DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH
Robert Silverberg
First published 1970
Copyright © Agberg Ltd 1977
ISBN O 575 O7523 6
Version 1.0
Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward,
and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
Ecclesiastes iii, 21
CHAPTER ONE
He had come back to Holman's World after all. He was not sure why. Call it irresistible attraction; call it sentimentality; call it foolishness. Gundersen had never planned to revisit this place. Yet here he was, waiting for the landing, and there it was in the vision screen, close enough to grasp and squeeze in one hand, a world slightly larger than Earth, a world that had claimed the prime decade of his life, a world where he had learned things about himself that he had not really wanted to know. Now the signal light in the lounge was flashing red. The ship would shortly land. Despite everything, he was coming back.
He saw the shroud of mist that covered the temperate zones, and the great sprawling icecaps, and the girdling blue-black band of the scorched tropics. He remembered riding through the Sea of Dust at blazing twilight, and he remembered a silent, bleak river-journey beneath bowers of twittering dagger-pointed leaves, and he remembered golden cocktails on the veranda of a jungle station on the Night of Five Moons, with Seena close by his side and a herd of nildoror mooing in the bush. That was a long time ago. Now the nildoror were masters of Holman's World again. Gundersen had a hard time accepting that. Perhaps that was the real reason why he had come back: to see what sort of job the nildoror could do.
'Attention, passengers in lounge,' came a voice over the speaker. 'We enter landing orbit for Belzagor in fifteen minutes. Please prepare to return to cradles.'
Belzagor. That was what they called the planet now. The native name, the nildoror's own word. To Gundersen it seemed like something out of Assyrian mythology. Of course, it was a romanticized pronunciation; coming from a nildor it would really sound more like Bllls'grr. Belzagor it was, though. He would try to call the planet by the name it now wore, if that was what he was supposed to do. He attempted never to give needless offence to alien beings.
'Belzagor,' he said. 'It's a voluptuous sound, isn't it? Rolls nicely off the tongue.'
The tourist couple beside him in the ship's lounge nodded. They agreed readily with whatever Gundersen said. The husband, plump, pale, overdressed, said, 'They were still calling it Holman's World when you were last out here, weren't they?'
'Oh, yes,' Gundersen said. 'But that was back in the good old imperialist days, when an Earthman could call a planet whatever he damn pleased. That's all over now.'
The tourist wife's lips tightened in that thin, pinched, dysmenorrhoeal way of hers. Gundersen drew a sombre pleasure from annoying her. All during the voyage he had deliberately played a role out of Kipling for these tourists — posing as the former colonial administrator going out to see what a beastly botch the natives must be making out of the task of governing themselves. It was an exaggeration, a distortion, of his real attitude, but sometimes it pleased him to wear masks. The tourists — there were eight of them looked upon him in mingled awe and contempt as he swaggered among them, a big fair-skinned man with the mark of outworld experience stamped on his features. They disapproved of him, of the image of himself that he gave them; and yet they knew he had suffered and laboured and striven under a foreign sun, and there was romance in that.
'Will you be staying at the hotel?' the tourist husband asked.
'Oh, no. I'm going right out into the bush, towards the mist country. Look — there, you see? In the northern hemisphere, that band of clouds midway up. The temperature gradient's very steep: tropic and arctic practically side by side. Mist. Fog. They'll take you on a tour of it. I have some business in there.'
'Business? I thought these new independent worlds were outside the zone of economic penetration that—
'Not commercial business,' Gundersen said. 'Personal business. Unfinished business. Something I didn't manage to discover during my tour of duty here.' The signal light flashed again, more insistently. 'Will you excuse me? We really should cradle up now.'
He went to his cabin and readied himself for landing. Webfoam spurted from the spinnerets and enfolded him. He closed his eyes. He felt deceleration thrust, that curiously archaic sensation hearkening back to space travel's earliest days. The ship dropped planetward as Gundersen swayed, suspended, insulated from the worst of the velocity change.
Belzagor's only spaceport was the one that Earthmen had built more than a hundred years before. It was in the tropics, at the mouth of the great river flowing into Belzagor's single ocean. Madden's River, Benjamini Ocean — Gundersen didn't know the nildoror names at all. The spaceport was self-maintaining, fortunately. Automatic high-redundancy devices operated the landing beacon; homeostatic surveillance kept the pad repaired and the bordering jungle cropped back. All, all by machine; it was unrealistic to expect the nildoror to operate a spaceport, and impossible to keep a crew of Earthmen stationed here to do it. Gundersen understood that there were still perhaps a hundred Earthmen living on Belzagor, even after the general withdrawal, but they were not such as would operate a spaceport. And there was a treaty, in any case. Administrative functions were to be performed by nildoror, or not at all.
They landed. The webfoam cradle dissolved upon signal. They went out of the ship.
The air had the tropical reek: rich loam, rotting leaves, the droppings of jungle beasts, the aroma of creamy flowers. It was early evening. A couple of the moons were out. As always, the threat of rain was in the air; the humidity was ninety-nine per cent, probably. But that threat almost never materialized. Rainstorms were rare in this tropical belt. The water simply precipitated out of the air in droplets all the time, imperceptibly, coating you with fine wet beads. Gundersen saw lightning flicker beyond the tops of the hullygully trees at the edge of the pad. A stewardess marshalled the nine debarkees. 'This way, please,' she said crisply, and led them towards the one building.
On the left, three nildoror emerged from the bush and solemnly gazed at the newcomers. Tourists gasped and pointed. 'Look! Do you see them? Like elephants, they are! Are those nili— nildoror?'
'Nildoror, yes,' Gundersen said. The tang of the big beasts drifted across the clearing. A bull and two cows, he guessed, judging by the size of the tusks. They were all about the same height, three metres plus, with the deep green skins that marked them as western-hemisphere nildoror. Eyes as big as platters peered back at him in dim curiosity. The short-tusked cow in front lifted her tail and placidly dropped an avalanche of steaming purple dung. Gundersen heard deep blurred sounds, but at this distance he could not make out what the nildoror were saying. Imagine them running a spaceport, he thought. Imagine them running a planet. But they do. But they do.
There was no one in the spaceport building. Some robots, part of the homeostasis net, were repairing the wall at the far side, where the grey plastic sheeting had apparently succumbed to spore implantation; sooner or later the jungle rot got everything in this part of the planet. But that was the only visible activity. There was no customs desk. The nildoror did not have a bureaucracy of that sort. They did not care what you brought with you to their world. The nine passengers had undergone a customs inspection on Earth, just before setting out; Earth did care, very much, what was taken to undeveloped planets. There was also no spaceline office here, nor were there money-changing booths, nor news-stands, nor any of the other concessions one normally finds in a spaceport. There was only a big bare shed, which once had been the nexus of a bustling colonial outpost, in the days when Holman's World had been the property of Earth. It seemed to Gundersen that he saw ghosts of those days all about him: figures in tropical khaki carrying messages, supercargoes waving inventory sheets, computer technicians draped in festoons of memory beads, nildoror bearers laden with outgoing produce. Now all was still. The scrapings of the repair robots echoed across the emptiness.
The spaceline stewardess was telling the eight passengers, 'Your guide should be here any minute. He'll take you to the hotel, and—'
Gundersen was supposed to go to the hotel too, just for tonight. In the morning he hoped to arrange for transport. He had no formal plans for his northward journey; it was going to be largely an improvisation, a reconnaissance into his own pockmarked past.
He said to the stewardess, 'Is the guide a nildor?'
'You mean, native? Oh, no, he's an Earthman, Mr Gundersen.' She rummaged in a sheaf of printout slips. 'His name's Van Beneker, and he was supposed to be here at least half an hour before the ship landed, so I don't understand why—'
'Van Beneker was never strong on punctuality,' Gundersen said. 'But there he is.'
A beetle, much rusted and stained by the climate, had pulled up at the open entrance to the building, and from it now was coming a short red-haired man, also much rusted and stained by the climate. He wore rumpled fatigues and a pair of knee-high jungle boots. His hair was thinning and his tanned bald skull showed through the slicked-down strands. He entered the building and peered around, blinking. His eyes were light blue and faintly hyperthyroid-looking. 'Van?' Gundersen said. 'Over here, Van.' The little man came over. In a hurried, perfunctory way he said, while he was still far from them, 'I want to welcome all you people to Belzagor, as Holman's World is now known. My name's Van Beneker, and I'm going to show you as much of this fascinating planet as is legally permissible to show you, and—'
'Hello, Van,' Gundersen cut in.
The guide halted, obviously irritated, in mid-spiel. He blinked again and looked closely at Gundersen. Finally he said, clearly not believing it, 'Mr Gundersen?'
'Just Gundersen. I'm not your boss any more.'
'Jesus, Mr Gundersen. Jesus, are you here for the tour?'
'Not exactly. I'm here to take my own tour.' Van Beneker said to the others, 'I want you to excuse me. Just for a minute.' To the spaceline stewardess he said, 'It's okay. You can officially convey them to me. I take responsibility. They all here? One, two, three - eight. That's right. Okay, the luggage goes out there, next to the beetle. Tell them all to wait. I'll be right with them.' He tugged at Gundersen's elbow. 'Come on over here, Mr Gundersen. You don't know how amazed I am. Jesus!'
'How have you been, Van?'
'Lousy. How else, on this planet? When did you leave, exactly?'
'2240. The year after relinquishment. Eight years ago.'
'Eight years. And what have you been doing?'
'The home office found work for me,' Gundersen said. 'I keep busy. Now I've got a year's accumulated leave.'
'To spend it here?'
'Why not?'
'What for?'
'I'm going up mist country,' Gundersen said. 'I want to visit the sulidoror.'
'You don't want to do that,' said Van Beneker. 'What do you want to do that for?'
'To satisfy a curiosity.'
'There's only trouble when a man goes up there. You know the stories, Mr Gundersen. I don't need to remind you, how many guys went up there, how many didn't come back.' Van Beneker laughed. 'You didn't come all the way to this place just to rub noses with the sulidoror. I bet you got some other reason.'
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.'
CHAPTER TWO
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 favours. 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 clown 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 towards 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 metres 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 on to 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 once had 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, he 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 grey tunic, polished boots, a mirror for his brow. He toned the colour 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 louvres 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 jagged rocks that framed the bathing area were visible. Gundersen looked out over the moonlight-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 louvres 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 parlour 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.
Mrs Stein said, 'There are some of those animals on the beach. The green elephants.'
Everyone looked. Gundersen signalled for another drink, and got it. Van Beneker, flushed, sweating, winked again and put a second snout to his arm. The tourists began to titter. Mrs Christopher said, 'Don't they have any shame at all?'
'Maybe they're simply playing, Ethel,' Watson said.
'Playing? Well, if you call that playing—'
Gundersen leaned forward, glancing out of the window without getting up. On the beach a pair of nildoror were coupling, the cow kneeling where the salt was thickest, the bull mounting her, gripping her shoulders, pressing his central tusk down firmly against the spiny crest of her skull, jockeying his hindquarters about as he made ready for the consummating thrust. The tourists, giggling, making heavy-handed comments of appreciation, seemed both shocked and titillated. To his considerable surprise, Gundersen realized he was shocked, too, although coupling nildoror were nothing new to him; and when a ferocious orgasmic bellowing rose from below he glanced away, embarrassed and not understanding why.
'You look upset,' Van Beneker said.
'They didn't have to do that here.'
'Why not? They do it all over the place. You know how it is.'
'They deliberately went out there,' Gundersen muttered. 'To show off for the tourists? Or to annoy the tourists? They shouldn't be reacting to the tourists at all. What are they trying to prove? That they're just animals, I suppose.'
'You don't understand the nildoror, Gundy.'
Gundersen looked up, startled as much by Van Beneker's words as by the sudden descent from 'Mr Gundersen' to 'Gundy'. Van Beneker seemed startled, too, blinking rapidly and tugging at a stray sparse lock of fading hair.
'I don't?' Gundersen asked. 'After spending ten years here?'
'Begging pardon, but I never did think you understood them, even when you were here. I used to go around with you a lot to the villages when I was clerking for you. I watched you.'
'In what way do you think I failed to understand them, Van?'
'You despised them. You thought of them as animals.'
'That isn't so!'
'Sure it is, Gundy. You never once admitted they had any intelligence at all.'
'That's absolutely untrue,' Gundersen said. He got up and took a new flask of rum from the cabinet, and returned to the table.
...
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