Downward to the Earth

by Robert Silverberg

  “It comes from an underground spring,” she told him. “Isn't it wonderful? Like a rite of purification."

  A gray tendril rose from the water behind her, tipped with rubbery claws. Gundersen could find no words to warn her. He pointed with short stabbing motions of two fingers and made hollow chittering noises of horror. A second tendril spiraled out of the depths and hovered over her. Smiling, Seena turned, and seemed to fondle some large creature; there was a thrashing in the water and then the tendrils slipped out of view.

  “What was that?"

  “The monster of the pool,” she said. “Ced Cullen brought it for me as a birthday present two years ago. It's a plateau medusa. They live in lakes and sting things."

  “How big is it?"

  “Oh, the size of a big octopus, I'd say. Very affectionate. I wanted Ced to catch me a mate for it, but he didn't get around to it before he went north, and I suppose I'll have to do it myself before long. The monster's lonely.” She pulled herself out of the pool and sprawled out on a slab of smooth black rock to dry in the sun. Gundersen followed her. From this side of the pool, with the light penetrating the water at just the right angle, he was able to see a massive many-limbed shape far below. Seena's birthday present.

  He said, “Can you tell me where I can find Ced now?"

  “In the mist country."

  “I know. That's a big place. Any particular part?"

  She rolled over onto her back and flexed her knees. Sunlight made prisms of the droplets of water on her breasts. After a long silence she said, “Why do you want to find him so badly?"

  “I'm making a sentimental journey to see old friends. Ced and I were very close, once. Isn't that reason enough for me to go looking for him?"

  “It's no reason to betray him, is it?"

  He stared at her. The fierce eyes now were closed; the heavy mounds of her breasts rose and fell slowly, serenely.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “Didn't the nildoror put you up to going after him?"

  “What kind of crazy talk is that?” he blurted, not sounding convincingly indignant even to himself.

  “Why must you pretend?” she said, still speaking from within that impregnable core of total assurance. “The nildoror want him brought back from there. By treaty they're prevented from going up there and getting him themselves. The sulidoror don't feel like extraditing him. Certainly none of the Earthmen living on this planet will fetch him. Now, as an outsider you need nildoror permission to enter the mist country, and since you're a stickler for the rules you probably applied for such permission, and there's no special reason why the nildoror should grant favors to you unless you agree to do something for them in return. Eh? Q.E.D."

  “Who told you all this?"

  “Believe me, I worked it all out for myself."

  He propped his head on his hand and reached out admiringly with the other hand to touch her thigh. Her skin was dry and warm now. He let his hand rest lightly, and then not so lightly, on the firm flesh. Seena showed no reaction. Softly he said, “Is it too late for us to make a treaty?"

  “What kind?"

  “A nonaggression pact. We've been fencing since I got here. Let's end the hostilities. I've been hiding things from you, and you've been hiding things from me, and what good is it? Why can't we simply help one another? We're two human beings on a world that's much stranger and more dangerous than most people suspect, and if we can't supply a little mutual aid and comfort, what are the ties of humanity worth?"

  She said quietly,

  "Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another: for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new—"

  The words of the old poem flowed up from the well of his memory. His voice cut in:

  "—Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

  Where—where—"

  “'Where ignorant armies clash by night,'” she finished for him. “Yes. How like you it is, Edmund, to fumble your lines just at the crucial moment, just at the final climax."

  “Then there's to be no nonaggression pact?"

  “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that.” She turned toward him, took his hand from her thigh, pressed it tenderly between her breasts, brushed her lips against it. “All right, we've been playing little games. They're over, and now we'll speak only truth, but you go first. Did the nildoror ask you to bring Ced Cullen out of the mist country?"

  “Yes,” Gundersen said. “It was the condition of my entry."

  “And you promised you'd do it?"

  “I made certain reservations and qualifications, Seena. If he won't go willingly, I'm not bound by honor to force him. But I do have to find him, at least. That much I've pledged. So I ask you again to tell me where I should look."

  “I don't know,” she said. “I have no idea. He could be anywhere at all up there."

  “Is this the truth?"

  “The truth,” she said, and for a moment the harshness was gone from her eyes, and her voice was the voice of a woman and not that of a cello.

  “Can you tell me, at least, why he fled, why they want him so eagerly?"

  She was slow in replying. Finally she said, “About a year ago, he went down into the central plateau on one of his regular collecting trips. He was planning to get me another medusa, he said. Most of the time I went with him into the plateau, but this time Kurtz was ill and I had to stay behind. Ced went to a part of the plateau we had never visited before, and there he found a group of nildoror taking part in some kind of religious ceremony. He stumbled right into them and evidently he profaned the ritual."

  “Rebirth?” Gundersen asked.

  “No, they do rebirth only in the mist country. This was something else, something almost as serious, it seems. The nildoror were furious. Ced barely escaped alive. He came back here and said he was in great trouble, that the nildoror wanted him, that he had committed some sort of sacrilege and had to take sanctuary. Then he went north, with a posse of nildoror chasing him right to the border. I haven't heard anything since. I have no contact with the mist country. And that's all I can tell you."

  “You haven't told me what sort of sacrilege he committed,” Gundersen pointed out.

  “I don't know it. I don't know what kind of ritual it was, or what he did to interrupt it. I've told you only as much as he told me. Will you believe that?"

  “I'll believe it,” he said. He smiled. “Now let's play another game, and this time I'll take lead. Last night you told me that Kurtz was off on a trip, that you hadn't seen him for a long time and didn't know when he'd be back. You also said he'd been sick, but you brushed over that pretty quickly. This morning, the robot who brought me breakfast said that you'd be late coming down, because Kurtz was ill and you were with him in his room, as you were every morning at this time. Robots don't ordinarily lie."

  “The robot wasn't lying. I was."

  “Why?"

  “To shield him from you,” Seena said. “He's in very bad shape, and I don't want him to be disturbed. And I knew that if I told you he was here, you'd want to see him. He isn't strong enough for visitors. It was an innocent lie, Edmund."

  “What's wrong with him?"

  “We aren't sure. You know, there isn't much of a medical service left on this planet. I've got a diagnostat, but it gave me no useful data when I put him through it. I suppose I could describe his disease as a kind of cancer. Only cancer isn't what he has."

  “Can you describe the symptoms?"

  “What's the use? His body began to change. He became something strange and ugly and frightening, and you don't need to know the details. If you thought that what had happened to Dykstra and Pauleen was horrible, you'd be rocked to your roots by Kurtz. But I won't let you see hi
m. It's as much to shield you from him as the other way around. You'll be better off not seeing him.” Seena sat up, cross-legged on the rock, and began to untangle the wet snarled strands of her hair. Gundersen thought he had never seen her looking as beautiful as she looked right at this moment, clothed only in alien sunlight, her flesh taut and ripe and glowing, her body supple, full-blown, mature. And the fierceness of her eyes, the one jarring discordancy? Had that come from viewing, each morning, the horror that Kurtz now was? She said after a long while, “Kurtz is being punished for his sins."

  “Do you really believe that?"

  “I do,” she said. “I believe that there are such things as sins, and that there is retribution for sin."

  “And that an old man with a white beard is up there in the sky, keeping score on everyone, running the show, tallying up an adultery here, a lie there, a spot of gluttony, a little pride?"

  “I have no idea who runs the show,” said Seena. “I'm not even sure that anyone does. Don't mislead yourself, Edmund: I'm not trying to import medieval theology to Belzagor. I won't give you the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and say that all over the universe certain fundamental principles hold true. I simply say that here on Belzagor we live in the presence of certain moral absolutes, native to this planet, and if a stranger comes to Belzagor and transgresses against those absolutes, he'll regret it. This world is not ours, never was, never will be, and we who live here are in a constant state of peril, because we don't understand the basic rules."

  “What sins did Kurtz commit?"

  “It would take me all morning to name them,” she said. “Some were sins against the nildoror, and some were sins against his own spirit."

  “We all committed sins against the nildoror,” Gundersen said.

  “In a sense, yes. We were proud and foolish, and we failed to see them for what they were, and we used them unkindly. That's a sin, yes, of course, a sin that our ancestors committed all over Earth long before we went into space. But Kurtz had a greater capacity for sin than the rest of us, because he was a greater man. Angels have farther to fall, once they fall."

  “What did Kurtz do to the nildoror? Kill them? Dissect them? Whip them?"

  “Those are sins against their bodies,” said Seena. “He did worse."

  “Tell me."

  “Do you know what used to go on at the serpent station, south of the spaceport?"

  “I was there for a few weeks with Kurtz and Salamone,” Gundersen said. “Long ago, when I was very new here, when you were still a child on Earth. I watched the two of them call serpents out of the jungle, and milk the raw venom from them, and give the venom to nildoror to drink. And drink the venom themselves."

  “And what happened then?"

  He shook his head. “I've never been able to understand it. When I tried it with them, I had the illusion that the three of us were turning into nildoror. And that three nildoror had turned into us. I had a trunk, four legs, tusks, spines. Everything looked different; I was seeing through nildoror eyes. Then it ended, and I was in my own body again, and I felt a terrible rush of guilt, of shame. I had no way of knowing whether it had been a real bodily metamorphosis or just hallucination."

  “It was hallucination,” Seena told him. “The venom opened your mind, your soul, and enabled you to enter the nildor consciousness, at the same time that the nildor was entering yours. For a little while that nildor thought he was Edmund Gundersen. Such a dream is great ecstasy to a nildor."

  “Is this Kurtz's sin, then? To give ecstasy to nildoror?"

  “The serpent venom,” Seena said, “is also used in the rebirth ceremony. What you and Kurtz and Salamone were doing down there in the jungle was going through a very mild—very mild—version of rebirth. And so were the nildoror. But it was blasphemous rebirth for them, for many reasons. First, because it was held in the wrong place. Second, because it done without the proper rituals. Third, because the celebrants who guided the nildoror were men, not sulidoror, and so the entire thing became a wicked parody of the most sacred act this planet has. By giving those nildoror the venom, Kurtz was tempting them to dabble in something diabolical, literally diabolical. Few nildoror can resist that temptation. He found pleasure in the act—both in the hallucinations that the venom gave him, and in the tempting of the nildoror. I think that he enjoyed the tempting even more than the hallucinations, and that was his worst sin, for through it he led innocent nildoror into what passes for damnation on this planet. In twenty years on Belzagor he inveigled hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nildoror into sharing a bowl of venom with him. Finally his presence became intolerable, and his own hunger for evil became the source of his destruction. And now he lies upstairs, neither living nor dead, no longer a danger to anything on Belzagor."

  “You think that staging the local equivalent of a Black Mass is what brought Kurtz to whatever destiny it is that you're hiding from me?"

  “I know it,” Seena replied. She got to her feet, stretched voluptuously, and beckoned to him. “Let's go back to the station now."

  As though this were time's first dawn they walked naked through the garden, close together, the warmth of the sun and the warmth of her body stirring him and raising a fever in him. Twice he considered pulling her to the ground and taking her amidst these alien shrubs, and twice he held back, not knowing why. When they were a dozen meters from the house he felt desire climb again, and he turned to her and put his hand on her breast. But she said, “Tell me one more thing, first."

  “If I can."

  “Why have you come back to Belzagor? Really. What draws you to the mist country?"

  He said, “If you believe in sin, you must believe in the possibility of redemption from sin."

  “Yes."

  “Well, then, I have a sin on my conscience, too. Perhaps not as grave a sin as the sins of Kurtz, but enough to trouble me, and I've come back here as an act of expiation."

  “How have you sinned?” she asked.

  “I sinned against the nildoror in the ordinary Earthman way, by collaborating in their enslavement, by patronizing them, by failing to credit their intelligence and their complexity. In particular I sinned by preventing seven nildoror from reaching rebirth on time. Do you remember, when the Monroe dam broke, and I commandeered those pilgrims for a labor detail? I used a fusion torch to make them obey, and on my account they missed rebirth. I didn't know that if they were late for rebirth they'd lose their turn, and if I had known I wouldn't have thought it mattered. Sin within sin within sin. I left here feeling stained. Those seven nildoror bothered me in my dreams. I realized that I had to come back and try to cleanse my soul."

  “What kind of expiation do you have in mind?” she asked.

  His eyes had difficulty meeting hers. He lowered them, but that was worse, for the nakedness of her unnerved him even more, as they stood together in the sunlight outside the station. He forced his glance upward again.

  He said, “I've determined to find out what rebirth is, and to take part in it. I'm going to offer myself to the sulidoror as a candidate."

  “No."

  “Seena, what's wrong? You—"

  She trembled. Her cheeks were blazing, and the rush of scarlet spread even to her breasts. She bit her lip, spun away from him, and turned back. “It's insanity,” she said. “Rebirth isn't something for Earthmen. Why do you think you can possibly expiate anything by getting yourself mixed up in an alien religion, by surrendering yourself to a process none of us knows anything about, by—"

  “I have to, Seena."

  “Don't be crazy."

  “It's an obsession. You're the first person I've ever spoken to about it. The nildoror I'm traveling with aren't aware of it. I can't stop. I owe this planet a life, and I'm here to pay. I have to go, regardless of the consequences."

  She said, “Come inside the station with me.” Her voice was flat, mechanical, empty.

  “Why?"

  “Come inside."

  He followed her silently in. Sh
e led him to the middle level of the building, and into a corridor blocked by one of her robot guardians. At a nod from her the robot stepped aside. Outside a room at the rear she paused and put her hand to the door's scanner. The door rolled back. Seena gestured to him to walk in with her.

  He heard the grunting, snorting sound that he had heard the night before, and now there was no doubt in his mind that it had been a cry of terrible throttled pain.

  “This is the room where Kurtz spends his time,” Seena said. She drew a curtain that had divided the room. “And this is Kurtz,” she said.

  “It isn't possible,” Gundersen murmured. “How—how—"

  “How did he get that way?"

  “Yes."

  “As he grew older he began to feel remorse for the crimes he had committed. He suffered greatly in his guilt, and last year he resolved to undertake an act of expiation. He decided to travel to the mist country and undergo rebirth. This is what they brought back to me. This is what a human being looks like, Edmund, when he's undergone rebirth."

  Eleven

  WHAT GUNDERSEN BEHELD was apparently human, and probably it had once even been Jeff Kurtz. The absurd length of the body was surely Kurtzlike, for the figure in the bed seemed to be a man and a half long, as if an extra section of vertebrae and perhaps a second pair of femurs had been spliced in. The skull was plainly Kurtz's too: mighty white dome, jutting brow-ridges. The ridges were even more prominent than Gundersen remembered. They rose above Kurtz's closed eyes like barricades guarding against some invasion from the north. But the thick black brows that had covered those ridges were gone. So were the lush, almost feminine eyelashes.