Downward to the Earth Read online

  Speaking English, Gundersen said, “Who are you? How did this happen?"

  He got no response from her. A fungoid crept across her mouth, and he flicked it aside. He touched her cheek. There was a rasping sound as his hand ran across her skin; it was like caressing stiff paper. Struggling to remember her, Gundersen imagined dark hair on her bare skull, gave her light arching brows, saw her cheeks full and her lips smiling. But nothing registered; either he had forgotten her, or he had never known her, or she was unrecognizable in her present condition.

  “Is it over soon?” she asked, again in nildororu.

  He turned to her companion. Gently, half afraid the fragile neck would snap, Gundersen lifted the man's head out of the pool of fluid. It appeared that he had been breathing it; it trickled from his nose and lips, and after a moment he showed signs of being unable to cope with ordinary air. Gundersen let his face slip back into the pool. In that brief moment he had recognized the man as a certain Harold—or was it Henry?—Dykstra, whom he had known distantly in the old days.

  The unknown woman was trying to move one arm. She lacked the strength to lift it. These two were like living ghosts, like death-in-life, mired in their sticky fluid and totally helpless. In the language of the nildoror he said, “How long have you been this way?"

  “Forever,” she whispered.

  “Who are you?"

  “I don't ... remember. I'm ... waiting."

  “For what?"

  “For the end."

  “Listen,” he said, “I'm Edmund Gundersen, who used to be sector chief. I want to help you."

  “Kill me first. Then him."

  “We'll get you out of here and back to the spaceport. We can have you on the way to Earth in a week or ten days, and then—"

  “No ... please ...."

  “What's wrong?” he asked.

  “Finish it. Finish it.” She found enough strength to arch her back, lifting her body halfway out of the fluid that nearly concealed her lower half. Something rippled and briefly bulged beneath her skin. Gundersen touched the taut belly and felt movement within, and that quick inward quiver was the most frightening sensation he had ever known. He touched the body of Dykstra, too: it also rippled inwardly.

  Appalled, Gundersen scrambled to his feet and backed away from them. By faint torchlight he studied their shriveled bodies, naked but sexless, bone and ligament, shorn of flesh and spirit yet still alive. A terrible fear came over him. “Na-sinisul!” he called. “Come in here! Come in!"

  The sulidor was at his side. Gundersen said, “Something's inside their bodies. Some kind of parasite? It moves. What is it?"

  “Look there,” said Na-sinisul, indicating the spongy basket from which the dark fluid trickled. “They carry its young. They have become hosts. A year, two years, perhaps three, and the larvae will emerge."

  “Why aren't they both dead?"

  “They draw nourishment from this,” said the sulidor, swishing his tail through the black flow. “It seeps into their skins. It feeds them, and it feeds that which is within them."

  “If we took them out of here and sent them down to the hotel on rafts—?"

  “They would die,” Na-sinisul said, “moments after they were removed from the wetness about them. There is no hope of saving them."

  “When does it end?” the woman asked.

  Gundersen trembled. All his training told him never to accept the finality of death; any human in whom some shred of life remained could be saved, rebuilt from a few scraps of cells into a reasonable facsimile of the original. But there were no facilities for such things on this world. He confronted a swirl of choices. Leave them here to let alien things feed upon their guts; try to bring them back to the spaceport for shipment to the nearest tectogenetic hospital; put them out of their misery at once; seek to free their bodies himself of whatever held them in thrall. He knelt again. He forced himself to experience that inner quivering again. He touched the woman's stomach, her thighs, her bony haunches. Beneath the skin she was a mass of strangeness. Yet her mind still ticked, though she had forgotten her name and her native language. The man was luckier; though he was infested too, at least Dykstra did not have to lie here in the dark waiting for the death that could come only when the harbored larvae erupted from the enslaved human flesh. Was this what they had desired, when they refused repatriation from this world that they loved? An Earthman can become captured by Belzagor, the many-born nildor Vol'himyor had said. But this was too literal a capture.

  The stink of bodily corruption made him retch.

  “Kill them both,” he said to Na-sinisul. “And be quick about it."

  “This is what you instruct me to do?"

  “Kill them. And rip down that thing on the wall and kill it too."

  “It has given no offense,” said the sulidor. “It has done only what is natural to its kind. By killing these two, I will deprive it of its young, but I am not willing to deprive it of life as well."

  “All right,” Gundersen said. “Just the Earthmen, then. Fast."

  “I do this as an act of mercy, under your direct orders,” said Na-sinisul. He leaned forward and lifted one powerful arm. The savage curved claws emerged fully from their sheath. The arm descended twice.

  Gundersen compelled himself to watch. The bodies split like dried husks; the things within came spilling out, unformed, raw. Even now, in some inconceivable reflex, the two corpses twitched and jerked. Gundersen stared into their eroded depths. “Do you hear me?” he asked. “Are you alive or dead?” The woman's mouth gaped but no sound came forth, and he did not know whether this was an attempt to speak or merely a last convulsion of the ravaged nerves. He stepped his fusion torch up to high power and trained it on the dark pool. I am the resurrection and the life, he thought, reducing Dykstra to ashes, and the woman beside him, and the squirming unfinished larvae. Acrid, choking fumes rose; not even the torch could destroy the building's dampness. He turned the torch back to illumination level. “Come,” he said to the sulidor, and they went out together.

  “I feel like burning the entire building and purifying this place,” Gundersen said to Na-sinisul.

  “I know."

  “But you would prevent me."

  “You are wrong. No one on this world will prevent you from doing anything."

  But what good would it do, Gundersen asked himself. The purification had already been accomplished. He had removed the only beings in this place that were foreign to it.

  The rain had stopped. To the waiting Srin'gahar, Gundersen said, “Will you take me away from here?"

  They rejoined the other four nildoror. Then, because they had lingered too long here and the land of rebirth was still far away, they resumed the march, even though it was night. By morning Gundersen could hear the thunder of Shangri-la Falls, which the nildoror called Du'jayukh.

  Nine

  IT WAS AS though a white wall of water descended from the sky. Nothing on Earth could match the triple plunge of this cataract, by which Madden's River, or the Seran'nee, dropped five hundred meters, and then six hundred, and then five hundred more, falling from ledge to ledge in its tumble toward the sea. Gundersen and the five nildoror stood at the foot of the falls, where the entire violent cascade crashed into a broad rock-flanged basin out of which the serpentine river continued its southeasterly course; the sulidor had taken his leave in the night and was proceeding northward by his own route. To Gundersen's rear lay the coastal plain, behind his right shoulder, and the central plateau, behind his left. Before him, up by the head of the falls, the northern plateau began, the highlands that controlled the approach to the mist country. Just as a titanic north-south rift cut the coastal plain off from the central plateau, so did another rift running east-west separate both the central plateau and the coastal plain from the highlands ahead.

  He bathed in a crystalline pool just beyond the tumult of the cataract, and then they began their ascent. The Shangri-la Station, one of the Company's most important outposts, was in
visible from below; it was set back a short way from the head of the falls. Once there had been waystations at the foot of the falls and at the head of the middle cataract, but no trace of these structures remained; the jungle had swallowed them utterly in only eight years. A winding road, with an infinity of switchbacks, led to the top. When he first had seen it, Gundersen had imagined it was the work of Company engineers, but he had learned that it was a natural ridge in the face of the plateau, which the nildoror themselves had enlarged and deepened to make their journey toward rebirth more easy.

  The swaying rhythm of his mount lulled him into a doze; he held tight to Srin'gahar's pommel-like horns and prayed that in his grogginess he would not fall off. Once he woke suddenly and found himself clinging only by his left hand, with his body half slung out over a sheer drop of at least two hundred meters. Another time, drowsy again, he felt cold spray and snapped to attention to see the entire cascade of the falling river rushing past him no more than a dozen meters away. At the head of the lowest cataract the nildoror paused to eat, and Gundersen dashed icy water in his face to shatter his sluggishness. They went on. He had less difficulty keeping awake now; the air was thinner, and the afternoon breeze was cool. In the hour before twilight they reached the head of the falls.

  Shangri-la Station, seemingly unchanged, lay before him; three rectangular unequal blocks of dark shimmering plastic, a somber ziggurat rising on the western bank of the narrow gorge through which the river sped. The formal gardens of tropical plants, established by a forgotten sector chief at least forty years before, looked as though they were being carefully maintained. At each of the building's setbacks there was an outdoor veranda overlooking the river, and these, too, were bedecked with plants. Gundersen felt a dryness in his throat and a tightness in his loins. He said to Srin'gahar, “How long may we stay here?"

  “How long do you wish to stay?"

  “One day, two—I don't know yet. It depends on the welcome I get."

  “We are not yet in a great hurry,” said the nildor. “My friends and I will make camp in the bush. When it is time for you to go on, come to us."

  The nildoror moved slowly into the shadows. Gundersen approached the station. At the entrance to the garden he paused. The trees here were gnarled and bowed, with long feathery gray fronds dangling down; highland flora was different from that to the south, although perpetual summer ruled here even as in the true tropics behind him. Lights glimmered within the station. Everything out here seemed surprisingly orderly; the contrast with the shambles of the serpent station and the nightmare decay of the fungoid station was sharp. Not even the hotel garden was this well tended. Four neat rows of fleshy, obscene-looking pink forest candles bordered the walkway that ran toward the building. Slender, stately globeflower trees, heavy with gigantic fruit, formed little groves to left and right. There were hullygully trees and bitterfruits—exotics here, imported from the steaming equatorial tropics—and the mighty swordflower trees in full bloom, lifting their long shiny stamens to the sky. Elegant glitterivy and spiceburr vines writhed along the ground, but not in any random way. Gundersen took a few steps farther in, and heard the soft sad sigh of a sensifrons bush, whose gentle hairy leaves coiled and shrank as he went by, opening warily when he had gone past, shutting again when he whirled to steal a quick glance. Two more steps, and he came to a low tree whose name he could not recall, with glossy red winged leaves that took flight, breaking free of their delicate stems and soaring away; instantly their replacements began to sprout. The garden was magical. Yet there were surprises here. Beyond the glitterivy he discovered a crescent patch of tiger-moss, the carnivorous ground cover native to the unfriendly central plateau. The moss had been transplanted to other parts of the planet—there was a patch of it growing out of control at the seacoast hotel—but Gundersen remembered that Seena abhorred it, as she abhorred all the productions of that forbidding plateau. Worse yet, looking upward so that he could follow the path of the gracefully gliding leaves, Gundersen saw great masses of quivering jelly, streaked with blue and red neural fibers, hanging from several of the biggest trees: more carnivores, also natives of the central plateau. What were those sinister things doing in this enchanted garden? A moment later he had a third proof that Seena's terror of the plateau had faded: across his path there ran one of the plump, thieving otter-like animals that had bedeviled them the time they had been marooned there. It halted a moment, nose twitching, cunning paws upraised, looking for something to seize. Gundersen hissed at it and it scuttled into the shrubbery.

  Now a massive two-legged figure emerged from a shadowed corner and blocked his way. Gundersen thought at first it was a sulidor, but he realized it was merely a robot, probably a gardener. It said resonantly, “Man, why are you here?"

  “As a visitor. I'm a traveler seeking lodging for the night."

  “Does the woman expect you?"

  “I'm sure she doesn't. But she'll be willing to see me. Tell her Edmund Gundersen is here."

  The robot scanned him carefully. “I will tell her. Remain where you are and touch nothing."

  Gundersen waited. What seemed like an unhealthily long span of time went by. The twilight deepened, and one moon appeared. Some of the trees in the garden became luminous. A serpent, of the sort once used as a source of venom, slid silently across the path just in front of Gundersen and vanished. The wind shifted, stirring the trees and bringing him the faint sounds of a conversation of nildoror somewhere not far inland from the riverbank.

  Then the robot returned and said, “The woman will see you. Follow the path and enter the station."

  Gundersen went up the steps. On the porch he noticed unfamiliar-looking potted plants, scattered casually as though awaiting transplantation to the garden. Several of them waved tendrils at him or wistfully flashed lights intended to bring curious prey fatally close. He went in, and, seeing no one on the ground floor, caught hold of a dangling laddercoil and let himself be spun up to the first veranda. He observed that the station was as flawlessly maintained within as without, every surface clean and bright, the decorative murals unfaded, the artifacts from many worlds still mounted properly in their niches. This station had always been a showplace, but he was surprised to see it so attractive in these years of the decay of Earth's presence on Belzagor.

  “Seena?” he called.

  He found her alone on the veranda, leaning over the rail. By the light of two moons he saw the deep cleft of her buttocks and thought she had chosen to greet him in the nude; but as she turned toward him he realized that a strange garment covered the front of her body. It was a pale, gelatinous sprawl, shapeless, purple-tinged, with the texture and sheen that he imagined an immense amoeba might have. The central mass of it embraced her belly and loins, leaving her hips and haunches bare; her left breast also was bare, but one broad pseudopod extended upward over the right one. The stuff was translucent, and Gundersen plainly could see the red eye of her covered nipple, and the narrow socket of her navel. It was also alive, to some degree, for it began to flow, apparently of its own will, sending out slow new strands that encircled her left thigh and right hip.

  The eeriness of this clinging garment left him taken aback. Except for it, she appeared to be the Seena of old; she had gained some weight, and her breasts were heavier, her hips broader, yet she was still a handsome woman in the last bloom of youth. But the Seena of old would never have allowed such a bizarreness to touch her skin.

  She regarded him steadily. Her lustrous black hair tumbled to her shoulders, as in the past. Her face was unlined. She faced him squarely and without shame, her feet firmly planted, her arms at ease, her head held high. “I thought you were never coming back here, Edmund,” she said. Her voice had deepened, indicating some inner deepening as well. When he had last known her she had tended to speak too quickly, nervously pitching her tone too high, but now, calm and perfectly poised, she spoke with the resonance of a fine cello. “Why are you back?” she asked.

  “It's a long st
ory, Seena. I can't even understand all of it myself. May I stay here tonight?"

  “Of course. How needless to ask!"

  “You look so good, Seena. Somehow I expected—after eight years—"

  “A hag?"

  “Well, not exactly.” His eyes met hers, and he was shaken abruptly by the rigidity he found there, a fixed and inflexible gaze, a beadiness that reminded him terrifyingly of the expression in the eyes of Dykstra and his woman at the last jungle station. “I—I don't know what I expected,” he said.

  “Time's been good to you also, Edmund. You have that stern, disciplined look, now—all the weakness burned away by years, only the core of manhood left. You've never looked better."

  “Thank you."

  “Won't you kiss me?” she asked.

  “I understand you're a married woman."

  She winced and tightened one fist. The thing she was wearing reacted also, deepening in color and shooting a pseudopod up to encircle, though not to conceal, her bare breast. “Where did you hear that?” she asked.

  “At the coast. Van Beneker told me you married Jeff Kurtz."

  “Yes. Not long after you left, as a matter of fact."

  “I see. Is he here?"

  She ignored his question. “Don't you want to kiss me? Or do you have a policy about kissing other men's wives?"

  He forced a laugh. Awkwardly, self-consciously, he reached for her, taking her lightly by the shoulders and drawing her toward him. She was a tall woman. He inclined his head, trying to put his lips to hers without having any part of his body come in contact with the amoeba. She pulled back before the kiss.