Downward to the Earth (12 page)

One of the candidates for rebirth, a female nildor called Luu'khamin, said to Gundersen, “The sulidor's name is Na-sinisul. He wishes to speak with you."

“Let him speak, then."

“He prefers that you know, first, that he is not a sulidor of the ordinary kind. He is one of those who administers the ceremony of rebirth, and we will see him again when we approach the mist country. He is a sulidor of rank and merit, and his words are not to be taken lightly. Will you bear that in mind as you listen to him?"

“I will. I take no one's words lightly on this world, but I will give him a careful hearing beyond any doubt. Let him speak."

The sulidor strode a short distance forward and once again planted himself firmly, digging his great spurred feet deep into the resilient soil. When he spoke, it was in nildororu stamped with the accent of the north: thick-tongued, slow, positive.

“I have been on a journey,” said Na-sinisul, “to the Sea of Dust, and now I am returning to my own land to aid in the preparations for the event of rebirth in which these five travelers are to take part. My presence here is purely accidental. Do you understand that I am not in this place for any particular purpose involving you or your companions?"

“I understand,” said Gundersen, astounded by the precise and emphatic manner of the sulidor's speech. He had known the sulidoror only as dark, savage, ferocious-looking figures lurking in mysterious glades.

Na-sinisul continued, “As I passed near here yesterday, I came by chance to the site of a former station of your Company. Again by chance, I chose to look within, though it was no business of mine to enter that place. Within I found two Earthmen whose bodies had ceased to serve them. They were unable to move and could barely talk. They requested me to send them from this world, but I could not do such a thing on my own authority. Therefore I ask you to follow me to this station and to give me instructions. My time is short here, so it must be done at once."

“How far is it?"

“We could be there before the rising of the third moon."

Gundersen said to Srin'gahar, “I don't remember a Company station here. There should be one a couple of days north of here, but—"

“This is the place where the food that crawls was collected and shipped downriver,” said the nildor.

“Here?” Gundersen shrugged. “I guess I've lost my bearings again. All right, I'll go there.” To Na-sinisul he said, “Lead and I'll follow."

The sulidor moved swiftly through the glowing forest, and Gundersen, atop Srin'gahar, rode just to his rear. They seemed to be descending, and the air grew warm and murky. The landscape also changed, for the trees here had aerial roots that looped up like immense scraggy elbows, and the fine tendrils sprouting from the roots emitted a harsh green radiance. The soil was loose and rocky; Gundersen could hear it crunching under Srin'gahar's tread. Bird-like things were perched on many of the roots. They were owlish creatures that appeared to lack all color; some were black, some white, some a mottled black and white. He could not tell if that was their true hue or if the luminosity of the vegetation simply robbed them of color. A sickly fragrance came from vast, pallid parasitic flowers sprouting from the trunks of the trees.

By an outcropping of naked, weathered yellow rock lay the remains of the Company station. It seemed even more thoroughly ruined than the serpent station far to the south; the dome of its roof had collapsed and coils of wiry-stemmed saprophytes were clinging to its sides, perhaps feeding on the decomposition products that the rain eroded from the abrasions in the plastic walls. Srin'gahar allowed Gundersen to dismount. The Earthman hesitated outside the building, waiting for the sulidor to take the lead. A fine warm rain began to fall; the tang of the forest changed at once, becoming sweet where it had been sour. But it was the sweetness of decay.

“The Earthmen are inside,” said Na-sinisul. “You may go in. I await your instructions."

Gundersen entered the building. The reek of rot was far more intense here, concentrated, perhaps, by the curve of the shattered dome. The dampness was all-pervasive. He wondered what sort of virulent spores he sucked into his nostrils with every breath. Something dripped in the darkness, making a loud tocking sound against the lighter patter of the rain coming through the gaping roof. To give himself light, Gundersen drew his fusion torch and kindled it at the lowest beam. The warm white glow spread through the station. At once he felt a flapping about his face as some thermotropic creature, aroused and attracted by the heat of the torch, rose up toward it. Gundersen brushed it away; there was slime on his fingertips afterward.

Where were the Earthmen?

Cautiously he made a circuit of the building. He remembered it vaguely, now—one of the innumerable bush stations the Company once had scattered across Holman's World. The floor was split and warped, requiring him to climb over the buckled, sundered sections. The mobile fungoids crawled everywhere, devouring the scum that covered all interior surfaces of the building and leaving narrow glistening tracks behind. Gundersen had to step carefully to avoid putting his feet on the creatures, and he was not always successful. Now he came to a place where the building widened, puckering outward; he flashed his torch around and caught sight of a blackened wharf, overlooking the bank of a swift river. Yes, he remembered. The fungoids were wrapped and baled here and sent downriver on their voyage toward the market. But the Company's barges no longer stopped here, and the tasty pale slugs now wandered unmolested over the mossy relics of furniture and equipment.

“Hello?” Gundersen called. “Hello, hello, hello?"

He received a moan by way of answer. Stumbling and slipping in the dimness, fighting a swelling nausea, he forced his way onward through a maze of unseen obstacles. He came to the source of the loud dripping sound. Something bright red and basket-shaped and about the size of a man's chest had established itself high on the wall, perpendicular to the floor. Through large pores in its spongy surface a thick black fluid exuded, falling in a continuous greasy splash. As the light of Gundersen's torch probed it, the exudation increased, becoming almost a cataract of tallowy liquid. When he moved the light away the flow became less copious, though still heavy.

The floor sloped here so that whatever dripped from the spongy basket flowed quickly down, collecting at the far side of the room in the angle between the floor and the wall. Here Gundersen found the Earthmen. They lay side by side on a low mattress; fluid from the dripping thing had formed a dark pool around them, completely covering the mattress and welling up over the bodies. One of the Earthmen, head lolling to the side, had his face totally immersed in the stuff. From the other one came the moans.

They both were naked. One was a man, one a woman, though Gundersen had some difficulty telling that at first; both were so shrunken and emaciated that the sexual characteristics were obscured. They had no hair, not even eyebrows. Bones protruded through parchment-like skin. The eyes of both were open, but were fixed in a rigid, seemingly sightless stare, unblinking, glassy. Lips were drawn back from teeth. Grayish algae sprouted in the furrows of their skins, and the mobile fungoids roamed their bodies, feeding on this growth. With a quick automatic gesture of revulsion Gundersen plucked two of the slug-like creatures from the woman's empty breasts. She stirred; she moaned again. In the language of the nildoror she murmured, “Is it over yet?” Her voice was like a flute played by a sullen desert breeze.

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.