Downward to the Earth (2 page)

Gundersen let the point pass. “What do you do here now, Van?"

“Tourist guide, mostly. We get nine, ten batches a year. I take them up along the ocean, then show them a bit of the mist country, then we hop across the Sea of Dust. It's a nice little tour."

“Yes."

“The rest of the time I relax. I talk to the nildoror a lot, and sometimes I visit friends at the bush stations. You'll know everyone, Mr. Gundersen. It's all the old people, still out there."

“What about Seena Royce?” Gundersen asked.

“She's up by Shangri-la Falls."

“Still have her looks?"

“She thinks so,” Van Beneker said. “You figure you'll go up that way?"

“Of course,” Gundersen said. “I'm making a sentimental pilgrimage. I'll tour all the bush stations. See the old friends. Seena. Cullen. Kurtz. Salamone. Whoever's still there."

“Some of them are dead."

“Whoever's still there,” Gundersen said. He looked down at the little man and smiled. “You'd better take care of your tourists, now. We can talk at the hotel tonight. I want you to fill me in on everything that's happened while I've been gone."

“Easy, Mr. Gundersen. I can do it right now in one word. Rot. Everything's rotting. Look at the spaceport wall over there."

“I see."

“Look at the repair robots, now. They don't shine much, do they? They're giving out too. If you get close, you can see the spots on their hulls."

“But homeostasis—"

“Sure. Everything gets repaired, even the repair robots. But the system's going to break down. Sooner or later, the rot will get into the basic programs, and then there won't be any more repairs, and this world will go straight back into the stone age. I mean
all
the way back. And then the nildoror will finally be happy. I understand those big bastards as much as anybody does. I know they can't wait to see the last trace of Earthmen rot right off this planet. They pretend they're friendly, but the hate's there all the time, real sick hate, and—"

“You ought to look after your tourists, Van,” Gundersen said. “They're getting restless."

A CARAVAN OF nildoror was going to transport them from the spaceport to the hotel—two Earthmen per alien, with Gundersen riding alone, and Van Beneker, with the luggage, leading the way in his beetle. The three nildoror grazing at the edge of the field ambled over to enroll in the caravan, and two others emerged from the bush. Gundersen was surprised that nildoror were still willing to act as beasts of burden for Earthmen. “They don't mind,” Van Beneker explained. “They like to do us favors. It makes them feel superior. They can't hardly tell there's weight on them, anyhow. And they don't think there's anything shameful about letting people ride them."

“When I was here I had the impression they resented it,” Gundersen said.

“Since relinquishment they take things like that easier. Anyway, how could you be sure what they thought? I mean, what they
really
thought."

The tourists were a little alarmed at riding nildoror. Van Beneker tried to calm them by telling them it was an important part of the Belzagor experience. Besides, he added, machinery did not thrive on this planet and there were hardly any functioning beetles left. Gundersen demonstrated how to mount, for the benefit of the apprehensive newcomers. He tapped his nildor's left-hand tusk, and the alien knelt in its elephantine way, ponderously coming down on its front knees, then its back ones. The nildor wriggled its shoulders, in effect dislocating them to create the deep swayback valley in which a man could ride so comfortably, and Gundersen climbed aboard, seizing the short backward-thrusting horns as his pommels. The spiny crest down the middle of the alien's broad skull began to twitch. Gundersen recognized it as a gesture of welcome; the nildoror had a rich language of gesture, employing not only the spines but also their long ropy trunks and their many-pleated ears.
"Sssukh!"
Gundersen said, and the nildor arose. “Do you sit well?” it asked him in its own language. “Very well indeed,” Gundersen said, feeling a surge of delight as the unforgotten vocabulary came to his lips.

In their clumsy, hesitant way, the eight tourists did as he had done, and the caravan set out down the river road toward the hotel. Nightflies cast a dim glow under the canopy of trees. A third moon was in the sky, and the mingled lights came through the leaves, revealing the oily, fast-moving river just to their left. Gundersen stationed himself at the rear of the procession in case one of the tourists had a mishap. There was only one uneasy moment, though, when a nildor paused and left the rank. It rammed the triple prongs of its tusks into the riverbank to grub up some morsel, and then resumed its place in line. In the old days, Gundersen knew, that would never have happened. Nildoror were not permitted then to have whims.

He enjoyed the ride. The jouncing strides were agreeable, and the pace was swift without being strenuous for the passengers. What good beasts these nildoror are, Gundersen thought. Strong, docile, intelligent. He almost reached forward to stroke his mount's spines, deciding at the last moment that it would seem patronizing. The nildoror are something other than funny-looking elephants, he reminded himself. They are intelligent beings, the dominant life forms of their planet,
people,
and don't you forget it.

Soon Gundersen could hear the crashing of the surf. They were nearing the hotel.

The path widened to become a clearing. Up ahead, one of the tourist women pointed into the bush; her husband shrugged and shook his head. When Gundersen reached that place he saw what was bothering them. Black shapes crouched between the trees, and dark figures were moving slowly to and fro. They were barely visible in the shadows. As Gundersen's nildor went past, two of the dim forms emerged and stood by the edge of the path. They were husky bipeds, close to three meters tall, covered with thick coats of dark red hair. Massive tails swished slowly through the greenish gloom. Hooded eyes, slit-wide even in this scant light, appraised the procession. Drooping rubbery snouts, tapir-long, sniffed audibly.

A woman turned gingerly and said to Gundersen, “What are they?"

“Sulidoror. The secondary species. They come from up mist country. These are northern ones."

“Are they dangerous?"

“I wouldn't call them that."

“If they're northern animals, why are they down here?” her husband wanted to know.

“I'm not sure,” Gundersen said. He questioned his mount and received an answer. “They work at the hotel,” Gundersen called ahead. “Bellhops. Kitchen hands.” It seemed strange to him that the nildoror would have turned the sulidoror into domestic servants at an Earthman's hotel. Not even before relinquishment had sulidoror been used as servants. But of course there had been plenty of robots here then.

The hotel lay just ahead. It was on the coast, a glistening geodesic dome that showed no external signs of decay. Before relinquishment, it had been a posh resort run exclusively for the benefit of the top-level administrators of the Company. Gundersen had spent many happy hours in it. Now he dismounted, and he and Van Beneker helped the tourists down. Three sulidoror stood at the hotel entrance. Van Beneker gestured fiercely at them and they began to take the luggage from the beetle's storage hold.

Inside, Gundersen quickly detected symptoms of decline. A carpet of tiger-moss had begun to edge out of an ornamental garden strip along the lobby wall, and was starting to reach onto the fine black slabs of the main hall's floor; he saw the toothy little mouths hopefully snapping as he walked in. No doubt the hotel's maintenance robots had once been programmed to cut the ornamental moss back to the border of the garden bed, but the program must have subtly altered with the years so that now the moss was allowed to intrude on the interior of the building as well. Possibly the robots were gone altogether, and the sulidoror who had replaced them were lax in their pruning duties. And there were other hints that control was slipping away.

“The boys will show you to your rooms,” Van Beneker said. “You can come down for cocktails whenever you're ready. Dinner will be served in about an hour and a half."

A towering sulidor conducted Gundersen to a third-floor room overlooking the sea. Reflex led him to offer the huge creature a coin; but the sulidor merely looked blankly at him and did not venture to take it. It seemed to Gundersen that there was a suppressed tension about the sulidor, an inward seething, but perhaps it existed only in his own imagination. In the old days sulidoror had rarely been seen outside the zone of mist, and Gundersen did not feel at ease with them.

In nildoror words he said, “How long have you been at the hotel?” But the sulidor did not respond. Gundersen did not know the language of the sulidoror, but he was aware that every sulidor was supposed to speak fluent nildororu as well as sulidororu. Enunciating more clearly, he repeated his question. The sulidor scratched its pelt with gleaming claws and said nothing. Moving past Gundersen, it deopaqued the window-wall, adjusted the atmospheric filters, and stalked solemnly out.

Gundersen frowned. Quickly he stripped and got under the cleanser. A quick whirr of vibration took from him the grime of his day's journey. He unpacked and donned evening clothes, a close gray tunic, polished boots, a mirror for his brow. He toned the color of his hair down the spectrum a short distance, dimming it from yellow almost to auburn.

Suddenly he felt very tired.

He was just into early middle years, only forty-eight, and travel ordinarily did not affect him. Why this fatigue, then? He realized that he had been holding himself unusually stiff these few hours he had been back on this planet. Rigid, inflexible, tense—uncertain of his motives in returning, unsure of his welcome, perhaps touched a bit by curdled guilts, and now the strain was telling. He touched a switch and made the wall a mirror. Yes, his face was drawn; the cheekbones, always prominent, now jutted like blades, and the lips were clamped and the forehead was furrowed. The thin slab of his nose was distended by tension-flared nostrils. Gundersen shut his eyes and went through one of the drills of a relaxation mode. He looked better thirty seconds later; but a drink might help, he decided. He went down to the lounge.

None of the tourists were there yet. The louvers were open, and he heard the roar and crash of the sea, smelled its saltiness. A white curdled line of accumulated salt had been allowed to form along the margin of the beach. The tide was in; only the tips of the jagged rocks that framed the bathing area were visible. Gundersen looked out over the moonslight-streaked water, staring into the blackness of the eastern horizon. Three moons had also been up on his last night here, when they gave the farewell party for him. And after the revelry was over, he and Seena had gone for a midnight swim, out to the tide-hidden shoal where they could barely stand, and when they returned to shore, naked and salt-encrusted, he had made love to her behind the rocks, embracing her for what he was sure would be the last time. And now he was back.

He felt a stab of nostalgia so powerful that he winced.

Gundersen had been thirty years old when he came out to Holman's World as an assistant station agent. He had been forty, and a sector administrator, when he left. In a sense the first thirty years of his life had been a pale prelude to that decade, and the last eight years of it had been a hollow epilogue. He had lived his life on this silent continent, bounded by mist and ice to the north, mist and ice to the south, the Benjamini Ocean to the east, the Sea of Dust to the west. For a while he had ruled half a world, at least in the absence of the chief resident; and this planet had shrugged him off as though he had never been. Gundersen turned away from the louvers and sat down.

Van Beneker appeared, still in his sweaty, rumpled fatigues. He winked cordially at Gundersen and began rummaging in a cabinet. “I'm the bartender too, Mr. G. What can I get you?"

“Alcohol,” Gundersen said. “Any form you recommend."

“Snout or flask?"

“Flask. I like the taste."

“As you say. But snout for me. It's the effect, sir, the
effect."
He set an empty glass before Gundersen and handed him a flask containing three ounces of a dark red fluid. Highland rum, local product. Gundersen hadn't tasted it in eight years. The flask was equipped with its own condensation chiller; Gundersen thumbed it with a quick short push and quietly watched the flakes of ice beginning to form along the inside. When his drink was properly chilled he poured it and put it quickly to his lips.

“That's pre-relinquishment stock,” Van Beneker said. “Not much of it left, but I knew you'd appreciate it.” He was holding an ultrasonic tube to his left forearm.
Zzz!
and the snout spurted alcohol straight into his vein. Van Beneker grinned. “Works faster this way. The working-class man's boozer. Eh? Eh? Get you another rum, Mr. G?"

“Not just yet. Better look after your tourists, Van."

The tourist couples were beginning to enter the bar: first the Watsons, then the Mirafloreses, the Steins, finally the Christophers. Evidently they had expected to find the bar throbbing with life, full of other tourists giddily hailing one another from distant parts of the room, and red-jacketed waiters ferrying drinks. Instead there were peeling plastic walls, a sonic sculpture that no longer worked and was deeply cobwebbed, empty tables, and that unpleasant Mr. Gundersen moodily peering into a glass. The tourists exchanged cheated glances. Was this what they had spanned the light-years to see? Van Beneker went to them, offering drinks, weeds, whatever else the limited resources of the hotel might be able to supply. They settled in two groups near the windows and began to talk in low voices, plainly self-conscious in front of Gundersen. Surely they felt the foolishness of their roles, these soft well-to-do people whose boredom had driven them to peer at the remote reaches of the galaxy. Stein ran a helix parlor in California, Miraflores a chain of lunar casinos, Watson was a doctor, and Christopher—Gundersen could not remember what Christopher did. Something in the financial world.