Downward to the Earth (16 page)

“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. She 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."

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.

Below the forehead the face was unrecognizable.

It was as if everything had been heated in a crucible and allowed to melt and run. Kurtz's fine high-bridged nose was now a rubbery smear, so snoutlike that Gundersen was jolted by its resemblance to a sulidor's. His wide mouth now had slack, pendulous lips that drooped open, revealing toothless gums. His chin sloped backward in pithecanthropoid style. Kurtz's cheekbones were flat and broad, wholly altering the planes of his face.

Seena drew the coverlet down to display the rest. The body in the bed was utterly hairless, a long boiled-looking pink thing like a giant slug. All superfluous flesh was gone, and the skin lay like a shroud over plainly visible ribs and muscles. The proportions of the body were wrong. Kurtz's waist was an impossibly great distance from his chest, and his legs, though long, were not nearly as long as they should have been; his ankles seemed to crowd his knees. His toes had fused, so that his feet terminated in bestial pads. Perhaps by compensation, his fingers had added extra joints and were great spidery things that flexed and clenched in irregular rhythms. The attachment of his arms to his torso appeared strange, though it was not until Gundersen saw Kurtz slowly rotate his left arm through a 360-degree twist that he realized the armpit must have been reconstructed into some kind of versatile ball-and-socket arrangement.

Kurtz struggled desperately to speak, blurting words in a language Gundersen had never heard. His eyeballs visibly stirred beneath his lids. His tongue slipped forth to moisten his lips. Something like a three-lobed Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. Briefly he humped his body, drawing the skin tight over curiously broadened bones. He continued to speak. Occasionally an intelligible word in English or nildororu emerged, embedded in a flow of gibberish: “River ... death ... lost ... horror ... river ... cave ... warm ... lost ... warm ... smash ... black ... go ... god ... horror ... born ... lost ... born ...."

“What is he saying?” Gundersen asked.

“No one knows. Even when we can understand the words, he doesn't make sense. And mostly we can't even understand the words. He speaks the language of the world where he must live now. It's a very private language."

“Has he been conscious at all since he's been here?"

“Not really,” Seena said. “Sometimes his eyes are open, but he never responds to anything around him. Come. Look.” She went to the bed and drew Kurtz's eyelids open. Gundersen saw eyes that had no whites at all. From rim to rim their shining surfaces were a deep, lustrous black, dappled by random spots of light blue. He held three fingers up before those eyes and waved his hand from side to side. Kurtz took no notice. Seena released the lids, and the eyes remained open, even when the tips of Gundersen's fingers approached quite closely. But as Gundersen withdrew his hand, Kurtz lifted his right hand and seized Gundersen's wrist. The grotesquely elongated fingers encircled the wrist completely, met, and coiled halfway around it again. Slowly and with tremendous strength Kurtz pulled Gundersen down until he was kneeling beside the bed.

Now Kurtz spoke only in English. As before he seemed to be in desperate anguish, forcing the words out of some nightmare recess, with no perceptible accenting or punctuation: “Water sleep death save sleep sleep fire love water dream cold sleep plan rise fall rise fall rise rise rise.” After a moment he added, “Fall.” Then the flow of nonsense syllables returned and the fingers relinquished their fierce grip on Gundersen's wrist.

Seena said, “He seemed to be telling us something. I never heard him speak so many consecutive intelligible words."

“But what was he saying?"

“I can't tell you that. But a meaning was there."

Gundersen nodded. The tormented Kurtz had delivered his testament, his blessing:
Sleep plan rise fall rise fall rise rise rise. Fall.
Perhaps it even made sense.

“And he reacted to your presence,” Seena went on. “He saw you, he took your arm! Say something to him. See if you can get his attention again."

“Jeff?” Gundersen whispered, kneeling. “Jeff, do you remember me? Edmund Gundersen. I've come back, Jeff. Can you hear anything I'm saying? If you understand me, Jeff, raise your right hand again."

Kurtz did not raise his hand. He uttered a strangled moan, low and appalling; then his eyes slowly closed and he lapsed into a rigid silence. Muscles rippled beneath his altered skin. Beads of acrid sweat broke from his pores. Gundersen got to his feet shortly and walked away.

“How long was he up there?” he asked.

“Close to half a year. I thought he was dead. Then two sulidoror brought him back, on a kind of stretcher."

“Changed like this?"

“Changed. And here he lies. He's changed much more than you imagine,” Seena said. “Inside, everything's new and different. He's got almost no digestive tract at all. Solid food is impossible for him; I give him fruit juices. His heart has extra chambers. His lungs are twice as big as they should be. The diagnostat couldn't tell me a thing, because he didn't correspond to any of the parameters for a human body."

“And this happened to him in rebirth?"

“In rebirth, yes. They take a drug, and it changes them. And it works on humans too. It's the same drug they use on Earth for organ regeneration, the venom, but here they use a stronger dose and the body runs wild. If you go up there, Edmund, this is what'll happen to you."

“How do you
know
it was rebirth that did this to him?"

“I know."

“How?"

“That's what he said he was going up there for. And the sulidoror who brought him back said he had undergone rebirth."

“Maybe they were lying. Maybe rebirth is one thing, a beneficial thing, and there's another thing, a harmful thing, which they gave to Kurtz because he had been so evil."

“You're deceiving yourself,” Seena said. “There's only one process, and this is its result."

“Possibly different people respond differently to the process, then. If there is only one process. But I still say you can't be sure that it was rebirth that actually did this to him."

“Don't talk nonsense!"

“I mean it. Maybe something within Kurtz made him turn out like this, and I'd turn out another way. A better way."

“Do you
want
to be changed, Edmund?"

“I'd risk it."

“You'd cease to be human!"

“I've tried being human for quite a while. Maybe it's time to try something else."

“I won't let you go,” Seena said.

“You won't? What claim do you have on me?"

“I've already lost Jeff to them. If you go up there too—"

“Yes?"

She faltered. “All right. I've got no way to threaten you. But don't go."

“I have to."

“You're just like him! Puffed up with the importance of your own supposed sins. Imagining the need for some kind of ghastly redemption. It's sick, don't you see? You just want to hurt yourself, in the worst possible way.” Her eyes glittered even more brightly. “Listen to me. If you need to suffer, I'll help you. You want me to whip you? Stamp on you? If you've got to play masochist, I'll play sadist for you. I'll give you all the torment you want. You can wallow in it. But don't go up mist country. That's carrying a game too far, Edmund."

“You don't understand, Seena."

“Do you?"

“Perhaps I will, when I come back from there."

“You'll come back like
him!"
she screamed. She rushed toward Kurtz's bed. “Look at him! Look at those feet! Look at his eyes! His mouth, his nose, his fingers, his everything! He isn't human any more. Do you want to lie there like him—muttering nonsense, living in some weird dream all day and all night?"

Gundersen wavered. Kurtz
was
appalling; was the obsession so strong in him that he wanted to undergo the same transformation?

“I have to go,” he said, less firmly than before.

“He's living in hell,” Seena said. “You'll be there too."

She came to Gundersen and pressed herself against him. He felt the hot tips of her breasts grazing his skin; her hands clawed his back desperately; her thighs touched his. A great sadness came over him, for all that Seena once had meant to him, for all that she had been, for what she had become, for what her life must be like with this monster to care for. He was shaken by a vision of the lost and irrecoverable past, of the dark and uncertain present, of the bleak, frightening future. Again he wavered. Then he gently pushed her away from him. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm going."

“Why? Why? What a
waste!"
Tears trickled down her cheeks. “If you need a religion,” she said, “pick an Earth religion. There's no reason why you have to—"

“There is a reason,” Gundersen said. He drew her close to him again and very lightly kissed her eyelids, and then her lips. Then he kissed her between the breasts and released her. He walked over to Kurtz and stood for a moment looking down, trying to come to terms with the man's bizarre metamorphosis. Now he noticed something he had not observed earlier: the thickened texture of the skin of Kurtz's back, as if dark little plaques were sprouting on both sides of his spine. No doubt there were many other changes as well, apparent only on a close inspection. Kurtz's eyes opened once again, and the black glossy orbs moved, as if seeking to meet Gundersen's eyes. He stared down at them, at the pattern of blue speckles against the shining solid background. Kurtz said, amidst many sounds Gundersen could not comprehend, “Dance ... live ... seek ... die ... die."

It was time to leave.

Walking past the motionless, rigid Seena, Gundersen went out of the room. He stepped onto the veranda and saw that his five nildoror were gathered outside the station, in the garden, with a robot uneasily watching lest they begin ripping up the rarities for fodder. Gundersen called out, and Srin'gahar looked up.

“I'm ready,” Gundersen said. “We can leave as soon as I have my things."

He found his clothes and prepared to depart. Seena came to him again: she was dressed in a clinging black robe, and her slider was wound around her left arm. Her face was bleak. He said, “Do you have any messages for Ced Cullen, if I find him?"