Downward to the Earth (18 page)

He did not stop fretting over the atmosphere and other discomforts until the moment when he realized he was alone.

The nildoror were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Na-sinisul. Mist engulfed everything. Stunned, Gundersen rolled back the screen of his memory and saw that he must have been separated from his companions for several minutes, without regarding it as in any way remarkable. By now they might be far ahead of him on some other road.

He did not call out.

He yielded first to the irresistible and dropped to his knees to rest. Squatting, he pressed his hands to his face, then put his knuckles to the cold ground and let his head loll forward while he sucked in air. It would have been easy to sprawl forward altogether and lose consciousness. They might find him sleeping in the morning. Or frozen in the morning. He struggled to rise, and succeeded on the third attempt.

“Srin'gahar?” he said. He whispered it, making only a private appeal for help.

Dizzy with exhaustion, he rushed forward, stumbling, sliding, colliding with trees, catching his feet in the undergrowth. He saw what was surely a nildor to his left and ran toward it, but when he clutched its flank he found it wet and icy, and he realized that he was grasping a boulder. He flung himself away from it. Just beyond, a file of massive shapes presented themselves: the nildoror marching past him? “Wait?” he called, and ran, and felt the shock at his ankles as he plunged blindly into a shallow frigid rivulet. He fell, landing on hands and knees in the water. Grimly he crawled to the far bank and lay there, recognizing the dark blurred shapes now as those of low, broad trees whipped by a rising wind. All right, he thought. I'm lost. I'll wait right here until morning. He huddled into himself, trying to wring the cold water from his clothes.

The night came, blackness in place of grayness. He sought moons overhead and found none. A terrible thirst consumed him, and he tried to creep back to the brook, but he could not even find that. His fingers were numb; his lips were cracking. But he discovered an island of calm within his discomfort and fear, and clung to it, telling himself that none of what was happening was truly perilous and that all of it was somehow necessary.

Unknown hours later, Srin'gahar and Na-sinisul came to him.

First Gundersen felt the soft probing touch of Srin'gahar's trunk against his cheek. He recoiled and flattened himself on the ground, relaxing slowly as he realized what it was that had brushed his skin. Far above, the nildor said, “Here he is."

“Alive?” Na-sinisul asked, dark voice coming from worlds away, swaddled in layers of fog.

“Alive. Wet and cold. Edmundgundersen, can you stand up?"

“Yes. I'm all right, I think.” Shame flooded his spirit. “Have you been looking for me all this time?"

“No,” said Na-sinisul blandly. “We continued on to the village. There we discussed your absence. We could not be sure if you were lost or had separated yourself from us with a purpose. And then Srin'gahar and I returned. Did you intend to leave us?"

“I got lost,” Gundersen said miserably.

Even now he was not permitted to ride the nildor. He staggered along between Srin'gahar and Na-sinisul, now and then clutching the sulidor's thick fur or grasping the nildor's smooth haunch, steadying himself whenever he felt his strength leaving him or whenever the unseen footing grew difficult. In time lights glimmered in the dark, a pale lantern glow coming milkily through the fogbound blackness. Dimly Gundersen saw the shabby huts of a sulidor village. Without waiting for an invitation he lurched into the nearest of the ramshackle log structures. It was steep-walled, musty-smelling, with strings of dried flowers and the bunched skins of animals suspended from the rafters. Several seated sulidoror looked at him with no show of interest. Gundersen warmed himself and dried his clothing; someone brought him a bowl of sweet, thick broth, and a little while afterward he was offered some strips of dried meat, which were difficult to bite and chew but extraordinarily well flavored. Dozens of sulidoror came and went. 

Once, when the flap of hide covering the door was left open, he caught sight of his nildoror sitting just outside the hut. A tiny fierce-faced animal, fog-white and wizened, skittered up to him and inspected him with disdain: some northern beast, he supposed, that the sulidoror favored as pets. The creature plucked at Gundersen's still soggy clothing and made a cackling sound. Its tufted ears twitched; its sharp little fingers probed his sleeve; its long prehensile tail curled and uncurled. Then it leaped into Gundersen's lap, seized his arm with quick claws, and nipped his flesh. The bite was no more painful than the pricking of a mosquito, but Gundersen wondered what hideous alien infection he would now contract. He made no move to push the little animal away, however. Suddenly a great sulidor paw descended, claws retracted, and knocked the beast across the room with a sweeping swing. The massive form of Na-sinisul lowered itself into a crouch next to Gundersen; the ejected animal chattered its rage from a far corner.

Na-sinisul said, “Did the munzor bite you?"

“Not deeply. Is it dangerous?"

“No harm will come to you,” said the sulidor. “We will punish the animal."

“I hope you won't. It was only playing."

“It must learn that guests are sacred,” said Na-sinisul firmly. He leaned close. Gundersen was aware of the sulidor's fishy breath. Huge fangs gaped in the deep-muzzled mouth. Quietly Na-sinisul said, “This village will house you until you are ready to go on. I must leave with the nildoror, and continue to the mountain of rebirth."

“Is that the big red mountain north of here?"

“Yes. Their time is very close, and so is mine. I will see them through their rebirths, and then my turn will come."

“Sulidoror undergo rebirth too, then?"

Na-sinisul seemed surprised. “How else could it be?"

“I don't know. I know so little about all of this."

“If sulidoror were not reborn,” said Na-sinisul, “then nildoror could not be reborn. One is inseparable from the other."

“In what way?"

“If there were no day, could there be night?"

That was too cryptic. Gundersen attempted to press for an explanation, but Na-sinisul had come to speak of other matters. Avoiding the Earthman's questions, the sulidor said, “They tell me that you have come to our country to speak with a man of your own people, the man Cullen. Is that so?"

“It is. It's one of the reasons I'm here, anyway."

“The man Cullen lives three villages north of here, and one village to the west. He has been informed that you have arrived, and he summons you. Sulidoror of this village will conduct you to him when you wish to leave."

“I'll leave in the morning,” Gundersen said.

“I must declare one thing to you first. The man Cullen has taken refuge among us, and so he is sacred. There can be no hope of removing him from our country and delivering him to the nildoror."

“I ask only to speak with him."

“That may be done. But your treaty with the nildoror is known to us. You must remember that you can fulfill that treaty only by a breach of our hospitality."

Gundersen made no reply. He did not see how he could promise anything of this nature to Na-sinisul without at the same time forswearing his promise to the many-born Vol'himyor. So he clung to his original inner treaty: he would speak with Cedric Cullen, and then he would decide how to act. But it disturbed him that the sulidoror were already aware of his true purpose in seeking Cullen.

Na-sinisul left him. Gundersen attempted to sleep, and for a while he achieved an uneasy doze. But the lamps flickered all night in the sulidor hut, and lofty sulidoror strode back and forth noisily around and about him, and the nildoror just outside the building, engaged in a long debate of which Gundersen could catch only a few meaningless syllables. Once Gundersen awoke to find the little long-eared munzor sitting on his chest and cackling. Later in the night three sulidoror hacked up a bloody carcass just next to the place where Gundersen huddled. The sounds of the rending of flesh awakened him briefly, but he slipped back into his troubled sleep, only to wake again when a savage quarrel erupted over the division of the meat. When the bleak gray dawn came, Gundersen felt more tired than if he had not slept at all.

He was given breakfast. Two young sulidoror, Se-holomir and Yi-gartigok, announced that they had been chosen to escort him to the village where Cullen was staying. Na-sinisul and the five nildoror prepared to leave for the mountain of rebirth. Gundersen made his farewells to his traveling companions.

“I wish you joy of your rebirth,” he said, and watched as the huge shapes moved off into the mist.

Not long afterward he resumed his own journey. His new guides were taciturn and aloof: just as well, for he wanted no conversation as he struggled through this hostile country. He needed to think. He was not sure at all what he would do after he had seen Cullen; his original plan of undergoing rebirth, which had seemed so noble in the abstract, now struck him as the highest folly—not only because of what Kurtz had become, but because he saw it as a trespass, an unspontaneous and self-conscious venture into the rites of an alien species. Go to the rebirth? For the first time he was genuinely unsure whether he would, and more than half suspicious that in the end he would draw back, unreborn.

The tundra of the border zone was giving way now to forest country which seemed a curious inversion to him: trees growing larger here in higher latitudes. But these were different trees. The dwarfed and twisted shrubs to his rear were natives of the jungle, making an unhappy adaptation to the mist; here, deeper in the mist country, true northern trees grew. They were thick-boled and lofty, with dark corrugated bark and tiny sprays of needle-like leaves. Fog shrouded their upper branches. Through this cold and misty forest too there ran lean, straggly animals, long-nosed and bony, which erupted from holes in the ground and sped up the sides of trees, evidently in quest of bough-dwelling rodents and birds. Broad patches of ground were covered with snow here, although summer was supposedly approaching in this hemisphere. On the second night northward there came a hailstorm when a dense and tossing cloud of ice rode toward them on a thin whining wind. Mute and glum, Gundersen's companions marched on through it, and so did he, not enjoying it.

Generally now the mist was light at ground level, and often there was none at all for an hour or more, but it congealed far overhead as an unbroken veil, hiding the sky. Gundersen became accustomed to the barren soil, the angular branches of so many bare trees, the chilly penetrating dampness that was so different from the jungle's humidity. He came to find beauty in the starkness. When fleecy coils of mist drifted like ghosts across a wide gray stream, when furry beasts sprinted over glazed fields of ice, when some hoarse ragged cry broke the incredible stillness, when the marchers turned an angle in the path and came upon a white tableau of harsh wintry emptiness, Gundersen responded with a strange kind of delight. In the mist country, he thought, the hour is always the hour just after dawn, when everything is clean and new.

On the fourth day Se-holomir said, “The village you seek lies behind the next hill."

IT WAS A substantial settlement, forty huts or more arranged in two rows, flanked on one side by a grove of soaring trees and on the other by a broad silvery-surfaced lake. Gundersen approached the village through the trees, with the lake shining beyond. A light fall of snowflakes wandered through the quiet air. The mists were high just now, thickening to an impenetrable ceiling perhaps five hundred meters overhead.

“The man Cullen—?” Gundersen asked.

Cullen lay in a hut beside the lake. Two sulidoror guarded the entrance, stepping aside at a word from Yi-gartigok; two sulidoror more stood at the foot of the pallet of twigs and hides on which Cullen rested. They too stepped aside, revealing a burned-out husk of a man, a remnant, a cinder.

“Are you here to fetch me?” Cullen asked. “Well, Gundy, you're too late."

Cullen's golden hair had turned white and gone coarse; it was a tangled snowy mat through which patches of pale blotched scalp showed. His eyes, once a gentle liquid green, now were muddy and dull, with angry bloodshot streaks in the yellowed whites. His face was a mask of skin over bones, and the skin was flaky and rough. A blanket covered him from the chest down, but the severe emaciation of his arms indicated that the rest of his body probably was similarly eroded. Of the old Cullen little seemed to remain except the mild, pleasant voice and the cheerful smile, now grotesque emerging from the ravaged face. He looked like a man of a hundred years.

“How long have you been this way?” Gundersen demanded.

“Two months. Three, I don't know. Time melts here, Gundy. But there's no going back for me now. This is where I stop. Terminal. Terminal."

Gundersen knelt by the sick man's pallet. “Are you in pain? Can I give you something?"

“No pain,” Cullen said. “No drugs. Terminal."

“What do you have?” Gundersen asked, thinking of Dykstra and his woman lying gnawed by alien larvae in a pool of muck, thinking of Kurtz anguished and transformed at Shangri-la Falls, thinking of Seena's tale of Gio’ Salamone turned to crystal. “A native disease? Something you picked up around here?"

“Nothing exotic,” said Cullen. “I'd guess it's the old inward rot, the ancient enemy. The crab, Gundy. The crab. In the gut. The crab's pincers are in my gut."

“Then you
are
in pain?"

“No,” Cullen said. “The crab moves slowly. A nip here, a nip there. Each day there's a little less of me. Some days I feel that there's nothing left of me at all. This is one of the better days."

“Listen,” Gundersen said, “I could get you downriver to Seena's place in a week. She's bound to have a medical kit, a space tube of anticarcin for you. You aren't so far gone that we couldn't manage a remission if we act fast, and then we could ship you to Earth for template renewal, and—"

“No. Forget it."

“Don't be absurd! We aren't living in the Middle Ages, Ced. A case of cancer is no reason for a man to lie down in a filthy hut and wait to die. The sulidoror will set up a litter for you. I can arrange it in five minutes. And then—"